Ether Wave Propaganda

Moving Day: change your bookmarks.

2008-07-12T13:16:00.002-04:00

We're still unpacking a few boxes over at Wordpress, but good ideas can spawn swift action. It's like moving from one of the old VGA graphics computers to something a bit more late-'90s at least! Onwards and upwards! Ether Wave Propaganda is now located at:

http://etherwave.wordpress.com

This site will remain up but will no longer be updated, so please update your bookmarks. If you link to this blog from your site, please be sure and update your link to the new site. I'd like to get the Google rankings and hit counts up at the new location, and references from other sites help immensely. Did you know that if you Google "history of science blog" this site is #1? Thanks to all visitors from around the world for your support for our little experiment.

Connoisseurship in Sci-Tech

2008-07-11T11:36:00.000-04:00

*First, on the WordPress version of this (http://etherwave.wordpress.com), please post a comment if you can’t see the banner with the picture of the radio tower. I’ve been having trouble with this. It seems to be stabilized, but that’s only on browsers on work computers.

Continuing on with the 20th-century historiography issue, I’d like to mention that I’ve been pretty taken with recent trends studying “connoisseurship”. To an extent, this idea has been allied with the idea of “tacit knowledge”–those elements of science that cannot be easily expressed and replicated. I used to be really into the tacit knowledge idea, but I’ve been less excited about it lately because I haven’t been able to find a good use for it outside of the standard critiques of the idea of obvious science (science that is readily recognized as truthful, and is easily replicable).

But, what really grabs me about connoisseurship is its power to describe motivation. Put it this way: Robert Oppenheimer famously described the hydrogen bomb problem as “technically sweet”, which was a motivation for pursuing it. If we can describe the criteria of what might constitute a “sweet” problem, or standard heuristic and argumentative methods in various times and places, we will have a historiographical tool that can be used to address multiple histories.

What I like best is that it’s the sort of tool that translates easily between scientific and technological milieus. What constitutes “the innovative approach”, “the appealing”, “the pressing problem”, and why? In technology studies, I’ve really liked some recent work I’ve seen on technical enthusiasm (MIT grad student Kieran Downes has been doing some nice work on audiophiles that I have specifically in mind). Within this kind of culture you have a stock of common knowledge (gizmos, mathematical methods, experimental apparatuses), and a set of things you’re on the lookout for (useful applications in certain fields, elegant solutions, certain kinds of phenomena). Innovation consists of combining these things in novel, but well-appreciated ways. While deeper innovation might consist of doing something more unfamiliar and pursuing strategies to assemble a culture of connoisseurship around it.

All this is very social studies of science and technology, of course. To understand the success or failure of a piece of science or of a technology, you have to understand the culture of its reception. I think the point of departure is in historians’ need to identify traditions of connoisseurship, and to examine the ways in which they became robust. Anyway, that’s all on that for now.

WordPress

2008-07-10T15:05:00.002-04:00

OK, I've created another version of this page:
http://etherwave.wordpress.com

As I thought, it is a lot more dynamic--and better looking! Watch this space for any announcements of a full-scale shift. In the meantime, the Blogger page will continue to be updated, but if you have any comments about the desirability of any impending move, leave them in either space.

PaulingBlog (now The Pauling Blog)

2008-07-10T10:13:00.007-04:00

By the way, check out the Oregon St. special collections' PaulingBlog (linked on the right), if you haven't already. They just did a revamp of their site. I'm excited to see a large science history collection present regular features from their holdings (in this case the Linus Pauling collection). We are also the first mention on their blogroll, so big thanks for that! I mentioned the new AIP web project below, but the History Center's associated Niels Bohr Library and Archives is also looking for new ways to branch out on the web. We're (the AIP, I mean) currently putting a lot of our oral history transcripts online, some with audio clips (which I'm picking out; see, for example, the Gamow interview), but I think snazzier things still are in store, and The Pauling Blog is carving out a nice path forward.

Speaking of snazzy, The Pauling Blog and Michael Robinson's exploration blog have me thinking about moving this operation over to Wordpress, because that tool seems to have more potential than Blogger. This would mean that I'll have to put in more than the cursory work that I've been doing here, but would coincide with my plans to include some graphics, as well as interviews and guest bloggers. The summer's ticking away, and I believe I promised improvements some time ago!

20th century science and technology

2008-07-10T09:17:00.007-04:00

I'd like to jump back to the 20th century historiography problem for a bit, one of the biggest ongoing problems seems to be how to integrate the histories of science and technology in this period. Telling a history of R&D is a part of this, but, the more I try and think about this, the more it seems to me that you either have to tell a story about science or technological research. I was talking to Tom Lassman about this a few weeks ago--he used to do contract history for the Army, and is now at the Nat'l Air and Space Museum--and he felt that the business and technology historiographies presented the most rigorous approach, which may well be true. I need to do more reading there. But I thought it might be useful to try and run through a few quick preliminary (and likely incomprehensible) thoughts on how these historiographies might come together.

The reason I've always leaned more toward science history than technology history is because it's always seemed to get at deeper issues. Where else can you turn without blinking between political, intellectual, legal, technological, art, and philosophical histories? Whereas the technology and business histories have always seemed a bit more dry: "first there was this kind of rocket, and then another kind of rocket, and then a third kind of rocket was canceled because of budget cutbacks or because it proved infeasible, but, in reaction to Sputnik, a fourth kind of rocket was approved". It doesn't have to be rockets, but you get the idea. The most conceptually problematic issues seem to revolve around the introduction of political considerations, or maybe the technology benefited some, but not others.

This view is, of course, unfair, but it's just a perception. The converse perspective on the history of science is that we are so preoccupied with problematizing everything and demonstrating the integration of such a diverse scope of activities that we actually forget to tell a history.

But, as I've been working on our new AIP web project (this is moving forward; more soon), it's clear that it is unexceptional for the technology history to be a very recognizable part of scientists' everyday experience. In assembling a list of physicists to include in our project, we get a lot of "science of the atmosphere"; or "science of circuits"; or "science of solar energy" which makes separating the physicists from engineers seem tedious and somewhat fruitless. (This speaks to the "problem of the problem" as well). What stance to take? Are we all technology historians now? I like to think there's an alternate route than resorting to actors' narrative perceptions of "well, first we worked on this technology, and it worked pretty well, but then there was a big controversy, etc." but what is it?

My concern is that it would be easy to simply write an endless series of histories detailing the emergence of different problems on which scientists worked. Besides, emergence is only half the story. Are things really so uninteresting after things have emerged and stabilized? Surely this is when things are at their most important (see Edgerton's Shock of the Old). Traditionally, there's been a lot of writing on the tensions between basic vs. applied science (stuff like Forman's "Behind Quantum Electronics"), but that seems too macroscopic for a history that deserves a finer point. The fact that most science is, in some sense or another, "applied" is the nature of 20th century science. The challenge is to find histories within that reality.

Here's a little speculation: I think the way forward will come by nailing down in what ways science matters in engineering. What is interesting about various kinds of technologies for sciences, and in what ways does science contribute to engineering practices that would otherwise be constrained? I imagine that the organization of different kinds of expertise, and people with different motivation will offer clues, as will a deeper understanding of what it takes to develop a company- or laboratory-level science policy. Odds are good that the history of biology and medicine has useful things to say here, but I'm not well-versed in that.

As I said, I'm just trying to get my head around this at this point, so none of this makes much sense, but expect more in future posts.

Biography and Canon-Building

2008-07-09T08:55:00.007-04:00

Crosbie Smith's Science of Energy probably takes the place in the canon of 19th century physics history writing from Energy and Empire, a biography of William Thomson that Smith co-wrote with Norton Wise. The latter is an excellent book, and would be replaced not for any defects in quality, but more because the former is more compact and also broader in its scope--more essential.

But this brings up a topic I've been meaning to address: biography. The best biographies not only place their subjects in their context, but they use their subjects to give the reader a kind of guided tour through that context. Smith and Wise certainly do that, and I mentioned once before that Roger Hahn's biography of Laplace is also good. I think I've also suggested that it's possible that historians of science are now really very good at writing books, but aren't quite sure what to do with the short form. If that's true, then the best books are probably biographies. If I'm looking for biographical information on a scientist, I'm always glad if there's something written in the post-1990, and preferably the post-2000 period, because those biographies almost inevitably demonstrate a maturity towards science-writing that is frequently lacking in prior works, which always seem to have something on the precocious childhood, a bit on the school days, some painfully in-depth treatment of some supposedly crucial moment ("did he or didn't he write this letter before so-and-so knew of the results of XYZ?"), and then maybe a too-detailed account of the science, or, alternatively, an almost total neglect of the science in favor of an account of the proverbial "human side" of science.

Now, it's probably for most of these aspects of prior works that biography seems to be a sort of embarrassing topic for scholars to address, something that's historiographically gauche, maybe because in choosing just one individual you inevitably provide them with too much agency, or it's too much of a foray into pop history, or something similarly naughty.

I'm not too sure that writing a biography was ever the career-killer I've sometimes heard it made out to be. A lot of good historians have written pretty definitive biographies (of course, there will never be definitive biographies of Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Darwin), but, more to the point, I think, while there will always be lousy biographies, most academic historians have learned the pitfalls and become conscious of the clichés well enough. Personally, I would not hesitate to make a good biography a canonical reference, if there were no other suitable introduction to a historical milieu.

Whose biography should be chosen is another question. Do we need to know the biographies of some of the big names, for example? Darwin, probably, because the length of his significant career is so long. I would hesitate to say Einstein, because he's sort of an outlying figure in certain ways, so he's not a particularly good introduction to his scientific context. One should certainly read about relativity, but I'm not sure it's absolutely necessary to read an Einstein biography. Anyway, whose biographies are important is definitely food for further thought.

Cosmology and the Problem of the Problem

2008-07-07T12:48:00.005-04:00

My plate is full of writing at the moment, but I really am more in a mood for research. Fortunately, the batteries on my laptop have been burned out for a couple of years now, so my recent transatlantic plane rides prevented me from doing much productive writing, but afforded me the opportunity to do some work on reading over the Schaffer oeuvre.

I should have done this years ago. I'll post more when I come to the issue formally; for now suffice it to say that Schaffer's pre-Leviathan work deals a lot with the reconstruction of natural philosophical cosmologies. I get the sense a lot of this early work is aimed at demonstrating that the term "natural philosophy" was more than just an antique word for "science". We got into this a bit in my class last spring when we had the students read Leibniz's Monadology and tried to explain what the deal with it was, but I'm beginning to see the topic for all its richness.

Basically, natural philosophy, unlike a modern scientific speciality, demanded fairly comprehensive views of the universe, meaning that conjecture relating to the natural world had to be consistent with an understanding of pretty much everything else: problems of God, mind, soul, life, comets, nebulae, the age of the universe, the origins of the earth, the nature of forces, the nature of light, etc.... By making a conjecture about any one thing, it created "problems" everywhere else, and a true philosophical mind had to reconcile their explanations with all these various problems. So, you end up creating or contributing to a cosmology.

The need to create elaborate cosmologies seems to taper off in the 19th century as specialization and professionalization start to be on the rise. After this point, you still have problem-oriented science, but these problems tend to be more practical, or at least more pointed, than the big "OK,if you believe that, then how do you explain X?" problems of the natural philosophy era. This is more of a multi-disciplinary sort of thing where it's important to develop specific explanations that are consistent with more general principles in a variety of fields. I've been doing some work on the study of Antarctic ice flow and climatology recently, and the "problem of Antarctic ice" has a lot to do with jibing paleoclimatological evidence, physical principles, and field research.

The ability to reconcile various points-of-view points to a standard of robust explanation that I was trying to discuss earlier. What is interesting is a shifting standard of robustness from consistency with a possible cosmology to a robustness as measured from multiple expert perspectives. Interestingly, the ability to cleave off problems and to address them from a limited set of perspectives seems to have coincided with the rise of new physical laws leading to more satisfactorily reductive world pictures, but that's not a connection I'm prepared to explore.

New Contributor: Christopher Donohue

2008-07-05T06:18:00.003-04:00

While I was away we've had a new contributor join us here at Ether Wave Propaganda: Christopher Donohue. Christopher is a graduate student in history, who is primarily interested in the intersection between the histories of political ideas, jurisprudence, and natural philosophy; he has already done a lot of work on the jurisprudence and intellectual/literary uses of shipwreck, which has resonances in problems of providence, madness, personal responsibility, and enlightenment. He also has a working interest in similar problems in the post-World War II period.

I initially met Christopher when he TA'd for my Intro to the History of Science class this spring at the University of Maryland. He's a fascinating guy who contributed a lot to the construction of that class; and he's very widely read, and has some pretty novel opinions on what he's reading (some might say crazy opinions, but after listening to him at length, I'm reasonably well convinced of his approach). So, I'm eagerly anticipating his contributions here. Welcome, Christopher!

Gone Fishing

2008-06-19T16:54:00.002-04:00

Just so any regular visitors don't wander off permanently, I'm going to be visiting family in Minneapolis and then on vacation in Ireland until July 4th, and might not be checking in until then.

Discovery, Begone! (or not)

2008-06-19T09:05:00.009-04:00

I've been thinking about what might prove canonical for early 19th century physics, and I am imagining that Jed Buchwald's book on the wave theory of light is going to be on there. Now, studying this or that side of a epochal debate in science (you could also talk about, say, vulcanism vs. neptunism, or catastrophism vs. uniformitarianism, vitalism vs. mechanism, whatever) is a different sort of history from something like Smith's look at the development of the massively influential energy physics program.

As Smith so ably demonstrates, energy was very much a program (tentative definition: a directed and deliberately strategized attempt to conceptualize knowledge within a certain scheme); whereas we might discuss the epochal debates as "approaches" to subjects. If we look at competing and incommensurable approaches to a problem, it's easy to write a history of their conflict, but only at the danger of losing the motivations of the actors involved, who may or may not be invested in the conflict (even while taking the occasional pot shot across the divide). We should probably concede that it is possible for ostensibly conflicting approaches to co-exist more-or-less peaceably. Therefore (problems of unequivocally defining "moments" in science aside) it is possibly improper to look at this or that result as proving the validity of one approach over another, or at least doing damage to opponents, because the debate might not really be within the actor's most immediate set of concerns.

In other words, by framing our narratives in terms of an epochal debate, we impose an external set of concerns on the historical actors, which is a form of Whig history, even if we are careful to not view actors as proceeding methodically toward the "correct" conclusion. Which is not to say we shouldn't have books about epochal debates. Indeed, they are crucial to defining the traditions in which scientists/philosophers/etc. work. We merely need to be careful about understanding what these narratives are and are not saying about what actors were up to.

All this I think is fairly second-nature now. What has been primarily accomplished is to set certain vocabularies and certain formulations of historical scenarios off-limits. "Discovery" is a big off-limits area. Most books (including Smith) trip all over themselves to note that Kuhn's efforts to identify multiple moments of discovery of a concept like the "conservation of energy" is pointless, because it takes the principle to be a pre-existing entity that exerts a magnetic force on actors, and diverts attention away from things like efforts to build credibility for the concept, and leads to the misleading condemnation of those who didn't "get" the discovery right away.

So, I figured, maybe we should just forget about words like "discovery"; but then I was dealing (for other reasons) with 20th century elementary particles, and found that there's no really compelling reason to not use the term to refer to the detection of something that was not there previously. Why shouldn't Chadwick have discovered the neutron? If something is discovered in an intellectual environment in which one would expect a discovery along those lines, then the notion of discovery can be (although not necessarily is) clear cut.

All of which gets me thinking about one of the few belabored aspects of Smith's book, which is his clear conceptual indebtedness to early Latour and Biagioli, in the development of networks of credit and credibility. The sociological literature tends to portray this as a sort of building of alliances to achieve acceptance, but it seems to me that it serves an intellectual function as well, which is building the robustness of a concept or method, arguing consistency with other ideas, and demonstrating novel applications to various kinds of problems.

I've been meaning to talk about robustness for awhile now, because I think it will prove important. Building alliances not only builds more widespread recognition, it also tests one's ideas to see if they jibe with other accepted or proposed ideas and observations. So, Thomson, by fitting his energy ideas into geological and religious ideas, builds upon the robustness of the network of theories. Kuhn, in discussing paradigm shifts, emphasized the building of discrepancies between observations as leading to the breakdown of a paradigm. But the reception literature (such as Warwick's take on the reception of relativity) has emphasized how isolated new views are within very robust explanatory schemes, and how problematic it is to expect an entire field to abandon these schemes for new and undeveloped ones. This argues for an importance of robustness above truth value in both sociological and philosophical realms.

Anyway, my point is, we use the term robustness already. It may be time to start thinking a little more deeply about what we mean by it. End of rambling post.

Canonical: Nye, Warwick, Smith

2008-06-18T08:57:00.003-04:00

Today's canonical entries in the history of 19th century physics:
1. Mary Jo Nye, Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics, 1800-1940 (1996)
2. Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (2003)
3. Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (1998)

Every good field needs an "orientation" text, and, in my experience, for this corner of history, Nye is it. Read chapters 1, 3, and 4 before Warwick and Smith, if you're not familiar with the territory. Taking some advanced electricity and magnetism helps, too, to get a little "Fingerspitzengefuehl" in how physicists came to use mathematics in this period.

Warwick and Smith basically cover what has to be the most important shift in the history of physics in the 19th century, which is the importation of 18th century analytical techniques use in what was called "rational mechanics" primarily to study orbits (but also ordinary mechanics and hydrodynamics), as the route to the creation of valid theories. The primary entry point for analysis into non-mechanical physics is the science of energy, which established the fields of thermodynamics and electricity and magnetism. These two books, read in this order, will pretty much tell you everything you need to know about this shift, at least in Britain (German physics will be coming up).

Warwick is in my top 3 favorite history of science books of all-time, and is an excellent account of the cultural and intellectual shifts necessary to make physics into the heavily mathematical science that it has since become. Very few authors ever discuss the uses of mathematics, let alone the experience of using them. Warwick does both in a way that illustrates the watershed shift in what it meant to be a physicist, and what it meant to offer a physical theory, that took place in this period.

Smith (which I've actually never read before now) discusses the "program" that provided the entry point for this new kind of physics, the "North British" idea of energy, which drew on Continental engineering theory and the experimentation of James Joule, recruited little-known work by Mayer and Helmholtz on conservation of "Kraft", systematized it in the fairly new Cambridge mathematical tradition, jibed it with geological theories about the history of the earth and the sun and attendant religious sensibilities, thereby creating an intellectual and social program (we should talk about this word "program" in the future; I find it very useful, but exploring its connotations would be worthwhile) that was capable of cementing a new scientific tradition.

Both works incorporate recent concern for social context in enlightening and highly specific ways. Both are extremely informative narrative accounts of topics of immense importance. Both concentrate largely on Britain, so we'll need to supplement them with works addressing what was taking place on the Continent (I really would like to find a good source on 19c. French physics--any suggestions?). Still, these books beautifully illustrate what one could argue to be the most important change in physics over the course of the century, and if you had to choose just two books to read on the history of physics in this period, I think you could make a case that these would be the two to read. We'll look at some good supplements in future posts.

The Canon Game: Preliminary Observations

2008-06-17T08:55:00.005-04:00

I'd like to start talking now about possible canons, but, before we get started, I want to make a few observations about what I, personally, would expect out of a canon. I think for a lot of people the idea of a canon is a little repulsive, because it suggests that there is a batch of writings (usually old ones) up on a pedestal that cannot and should not be touched or questioned, and that serve as models for all us mere mortals. I also think a lot of people think of a canon as works serving as methodological milestones. Thus, obviously, we'd have to start with Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions or something, and move on from there. In my previous post on the Forman thesis, I rejected this view, arguing that milestones, however influential they may have been in their day, are not best suited to guide future inquiry.

I'm a believer in the inevitable existence of things that must logically exist whether they are acknowledged or not. The idea of the inevitable rationale underlying policy plays a big role in my research on the policy sciences. I think the same applies to a canon: one always exists whether we want it to or not. Even if we don't have a specific set of writings we've all read, there is a certain constellation (or "model" to borrow once again from C. S. Lewis' framing of medieval literature) of arguments and strategies that are derived from set of writings, as well as certain key ideas about the "Enlightenment" or the "Victorian era" or the "Cold War" within which we may write. Thus, we are best off to acknowledge the necessity of canonical literature, and to ask the questions: what does it do for us, and is there a better one available?

I believe that a canon should help us mine the available historiography, which is actually very deep, and build on it. One theme I've been circling around is the tendency of historians of science to do a remarkable impersonation of 19th century Homesteaders in going further and further afield from the actual history of science to find new land to till. This is fine, but are we exploiting the land we're already on to its fullest? A properly selected canon can be very revealing of the richness of the historical terrain that is available to us.

This brings up the most important point. We can think of a canon as the tool of specialists or as a general tool for all of us. I lean toward the general tool interpretation. Specialists are obligated to be familiar with an entire literature within a certain area, and would probably be inclined to pick out a game-changing paper, thus bringing us back to the pedestal conception of canon. But I think to the non-specialist these papers don't resonate as effectively without the necessary background knowledge. A well-chosen canon will allow those who know it to be familiar enough with the terrain to speak competently about it, even if they can't achieve "wonk" status, and thus be a receptive and discerning audience in areas outside their specialty.

Also, at least from my perspective, the selection of canonical works should focus on familiarity with history rather than methodology. I know there are many who disagree, but I'm of the opinion that unless you know the history, you're doomed to making absurd statements; cleverness cannot save you. This has been a priority of mine, especially since teaching my intro class last semester. So, rather than start out in an area I'm really familiar with, I'd like to start with something I'm semi-familiar with, but in which I still ought to be much better schooled: 19th century physics.

Possible Internet Futures

2008-06-16T08:56:00.006-04:00

In the comments to the post below about edited volumes, Michael Robinson, who runs the Time to Eat the Dogs blog, which looks at the history of exploration and its interaction with science, asks some good questions about ways forward in using the internet to develop "wonky" scholarship, that should probably be answered with a post of their own.

All questions of online scholarship start, but do not end, with Wikipedia. The Advances in the History of Psychology blog has discussed Wikipedia, and particularly the problem of sharing space with enthusiast historians. As Michael points out, this creates especially big problems for a topic like exploration, which have a lot of basic information that should take precedence over more scholastic aspects of it. Should the wonky discussions go under "Exploration," under a special segment of "History of Science"; or maybe we need an entirely separate resource? But this isn't a limited problem: Wikipedia's rules demand that pages be summaries of topics--not storehouses of all available information; and it is forbidden to post original scholarship there. Wonks need to turn elsewhere.

This was the object of the STS Wiki, which seems to have turned up defunct. You can still view a cached version of it if you Google "STS Wiki". Ultimately, I bet this is the way that scholarship is going, and that the failure for the STS Wiki is probably due to two reasons. First, it was not publicized very well (I hadn't heard about it until I stumbled across it). Second, our profession does not currently prioritize this sort of online work. The HSS recently did some fund-raising for a bibliographer, but it would probably not be necessary to even have a bibliographer or a cumulative bibliography, if the community was more committed to spending part of their time maintaining a communal resource. This is a reverse case of the tragedy of the commons, where no commons are built, because there is no mutual responsibility for their construction, or even the coordination of their construction. Wikipedia, while open to all editors, is actually based on an intricate series of rules and conventions of format; someone needs to invent and enforce those.

But, the internet represents such a sea change in the way that information is deposited, arranged, and accessed, that I doubt a single resource will be the answer. Michael used the term "carnival of blogs", which I like. Intellectual conversations take place in real-time or close to it; not through "round table" sessions (which always look suspiciously and disappointingly like ordinary sessions), or in quarterly intervals in journals, which is why I thought it was essential to respond to Peter Galison's questions in blog format. I'm hoping the carnival of blogs becomes a real thing that helps replace the edited volume and supplements the peer-reviewed journal. Blog rolls and key words (which allow one to access past posts dealing with similar issues easily, and which I've begun to stick on archived posts here) will help make blog scholarship become more coherent, and less "thought of the day" oriented.

The great thing is that web resources don't have to look alike, or have the same sponsorship, and can thus evolve to fulfill a variety of needs. Since this blog is sort of a DIY space for contemplation, which is sometimes fairly critical, I prefer to keep it on blogspot for the time being. But I'd also like to do something like AHP for the history of physics under the auspices of my employers at the AIP, once I've completed a couple of other projects. We also do need to face down the Wikipedia problem. The current state of the History of Physics article there begs for academic intervention (I've been working on this, actually, and plan to replace what exists with a more organized framework if no one else beats me to it). A more centralized resource could be run by HSS (in conjunction with SHOT, 4S, etc...), which could direct visitors to the various sites that fill whatever wonky or non-wonky needs they may have.

Ultimately, it's impossible to say what resources will fill what needs, but these things require scholars with a commitment to refashioning scholarship in novel ways, and blending the boundaries between academic, popular, and factual presentation. The best path, in my view, is to keep thinking, trying out prototypes, calling attention to new projects, and seeing what sticks.

Edited Volumes

2008-06-13T09:35:00.004-04:00

Doing a little self-educating, and preparing for the canon-building series, (and procrastinating on some manuscript revisions), I thought a good idea would be to take a look at the collected works of Simon Schaffer. Everyone agrees he's an enormously important scholar in the field, but I've never really heard any discussion of his approach beyond the fact that he likes to talk about experimentation and instrumentation. I don't dispute the notion (as a grad student I had the pleasure of a one-on-one pub lunch with him and was as blown away by his grasp of the issues as anyone I've ever talked to), but I would like to have a little bit more of a discussion about his, erm, "shtick", as in, what is it? That's for a day far off.

Of course, he's never written a solo book, which makes tracking his work down a little bit of a task. And, actually, it's worse than that. It turns out a very significant portion of his work is in the format of entries in edited volumes, which brings me to today's topic. First a straight-out gripe: edited volumes are a little annoying, particularly because, unless you happen to enjoy doing JSTOR searches of the Isis cumulative bibliography (which I try to avoid if at all possible), edited volumes are a good way of hiding scholarship from the uninitiated. If you don't happen to know that an edited volume exists, it may as well not.

What do edited volumes accomplish? I get the impression that if people put together a good conference, they feel the contributions ought to all be published together, which means that there's never more than a cursory effort to pull it all together (and the effort that is put in is usually pretty ponderous, because conferences rarely result in much that can be pulled together in any coherent way). This is especially trouble in vague, "thematic" conferences--"science and wooden boxes" or something. These always sort of hint at a broader significance, but are always more suggestive than conclusive. Not only is there no "end" to the work, there's never any beginning. The old saw "read it for the footnotes" applies, of course.

And of course, there are also summary volumes like the Cambridge History of Science series, or 1990's Companion to the History of Modern Science, to which major scholars also contribute. I've never been encouraged to sit down with these--probably I should. Are these our canon? Should they be taught in classes, or is that considered a waste of time in favor of more advanced material? They're certainly not anything that's ever "discussed". It strikes me as smacking of German romanticism or something to want to discuss the adequacy and the "feel" of an overarching view of a topic without knowing what I mean by that. But it's still probably worth addressing, because frankly I'm not sure how I should feel about this corner of the literature; which makes it a good topic for further blog inquiry.

But, here's another thing with edited volumes. As a quick look at the edited volumes Schaffer's contributed to indicates, there are also those edited volumes that seem to be the playground of the elite. Is it the case that the edited volume format is also where the vanguard issues of our field are defined? If so, what are the consequences of defining a vanguard within a format that emphasizes neither cumulative knowledge nor conclusive results? How are our readings of this vanguard literature changed if we do not have ready access to the background knowledge the contributors already possess? Maybe not being a master of this background knowledge is all just part of being a younger scholar, but I always like to be reform minded...

So, is there a more efficient way of proceeding with all of this? I have zero problem with the publication of intermediary thoughts and results--in fact, I think it should be done more often and more publicly, even if the thoughts aren't entirely original (thus this blog). Wouldn't it be nice if scholarship on topics could all be intertwined, so if you wanted straight-up facts, or a summary of argumentation, or access to the lines of scholarship on a given topic, or a given methodological approach, you could use a centralized gateway to access the collected literature and summaries thereof? As usual, I think the internet will be transforming. Maybe I'm just being lazy, but getting access to accumulated knowledge in the most compact way possible has always been a lever to better scholarly contributions.

*This post was edited from its originally posted version, mostly to take into account the summary literature.

Galison's Q's #10: Scientific Doubt

2008-06-12T08:50:00.011-04:00

In our last episode of Galison's Questions, we have the issue of scientific doubt. So much good scholarship has gone into showing the social processes by which scientific controversies are resolved that we seem to feed into the tobacco industry/creationism & ID supporters/warming skeptics strategy of nullifying policymaking by introducing the perception of existential doubt rather than uncertainty (of degree, of mechanism, etc...) into questions that scientists are more-or-less in agreement on.

My pithy line on this is that we now know how science looks like politics, but we don't understand how politics looks like science. We know how we agree, but we don't know why we are able to agree on anything, whether it is a scientific fact or a policy initiative. (Another repetition on the sociology vs. philosophy tension).

As I've mentioned a few times in my historiographical argument about the Twentieth-Century Turning Point Presumption, problems of scientific doubt have been taken to mean the unraveling of a consensus built up in the 17th century by framing science as somehow removed from society. (A problem to which only Bruno Latour has the answer??) As I've said before, I don't believe any such consensus has ever existed in the way we often seem to think it does, and that whatever consensus has existed is in absolutely no danger of unraveling. I don't believe we've reached any sort of postmodern divide wherein the divide between truth and fiction has been destroyed by mastery of discourse, or spin, or what-have-you.

The sowing of doubt has long been a staple of moral history (see the Garden of Eden story), and the relationship between doubt (inaction) and conviction of reason is also a staple of political history (not to mention literary history; see Hamlet). I believe, contrary to any notion of science losing a centuries-old luster, it is a sign of the success of science in, at long last, becoming such an indispensable element of policymaking, that it, too, has now taken its turn in the discourse of doubt in the sphere of decision-making.

Doubt has always been the tool of either overturning or defending the status quo. It is not new (Galison portrays otherwise: "we now face another kind of doubt"). What is new is a newly enhanced role for scientific specialists in decision-making that has (rightfully) never come under serious doubt in the realm of improving private decision. When the private bleeds into the public, as it must do in any political system that ultimately must defend itself to public scrutiny, uncertainty transforms into doubt, and scientific questions are transformed into political questions with a scientific gloss--but they cease to be problems which epistemology can address, and thus questions which historians of science have any special insight on versus political historians. (On this point, here's another plug for Harvard UP reprinting Ezrahi's Descent of Icarus, which I disagree with, but which is the essential source on this problem).

Ultimately, I think if we want to understand science in the context of decision-making, the problem of the public versus private (if it's in the newspapers, it's too late, we've already lost a clear perspective on the role of science in modern society), and the problem of localized versus general responsibility, will come up. We'll find that science has never played a stronger role in decision-making, but only in areas where responsibility for making decisions under informed uncertainty remains localized. Our friends in the political science departments may come in handy (we have friends in the political science departments, right?)

Historical Traditions

2008-06-10T08:53:00.009-04:00

I was looking through some of the other entries in Isis' focus section on new directions in the History and Philosophy of Science, and one of the historically-interested philosophers, Michael Friedman, made a point that accords nicely with the approach that I developed in my class and am thinking more about now.

First, some background. I've talked a lot here about the ways our writing emphasizes the science-society relationship in very specific ways; and I've written a little (especially since I've gotten into Galison's questions) on the ways that other topics of broad interest to historians of science tend to revolve around science's and scientists' addressing of philosophical questions: the mind-body problem, the nature of space (from Kant to Einstein), the relationship between perception, cognition, expression, and reality, etc... In most cases, there is little interest on the content and "character" of science itself, taken broadly, i.e. what science is "all about" in various times and places. I'll deal with the successes of notable exceptions when I get into the problem of the canon, but that's the background of this excerpt of my reading of Friedman's piece:

Following a long discussion of the history of philosophy, Friedman suddenly shifts gears, and, connecting up to Galison's 7th and 8th questions on locality and globality, he writes, "I want to suggest that the old-fashioned notion of tradition should, once again, be seen as central to historical inquiry. History should be seen, in particular, as the birth, unfolding, evolution, transformation, and (perhaps most important) mutual interaction and entanglement of a very large number of traditions constituting the extraordinarily complex and ever-changing fabric of human culture. Naturally, as a professional philosopher of science, the traditions in which I myself am primarily interested, and with which I am most familiar, are traditions of thought (both scientific and philosophical), but it is of paramount importance to realize that these traditions, too, are only a part of a much larger cultural whole comprehending religious, political, artistic, technological, instrumental, institutional, and many other traditions within a vast and intricately interconnected web. Just as a particular philosophical or scientific idea has the meaning it does only as a part of this larger whole, a given temporal slice or historical episode (as studied within contemporary microhistory, for example) has the meaning it does only in the context of a number of temporally extended traditions that intersect, as it were, at precisely this focal point."

This neatly encapsulates my perspective on what it means to do the history of science. In itself, Friedman is not saying anything controversial here. To demonstrate that this is what history is, is not the task of the historian. That's a starting point, not an ending point. The task of the historian is to chart and to argue about the importance and interaction of all kinds of traditions. This means that it is important for the community, as a whole, to write about all of these traditions, and, again, for the community as a whole, to take an interest in all of these different traditions. So, yes, we should be art historians, architectural historians (Jenny promises more posts soon!), and historians of philosophy, but that doesn't excuse us from actually being historians of more specifically scientific traditions, as well. There are, of course, lots of historians who are interested in nitty-gritty issues of science without worrying about imagery or philosophy or anything (and who probably know the key traditions intuitively), but very few who assert themselves with respect to traditions, or who feel that a detailed understanding of them, in all their multiple strands, is important for students to pick up. That's too bad, because the more I learn about various traditions, the more I feel I actually understand the history of science. Seeing a philosopher, of all people, point this out is very encouraging.

Galison's Q's #9: Relentless Historicism

2008-06-07T10:49:00.005-04:00

Question #9 has got to be my favorite. I hadn't read this over in detail before putting together my thoughts on #8, but it turns out the reasoning behind this question sums up where I was trying to go with my discussion of globality better than I did. Basically Peter says that we take certain theorists seriously, while historicizing everything else: "more accounts of the development than I can count put Ludwig Wittgenstein on a transhistorical pedestal and use his claims (of family resemblance or of continuing a series) as an unmoved prime mover, wisdom without origin."

First, let's address the critique. Galison portrays the tendency to single out thinkers as a sort of oversight in the historicist project, but this is charitable. At our worst, I think we see ourselves in a full-out political battle royale, and historicism is our gun. If we see certain thinkers as "on our side" we will portray other thinkers as "products of their context" to invalidate their claims. Which is just dishonest scholarship.

So how should we treat old ideas? Galison provides two perspectives: we can try to be relentlessly historicist; or we can admit some structuralist means of escape. I think the latter position is inevitable, because in saying what "was done" in the past, the vocabulary we use to describe it constitutes a claim about "what can happen".

A Marxist or a poststructuralist theorist might ask some motivation-independent question "what political program was asserted?" A Whig historian or a philosopher might ask a Platonic question: "what was accomplished?" A sociologist might ask a skeptic's question: "what physical action do we believe was taken, never mind the intellectual significance?" All have their own vocabularies "the masculine gaze was applied" or "a theory was confirmed" or "a Type 3F truth claim was made".

What is the poor historian to do? What vocabulary will we choose, and, thus, what structuralist interpretation of "was done" will we advocate? What will be our fundamental (arbitrary?) historical reality? This is a question for debates and tracts and the like, but it never hurts to blog about it either.

Right now we have a bricolage (if you will) of colloquial language, sociological theory, scientific theory, and philosophical theory. We have a list of "actors' terms" and we have our modern language, which we must reconcile in making claims (of varying strength) about how they perceived and explained and responded to things that we know to have been physically possible. For example, when they claimed they received a message from God, we might say that "had an idea, and claimed that they received a message from God".

But when we say "had an idea" and "claimed", this is a structuralist vocabulary. The question becomes, how well do we use our language? When we say "claimed" this could mean "asserted" or "hyperbolized" or "speculated" or "said" all of which contain sociological/colloquial weight. "To assert" means "to say something in the expectation of disagreement in which event you will defend your statement" whereas "to say" might imply either "to say in the expectation of being believed". Et cetera.

What does all this boil down to? I've been trying to think about this for awhile, and I simply can't articulate what I'd like to say. "Expectation" is important; so is "demonstration" and "agreement"; so is the vocabulary of likelihood. I'll just end up by saying this. When I was in high school, I took this (terrible) cultural anthropology class that met right after a philosophy class. I doubt the philosophy class was much better, but for a week or two the question "How precise is your language?" was written up on the board for that class. Damned if that's not a great question, and damned if Galison's two-sided question isn't great as well.

PS. One last point. Maybe the question is actually a little unfair. No one says we can't both historicize and use theorists. Just because (sometimes) our object of study also happens to be the source of our methodology, doesn't mean we have to tie ourselves in knots (as I've been doing over this question). Like any scholar or scientist, the best we can do is choose a vocabulary and take things into account that seem to explain our subject in a way that answers as many possible questions and provokes as few objections as possible. And I won't theorize as to why that is!

Globality vs. Semi-Globality

2008-06-05T08:34:00.007-04:00

These are not very descriptive terms, but they make the case well enough. I think we have to admit that we've never really given up on Conant's project to explain science via historical case study. Even if we no longer pursue a philosophy of scientific knowledge, the search for theories thereof has not ceased. All the big historians still are very eager to make some kind of contributions to the big questions. Look at the scope of Galison's questions--locality, globality, ethics, context. These are not questions about what is within the history of science, but questions that the history of science might address. They are not a path out of case study--they are a recipe for more.

The other pieces in this Isis focus section venture even further in this direction. They are permeated by trying to address the nature of reality, the nature of observation, and so forth. They are historicized, but not around scientific practice, but the philosophers who have explicitly addressed these questions: count the number of times pre-Kantian, Kantian, post-Kantian, and neo-Kantian appear... as if Kant or any other philosopher (let's not get into the Heidegger fascination) were actually standard bearers who affected directions in scientific practice. It's true many influential scientists (especially Germans) were influenced by these philosophical discussions. But we study them at the expense of understanding less articulated, more ingrained traditions of practice. Are we even playing a dangerous and somewhat illegitimate game by trying to read global philosophical debates (and historical epochs) onto localized practice?

If we want to be intellectual historians, are we even very good ones? Why, when we talk about the Enlightenment, is there such a fixation on Kant, even though he was a fairly marginal figure in his time? Even a cursory examination of Enlightenment science and philosophy reveals that it was not particularly Kantian. What about Hume? What about the scores of other thinkers that usually don't make the canon, but were quite influential in their day?

But, big "global" questions aside, why aren't key "semi-global" questions more hotly debated? The older historiography is extremely useful on certain semi-global problems. Buchwald's book on the wave nature of light (1989) will surely go in my canon, but the topic would be considered parochial today, since it is not addressed to externalist links or the nature of observation. It would, I imagine, receive a politely glowing review in Isis (and elsewhere) and then be promptly ignored. And there are whole hosts of untapped semi-global issues--the rise of methods of argumentation in economics, the intertwining of science and engineering in the 20th century, the evolution of the concept of radiation and the proliferation of physical-chemical radiation studies, the professionalization of the 19th century laboratory (there's got to be something on this that I'm not aware of).

All of these are extremely important, key "semi-global" issues that could use penetrating historical treatments, but I simply can't imagine them being hot topics of conversation in colloquia, seminars, HSS meetings, and so forth. They're too historical, too internalist, too detail-oriented, and not philosophically/sociologically global, and most definitely not capable of being treated via case study.

PS. When we get around to canon-building in a couple of weeks, I suspect we'll find that the early modernists and maybe the history of medicine people are way ahead of everyone in addressing the semi-global, but that's a topic for another day.

Galison's Q's #8: Globality

2008-06-04T08:48:00.003-04:00

In his 8th question, Peter Galison flips question #7 on its head: by concentrating on the local, what is invisible that only becomes visible at the global scale? Peter discusses issues of community knowledge (the coordination required to build a robust science of meteorology, for example), or issues of disciplinary identity, which can only be built over time. I totally agree, and would go even further to say that everything viewed locally looks different when viewed from a broader scale. The reason is that local perspectives make implicit presumptions about broader context (see #1): what we choose to study locally, and how we design our localized studies are issues that must be defined by our broader interests.

When we study the local, it is because we expect it to tell us something about, or be reflective of some broader story: the philosophical conundrums of observation or theory generation, the politics and economy of empire, the intellectual tensions between science and religion. This is why the case study method has become so unsatisfying, to me anyway (see #7), because the same general points from a frighteningly narrow array of general interests are repeated again and again in local example. The local is the global in different guise.

Which is not to say that the local can't be useful. It has only been by looking at the local that we have come to appreciate the rich diversity of scientific practice, and have linked it to global externalities. The trick to moving forward is to have the courage to expand our global interests--to multiply the number of general issues in which we are interested, which we can then turn around and see operating at the local level.

The problem is that everyone has to be on board with this expansionary program. Time and again in workshops I've seen fairly parochial questions be sympathetically criticized for failing to satisfy a more general interest within the history of science community (these general interests are our limited menu of issues which we all understand). This means that key semi-global problems, especially those that are specific to a certain discipline, don't tend to get aired outside of sub-groups of a few scholars. Yet, if there's no broader disciplinary reward for addressing these important semi-global problems, they will never be treated as seriously as they deserve, even as the issues of the generalized journals continue to be filled with case studies addressing the same old set of global issues.

The onus is on the audience to become interested in the semi-global, even in areas outside their specialty, and not insist on everything being framed in terms of issues that everyone who's spent any time in the profession could rehearse in their sleep. Coming up tomorrow: what I mean by the semi-global vs. the global.

Galison's Q's #7: Locality and Microhistory

2008-06-03T08:56:00.003-04:00

If I'm not too keen on questions of science ethics and science politics (at least contemporary questions), in Problem 7, Galison touches on a question near and dear to my heart: case study history. Basically, Peter asks: "What's the deal with all the case studies?" (which could also be this blog's motto). He notes that microhistory case studies of individuals or laboratories or what-have-you, were once seen as a Baconian way of getting at an underlying philosophy of science. But that project's long dead, as is the project to nail down a specific moment when some important thing was discovered or theorized. Case studies don't seem to make a claim to "typicality"--if anything they argue for the uniqueness of moments in science.

My position on this blog has consistently been that the case study has basically just become a habit. This habit was originally grounded in the utility of the case study in demonstrating the intermingling of science and its context (as Galison points out), which itself stems from the sociology-philosophy feud. Rather than demonstrate a set ahistorical philosophy of scientific method, sociologists commandeered the case study approach as a way to build their own historicist theoretical vocabulary (historians: seek out some pure sociology of science some time; it's basically the modus operandi). Historians--who, as I've pointed out, have only minimal use for this vocabulary--have basically taken away the core historicist sociological insight, that "science" follows no peculiar "high road" to knowledge (science is comprised of a series of unique practices), and beat that naive position straight into the ground.

