Doppelganger

I admit it, I Google myself from time to time. Mostly, I want to see how visible I am on the internet, since William Thomas isn't the most Google-able name in all the world. The last time I did so, I ran across a weird coincidence. Apparently there's a history professor at the University of Nebraska named Will Thomas (William G. Thomas III, to be precise; on my end, I'm G. William Thomas (the original)), who studies 19th century American history and had a strong interest in new ways in which humanities scholarship can take advantage of the internet. He has a good blog called Roots of Modern America, mostly on the railroads; and a couple of other online projects, one also part of his railroads project. He even looks a little bit like an older version of me:

That's him above, and below, for those of you who don't know me, is a picture taken of me last weekend at a Washington Nationals game.
I only post this because I encourage you to take a look at some of his online work. The internet is undoubtedly going to transform how we publish and communicate historical work (aside from novel applications, I firmly believe that any work that would retail for more than $40-50 should have a free internet version--if it's not commercially viable, make it available to everyone) so we should be comparing notes.

controversy and conversation

Here's a thought for the day: how do you tell a scientific conversation from a scientific controversy? I was thinking about this while thinking about the problem of limited perspective. Yesterday I discussed C. P. Snow's two cultures problem--he was concerned that administrators had too narrow a perspective, that they weren't open to scientific revelations, that scientific knowledge no longer counted as part of intellectual life. The flip side to this argument is the critique of scientism: science's limited perspective can constrain thinking within the bounds of what has been accepted as adhering to the constraints of certain kinds of scientific models. Of course, these constraints are frequently designed around certain political or technical projects.

I've expressed my doubts that these critiques address a realistic portrayal of the place of science in society in any era. Both seem to hinge on a scientific authority that is either ignored or fetishized, in either case supposing a final conclusion that "science" advocates. Studies of scientific controversies also seem to be mostly concerned with the circumstances of their resolution. But little emphasis seems to be placed on the productivity of debate. By emphasizing controversy rather than conversation, by emphasizing the closure of argumentation rather than its opening up, do we assume that issues of science tend to assume a bitter tone? Is this seen as a choice between optimism and pessimism, or hagiography and critique?

I don't have a good answer, and I'm not sure how long I want to keep asking hand-waving questions. As we move into summer, I want to try and do something different and more constructive with this blog, so, following the conclusion of the responses to Galison's questions, be on the lookout for more speculation on canon-building. I also want to try and capture some lessons from my class and do some exercises in historical summary along the lines of "if we had to tell the story of, I don't know, physiology in the latter half of the 19th century in 10 minutes, what would we say about it?" I like reductivist exercises, because they force you to separate what you know from what you don't.

Science and Humanities

C. P. Snow rises from the dead to haunt us once again! I'm going to take a break from Galison's questions for a post or two to try and concentrate on some other things. In this case, it's a New York Times article on a curriculum to unite the sciences and the humanities, which Advances in the History of Psychology picked up on as well.

We are confronted with the question of whether the science and the humanities (a.k.a. non-science) cultures can ever resolve their perspectives. I've been hacking away at the intro to my book, which essentially says that we among the academic commentariat have missed the boat. The two cultures never existed. (See also Edgerton's Warfare State and Guy Ortolano's recent intellectual history dissertation on the Snow two cultures controversy).

This is a hard subject to address in blog format, but I'd just point to two issues. First, the problem of specialist knowledge is not limited to science. Modern society is effectively founded on the notion that many differing kinds of specialist knowledge and skill must be brought together even though no one individual (or committee) can master it. Questions of trust and fairness abound. This issue is much bigger than science, and Snow was wrong to suggest that the inclusion or exclusion of science, in particular, was central to this problem (science studies could do with some reality checks here as well).

The second issue is the definition and relevance of the humanities to public and scientific culture.
By any reasonable standards, science is incredibly mainstream. And humanistic thinking is equally mainstream, if, by humanistic thinking, you mean non-scientific thinking. The two get along quite nicely, again, by any reasonable standards. Snow was (needlessly) worried that Britain's administrative ranks were chock full of people who could quote obscure literary passages, but knew nothing of the second law of thermodynamics. But this was not representative of the state of British science-society relations in Snow's day. Today the concern is even less relevant.

Science has been incorporated into the technological life of society to the point where the university-commercial divide has ceased to exist in a meaningful way. There are many who hand-wring about the integrity of academic science, perhaps in some cases rightfully, but the situation we enjoy was precisely what Snow was advocating. The question thus becomes, do the academic humanities have anything to contribute along the lines suggested in the NYT article?

The NYT article suggests the contents of the humanities could be useful (not just some vague analysis and writing skill acquired through work in humanities courses regardless of their content). Personally, I doubt it. I think our work could be useful, if we wanted it to be (and it'd be legitimate if we said we don't want it to be). Public discourse consists of a series of short-hand references--historical references (witness the recent hubbub over Bush's reference to appeasement), turns of phrase, etc. Humanists could be good at researching, dissecting, and judging the pertinence of the way public discourse unfolds.

We in the history of science could demonstrate how people are bad at talking about science and technology; but that would mean taking what non-historians have to say seriously. Traditionally, some non-historians have done very well in arguing about issues. A humanities training could be good at preserving the quality of prior arguments and rearticulating them, and repackaging them in useful ways so as to promote originality and cumulation of ideas. But our work will never be pertinent unless we are committed to being cumulative ourselves--working amid abstruse details, and refusing to set up straw men. Scientists have no problems with either, and it's gotten them a long way. Until we can match them in terms of quality and the core importance of their contributions, I don't think programs that attempt to link science with the humanities can flourish.

--apologies for sloppy use of the term "humanism" in the prior version of this; it's still not up to snuff (humanists=practitioner of the humanities; ugh), but will have to do.

Galison's Q's #5: What Should We Make?

Jumping off of "fabricated fundamentals", Galison asks a related question: if we can make new natural things, what natural things should we make? It's basically the same thing Donna Haraway was getting at back in the '80s with her Cyborg Manifesto (I think--Haraway can be baffling). We're all artificial now, so now what?

I don't really see this as a history and philosophy of science question at all--it's basically a political and economic question. We have some technology, so what should we do with it? Economists will tell us that we will be hard-pressed to come to conclusive answers because individuals hold different values, and that market-type negotiations will instead determine what takes place. Is it possible to ban a technology? Probably not; if it's valuable enough, a black market will develop. Then, if some people have access to it while others don't, that changes the dynamics of what constitutes ethical and legal behavior (see the plethora of current IP issues, or the ambiguous social attitudes toward narcotics). Do we in the science studies professions have anything original to say on this score? I'm not too sure we do.

Thinking about this actually reminded me of one of the most interesting sci-fi novels I've read (I'm not really a student of the genre), Frank Herbert's Dune, where a society 30,000+ years from now is highly technological, highly feudal, and highly religious. In this techno-ethical system, the highest technologies revolve around the mind. Interstellar travel is based on folding space, which is accomplished using a state of hyper-consciousness achieved through ingesting the spice "melange" (which only exists on the desert planet Arrakis, a.k.a, Dune). Melange is a pretty transparent stand-in for oil, and its trade is tightly controlled. But maybe a more pertinent point to this post is the fact that "thinking machines" (i.e. advanced computers) are religiously banned; in their place are "human computers" called Mentats. There's more to the book than that; but it's an illustration of the book's overall treatment of the limitations on the use of technology in a time when technological applications are basically unlimited, essentially suggesting that fanaticism and totalitarianism (the book's main plot revolves around the possibility of a coming galactic "jihad") are the only replacements for economic behavior in a society where technology must be controlled. Interesting stuff.

Galison's Q's #4: Fabricated Fundamentals

In his 4th question, Peter Galison asks about the manufactured fundamental; essentially, what do we mean by fundamental? How does something get to be fundamental, and if we manufacture a new fundamental (like, say, a transuranic element) is it natural or artificial?

This seems like sort of a gimme. In one sense, it's a very old question. Many seventeenth-century objections to experimental knowledge hinged on the fact that an artificial manipulation of nature did not represent a form of knowledge that could be considered natural, and eternal, and, thus, philosophically interesting. Bacon and Galileo argued otherwise, and, over the course of the century, opinion slanted their way. So, really, engineered states of nature have always been a part of modern scientific inquiry. If lasers, or engineered proteins, or quark interactions, or nano-scale technologies seem artificial, I don't see anyone really seriously objecting that they are worthy of study as objects of interest, and whether one chooses to view them as natural, artificial, fundamental, or whatever, strikes me as a matter of linguistic convention, perhaps worthy of Scholastic debate. They are constrained states of nature, like everything else.

A somewhat more difficult question is how do things come to be fundamental? This plays right into the old SSK questions. How are quarks constructed? Or, following the rival approach, how do experiments end? The old approach seems to emphasize the social resolution of conflicting opinions in controversy. They are replete with the politically defeated scientists, often sulking into retirement stubbornly clinging to their positions. But is that really typical? Don't scientists willingly change their minds all the time? I don't deny that the processes of convincing and being convinced are based on social-linguistic traditions, but, at the same time, the role of evidence is clearly important. Here's my opinion: the future of historical study in this area will focus on robustness. At some point the evidence fits so tightly together that you feel compelled to acknowledge its persuasiveness.

At some point after 1900, even though atoms have been persuasively argued for for a century, you really should start admitting that they exist. The distinction between whether you feel they exist ontologically or phenomenologically ceases to matter, because your practices with respect to them will be the same in either case. To put a little sauce on it, take the quantized field: do virtual particles exist? The name "virtual" even acknowledges that they have a quasi-ontological status (rooted in the superposition of discrete quantum states), but, for all intents and purposes, the robustness of their use in HEP theory effectively secures their reality. Whether they are what we (and, by we, I mean physicists) think they are (if, indeed, physicists think about it at all) is another matter.

