Table of Contents: - PSA Election Results
- PSA @ APA Session Call
Grad Reads - NEW PSA Office Hours
- PHOS 90th Anniversary
- PhilSci Archive Top 5
- Calendar of Events & Calls for Papers - Upcoming Dates
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Thank you very much for your participation in the 2023 PSA election! We had an excellent slate of candidates and the results of the election were very close. Please join me in welcoming the newly elected PSA leadership.
PSA Governing Board: Mathais Frisch & Lydia Patton will join the Governing Board on January 1, 2024. They will replace Soazing Le Bihan and Kareem Khalifa. PSA Nominating Committee: Lauren Ross, Otavio Bueno and Emily Parke will be the members of the Nominating Committee starting on January 1, 2024. They will replace Matt Haber, Catherine Kendig, and Julia Bursten (chair). |
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The PSA invites nominations from members for an "author meets critics" book session for a special session of the APA dedicated to work by philosophers of science. We especially encourage nominations of work by early or mid-career scholars, and books of potential wide interest to philosophers with specializations other than philosophy of science. Please submit your nominations, with no more than a brief paragraph or two explaining your nomination, and a list of willing and/or potential critics (noting who among the critics has officially agreed attend) to Anya Plutynski, aplutyns@wustl.edu by July 30. The PSA Awards committee will vote on a nominee to present at the next Eastern APA.
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Our first Short Reads by Grads is a review of Sarah Richardson's The Maternal Imprint (2021), written by Maja Sidzińska. Maja is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and she works primarily in the area of contemporary and historical metaphysics of science. Her dissertation work concerns different ontological understandings of pregnancy and its upshots for discussions of biological individuality, and it concerns the kinds of metaphilosophical frameworks within which such questions are best understood.
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Review of Sarah S. Richardson’s The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of
Maternal-Fetal Effects (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
In The Maternal Imprint (2021), Sarah Richardson illuminates the gendered, racialized,
and classed history of the science of maternal influence on the fetus in pregnancy (1). Richardson begins by discussing August Weismann’s 19th century theory of heredity, which posited an equivalent role to the male and female germ plasms in conferring traits to offspring. This theory opposed earlier ideas about heredity which held pregnant mothers to confer physiological effects as a result of their impressions. Weismann’s theory was taken to have implications for gender equality, since it was understood as implying equal moral responsibility for the health of offspring and future generations more generally. In response, however, arose narratives of “prenatal culture”—views which once more attributed to the pregnant mother a greater role in influencing the health of her offspring: she could pass on her own cultural improvement to her offspring through the womb! Thus, primary moral responsibility for the health of offspring and the “human race” once more swung back to pregnant women.
The controversy about maternal effects raged in Western biomedicine of the early 20th century, with some scholars challenging the idea of maternal effects. In yet another reversal, the rise of eugenicist “germ plasm hygiene” theories led to conceptions of reproductive risk as the equal remit of both mothers and fathers; in the name of civic virtue, potential and expectant parents were implored to care for the health of their sperm and eggs. Such imperatives gave way to new social expectations, as certain reproductive outcomes could not be explained by genetic inheritance alone; Richardson cites early 20th century genetic research on wheat, silkworms, snails, and mice—later applied for agricultural ends—as informing the new science of maternal effects. Maternal effects, a concept introduced by Dobzhansky, were effects caused by the maternal phenotype which were not explained by direct Mendelian mechanisms. In the second half of the 20th century, scientists wondered if racial or ethnic trauma had biological, intergenerational effects, passed on during gestation. Because social determinants of health didn’t fully explain disparities in outcomes across races, and given newly available data on the human genome, researchers began exploring whether epigenetic effects, in the form of DNA methylation, could settle the question. Richardson concludes that the current epigenetic science of maternal effects does not support a positive answer. Carefully reviewing three foundational studies of maternal epigenetic effects, she finds significant methodological weaknesses, which include too-small sample sizes, an absence of longitudinal data, an absence of suitable controls, among other issues. Pronouncements in the contemporary popular media about mothers’ abilities to direct the health of their offspring are driven not by science, but rather by cultural tropes about individual women’s moral responsibility for reproduction.
Richardson’s book provides a rich resource for understanding the history of the science
of maternal influences in pregnancy, one which challenges us to think about the role of values
in science, theory change, scientific methods, and the social context of science. Selected case
studies vividly illustrate the interaction of social norms and empirical findings, and are
fascinating in their own right. However, some metaphilosophical ambiguities arise in the work.
In the first six historical chapters, Richardson’s critique of the science is largely feminist, while
her critique of the contemporary epigenetics science in Chapter 7 proceeds on methodological
grounds. This raises a question about Richardson’s view as to whether (or how) the science
should respond to normative social concerns or whether the science should simply be more
rigorous. In Chapters 8 and 9, Richardson takes the progressive view to be that we should give
up on the epigenetic science of maternal effects, given that the effects, if there are any, are
very small, and given that interventions in the social conditions in which pregnancies take place
are the most effective at improving infant outcomes. And yet earlier chapters had shown that
what is progressive is historically contingent: prenatal culturists grounded their calls for
increased freedoms for women in women’s alleged gestational influence of offspring (Chapter
3, 75ff), while eugenicists who rejected maternal effects suggested increased responsibility for
prospective fathers for reproductive outcomes (Chapter 4, 83ff). If reproductive agency is the
progressive aim, it is not clear whether we ought to embrace or reject the science of maternal
epigenetic effects. The reliability of the science aside, maternal effects science has recently
been deployed in arguments for improved reproductive conditions as well as used for the social
shaming of mothers. These questions notwithstanding, The Maternal Imprint makes a
consequential contribution to the critical study of science, and provides abundant entry points
for further research. Its findings are broadly relevant for scientific practice, and for how the
results of epigenetic research should be interpreted.
1. A note on terminology: I follow Richardson’s gendered terminology throughout; see Richardson (2021, 19) for an explanation of her usage.
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Philosophy of Science - 90th Anniversary
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PhilSci Archive - Top 5 Downloads
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PhilSci-Archive is the official preprint repository for the PSA and the best place to host your philosophy of science preprints. It offers a free, stable, and openly accessible archive for scholarly articles and monographs. With PhilSci-Archive, researchers can search the open-access repository and get curated alerts about new work delivered to their inboxes. Many journals encourage authors to post preprints on archives like the PhilSci-Archive in order to increase readership, and historical data suggests that posting to the archive increases a published paper’s citation rates (see https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/20778/). Visit philsci-archive.pitt.edu today to create a free account and post your preprints.
The most downloaded preprints for the last 6 months from include: Avigad, Jeremy (2022) - What we talk about when we talk about mathematics Villavicencio, Marcos (2020) - Four Examples of Pseudoscience Zinkernagel, Henrik (2008) - Did time have a beginning?
Vickers, Peter John (2008) - Bohr's Theory of the Atom: Content, Closure and Consistency
Griffiths, Paul E. (2021) - What are biological sexes? |
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Calendar of Events & Calls for Papers - Upcoming Dates |
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