To what end? The most charitable interpretation, I believe, is that the strategy is used to illustrate the interaction of science with certain defining epochal trends: Enlightenment, modernity, imperialism, Cold War, etc... I've been pretty critical of this, because I think we've said little interesting about the history of science, and we've said little that's really very new about any of these historical epochs. If anything, we've simply validated (only to ourselves) some notion that these things are coherent historical entities that can be easily encapsulated in caricature. Our job seems to be to adorn these concepts in baroque detail with our case studies, to add to our "model" of modernity, imperialism, etc... (my use of the term "model" here echoes C. S. Lewis' description of the medieval literary model of the universe--see my post on "Hobbit History"). I'm pretty sure we get this habit off the literary theorists and art historians, whose primary job seems to be to pick out and describe literary/artistic epochs.

Galison asks "if case studies are paving stones, where does that path lead?" I'm obviously pretty belligerent and grumpy on this issue, and would reply "nowhere fast". If we're going to continue using the approach, we need very badly to be more creative in our identification of scientific trends. We won't do it by copying the arts and letters crowd so slavishly.

Galison's Q's #s 6: The Politics of Technology

2008-06-02T08:41:00.008-04:00

Galison's 6th question is kind of the same as his 5th, which deals with the politics of technology. Galison notes that historians of science have shown a traditional strength in the philosophy and sociology of knowledge, and that we should augment our growing concern in the philosophy of ethics with a further concern in political and legal ramifications of science and technology.

Galison's question is rooted in the 20th century sea change in the relationship between science and technology. One possible response would be to claim that history of science has rightly been a form of intellectual history, and that questions of technology are beyond the pale, and best left to the SHOT folks. However, this is just a dodge. Because science and technology are now so much more strongly intertwined than science and philosophy, it would be disingenuous for us to just pass the buck.

That said, it also seems disingenuous of us to suddenly become political theorists. Our specialty is in epistemological issues, and to suddenly stake a claim to political and legal issues because they concern science (really, what doesn't?). What do those of us who study science have to contribute to these questions? How is the politics of sci-tech issues different from the politics (or the law) of anything else?

Is it even dangerous to stake a claim to an issue as pertaining to science? Take global warming--an enormous amount of robustness has been achieved in the science of climate change, but, because global warming has been branded a "science" issue, the onus has remained with the scientists and the question of "proof", while policymakers have been allowed to sit on the fence and avoid responsibility. We will note that the onus on, say, military intelligence, is not nearly so strong even though the political role of intelligence is virtually the same as that of science. Yet, no one would forgive a general for not taking effective action in a timely manner because intelligence had failed to provide absolute clarity.

Thus, to repeat the claims of last time, I don't think we have much original to contribute to the theory of science in politics and law. I'm pretty sure gesticulating about shifting or collapsing boundaries (between the public-private, the artificial-natural, etc...) doesn't qualify--lawyers parse issues like these all the time. It doesn't take a scientist, or a historian thereof, to discern and articulate the implications of science, once the capabilities of technologies have been articulated. That said, I do think our own historical work would benefit greatly if we schooled ourselves further in political and legal theory and history (I suspect our generally accepted interpretation of the Enlightenment is subpar--a post for another day). To foster a good 20th-century historiography, we'll absolutely need to find some realistic way of grasping how managers, policymakers, and legislators have perceived and reacted to scientific issues. To be better historians of science, we'll need to be better political and business historians.

Doppelganger

2008-05-30T15:01:00.007-04:00

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

2008-05-29T15:37:00.004-04:00

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

2008-05-27T09:40:00.008-04:00

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?

2008-05-23T09:49:00.009-04:00

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

2008-05-21T09:52:00.007-04:00

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

2008-05-19T09:10:00.003-04:00

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

2008-05-16T15:37:00.003-04:00

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

2008-05-15T08:55:00.010-04:00

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

2008-05-14T09:46:00.004-04:00

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

2008-05-12T08:15:00.002-04:00

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

2008-05-10T09:42:00.003-04:00

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?

2008-05-08T13:17:00.009-04:00

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

2008-05-07T09:16:00.009-04:00

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!

2008-05-02T10:17:00.006-04:00

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!

2008-05-01T15:07:00.002-04:00

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

2008-05-01T11:54:00.007-04:00

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.

Harvard Conference

2008-04-28T09:21:00.004-04:00

It's been almost a week since the last entry, because I've been back up in my Cambridge, Mass. stomping grounds at a highly interdisciplinary conference on "Instability and Decomposition" put together by my friend, collaborator, and former colleague Lambert Williams. There were a lot of pretty sharp presentations on a really diverse array of topics. I gave a revised version of my Air and Space Museum talk (with even more diagrams, which seem to be going over well). This talk sets itself up in opposition to arguments where the big story is how patronage and politics shape the scientific policy advice being received. I don't say this isn't the case, but try and bring the analysis in new directions by reframing the motivation of policy scientists as being the improvement of policy (rather than dictation) through analysis, and by recasting policymakers as intellectual participants in the policy science process.

The only thing I want to talk about with respect to the conference is that only a couple of the talks really set up any sort of argument with the literature. There was an interesting friction between two papers, one of which framed itself using Homi Bhabha's postcolonial critique, and another that set itself up in opposition to it (in a way that had some odd resonances with my paper, actually). Now, I don't know the first thing about Bhabha's critique, but it still gave the papers a little spice, a sense that something was being achieved. I find it strange that most papers don't try and throw out a few sparks.

Anyway, Jenny wanted me to offer a few opinions on her summary of our debate last week before she posts, so I'll do that at first opportunity, so we can get that up. And I swear I'll get back to my string on Holmes, as well as maybe talk about R&D.

Virtual History Chat

2008-04-23T16:28:00.003-04:00

Jenny and I just finished our first experimental online history chat--I think it was reasonably successful, and could be used for certain kinds of discussion. Largely historians (not historians of science) participated--it seemed to be agreed that some of the deeper theory-based concerns were not very high on everyone's minds, but that there was plenty of need for new kinds of historiography that haven't yet cohered. Maybe we're in a period of theory hangover? Jenny will sum up in more detail soon.

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

2008-04-22T09:28:00.006-04:00

Apologies for my prolonged blog absence. I have not abandoned Will in his search for the history of history but was traveling abroad, which always takes time out of one's schedule.

I am happy to announce that our online debate will debut tomorrow night, Wednesday, April 23rd, 8pm Paris time or 2pm Eastern standard time. If you have a Gmail account and would like to join our group chat room, feel free to send either me or Will an email at jennifer.ferng or gwilliamthomas. We will hope to refine this project as time goes on.

We will begin the debate with Stanley Fish's recent essays on French theory in America.

Some other questions we hope to kick around are: how are French theorists different from French historians? Are there competing schools of contemporary French historiography today? What type of new methodologies are being used and what kind of exciting questions are being asked by graduate students and more established scholars? How do French historians compare with British historians? Is modernism still alive in the humanities or should it be? What about its relation to postmodernism?

We hope you can join us and look forward to a constructive and critical debate!

Depicting Science in Context

2008-04-21T08:53:00.003-04:00

First: Jenny's been away from Paris, but will be back this week, and, so far as I know, her online debate is still on. The plan is to use Google Talk Messaging, which requires either a special download, available here, or just a gmail account. If you'd like to participate or just watch, you can contact one of us on our gmail accounts: gwilliamthomas or jennifer.ferng and we'll be sure to send you an invite. I expect it will be in the evening Paris time, so afternoon in America, on the 23rd. If you'd like to suggest possible points to discuss (really anything goes, but the idea is historiography, not even necessarily of science), leave a comment here.

Now, I wanted to discuss strategies for talking about scientific culture, which is influenced by my recent reading of Holmes, Mirowski's More Heat Than Light (which I'm using for ideas for my lecture on economics tomorrow), and some recent emails with Paul Erickson concerning his work on game theory (which everyone interested in 20th century science should have a look at when it come out).

Here's the historiographical problem: how do we talk about events "in their own terms"? First runs through a history tend (maybe inevitably?) to be Whiggish--how does the past presage some later understanding? The historian's major response seems to be "to situate B within the contemporary context of X" or to show "B as a product/reflection of X"; which tends to read the history of B only inasmuch as it relates to X. Now, this in no way precludes reading B as a product of Y or Z, either, but it also doesn't bring us any closer to understanding B "in its own terms". This is definitively not to say that B is independent of everything else, but I do think it prevents us from taking B seriously, even as we take its cousins at the end of the alphabet entirely too seriously. Why are X, Y, and Z allowed to take on a solid meaning, and not B?

Take Mirowski--his big argument in MHTL is that 19th century economics was forged in relation to the perception of what physics was accomplishing, with neoclassical economics being a direct copy of energetics. He's certainly right about the existence of the connections, but I rarely feel like I'm understanding the economics on its own terms, despite his valiant efforts to dispel the Whiggishness of the history of pre-neoclassical economics as striving towards some sort of obviously true neoclassical understanding. The mathematical moves the economists make might appear to mimic physics in some ways, but is there a different epistemology at work? Did the economists really think they were doing the same thing as the physicists, even if the equations are copied directly? I would tend to think not, given that their main tradition was one of political philosophy rather than mathematical physics, so I would think that the mathematics would be reinterpreted within the historically dominant tradition. A conversation for another day....

Anyway, Mirowski aside, my main trouble with "in the context of X/Y/Z" is that it presumes we have a solid understanding of X/Y/Z, when what is really meant is a simple shorthand. Take "science X in the context of the Cold War"; what is usually meant is that said science "has an aroma of paranoia about it", "benefits the military", and/or "is expensive"--detailed understanding of Cold War historical dynamics will typically not figure. As for science X, it's usually implicit that the science itself is understood well enough "in its own terms" and that, therefore, additional light will be shed on it by situating it within its context. But, what strikes me is that the science is usually not well understood, either because it hasn't ever been recapitulated in a coherent narrative, or that whatever recapitulation does exist is all within the inadequate Whiggish old school/practitioner/pop historiography, which few historians in the audience will actually read (for good reasons), thus limiting the informativeness of the exercise.

So, in my mind, it's best to go back and retell the original story, maybe in a different way, paying attention to different things, or assigning different weights to different parts of the narrative "in light of" what we know about the context. So, we still acknowledge that the thing we are studying is actually an entity in and of itself, and is not merely an artifact bearing the marks of overlapping themes and discourses. This is why I like Holmes so well--he really tries to get back to the original material and understand its intellectual project without abandoning the context. This inevitably makes for a really convoluted history, but the attempt to unravel it is, in my experience, where the really good historical arguments take place. Next time, as promised, Holmes' epilogue.

Holmes, Part 3: Does Nature Matter?

2008-04-18T09:04:00.007-04:00

Comparing what I've (poorly) called the historical arc vs. the historical reality models of writing history, Holmes goes on to discuss some of the relevant literature. Probably his main target here is Robert Kohler's (1982, now out of print) From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline, the first chapter of which explores how "physiological chemistry" was caught in a sort of professional limbo between physiology and organic chemistry in the German university system--hence this gap between first major calls for a cell-oriented chemistry ca. 1850, and the eventual instantiation of a full-blown biochemistry ca. 1900.