Exactly what "robustness" entails has social and physical elements that are definitely worthy of study. Actually, there's a specialty in operations research dedicated to the idea of robustness--might be worth checking out the technical literature on it.

Galison's Q's #3: Technology of Argumentation

PhunDay: once again a great time. Good papers; good, deep arguments. Apparently we've got some blog readers from Princeton, so here's a shout out to y'all up in NJ.

To continue on with another PhunDay participant, Peter Galison's questions, I'll address Peter's third question about historical argumentation. He starts out by talking about the boxes of inquiry: physical sciences, biological sciences, earth sciences, etc... which leads to a heavy concentration on certain areas clearly within these boxes (Darwin, quantum measurement, number theory, etc...), but less in cross-cutting areas, though we have a good start in areas like probability, objectivity (cf. his new book with Raine Daston), observation, and model building. So, the question seems to be, where should we go with this?

I guess I have a few reactions. First, it may be too easy to invent or commandeer categories and then to tell their history in our eagerness to find sexy new ways of looking at history. Before commenting conclusively or in depth I have to sit down with the book rather than flip through it, but I have my suspicions about the objectivity argument (Ted Porter wrote a good review on this, too, I think in Isis--I'd have to look it up). Galison and Daston chart attitudes toward objectivity through time. But is objectivity the sort of thing that bears coherent attitudes that change in clear ways? You can tell a history of anything if you cherry pick your evidence, but I always liked Keith Thomas' Man and the Natural World, which to me serves as a permanent refutation of the notion that the human "attitude to the natural world" is something that actually has much of a history, because there are just too many concurrent--and contradictory--perspectives couched in concerns other than a general outlook on the natural world. (It's true Thomas focuses on the "man" bit from his title, but arguments that "women" have a coherent attitude to the natural world have always struck me as fiercely reductivist as well). I'd think objectivity is a similar sort of concept--different attitudes toward portraying the "typical" or the "prototypical" or the "unusual" or the "specific specimen" would probably vary depending on concern rather than on grander epistemic shifts, but maybe that's wrong....

That said, the approach has produced its successes. I think Daston and Park's charting of attitudes toward wonder was very well done and was a nice way of looking at changing ideas about knowledge without adhering to science/non-science boundaries. Also, I believe the history of 20th century science cannot be told without discussing a constant state of interdisciplinary shifting. These shifts might not be a broad cross-science trend, but they definitely defy a one-field analysis. Also, Peter's focus on the tools of science is apt. There's a lot more history left to write on the history of such-and-such a method of arguing, or such-and-such an epistemological sensibility. In fact, these histories probably serve as a sort of guide to interdisciplinary shifts. I'm not sure if I can articulate that any better at this point.

One last observation: historians of science have never seemed to mind stepping outside of boxes. If anything, we've become obsessed with accounts that emphasize what is external to the history of our science. Yet, we do seem to harp on the same bits of science, the same stories over and over again, don't we? I attribute this to a growing lack of concern with the actual history of science, and more toward seeing ourselves as historians of "ways of seeing the world" or something. But this strange disconnect between our desire to go outside the box and our adherence to a very narrow set of episodes or scientific practices is worthy of further thought.

Contrite Post #1: Final Exams

I'm off to the always enjoyable Princeton-Harvard Physics History PhunDay tomorrow--a real model for what a workshop should be. Today's post, however, comes amid correcting final exams for History 174, and my realization that, while my course's design seems to have produced some good, improved writing (big thanks to my TA for working with students, reading drafts, revisions, etc.), it seems to have primarily been an exercise in self-education. Indeed, I learned a lot! I wish I'd have had a chance to have taken my course at some point, taught by someone with a better established knowledge of the subject matter than myself.

However, it's painfully clear that I torpedoed my undergrad students. Everything coming back to me on the exam IDs is all about what so-and-so discovered, or what they're famous for, or how something changed the world, or something, without picking up on trends and narratives and the like. In other words, what I wanted them to learn registered, but got echoed back cloaked in the language of pop-history. It's pretty clear there's not much in the way of "superlunary" ideas about how science works; in fact, I'd say they don't think about it much at all. It's more just trying to figure out who the "notables" are.

Even more disappointing are the essays, which, except for some good answers on my Bacon vs. Descartes question, are almost all BS. It's clear the readings weren't touched too much. All-in-all no one paid much attention. I attribute this to students having other priorities--if they'd paid attention more than intermittently, they'd have surely done better. But, at the same time, I could have focused more tightly on certain ideas, and repeated them, and hammered them home to get students interested.

So, lessons definitely learned. I structured the course in such a way that students were exposed to all kinds of historical threads from which they could choose what they were most interested in. Several who kept up really, really liked this approach. I'm glad that they were so drawn in. But most just seem to have gotten lost. Who's to say they would have gotten more out of the course had I used another approach, since many are just science majors fulfilling a requirement? Still, you just can't teach a course of 77 kids for the benefit of 5.

