Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c47g7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T23:43:59.957Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Why I Am a Presentist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2013

Naomi Oreskes
Naomi Oreskes*
Affiliation:
Department of History of Science, Harvard University E-mail: oreskes@fas.harvard.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Both geologists and historians study the past, but they have divergent views of the present. Geologists are unambiguously presentist. They believe that the observable present is a crucial resource in understanding the past, because in the observable present we can see and study the processes that have occurred in the unobservable past. For geologists, it is largely uncontroversial that the past not only can but should be interpreted with reference to the present.

Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 26 , Issue 4: Approaches, Styles, and Narratives: Reflections on Doing History of Science , December 2013 , pp. 595 - 609
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alvarez, W. 1986. “Toward a Theory of Impact Crises.” Eos, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union 67 (35):649–658.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boorstein, Daniel. 1989. Hidden History. New York: Vintage Press.Google Scholar
Brandt, Allan. 2004. “From Analysis to Advocacy: Crossing Boundaries as a Historian of Health Policy.” In Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings, edited by Huisman, Frank and Harley Warner, John, 460–484. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Brysse, Keynyn, Oreskes, Naomi, O'Reilly, Jessica and Oppenheimer, Michael. 2012. “Climate Change Prediction: Erring on the Side of Least Drama?” Global Environmental Change 23:327–337. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378012001215 (last accessed August 15, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butterfield, Herbert. 1965. The Whig Interpretation of History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Cartwright, Nancy. 1983. How the Laws of Physics Lie. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cartwright, Nancy. 1999. The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cockell, Charles, Koeberl, Christian, and Gilmour, Iain, eds. 2010. Biological Studies Associated with Impact Events. New York and Heidelberg: Springer.Google Scholar
Culver, Stephen J. 2003. “Benthic foraminifera across the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary: A Review.” Marine Micropaleontology 47:177–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fine, Arthur. 1996. The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism and the Quantum Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gavroglu, Kostas, and Renn, Jürgen, eds. 2010. Positioning the History of Science. New York: Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
Glantz, Stanton A., Slade, John, Bero, Lisa A., and Hanauer, Peter. 1998. The Cigarette Papers. Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Golan, Tal. 2004. Laws of Men and Laws of Nature: The History of Scientific Expert Testimony in England and America. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1965. “Is uniformitarianism necessary?” American Journal of Science 263: 223–228, http://www.ajsonline.org/content/263/3/223.abstract (last accessed June 28, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Le Goff, Jacques. 1996. History and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna J. 1990. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Harding, Sandra. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Hindle, Brooke. 1984. “A Retrospective View of Science, Technology, and Material Culture in Early American History.” William and Mary Quarterly 41 (3):422–435. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/hindle.html (last accessed June 18, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hookyaas, Reijer. 1963. Natural Law and Divine Miracle: The Principle of Uniformity in Geology, Biology and Theology. Leiden: E.J. Brill.Google Scholar
Hubbert, M. King. 1967. “Critique of the principle of uniformity.” In Uniformity and Simplicity, edited by Albritton, Claude C., Geological Society of America, Special Paper 89:3–33.Google Scholar
Hut, Piet, et al. 1987. “Comet Showers as a Cause of Mass Extinction.” Nature 329:118–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keller, Evelyn Fox. 1984. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. New York: W. H. Freeman.Google Scholar
Keller, Evelyn Fox, and Longino, Helen, eds. 1996. Feminism and Science. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Koeberl, Christian. 1996. “Chicxulub-the KT boundary impact crater: A review of the evidence and an introduction to impact crater studies.” Abhandlungen der Geologischen Bundesanstalt 53:23–50.Google Scholar
Koeberl, Christian, and Reimold, Wolf Uwe. 2012. Meteorite Impact Structures: An Introduction to Impact Crater Studies. New York and Heidelberg: Springer.Google Scholar
Longino, Helen. 1990. Science as Social Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newcomb, Sally. 1990. “Contributions of British Experimentalists to the Discipline of Geology 1780–1820.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 134 (2):161–225.Google Scholar
Oldroyd, David. 1990. The Highlands Controversy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Oreskes, Naomi. 1999. The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oreskes, Naomi. 2004. “The scientific consensus on climate change.” Science 306:1686.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Oreskes, Naomi. 2007, “From scaling to simulation: Changing meanings and ambitions of models in the Earth sciences.” In Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, and Exemplary Narratives, edited by Angela, N. H. Creager, Lunbeck, Elizabeth, and Norton Wise, M., 93–124. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Oreskes, Naomi. 2013. “On the ‘reality’ and reality of anthropogenic climate change.” Climatic Change 119:559–560, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-013-0779-3 (last accessed June 30, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oreskes, Naomi, and Conway, Erik M.. 2012. “Perspectives on global warming: A Book Symposium with Steven Yearley, David Mercer, and Andy Pitman.” Metascience 21:531–559, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11016–011–9639–9 (last accessed July 17, 2013).Google Scholar
Oreskes, Naomi, and Doel, Ronald E.. 2002. “Physics and chemistry of the earth.” In The Cambridge History of Science, Volume V: Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences, edited by Mary, Jo Nye, 538–552. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rampino, Michael, and Self, Stephen. 1993. “Bottleneck in human evolution and the Toba eruption (Letter).” Science 262:1955.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rudwick, Martin J. S. 2010. Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Secord, James. 1990. Controversy in Victorian Geology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shea, James H. 1982. “Twelve fallacies of uniformitarianism.” Geology 10:455–460, http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/10/9/455.abstract (last accessed June 8, 2013).2.0.CO;2>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smit, J. 2002. “The Fate of Planktonic Foraminifers Crossing the KT Boundary (Or Not): A Review.” In Catastrophic Events and Mass Extinctions – Impacts and Beyond, edited by Christian, Koeberl and Macleod, Kenneth G., 204–205. Boulder CO: Geological Society of America.Google Scholar
Solomon, Miriam. 2001. Social Empiricism. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Toon, Owen B., et al. 1997. “Environmental Perturbations Caused by the Impacts of Asteroids and Comets.” Reviews of Geophysics 35 (1):41–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, Richard. 2011. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. New York: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Wylie, Alison. 2002. Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar