My Latest Proposal…
Posted by evanduq on July 11, 2009
Here’s a little diddy that I wrote earlier today. For this.
The Royal Society’s Attentions: Then and Now
Why should we care about an analysis of the joint attention, action, belief, and intention of the Royal Society at its beginnings and now? Improving natural knowledge, among the multitude of other activities the Society engages in, is still very relevant. The Royal Society is fast approaching its 350th anniversary, and it, no doubt, will be a major player in the near future’s heightened issues with and awareness of climate change. Prince Charles recently gave a speech at the Richard Dimbleby lecture titled “Facing the Future,” in which those themes were at the forefront. Any institution which might be involved in the coming debates must have some direction and stance on the issues, even if there is internal debate within the institution itself. I feel that the Royal Society is healthy enough to take on challenges with joint cooperation as an institution within the larger scientific community.
How much has the Society changed from its first beginnings? From its first beginnings as a meager gathering of men sharing close common social interests in taking no one’s word for it in the realm of natural science and empirical investigations, it has grown into a vast society within society at large. As an institution working against “a background of group identities, culturally accepted norms, practices and stances, and biologically basic capacities for joint actions and attentions,” the Royal Society represents just one of many instances of concerted human and technological effort toward whatever might constitute the reality of “progress” in the present’s becoming past and future.
In this paper, why skip most of the material in between then and now in the history of the Royal Society? Not to downplay the significance of the history of the Royal Society in between then and now, but I find that it perhaps suffices to focus mainly on then (the beginnings) an now (the present day) as key “moments” in order to look beyond them to future points of interest and developments.
What am I ultimately trying to get at in the paper? I hope to let unfold, in my investigations, a coherent picture of the Royal Society as a social reality with joint attention, action, belief, and intention. The scope is limited but aims at a brief generalization based on two instances of analysis. I want to emphasize the role of networks of people and their interpretations of natural phenomena based upon experimental observation and use of technology. The world has come from an era of primarily hand-written letters on paper sent through the intermediary of human messengers to the age of email and cellular communications over digital networks and the airwaves. I hope to find some clear results and the implications that they might hold.