Galison's Questions #2: The Basic and the Pure

In his second question Peter Galison asks us to figure out what we mean when we speak of "basic" versus "applied" science. I don't like this question as much as I did the context question. First, because I think he's pretty blithe about conflating two separate issues: the question of foundations in science, and the perennial R&D issue, which has little, if anything, to do with fundamental knowledge in any strict sense. Second, ultimately, I think this issue is less worth debating than the externalist vs. internalist debate (which I think is worth having, not to settle the question of which one really matters, but to put a little respect back into internalist histories).

Peter's very clear about why he thinks the "basic" issue is important--it's the Cold War. "So much seemed at stake in these Cold War battles. Superlunary science seemed the only hope for a model of democracy. Enlightenment reason, argued many, carried just that mixture of rigor and courage that could block the ferocious and demeaning demands of Hitlerism and Stalinism as they pounded on the gates of the academy.... But as the Cold War aged, as "the war" increasingly called to mind Khe Sanh rather than El Alamein, the symbolic register of science began to slip. For a generation of scholars ["scientists, philosophers, and historians"] who came of age after the 1960s, rather than in the 1940s and 1950s, science appeared not so much the last bulwark of reason against brute force as, instead, the sharp edge of endless war."

This is a classic case of the Twentieth Century Turning Point Presumption, which I reject. Whose arguments are these? Why are they important? Did anyone actually, seriously think that pure, unadulterated science was a bulwark of democracy? Did anyone seriously feel pure science was under immediate threat? Why? Because it had large amounts of government funding? Because its funding later retreated somewhat from outrageously high record levels? Didn't the exact same disillusion occur after World War I? What happened, did everyone just kind of forget about that Post-WWI malaise? (I just saw a talk by Michael Adas on a project claiming that Vietnam was to America as World War I was to Britain--the historiographical "Britain/America discordance" is a topic I'd like to address some time). Or, maybe, the disillusion has been played up by commentators against the grain of historical reality? Let's challenge the "symbolic register of science" as a category of historical analysis, and see what's really behind it.

Edit: Peter uses so many vague statements here, I can't truthfully tell if he's referring to some general attitude about science, or an extremely narrow range of philosophers and commentators on science. His reference (hidden in my ellipsis) to the "Unity of Science" movement seems to suggest he's talking about a sideshow that has a bearing on how we, the readers of Isis, talk about these issues. In this case, maybe he's making a related point to the one I'm making??

One more thing: I've previously noticed Peter's frequent use of the phrase "at stake", and I've tended to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I'm wondering, if we were really to boil the issue down every time this phrase is used, if we can really make the case that what is claimed to be at stake is really at stake, or (as Peter's qualification "seemed to be at stake" implies) if anyone who might have used this rhetoric at some point or another seriously thought that these things were at stake. Did a new "generation"--a whole generation--really feel differently? If we're going to move forward productively, we're going to have to be careful about discordances between rhetoric and practice--"at stake" tends to blur the boundaries. It's going on my yellow flag list, along with "Randomly Chosen Science as Having Some Association with a Caricature of a Broad Historical Trend". (I'm a bit sensitive to this at the moment, because I just read a paper last night that made particularly egregious use of the phrase "at stake").

History and Museum Studies

Just looking over Jenny's overview of our online debate/conversation, I noticed a remark of mine that historical studies of material culture could "devolve" into museum studies. That sounds a little dismissive, but I stand by it, provided we don't take "devolve" to mean "degrade". I think my point is more that the analysis of objects is not the same thing as history, so to take a historical artifact and analyze it according to whatever criteria we please (say, using a literary-type analysis), does not constitute the practice of "history".

But this is not to say that museum studies is below history. If I've taken away any big points from reading the Copenhagen Medical Museion's blog, it's that museum studies can similarly devolve into history. Thomas Söderqvist has often expressed on that blog his boredom at simply placing objects in their context. I am completely convinced that museum studies is a pedagogical-aesthetic-historical hybrid activity, and should not simply be "history".

Ultimately, this just goes back to one of the points I started this blog with, which is that we need to be clear up front about what our motivations are, and who we expect our audience to be. I'd like to see a sort of renaissance of historical analysis that is not automatically labeled "bland" or "conservative" because it's not museum studies. I see the two areas as related but distinct enterprises, and, by keeping them, and other areas, conceptually distinct, I hope that historical analysis (versus literary analysis, philosophical analysis, sociological analysis, or, for the lack of a better term, "issue" analysis) can be seen as a lively and progressive field of inquiry.

French history debate results

Sorry for another prolonged absence. Obviously Will is beating me in the number of posts here but I will do my best to plod alongside his commentary. This post summarizes our online debate that occurred several weeks ago. We are thinking of trying something similar, maybe with more of a direct science slant, in the near future.

Online debate on French history, theory, and the question of modernism

Our first experimental virtual chat went very well, and we are happy to report that we had the generous participation of some French historians in training who took some time to talk with us about the usage of theory, the meanings behind history, and what it means to be modern.

