Karoliina Pulkkinen

Presentism – the influence of the present on historians’ work – has been met with resistance among historians of science; many hold that excessive reference to the present can compromise the aim of understanding past practices in their own terms. In response to this concern, a number of authors have argued that not only is such influence inevitable, it can also be legitimate and helpful. In probing into the presentist and anti-presentist positions in histories of science, I argue here that there is a much larger degree of compatibility between the two positions than has been previously acknowledged. Building on recent work on legitimate forms of presentism, I argue that at least three types of presentism – empirical presentism, motivational presentism, critical presentism – display compatibility with anti-presentism, insofar as certain pitfalls of presentism are kept in mind.

There is much debate on how social values should influence scientific research. However, the question of practical applicability of philosophers’ normative proposals has received less attention. Here, we test the attainability of Matthew J. Brown’s (2020) Moral Imagination ideal (MI ideal), which aims to help scientists to make warranted value-judgements through reflecting on goals, options, values, and stakeholders of research. Here, the tools of the MI ideal are applied to a climate modelling setting, where researchers are developing aerosol-cloud interaction (ACI) parametrizations in an Earth System Model with the broader goal of improving climate sensitivity estimation. After the identification of minor obstacles to applying the MI ideal, we propose two ways to increase its applicability. First, its tools should be accompanied with more concrete guidance for identifying how social values enter more technical decisions in scientific research. Second, since research projects can have multiple goals, examining the alignment between broader societal aims of research and more technical goals should be part of the tools of the MI ideal.

Dmitrii Mendeleev’s periodic system is known for its predictive accuracy, but talk of its completeness is rarer. This is surprising because completeness was a quality that Mendeleev saw as important for a systematization of the chemical elements. Here, I explain how Mendeleev’s valuing of completeness influenced the development of his periodic system. After introducing five indicators of its completeness, I zoom into one in particular: Mendeleev’s inclusion of a schematic row of oxides. I then show how it guided Mendeleev’s predictions of indium and ekaboron, which suggests that the valuing of completeness was instrumental for making predictions.