Now, things get complicated here, so all this is all too-fast, too-rough recapitulation, but, long story short, Kohler's book focuses almost exclusively on the non-scientific politics of disciplinary formation. One of Holmes' big points is to bring the science back into the picture. "If we are to understand scientific innovation and change comprehensively, then we need studies at all levels of organization, from the individual investigator [which he goes on to defend vigorously] and the local research school to the international field; and on time scales ranging from daily experimental operations to the several decades or even much longer that are often required for scientific problems to evolve and for major domains of scientific knowledge to be acquired." He had previously discussed Mulkay and Edge, but he's also clearly addressing the points made by Kohler and Latour: "A research field is more than a network of communication and ties of professional interest."

In some sense, this boils down to the usual, "but nature matters!" argument deployed against the "spin up" interpretation of sociology. Rudwick (see the last post) certainly agrees (see the latest HSS newsletter). Kohler seems to as well, and actually, in his 1982 book, seems to lament the politics of the German university that prevented biochemistry from emerging. Although Holmes gets into it, repeatedly, with the sociologists' "spin up" arguments throughout the lectures, I get the feeling his main concern is not with proving that nature matters, but, rather, that he has his own, very historiographical agenda. He wants to know how we get down to telling histories that reveal what mattered, and thus why his approach to history is best in this case, as opposed to an approach like that used in, say, Great Devonian Controversy or From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry.

By embracing both long time spans (unlike a case study approach like Rudwick's), and by embracing laboratory-level practice (unlike Kohler's approach to a similar topic), Holmes aims to show how the formation of a field like biochemistry is not simply a matter of willing it into existence provided there are no political barriers, but that nature and the evolution of ideas about nature matter in determining what is deemed worth investigation. Most of his lectures are centered around constructing a narrative in which such points are pertinent. In other words, he shows how a more sociologist-friendly book like Kohler's is actually more Whiggish than his approach, because it presumes that a field like biochemistry ought to exist, and that it was necessary for the emergence of biochemical knowledge (as Kohler himself seems to confirm). This could all be a big misinterpretation of the historiographical argument taking place, on both Holmes' and Kohler's parts--I read this stuff quickly--but it's what I took away from it.

Next time: Holmes responds to some criticisms in his epilogue.

Holmes, Part 2: Historical Realities vs. Historical Arcs

2008-04-17T16:44:00.011-04:00

In the previous post I pointed out that Frederic Holmes was dealing with the problem of predecessor science. At the beginning of his lectures (1990), Holmes sets up an interesting comparison, saying that one can focus on "conceptually defined problems that appear to unify the contributions of several or many scientists." He points to Jed Buchwald's The Rise of the Wave Theory of Light, Alan Rocke's Chemical atomism in the nineteenth century, and, lo and behold, John Heilbron's Electricity in the 17th and 18th centuries. They key here is "appear to unify"--even though we're looking at scientists with diverse perspectives, they fall into a collective conversation. So, this tends to exclude arguments along the lines of "this guy in India had this same idea in the 8th century" or the perennial favorite, "this really all goes back to Descartes". This is important for Holmes, because it demands that if he's going to trace his topic of metabolic chemistry back to the pre-1850 era, the burden's on him to indicate that the 1850'ers and the 1930'ers were having the same conversation in a more-or-less continuous tradition.

But what's really interesting to me is a second trend of argumentation exemplified, according to Holmes, by Martin Rudwick's Great Devonian Controversy. Rudwick's book (1985) is one of the key texts in the study of resolution of scientific controversies, which shows how artificial their closure seems to be. According to Holmes, Rudwick's work, in comparison to the others, "is a more tightly bounded, densely recounted episode that Rudwick employed in his effort to transcend 'the individual scientist' in order to see how 'a specific scientific problem... brought together some group of individuals in an interacting network of exchange."

Holmes goes on from here with little comment, but the timing of his lectures, five years after Leviathan and Rudwick, comes at a critical juncture. These works still represent fresh, productive approaches that compete with a slightly older style represented by guys like Buchwald and Heilbron. For Holmes they are two possible models that do two different kinds of work, but there's no need to comment on their historiographical place, because they're two accepted approaches.

Now, in my mind, Rudwick is prototypical of the case study tradition. It sets out to demonstrate by means of example, rather than to trace a history. It functions both as an illustration of a moment of "science in action", and as an exemplar of a long-term historical reality (episteme?) (i.e., social structures in which controversies can be resolved in a gentlemanly fashion). Whereas the three works mentioned above chart out more of a medium-term historical arc. I would claim that somehow the Rudwick model came to dominate historical writing in subsequent years, but it's not the model that Holmes chooses for his discussion of the 1840s to 1930s historical arc.

For now, I'd just like to muse about functional differences between these two models. The Rudwick model seems like sort of a one trick pony--if we don't appreciate (and it's debatable whether historians did) that the settlement of controversy can proceed independent of scientific arguments, Rudwick serves as a slap in the face. But, like a joke, the more you tell the story, the less illuminating each new case study becomes. Whereas, inquiries into historical arcs, while perhaps less earth-shattering, I think, ultimately gives us something to argue over, and, if we choose the right trends (or invent new narratives altogether--excitement!), this is probably the most continually productive route.

I think this choice of models is really one of these stylistic/economy-of-writing issues. It's not a question of correctness, but how much argumentative work you can make history do for you.

Holmes' "Between Biology and Medicine"

2008-04-16T09:53:00.004-04:00

I just gave my 20th century biology lecture yesterday--not much to report except that I argued that a productive way to approach the subject is to figure out how biology emerges as something independent of medicine, physiology, and chemistry. I look to the emergence of a full-throttled biochemistry (a chemistry specific to life) situated around 1900: enzymes, understanding proteins, biochemical pathways, and all that. This merges with the more physiological/evolutionary genetics with DNA in the new field of molecular biology mid-century.

But, after a bit of scraping, my best guide to all this turned out to be a mightily interesting 1992 book (collecting four 1990 lectures) by Frederic Holmes called (of all titles): "Between Biology and Medicine: The Formation of Intermediary Metabolism". It sounds very arcane, but turned out to be riveting, because it deals pretty head-on with some of the questions I've been thinking about here. Basically, Holmes wrote (an absurdly detailed) two-volume book on Hans Krebs, trying to tease out the origins of intermediary metabolism in the 1930s, and, as so-often happens, he had the trap-door open beneath him as he found that intermediary metabolism has "predecessors" in the first half of the 1800s.

Now, Holmes is rightly suspicious about this "predecessors" question, and ends up tackling some very deep issues about how to write history. I have a lecture coming up tomorrow on R&D (another very bloggable topic), so I'm going to leave this here, but I'm going to come back to this in the next few posts.

Also, Jenny's long-awaited online debate thing is due to go forward on the 23rd--stay tuned! (seriously)

Understanding Scientific Communities

2008-04-13T16:20:00.005-04:00

To elaborate a bit on Friday's post, this chart

represents a fairly wide study of a lot of different communities--understanding their official organizational relationships, understanding who the players are, what their backgrounds are, who they talked with, and understanding what they thought the purpose of their work was. It is impossible to simply take a text produced by one part of this chart and understand its historical significance, without understanding what the other people on this chart were doing. In other words, it would be almost impossible to really understand the historical development of a field like operations research (OR) if presented in a case study format. This is why I think it's so important that journal articles do as much work as possible to guide the audience around a historical milieu.

Understanding a community and its culture is really a challenge, and I'd love to see some intriguing new ways of writing about it. On the subject of OR, Paul Ceruzzi was just telling me about his new book on the development of military contractors (OR, R&D, etc...) in the Tyson's Corner area of the DC suburbs, which I think is a pretty illuminating approach to studying a poorly-defined community. Dave Kaiser's new book on the postwar physics bubble looks at shifts in physics pedagogy reflecting a shifting physics demography. David Edgerton's Warfare State comes off as a bit clunky, but it's an important new perspective on the British state-sponsored scientific community (and others). Several months ago, I mentioned an internet project we're hoping to get some funding for here at the AIP to try and create an internet guide to the postwar American physics elite. But this is an old question--back in the '70s, for example, Steve Shapin and Arnold Thackray were pushing prosopography as an important method of studying what we mean by a scientific community--but prosopography has had only a few champions since. Are there any other exemplars out there?

National Air and Space Museum Talk

2008-04-11T09:18:00.011-04:00

Last night I went down to the National Air and Space Museum to give a talk on some of my current work. What a kick! The NASM and American History Museum crowd are a really lively bunch, and give you very probing questions. I even got a chance to debate at a highly theoretical level with Paul Forman. I was talking with him about the new SEE stuff; he seems to feel it's a retreat to a modernistic frame of thought, with which I agree, but which I see as inevitable and thus healthy, since there are no really viable alternatives--a topic I've also been throwing out in my class as food for thought (you'll never convince me that postmodernism represents a coherent or original way forward). Of course, this is not interpreting modernism in the same way as, say, Latour. But I digress... It was a good time.

I just wanted to post a few slides from that talk that generated a lot of discussion, since I think they get at why I hold the convictions that I do, which inform a lot of my posts here. A lot of work on mid-twentieth century policy science considers policy scientists and their patrons to have held a rationalistic view of the science-politics relationship (actually, Latour accuses "us all" of that pretty explicitly):
Click on the pictures if you want a bigger version. Anyway, science studies seem to have replaced this picture with an alternative:

My argument is that this still assumes a science-politics barrier: it is we scholars who are wise to how science actually functions in a society. But I think this model totally misrepresents how the policy scientists conceive of themselves, their epistemology, and their intellectual role. In particular, it lumps the sciences together, and assumes that they are all operating on the same epistemological basis ("science"), and that they think they are all producing rationalized conclusions that policymakers are expected to follow. But I claim we really need to fairly portray the intellectual terrain as they actually saw it:

In this picture there are no clear intellectual divides between the scientists and the policymakers. Some, necessarily, speak in idioms very similar to those of the policymakers. Others speak in idioms that are more purely mathematical. Now, this chart doesn't work algorithmically like a machine. Each entry is self-sustaining, occasionally absorbing insights from the other areas on the charts (roughly in accord with the kind of arrow I've drawn)--think Galison on "intercalation". What is most important is that there is an assignment of responsibilities. This chart represents perspectives on rationality--no one claims to have access to some kind of scientific truth. The social relationships are geared toward critique and improvement, not monolithic proclamation, and each does so in full cognizance of their relationship to the other areas on the chart at least immediately connected to them. (Note that the mathematical theoreticians are in no way directly connected to policy.) My claim is that this is how policy scientists and policymakers actually saw themselves--it is not a prescription; it is a reflection of a historical reality.

Now, this, I think, is just what Collins and Evans are on about with their idea of interactive expertise. Notably, this entire system of critique is predicated on the ideas that 1) decisions must be made (C & E say "the speed of politics exceeds the speed of science" but I think this still places too much emphasis on the science-politics divide); 2) some decisions will fulfill stated goals better than others, and to choose the best means is the operative definition of rationality--not some external access to an objective "true and impersonal" solution; and 3) all decisions will be revised on a subsequent occasion in light of more recent information and analysis.