Our guests included Micah Alpaugh, a Ph.D. candidate in history at UC Irvine, who studies non-violent political protest during the French Revolution; Meghan Cunningham, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Northwestern, who examines modern conceptions of the family as evidenced in the writings of Enlightenment savants; and Natasha Naujoks, a Ph.D. candidate in history at UNC Chapel Hill, who investigates the mythology of Napoleon during the 19th century in light of both classical and contemporary traditions.

Here are summaries and fragmented excerpts selected from our group chat:

1. Derrida and Foucault in the Classroom

The long shadowy presence of Foucault seemed to dominate this part of the conversation since most of our participants’ educational backgrounds had touched upon his theories in some way. Most of our guests were in agreement that theory was often taught but there was little in the way of guidance about how to employ theory in relation to history. Natasha recommended Elizabeth Clark’s History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn as a good source that commented about the origins of the “new intellectual history” and its debt to French theory. Apparently, it also turned out that I was the sole supporter of theory with Will and the others quite happy to leave it alone. No closet Deleuzians here...

2. Textual Interpretation, Inside Out

Literary interpretation was another area of interest that seemed to be debilitating, or at least, lacking in proper means of usage. Meghan raised the problem of interpreting the emotional language found in the letters between romantic partners, parents/children, and friends for the purposes of her dissertation. Micah agreed that linguistic categories were equally limiting for the concept of mass-action. Everyone seemed to enjoy the work of Clifford Geertz as a budding graduate student, but Micah’s dislike of Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms merit as a micro-history divided the group. Bruno Latour’s Laboratory Life and Science in Action provided some amusing thoughts about the agency of salmon.

Meghan: (summarizing the book)...with the more theory-inclined arguing that bacteria have agency...
Meghan: and this one history grad student pipes up, "So what's next? Salmon have agency?"
Will: See, it's not that he's wrong, if you read him right, it's that he's not that helpful.
Meghan: I would say that was my take on him as well.

3. Historians are Humanists too!

Should history graduate students really pretend to be part of the humanities in order to garner more grants and fellowships (when art historians really do need the money)? As Natasha aptly articulated, the “exercise in fantasy,” when a dissertation has yet to become a concrete project, is a mix of rhetorical posturing and not knowing where one will find the appropriate forms of evidence (if they even exist). Some shuddered at the thought that some historians do not even use archives at all.

4. Traversing the *“Leaderless Minefield”

Meghan noted that some historians, in the spirit of finding new frontiers, were making the move to the area of material culture. Which possibly could devolve into museum studies, according to Will. Which could be generalized as visual culture, as I implied. Which could end up in media studies. Not quite sure if that is so good. In retreating to the analysis of culture, the group agreed that there was a strong lack of argumentative programs that did not offer any original viewpoints about the state of the field (there were many scholars who were certainly trying to avoid obvious faux pas or attempting to revise the revisionist literature).

*We actually owe this term “leaderless minefield” to Micah.

5. Modern, Modernism, Modernity, WTF?

We managed somehow to return to address Fish’s assertion that deconstruction does not and could not have a politics, which did not sit well with most of the guests. The conversation finalized around the types of questions that our guests are posing in their projects and if looming presence of modernity played a role in their assessment of historical periods, fields of study, and the kinds of conclusions drawn from scholarship.

Micah: Very broadly, I think it's time to have Revolution come back in -- the Soviet hangover's worn off a bunch over the last twenty years, and the world over the next few is likely to get a lot more interesting...
Meghan: I would say my chief interpretative issue is how to write a sort of collective biography, and in particular how to access emotional/private life issues through texts, which involves a lot of correspondence theory.
Natasha: on a provincial level, I'm challenging early modern and modern French historians about periodization
Natasha: I really resent the 1789 dividing line
Me: What would be the new date of the French Revolution?
Micah: I'm pretty invested in the 1789 line myself.
Natasha: I'm in favor of 1750-1850, not across the board of course
Micah: Sounds Furettian ;)
Natasha: well, I do love my ferrets, you know...no seriously, think about teaching the French Revolution, how could you possibly start in 1789 and make sense of it? Inevitably you'd have to create a sort of prologue unit, you know, "origins of..."
Micah: Such is the great challenge, but a worthwhile one. Did the French Revolution really have origins?
Natasha: no, was an accident...you're right :-) Seriously, though, I'm not sure I'm convinced by the conflation of the FR and "modernity,” fraught with teleological problems
Micah: Yeah, modernity, WTF?

What is Context, Part 2

Mulling the issue over some more, I'd like to take a mulligan on my previous answer to the context question. I feel I punted on the question by offering a critique of some prevalent uses of context, without ever answering the question in a compelling way. One way is to try and add some dimensions to the concept. I guess I think of it along two axes: generic-necessary and tradition-response. I refer to them as axes, because they are probably more descriptive qualities than firm categories.

So, a necessary context is some context necessary to arrive at a proper understanding of something; it provides a motivation. Situating something within a new necessary context can totally change why we see something as having taken place.

