Contenu du sommaire : Faire science

The paper questions how theoretical production has been conceived as a way to scientize French literary studies in the 1960s and 1970s. The emergence of structural methods engaged reflections on scientificity in the Humanities, which were extended in the semiology developed around Roland Barthes. The question of science then appeared through the debates on the role of literary criticism. The end of the 1960s is marked by an evolution towards an aesthetic and theoretical radicalness which identified theory and science. Eventually, the collective construction of poetics around Genette and Todorov shows at the same time how theory is prioritized over the question of science, and the complex relationship with literature in the definition of a science of literature. The paper relies on a study of some theoretical texts and of several theorists' trajectories, in a perspective of historical sociology of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Created in 1950 to promote “all the sciences”, the National Science Foundation (NFS) did not explicitly include social sciences until 1957. We study this process of inclusion from the first debates about the creation of such a foundation in 1945 and highlight two phenomena. On the one hand, social sciences had to cope with a double constraint: of object of studies regarding political limitations; of methods of inquiry regarding natural scientists' conceptions of scientificity. On the other hand, strategies of inclusion varied among disciplines, as varied the requirements to cope with NSF' “standards”. More generally, this study highlights the double bind generated by the “quest for scientific legitimacy”, that actually hinders the possibilities of scientific progress for the social sciences.

Through the constitution of membership criteria to the discipline, this article studies the question of “making science” in economics. The article reconstructs a sequence during which the constitution of membership criteria and homogenization of the disciplinary corpus were crystallized: the standardization of PhD program. Based on an analysis of the Bowen Report, the paper focuses on the role of the American Economic Association in this process and analyzes the challenges associated with heterogeneity and lack of certification for a discipline going through a professionalization process and claiming the authority of science. Contemporary economists often claim the exceptionality of their discipline within the human and social sciences by highlighting its consensual character. The article shows that constitution of membership criteria and the homogenization of the disciplinary corpus are essential to create the conditions for a consensus to settle.

Political economy, social economy, economical science: during the Interwar, these different names reveal a boundary-process, which aims at defining the best way of “doing science”. This best way of doing science is characterized by Edgard Milhaud in its Enquiry on Production, which he realized at the International Labour Organisation between 1920 and 1925. This paper intends to determine the place of this enquiry within the field of political economy, and thus examine the conditions of possibility of a scientific practice within an administrative and political setting.

What are the reasons leading some researchers to advocate the application of certain methods on the ground that they are more precise and more systematic, even though they are also more abstract and more constraining than those currently in use? This question is examined here through a review of the evolution of the academic career of two French archaeologists, Georges Laplace and Jean-Claude Gardin. Their earliest works, dating from the 1950s, were characterized by the application of more abstract methodologies, based on formalization or on the use of computation. In the following decades, Laplace and Gardin's approach remained marginal in France, even though at the same time, similar perspectives were becoming popular not only among English-speaking archaeologists but also in other academic fields in France. The biographical perspective adopted in this paper allows us to highlight the parallel trajectories and the tensions existing between the epistemical, ethical, biographical, and political dimensions that shaped the careers of Laplace and Gardin. As such, their academic experiences appear as the most radical forms of the contemporary aspiration to modernize and professionalize archaeology.

During the Second World War, the place of school and academic geography changes in the French education system. Indeed, this discipline owed the Vichy Regime its separation with history in university curricula and structures, after more than a century of “marriage”. The here for the first time published and commented documents shed new light on this little known event in the history of the French institutionalization of human sciences. They particularly stress the relationship between higher education and the machinery and ideology of Petain government.

This paper questions the historiography of ethnomathematics as it is generally practiced in this field of research, which currently refers to the study of cultural variations in the uses of mathematical ideas and knowledge, especially those elaborated outside the scope of scholarly and academic activities. If what are generally considered as the founding texts of ethnomathematics were published in the 1970s and 1980s, the emergence of an anthropology of mathematics can be traced back to ethnological, mathematical, and philosophical studies written since the 19th century. However, the prevalence of the evolutionist and “prelogical thought” theories appears to have durably impeded the recognition of a mathematical rationality expressed through various activities in non-Western societies (and particularly in those with an oral tradition). At the turn of the second half of the 20th century, a significant epistemological change occurred on this issue, which prompted the development of studies that are now generally considered to be seminal works in the establishment of ethnomathematics.