Acknowledgments

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspects of this volume have been our interactions to craft it, interactions in which we each became more knowledgeable through each others’ comments on the participants’ and our own work, the articles we collectively found and sent to each other, and the personal sympathy, empathy, and support we derived from each other in our respective trials. We have each grown in friendship as well as in a broader knowledge. We also wish collectively to acknowledge the rich interactions we have had with the other participants in crafting the book and their good will and sustained efforts to produce and then to respond to our comments and questions—which have often provided learning experiences for us. We got a contribution from everyone who presented—remarkable, perhaps unprecedented for such conferences. This was surely due to the involvement of the participants and the good interactions they had with each other and with us.

Linnda Caporael is grateful to her family, Greg Eismin and Kwanchira Chindamanee. With great charm and frequent hilarity, they produced a working space of love and good cheer, as well as many dinners, cleanups, and dog walks. As always, her sisters, Roe and Barb have been a source of unconditional support and good advice. Suzanne created the provocative conceptual art. Marilynn Brewer, of the Psychology Department at the Ohio State University and New South Wales, scaffolded an intellectual lifetime of challenging conversation and collaboration. Marilynn’s comments and critique during the work on the volume were invaluable. Linnda also thanks the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) and Werner Callebaut for fellowship support in 2005, which facilitated the initial workshop proposal leading to this volume. She thanks the members of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Anne Borrero, who provided unfailing staff support during an unanticipated stint as acting head, and Dean Mary Simoni for her gift of time. Thanks also to Colin Garvey for last-minute help with proofreading.

Jim Griesemer thanks his family (Connie, Ellen, and Kate) for their accommodation of Jim’s crazy work schedule, disruption of home life, and general forgetfulness during the writing of this book. He is grateful to Elihu Gerson for comments, conversations, and general support of his work and projects and to the Philosophy Department and Science and Technology Studies Program at the University of California, Davis, for providing congenial work environments. Jim also appreciates the award of a Herbert A. Young Society dean’s fellowship (2011–2014), which facilitated completion of his work on this project. Jim thanks Peter Godfrey-Smith, City University of New York Graduate Center, for several productive and challenging discussions that prompted clarification and articulation of his views on HIV-1 reproduction. Steve Lawrie, Indiana University, provided helpful discussions of HIV, prions, and other aspects of molecular biology. Mike Trestman helped with manuscript preparation at crucial moments, for which Jim is also grateful. Jim’s contributions to this volume are dedicated to the memory of his father, Richard A. Griesemer (1929–2011), whose talents as a scientist and science administrator are both sources of inspiration.

Bill Wimsatt would like to acknowledge generous funding provided by the Winton Professorship at the University of Minnesota and the support of the Center for Philosophy of Science and Department of Philosophy that made possible an extended visit by Jim Griesemer and an overlapping visit by Linnda Caporael in the fall of 2010 and allowed us to work together face-to-face in our early postconference planning for this volume. To Barbara, he owes not only support, but a powerful pragmatic application of “near decomposability”--her liberating heuristic of “taking it outside” where difficult sections are removed from interactive contexts to be worked on and solved independently.

We thank Gerd Müller (chair), Werner Callebaut (scientific director), and Eva Karner (secretary) of the KLI, who were invaluable to us in our planning, preparation, and workshopping, and its Executive Board for supporting the workshop. We are grateful to them and the housekeeping staff, Ferida and Mustafa, for making our stay at KLI both productive and enjoyable. Jeff Schwartz, University of Pittsburgh and a KLI visitor fellow, made many useful and insightful comments during our workshop, as did Joeri Witteveen, a junior fellow at KLI, and Andreas Wilke, a KLI postdoctoral fellow, and a number of other fellows and observers. We are grateful to them.

We thank Susan Buckley for her generous support, flexible attitude, and ability to provide a human interface for MIT Press, without whose scaffolding this volume would not have been possible, Bob Prior for shaping the initial volume and ongoing support, and Katherine Almeida for her patient guidance from raw papers to polished book manuscript.