A generic context, on the other hand, enriches our understanding of a topic, but will rarely demand a wholesale change in the way we think about something. It describes a gross sort of contingency (i.e., 19th century natural history wouldn't have existed in anything like the form it did without the imperialist project), or it provides an understanding of why something looks the way it does. Say there's an operative metaphor or imagery in use that resonates with some other metaphoric tradition that has nothing to do with the history of the subject at hand. Oftentimes, a generic context is something we can safely take for granted, but it doesn't have to be menial. For example, say we've never paid attention to a certain tradition of theory-making, a study of that tradition will tell us both about the theory in question, as well as about the context. However, in subsequent history (provided the original study has achieved canonical status), we can refer to this tradition off-hand, or even ignore it entirely.

A context of tradition speaks to us of a learned behavior. A scientist uses this sort of diagram, which goes back a century, or the tradition of spectroscopic analysis, or the tradition of anthropological characterization in terms of evolutionary principles.

A context of response speaks to us of a more reasoned response to some stimulus. Placing a theory in the context of a certain experiment tells us that to understand the motivation behind the theory, we have to be aware of such and such an experiment. To understand why science funding increased after 1957, we have to be aware of the launch of Sputnik.

So, when is contextual analysis worthwhile? A context of tradition, it seems to me, can move from being a necessary context, if it hasn't been previously considered, to being a generic context, once the tradition becomes well-understood. Whereas, a context of response is always necessary (or is it?). So, it's always worthwhile if we can learn about a new context. We can do this through a case study, or, better still, by making the context the subject of investigation itself. One of my favorite history of science books is Andy Warwick's Masters of Theory. It could place, say, the work of the Maxwellians in the context of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, but it's a much better book than that, because it turns the scenario around and make the Tripos (the ostensible context) the subject instead. Galison's Einstein's Clocks is a great book, but it's maybe a bit awkward, because it's framed around placing the special theory of relativity in the context of the technical challenges of the late-19th century, but the book ends up being about this context. The effect is to make much of the book seem extraneous to the central point of contextualizing relativity, until you realize that Galison has simply shifted the focus to the context.

Conversely, it's rarely interesting to contextualize something for the sake of contextualization. To contextualize something significant (like the theory of relativity) is interesting only if the context is necessary. If it's generic it's less interesting. So, you could say, Einstein talked a lot about clocks in his 1905 relativity paper, and then say that clocks were everywhere in this period. But Galison goes beyond this, and shows that the problem of simultaneity was a deeply conceptual problem in this period--what could have been generic becomes necessary. However, if the subject is insignificant and is placed within a well-understood context, it's not interesting. So, say someone placed some other uninfluential paper on time coordination within the context Galison illustrated, it would just come off as a cheap knockoff. That said, there might still be room for a definitive history of time coordination in the late 19th century not as context, but as subject, if there are actors and traditions that need to be made explicit, but not if it's just a recapitulation of what Galison said.

Galison's Questions, #1: What is Context?

In the latest Isis Peter Galison address "Ten Problems in History and Philosophy of Science". This is the sort of thing where it's easy to just nod and agree, yeah, these are good questions--and then never worry about it again. The blog format seems to be a good way to respond quickly and publicly. It'd be nice if there was some sort of more widespread way to respond, but, lacking that, I've decided to tackle Galison's questions here, in a new series of posts. So, bust out your copy of Isis, and play along.

Galison's first question is "What is Context?" He observes that the escape from externalist-internalist debates has resulted in an appeal to context. But, to phrase it in a Seinfeldian way: what's the deal with context? Does it cause events, does it provide resources, what? Philosophers refer to the context of a work by refering to other works. Historians refer to the non-textual environment surrounding a text we are interested in. "What kind of thing is a candidate for context?" "How does a contextual explanation work?"

It so happens I recently pontificated on this issue, so I'll just expand on my previous point. Basically, I think context can entail pretty much anything. The trick, in my mind, is to avoid exchanging your subject for its context. Let's say you're writing about a science in the context of imperialism, I've seen far too many accounts where it is actually irrelevant what science is being talked about, because the paper, ultimately, is about imperialism, not the science. The point of the paper is to show that the science was reflective/a product of its imperialist context. But, using this strategy, we don't really learn much about the context either, because it basically just uses things everybody already knows about imperialism (or whatever) to illustrate the case in point, almost always: "context matters".

So, that brings it to the question: how does context matter? Here I think, if we are truly interested in the science in question, we cannot, unequivocally, beyond a doubt, set out to study "Science X as _____". The word "as" is nice, because it allows us to see things as they do not immediately appear to be, but it's also one of the most abused crutches in historiography. In my mind, the thing we need to do is get back to studying X in and of itself in light of as many different contexts as seem pertinent, and then discuss the ways in which they matter or do not matter, and maybe even attempt to assign significance to them.

Let's take, say, a theory to be our example. We might write about a theory in the context of some experiment. The theory is designed to explain the experiment. However, one very nice trend in the historiography has been to not take the theoretical context for granted. Let's discuss the theory in the context of previous theories. What theory-making tools does the theory in question make use of? Thus we have now started to discuss the history of various theory-making traditions, which is, clearly, at least as important in explaining any given theory's existence/form/style/whatever, as the experiment that actually provided the impetus for this particular theory.

