In October and November of 2008, the distinguished feminist scientist and scholar Evelyn Fox Keller visited Taiwan and gave a series of lectures, including the keynote speech at the International Conference of Global Women Scientists held at Taiwan's National Yang-Ming University. We were unaware at the time that Keller had presented a paper at the International Congress for the History of Science in Beijing in 2005, titled “Globalization, Scientific Lexicons, and the Future of Biology.” After Keller's visit to Taiwan, she discussed with Karine Chemla and Francesca Bray (historians of science and technology, and close friends of hers) the possibility of the newly launched EASTS running a special issue called “Language Matters,” a proposal that, as editor-in-chief at the time, I strongly endorsed. Keller, Chemla, and Bray enthusiastically discussed the details of “Language Matters” and proposed that invited papers be submitted before November of 2010 under three general categories: the history of scholarship on East Asian languages and science from the nineteenth century onward; how language works in science and technology; and how language works in the historiography of science and technology. Such were the scope and remarkable vision of this issue that no fewer than thirteen scholars were invited to contribute. Unfortunately, however, things did not go quite so smoothly after that. Many scholars were extremely busy, and EASTS was unable then to fund invited scholars to visit Taiwan for a “Language Matters” workshop. No less critical were the tragic events of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011. The momentum behind that special issue gradually dissipated, and in the end it went silent. In my seven years as editor, its untimely end was one of my great regrets.
Six years later, in the spring of 2016, our current editor, Kuo Wen-Hua, a doctoral graduate of MIT's STS program, visited Professor Keller at MIT. Keller handed him her unpublished paper “Globalization, Scientific Lexicons, and the Future of Biology,” which she had presented in Beijing in 2005, and Kuo had the remarkably good idea of publishing in EASTS a panel discussion with Keller's updated paper at its center, inviting scholars to comment on it and Keller to reply. In a way, the idea was a revival of our lost special issue, albeit different in form and scale. When Kuo proposed this to Keller, Chemla, Bray, and myself, we all enthusiastically supported it, and with the kind help of Ruey-Lin Chen of National Chung-Cheng University, the two of us invited commentators. This new invitation was quite different in its timing from the one in 2009, and the results are very encouraging. Although under tight schedules and heavy workloads, the five contributors are Francesca Bray (United Kingdom), Ruey-Lin Chen (Taiwan), Tomoko Ishida (Japan), Dayk Jang (South Korea), and Karine Chemla (France), with a precious reply to these from that most respected and experienced of professors, Evelyn Fox Keller (United States).
In my opinion, two general observations on this panel can be made. First, the responses and discussions are global in scale: in addition to comments from East Asia (South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan), we have comments from France and the United Kingdom, plus the replies of Keller herself from the United States. Second, it is an interestingly heterogeneous group of commentators: a historian of mathematics, a historian of gender and technology, a philosopher of science and experimentation, a philosopher of biology and evolutionary studies, and a very young philosopher of biology and genetics. With all this in mind, I now present to you this remarkable forum: “Keller on Language, Science, and Globalization.” Keller's updated paper, the five commentaries on it, and Keller's own reply are all self-explanatory from their titles and need no further introduction.
Daiwie Fu is distinguished professor of science, technology, and society at National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan.