As I said, fun stuff!

Binzley on Catholic Science

2008-04-09T08:56:00.005-04:00

Awhile ago I promised a look at Ronald Binzley's recent Isis piece on the Albertus Magnus Guild, a mid-2oth century American Catholic science society. So I thought I better just go ahead and write it up. Basically, I like the piece in the same way I like a good magazine article: it does a great job of informing me about a topic I know nothing about. Indeed, Binzley makes a good case that no one knows much about his topic's general area. Footnote 6 is the key, where he discusses the large amount of interest in the relationship between science and religion, and how, in the historical space in question, almost all the literature is on Protestantism. Plus I'm from a Catholic background myself, so there's some automatic interest there.

So the piece is chewy and delicious, but is it nutritious? That question hinges on the way Binzley frames his inquiry. Basically, what does the article, a case study, tell us about Catholic science in America? According to Binzley, near the end of his article, not much: "The [AMG], though short lived, provides historians with an important case study for understanding the development of Catholic science education and the relationship between the American Catholic Church and the sciences...." Yet: "How representative the guild's viewpoint truly was of Catholics working in the sciences during the mid-twentieth century is a question that we will be able to answer only with additional studies of the Catholic institutions and individuals involved with the sciences during this period."

OK, so why is the case study "important" then? Well, there is an argument at work here. Binzley chooses to argue in terms of the traditional view of the Catholic Church as hostile to science: "At first glance, the character of science departments in twentieth-century American Catholic institutions of higher learning seems to conform to the conflict interpretation of Catholicism's relationship to science.... [Next paragraph]: Despite this sociological consensus, I believe a careful consideration of the historical development of Catholic science departments will yield a more nuanced assessment." I mentioned once before that the word "nuance" will often signal a nearby naive position. Binzley is very honest about this. Two paragraphs earlier: "The historiography on the relationship of the Catholic Church to the sciences has undergone substantial revision in the last several decades." It is well known to anyone who has been paying attention that the Church has not been hostile to science. The piece mostly serves to extend this assessment to more recent periods (not just early modern Jesuit natural history and philosophy, or whatever).

The issue of the economy of writing comes up. I have been told by wise men never to use the word "gap" when explicating the importance of my piece. Here: "It is my hope that this essay, beyond filling a gap in the literature, will help awaken more historians to the need for additional research on the interaction of American Catholicism and science during the twentieth century." This, in my mind, is the crucial point in the defense of the piece's formulation as a case study. However, if we are honest about our understanding of 20th century science, we'll admit we have an ocean with islands, not a jigsaw puzzle with gaps. I mentioned we know nothing about 20th c. Catholic science, but we also know nothing about a lot of things.

Why study Catholic science, then? The piece presents itself as, while not really settling much in and of itself, being the pebble that sets off the avalanche. But the history of science field's not big, and I don't foresee a sudden explosion of interest in the topic. Therefore, it seems to me, if we're going to write on the topic, we should try and set out some sort of scheme, however flawed, for saying something about the topic in a general sense. What are the most important set of concerns in the history of modern Catholic science, and how were these concerns typically answered? From this perspective the brief general discussion of Catholic science education on pp. 699-700 is by far the most interesting part of the piece for me.

So, basically, this all amounts to another thrown stone in my campaign against the case study. I think case studies play it too safe, that they hide from criticism by making narrow absolute claims, while attacking straw man naive positions to justify themselves. I don't think we should be afraid to be a little sloppy in making broad claims--but I suspect that creating this kind of study means massive methodological changes. We would no longer be able to rely on one or two magic archival files to produce a quality piece of academic work. We would have to be more adventurous in assembling porous data from a wide variety of sources.

The New Canon: Contents/Forman Thesis

2008-04-07T08:45:00.011-04:00

Well, I think my thoughts on the sociology-history link are exhausted for the time being (though I want to get back to SEE later). Today I want to talk about canons, and the fact that as near as I can tell, we have no up-to-date canon in the history of science, whether in individual fields, or across the profession as a whole. I know that preparing for my general exams was a highly arbitrary and undirected process, and that prior to teaching Intro to Hist Sci, my overall factual knowledge of the history of science was embarrassingly limited to a few historical islands. And I'm fairly sure this is typical for most students coming out of grad school today. A good way to develop a broad knowledge, and to have something to talk about with your peers, is to build a canon. Whenever I've mentioned a lack of canon, I've usually met with some kind approving affirmation that we have loosed ourselves of the bounds of a rigid set of things that constitute the history of science. Who needs a canon? I once asked if there's some set of books that everyone in my old grad program had read--I'm not sure we got past Leviathan and the Air Pump. This gives me a sort of nervous feeling, so I'd like to explore the issue of the canon.

Well, then, smart guy, what should be in our canon? I really have no idea, so it's time to start some wild speculation! I'd like to start by asking whether we should have "game changing" texts in our canon. I once heard that everyone in the history of physics needs to read the Forman Thesis (Paul Forman's 1971, "Weimar culture, causality, and quantum theory, 1918-27: adaptation by German physicists and mathematicians to a hostile intellectual environment"). This was one of the first major forays (prior to SSK) in exploring the relationship between science and its external context (edit: or so I am led to believe--there's a whole Marxist scholarship for example that is doubtless worth a look).

But I'm not so sure we need to read it. I've never found it particularly enlightening--why not put one of the several responses to it in the canon in its place? I always liked John Hendry's 1980 "Weimar Culture and Quantum Causality" in Darwin to Einstein: Historical Studies. Not only does it contain a good recap of Forman's arguments, it presents a much more sophisticated treatment of the relationship between the internal intellectual dynamics of physical theory and broader cultural movements.

Why isn't Hendry our champion on this subject rather than Forman? I think it's out of reverence for Forman's path-breaking achievement. Older scholars seem to remember how differently they thought about the history of quantum mechanics after Forman--he started the debate. That's fine, but shouldn't we really be studying the most refined product of this line of thought rather than the foundation stone? Doesn't it just lead us to reenact arguments that were pretty well settled long ago? I've seen a similar attitude in play with regard to Merchant's Death of Nature. If we read or refer to one text, it seems to me it's the original, even though the subject of gendered language and science has been handled much more deftly since (see the extended discussion on Merchant's book in Isis, September '06). Why don't we ever anoint a "new champion" like they do in other fields, like literary translation?

Anyway, the Hendry Thesis is in my new canon--the Forman thesis is out.

History of History

2008-04-04T09:52:00.003-04:00

I've noticed lately that my meanderings have been delving a lot into the history of the history of science lately. I think we need to study the history of our profession for the same reason that it's useful to know about the history of science: because practices have deep roots in argumentative traditions. So, I made the claim that we claim to get a lot out of the sociology of science (like our close focus on practice) that we could have probably also gotten from elsewhere, like mainstream cultural history, without all of sociology's hangups about understanding actual scientific results.

Could this have happened? It's an interesting question, because the history of science profession (at least in America) is rooted not in mainstream history, but in a close tie to the philosophy of science, the value of which the sociologists questioned, because what the philosophers (and "Wave One" sociologists) said happened in science was not actually evident "on the ground"--Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life was supposed to be a bit of a bombshell for this reason (if I understand my metahistory right). According to this story, so hung up were we on narratives emphasizing 1) the march of theories, 2) the growth of theories from crucial experiments, or 3) the continual interplay of theory and experiment, that we failed to pay any attention to what actually happens in science.

According to this narrative, we would not have thought to incorporate the insights of cultural history and Skinner, etc., into our work, because of our insistence on the special, algorithmic nature of science, predicated on our roots in philosophy. The ordinary rules of historical investigation would not have been thought to apply without the insights of the strong program. I think this probably mischaracterizes the historical work being done in the late '70s. But another reason for studying history is so that we can better learn how to escape it. If I am right in saying that we justify case studies, simply because they demonstrate how 1), 2), and 3) above are not how science works ("I choose, D, None of the Above"), then we may have bound ourselves up more than we've released ourselves. A further review of the "old" history, like what I was doing with Heilbron, may be in order.

Discourse on Style

2008-04-02T09:06:00.006-04:00

Since I eventually rejected Buffon's "Discourse on Style" as a title for the blog (no clear science reference), here's a few quick thoughts on what has always seemed to me to be the most important reason for reflecting on "the issues". That is improvement in style. These thoughts aren't well refined, so I may post some clarification later.

In his response to me (below), Matt Stanley brings up the important observation (that I haven't seen too much myself) that popular writing by scholars is often panned by other scholars. Now, I haven't heard too much criticism of Alder's Measure of All Things or Galison's Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps (except by nitpickers on the history of telegraphy), so I'm not too sure if it's a universal revulsion (and it's not the first time I've heard calls for bringing our craft to the masses). But I think it also goes to reinforce my point that there seems to be some sort of professional need to guard "our" style against corruption, because apparently we think that our intellectual gains are fragile.

But what's in style? I was previously a bit mean to Actor-Network Theory and Pickering's "mangle", saying that, by contrast, the new SEE may be "worth historians' time". This question of worth ought to be clarified. I do not mean that ANT and the mangle (a punk revival band name?) have no worth--I think they're fine for those who are interested in those kinds of theories. But I think their impact on how we write history is pretty negligible. Even though we all love Latour very much, I don't see his jargon or even his concepts getting deployed too much in the historical literature. In fact, I'd say that the bulk of the impact of sociology has been avoiding clumsy statements.

Let's go to the literature. Here are the first three sentences of John Heilbron's 1979 book Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries (which I used for my lecture on "Invention and the Industrial Revolution"): "The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century did not affect the several branches of natural philosophy equally. Some sciences, like astronomy, mechanics and geometrical optics, already far advanced in antiquity, were then transformed into prototypes of modern, quantitative, instrumentalist physics. Other sciences, like chemistry, exchanged one set of unproductive concepts for another."

Now, all right-thinking historians will cover their ears in pain at some of those statements. Bowler and Morus' Making Modern Science textbook that I'm using goes out of its way to reject the idea that the "scientific revolution" (whatever that is) came to chemistry late. But here's the thing: Heilbron's book is actually pretty damn good, and commits very few Whiggish heresies. Yes, he drops some of these discordant sentences on us, and, yes, the sociology of science has trained us to avoid them, but that's actually not a very substantive stylistic improvement for the sheer amount of praise showered on sociology. Again, I'm not saying the sociologists are wrong and shouldn't exist, just that their importance for the writing of history is overstated, especially since we never mention prior historical theorists like Quentin Skinner, who offer many of the same lessons without all the quasi-philosophical hoopla. [edit: "contemporaneous" is probably more accurate than "prior"]

Matt Stanley on Reviewing "Pop" Lit

2008-03-29T15:09:00.007-04:00

In response to a previous post on whether it's worth our while to combat typical pop fallacies in scholarly reviews, I've asked Michigan State historian Matt Stanley (a former grad student colleague of mine at Harvard) to give us a reply regarding his recent HSNS review of four new Einstein books, which I used as an illustration. He's generously taken the time to give us a good one. Here it is:

Before I get started, thanks to Will for starting up this blog and offering me a chance to join the conversation. I think there are two points I would like to bring up in response to Will's thoughts on Us vs. Them.