Context doesn't always have to be the cliches we already understand (and should probably reconceptualize or even unlearn) from any given historical era. In fact, I think I disagree with Galison. Internalism vs. externalism should not die; we just don't need to be purists about it. Ultimately, we can call some contexts unequivocally internal and some contexts unequivocally external, and some will be more difficult to define. But, I think we need to defend the attention we pay to certain contexts. We can say Science X would not have looked the same without its imperialist context. Well, sure, and I wouldn't exist if my mother had never met my father. What's your point?

R&D, please

A couple of weeks ago, in my Intro to History of Science course, I gave a lecture on the rise of research and development as perhaps the most socially significant arm of the scientific enterprise. It was one of my favorite lectures of the semester. In some ways it extended off the "culture of invention" lecture that I gave with my industrial revolution lecture, but emphasized how tightly intertwined laboratory/workshop work had become with the invention/development culture.

The invention lecture emphasized loose connections, and was given in the same week as the 19th century physics lecture--the non-textbook readings of the week were from Smith and Wise's Lord Kelvin biography on William Thomson and the telegraph. The R&D lecture started off with the fairly familiar story of BASF and the German chemical industry and the emphasis at places like the KWG on more applied kinds of research. I also brought in Dave Kaiser's recent work on the growth and "suburbanization" of physics in the postwar period as being specifically oriented around R&D-type activities (which he doesn't devote much attention to, emphasizing the pedagogical angle instead).

However, I began the lecture by emphasizing the complexity of the relationship between "basic science" and "applied science"--where a "simple narrative" tells you basic leads to applied, the "complex narrative" has more to do with basic science facilitating the leap from technology to improved technology, than with unveiled secrets of nature leading to fabulous new technologies. I emphasized that the complex narrative was well-understood by anyone with real knowledge of R&D activities. David Edgerton's "The Linear Model Did Not Exist" was the reading for the week (along with a 1928 article in United Empire called "Scientific and Industrial Research" by British science administration luminary, Henry Tizard).

I was especially satisfied with the lecture, because I don't think it would appear in too many courses or historical overviews, and yet is both simple to understand and extremely important. I pointed out that even though R&D dominated scientific culture, and to a remarkable degree in the postwar era, Bowler and Morus devote pretty much zero attention to it. Their "Science and Technology" chapter ends just when the story is getting interesting! Beyond the scope of the class, I don't think we've come to terms with R&D as a part of scientific culture, which is a part of our continuing historiographical difficulty in really understanding and describing science in the 20th century in general. Edgerton's article is not a bad place to start thinking about the issue--a draft of it can be found here (see #41 under articles).

Holmes, Part 4: Teleology? Why not!

In the epilogue to Frederic Holmes' "Between Biology and Medicine" lectures, he addresses some of the general criticisms he received after his lectures. Two of them had to do with whether he was being "teleological" which seems to be used here as a synonym for "Whiggish". By conceptualizing his lectures as what "led up to" intermediary metabolism, was he not being teleological and attributing motivations to his actors that they did not hold? Holmes therapeutically observes that we must "guard vigilantly" against this kind of reading of history, but defends himself in a couple of ways.

First "the unrecognized biases of hindsight inevitably shadow all historical narrative." This is an uncomfortable point; we are always led in our investigations of the past by the concerns of how something came to be. I think I agree. It is only once we are immersed in the concerns of the past that we can look around and say, "Well, actually, they seem to be a lot more concerned with these other things..." But, this doesn't change the fact that Holmes is reading a precursor history of "intermediary metabolism" stretching back to the 1850s, while it wouldn't really congeal as a field until the 1930s--why is this legit?

So, second, Holmes is interested in the development of "fields" and "disciplines" and "investigative pathways" and "streams". I think it's true that none of his actors ever really take up a directed line of research in physiological chemistry; rather they pass through it. So, is it the author's imagination that such a stream even exists? I think Holmes makes a convincing point to say "no"; the actors recognized the issue, but, for various reasons of discipline and specific investigative problems (e.g., difficulties in making progress on the problem of lactic acid formation in tissues) they pursued other paths.

I think this issue can best be resolved through some hypothetical situations. If the 1850s chemists and physiologists had seen the work of the 1930s, would they have recognized it as a contribution to their field, or would they have looked at it in bafflement and incomprehension--as incommensurable with their paradigm, or, alternatively, as irrelevant to the discourses that they engaged in? Holmes, I think, would argue that they would have seen it as significant--and here is where we must distinguish teleology from Whiggishness.

Teleology suggests a purposeful process; and people are purposeful creatures. It is when we read purpose onto nature that we commit teleological fallacies. While there have been some notions that science represents a blind process, I don't think there are many who would deny that there is some envisioning of the potential results of future research programs. While they would certainly not have envisioned "intermediary metabolism" in all its details, they did have concerns about the chemical processes of cells, which they only marginally addressed for reasons that are explainable in terms of scientists' choice not to pursue the program more rigorously.

So, in taking a teleological view, is Holmes being Whiggish? Maybe a little insofar as he chose to pursue this topic rather than another that would have been more significant at the time, but not insofar as he is addressing concerns that would have been foreign to the historical actors. Thus the emphasis on disciplinary formation--disciplinary formation represents a choice of what problems should be solved; and he shows that even though they could have addressed the problems of metabolism (roughly what the Germans were calling "Stoffwechsel" at the time), they chose not to.

So, at any rate, the product is an informative history of 19th century laboratory physiology and chemistry. Maybe there are better, more informative narratives to follow that will tell us about these traditions, but looking at it through the lens of the relatively minor field of physiological chemistry, while Whiggish in its choice, still represents a legitimate perspective on past events. Until I stumble across something better on this topic, this is my go-to, canonical source. If any experts in the area can recommend a better, more informative go-to source, I'm very much open.

But it's a tough area to represent, so I'm not sure there are better sources. As Holmes closes the book: "These criticisms... reinforce my belief that a deeper historical examination of how the fields and disciplines of science have arisen and are sustained is crucial to our understanding of the nature of science [I'd rephrase that to "history of scientific knowledge"]. They also make it all too clear that the magnitude of the undertaking is greater than historians of science have so far attempted."

So, here's my question: have we since attempted this in the area of 19th/early 20th-century laboratory physiology and chemistry, or have we fallen back on easier, more localized questions (which, incidentally, Galison asks about in his "10 questions")?

New Isis!

Ah, it's that time again: the new Isis just found its way to my desk (a little worse for wear in the mail). On first glance, this one looks pretty cool, too. Former grad student colleague Alex Wellerstein has a piece on the patenting of the bomb; also: Rebekah Higgitt and Charles W. J. Withers on women as an audience at the BAAS, over a 70 year time scale--good sign! Robert Kohler has a piece on Vernon Bailey--looks a bit narrow, but maybe it'll be surprising. Plus, a Focus section on "Changing Directions in History and Philosophy of Science" including 10 questions from my dissertation advisor, Peter Galison. Peter usually asks good, probing questions, so should be a good read. Another talented former colleague, Deborah Coen, reviews literature on the German environment, including one by David Blackbourn, who ran a great course I took in grad school on Problems and Sources in German History. OK, this post is getting a little Harvard-centric....

Plus, coming up in 3 months, a Focus section on the relevance of the history of science. I'll believe it when I see it, but it's good to at least broach the topic. The blogging plate is full!

Housekeeping

Only three lectures left to go! After History 174 comes to a close (today was "Science and the Computer: Computation, Automation, Simulation, Information"), I think it will be about time to rejigger the blog a little bit, maybe harp on some people again to sign on as contributors, so we can get a more diverse dialogue going here.

One thing I'd like to see happen is a wider community of commentary and speculation. I think people take the blogging thing altogether too seriously and get intimidated, like you have to have some profound insight to blog. But I think it's more of a place for unserious thinking, since we have to do so much serious thinking for publications. The most interesting and vital thinking seems to go on behind the scenes, so it seems like a good idea to open those conversations up a little to the public.

Anyway, to try and create a sense of there being an active blog community (no slackers!), I've decided to weed out a few defunct sites on the blog roll to the left. Phil Mirowski seems to have come to the end of his book promo blog, so he's gone; it's too bad, because I think if he ever had a real blog it would be seriously, seriously entertaining. Paul Edwards has apparently bored of writing about Infrastructuration, too, with no immediate hopes of return. However, Robert Vienneau's "Thoughts on Economics" is updated regularly, and is usually historical in character and is also really thought-provoking--I recommend looking at it even though (especially because?) it's not within The Biz. Similarly, the Copenhagen Medical Museion blog, Biomedicine on Display, kept up primarily by Thomas Soderqvist, is also frequently updated, and often asks really good questions.

Advances in the History of Psychology (celebrating 340 days on the web) is a little bit more newsletter-like with only occasional scholarly commentary. It is very professionally done--a model for all who want to try and reach out in this direction. Similarly, Michael Barton's "The Dispersal of Darwin" is also usually in the newsletter vein. He's done a great job of keeping the blog up, and his ClustrMap shows he has a wide audience. I might try and figure out some criteria for figuring out which of the (many) other popular blogs should get links.

The institutional blogs (except the Medical Museion) seems to be growing in fits and starts. The Penn Logan Lounge seems to have become a semesterly-updated seminar list, so I'm going to axe it. The University of Minnesota department blog is not updated a lot, but looks like it could become a place for reviews and thoughts--plus it's Minnesota, and Minnesota is awesome. I'm really interested to see what the University of Oklahoma gang does with their Hydra online grad student journal/website.

I'll be on the lookout foor more sites to put up, and will see if any of the hibernating ones spring back to life. If any readers have suggestions, please leave a comment. We're looking for blogs dealing with the history of science, or any particular science, in at least a somewhat probing way, but the audience doesn't have to be academic.