First, the issue of whether historians should spend their time critiquing "pop historians." I can tell you that reviewing that kind writing isn't much fun - it can actually be kind of painful, as I hope my HSNS review made clear. But I do think we have an obligation to do so. To the vast majority of literate people out there, books like Isaacson's are the only exposure they will have to the history of science. That means that their ideas of how science works will be shaped not by cutting-edge historiography, but by tired tropes and long-exposed myths. Presumably as scholars we have some obligation to use our knowledge to improve the general social understanding of our field, and one way to do that is to review books that will easily sell a hundred times as many copies as our monographs. It's surely the case that it would be more useful to put such a review in the NY Times rather than in a scholarly journal, but we don't always have the audiences we might like. So in short, I think reviewing popular books is an important obligation. This also raises the issue of whether historians should perhaps write for wider audiences - perhaps we can talk about that another day (after tenure, maybe).

Second, the issue of whether we should instead be "sharpen[ing] our abilities" by instead focusing on scholarly books. Personally, I'm not sure the purpose of writing reviews is to sharpen one's critical abilities. That's surely a result of review writing, but I'm skeptical that that should be the purpose. I see reviews as performing the valuable service of providing information on books that someone might not have the chance to read themselves, and possibly induce them to pick up the book or stay away from it at all costs. A secondary function, I think, is to make historiographical or substantive points regarding the book or its subject that don't quite merit a full-length journal article on their own.

I don't see my essay review as taking any kind of Us vs. Them perspective. On the most basic level, half of the authors I discuss are well-established professional historians (Rowe and Schulmann). On the more substantial level, I hope I made my objections to Isaacson and Neffe on well-supported points of analysis and substance, and not simply that they should stay on their side of the railroad tracks. Indeed, I would be quite embarrassed to see a review of Neffe's book that dismissed it just based on the author's credentials rather than its actual merits (or lack thereof). I think Us vs. Them appears quite a bit in our profession, but I usually see it go the other way - that is, historians taking flak from their colleagues for writing books aimed at popular audiences. I'm all for crossing that line in both directions, but I don't think non-historians' books should get a free ride from critical reviews.

Writing about Scientific Culture: Hentschel

2008-03-28T09:21:00.003-04:00

I did my 19th century physics lecture yesterday. Mostly I used Mary Jo Nye's invaluable Before Big Science overview, which also does a nice job of keeping the histories of physics and chemistry interlinked. I was planning on saying more about spectral analysis, but, 19th century physics being kind of a big topic, I didn't even get the chance to bring up Kirchhoff--so it was basically: "the wave-like properties of light had been an important part of scientific practice for some time, like in the analysis of spectra [45 second description of spectra]. Now, here's Hertz!"

But, preparing the lecture, I found two books on spectra, McGucken's 1969 Nineteenth-Century Spectroscopy and Klaus Hentschel's 2002 Mapping the Spectrum: Techniques of Visual Representation in Research and Teaching. Hentschel's book is definitely going on my to-read-in-full list. Based on a preliminary survey, this looks like really exciting history. Here's why I think so.

1) Significance is clear. If you know anything about practice in physics, astronomy, and chemistry after 1850 or so, you'll know that spectral analysis is absolutely central. Given its centrality, there seems to be an absurdly small amount of literature on it.
2) The internal significance of method is clear. Hentschel differentiates himself from McGucken by noting that McG doesn't really discuss spectroscopy as a visual culture--yet it very clearly is.
3) He follows cultural traditions--this isn't a snapshot that says: visual culture is a part of spectroscopy (that much is obvious). It says, here's how visual culture is an integral part of the history of spectroscopy. (That "research and teaching" bit in the subtitle is important--for some reason you can usually hit a home run talking about pedagogy).

One of the greatest challenges we have is to write about science as culture. The sociology of science has undoubtedly helped us to do that. (I think reception studies have probably benefited the most). But, in my mind, it's not enough to simply portray science as a culture and call it day; you have to make a case for how culture changed and why. It's difficult to escape discussing epistemological convictions in such cases.

Can this be done in short form? Is it the case that our books are good and our articles are bad? I've been thinking about this a lot recently. If it is the case, I definitely don't think it has to be that way. In my class I have now systematically abused every facet of science from the medieval era to the 1800s by chopping them up into snappy 45-5o minute overviews, but I think I've managed to assemble a big picture of cultural change, where you can see different traditions flowing and interacting in the production of disciplines and knowledge. From a personal perspective, it's been massively educational!

Postmodern equivocation

2008-03-26T08:51:00.015-04:00

Here's that Zammito quote, Nice Derangement of Epistemes, pp. 262-263; on Stanley Fish's reply to Alan Sokal at the height of the science wars:

"Stanley Fish, before he resorted to ad hominem self-righteousness [Zammito does not pull punches], also offered a defense of the postmodernist stance. He wrote: 'What sociologists of science say is that of course the world is real and independent of our observations but that accounts of the world are produced by observers and are therefore relative to their capacities, education, training, etc. It is not the world or its properties but the vocabularies in whose terms we know them that are socially constructed--fashioned by human beings--which is why our understanding of those properties is continually changing.' This is a remarkable piece of writing. If, indeed, science studies took the stance that Fish represented, there would be nothing radical whatever about it. That is, in fact, why Fish is unbelievable, for science studies does seek to be radical. Indeed, a careful study of Collins, of Pickering, and above all of Latour--to say nothing of Harding and Haraway--suggests not only that they would repudiate Fish's intervention but recognize it for what it is--disingenuous rhetoric. There is a characteristic move here, one which features in much postmodernist posturing. Extreme positions are taken; when challenged, authors deny the extremity and affirm they really meant a far more modest posture."

Zammito is astute here and what he says jibes well with what I've seen in my short career in the history of science. It shows the instability of ideas* in the sociology of science, which devolves into one of two states, call them "spin up" and "spin down" to use the idea from physics that "intermediate" quantum states cannot exist.

Spin up is the radical "strong program" that I refer to as a parlor game, which states that science-society relations are understandable without reference to epistemology. The problem is that the stance totally fails to explain historical events, which cannot be understood without reference to the robustness of scientific (or really any) ideas and the incentive to agreement that robustness provides (more on "robustness" later). Hence the need for epistemological "cheats" as I called them yesterday.

Spin down is the banal "science is not context-independent" critique which sets up prior scholarship (and a general "society's view" often referred to using the pronoun "we") as a straw man that presumes a naive philosophical ("algorithmic") viewpoint toward science, that nobody holds (I think we could include even the Wave One'ers here, although Collins and Evans insist on keeping them naive). Spin down informs the majority of professional history of science writing today.

So, by refusing to take any positions between spin up and spin down, sociologists are faced with either being interesting and wrong, or uninteresting and right, and will tend to vacillate between the positions as it suits their interests. However, Zammito goes on: "At least in Collins, Pickering, and Latour we have authors strong enough in their convictions, whatever others think of their claims, to refuse to water them down and escape criticism."

Notably, all three of these individuals have tried to break out of the constraints of the spin up-spin down duality. Latour with Actor Network Theory, Pickering with the "mangle" (which I want to discuss later), and now Collins and Evans with SEE. I have my reasons for thinking that SEE is actually worth historians' time.

*I love the term "instability of ideas"; in "Fog of War", LBJ, in a conversation with Robert McNamara re: Vietnam, quoted a senator saying it.

The sociologists' game

2008-03-25T12:04:00.006-04:00

I'm planning on looking at the Collins-Evans SEE program in a little bit more depth in the future. I just received my copy of Rethinking Expertise, and will delve into it at the next opportunity (things are nuts--hence no blog posts in almost a week!) I think we're eventually going to have a Q&A with Collins and Evans as part of an effort to improve the blog and expand readership.

For now, I'd like to take apart a line in my previous post about their "Third Wave" which is that they seemed "hamstrung" by not engaging in epistemology. This comment is clearly indicative of the historian/sociologist divide. Sociologists of science take particular pride in performing "symmetrical" analyses--that is their sociological descriptions should apply regardless of epistemology. This way they can comment equally on how scientific knowledge operates in society as well as how knowledge gleaned from reading the cracks in a turtle shell produced by a hot poker operated in Ancient Chinese society (say, by determining whether it was auspicious to plant crops).

This move can come off as sort of like a parlor game: how much can we say about knowledge and society without recourse to philosophy? Rhetorically, it takes scientific knowledge down to the level of turtle shell poking, which has been the cause of much protest, especially since reckless statements have been made (Zammito has a good line on this--I'll dig it up later). I get the sense that the problems caused have also given rise to this idea of things having a "voice" which is interpreted through attendant "spokesmen". This is part of the point of a lot of Latour's work, particularly beginning with Pasteurization of France.

I won't recap the whole history of SSK here (again, see Zammito); but I find it interesting that sociologists refuse to use philosophical "cheats" to rectify, at least temporarily, the rhetorical absurdities. As an historian, I feel entirely free to investigate social structures and philosophical convictions to see how they inhabit scientific practices, but (I think) that's because I'm interested in investigating specific historical practices of specific actors; I'm not attempting to explain "scientific practice" in general (at least in long duration trends). In this way, I can at least make a stab at explaining the historical data.

The idea of having to tear science down before we can build it back up sociologically (as Collins and Evans seem to be trying to do) strikes me as inefficient. The insights achieved by SSK have been valuable, and we can write better histories because of it, but the gap between the initiation of Wave Two and the initiation of Wave Three (should it even take off), has meant spending Moses-like time spans in the academic wilderness with a deconstructed scientific enterprise that obviously has merit. If the refusal to use epistemological cheats really is just a parlor game, we should ask if it was worth it.

Scientists and Historians, Take 3

2008-03-20T08:43:00.007-04:00

Refining my thoughts about the relationship between scientists and historians, I think I can now make my case a bit more succinctly. The main question is: what counts as history? For historians, almost everything now counts as history: culture, epistemology, practice, physical objects, and so forth. And, going back to the historical record, historians can see that scientists have had high level (if sometimes poorly articulated) discussions about the relationship between institutions, practices, and knowledge. This is one reason why Peter Galison's Image and Logic is one of my favorite history of science books; it's not because of the trading zones and pidgins and creoles; it's because in Chapters 2 through 8, while he doesn't constrain himself to "actor's categories", he does let the actors work the issues out amongst themselves rather than describe the "tensions inherent in their work" or something like that. I think it's the fact that these actors do work these issues out and develop new socio-epistemological cultures that gives the book its fairly unique optimistic tone. One of Galison's main stylistic points is that he refuses to bemoan whatever trend there might currently be that threatens to consume science. He is not the analyst-as-enlightened-external-observer.

The unfortunate bit is that scientists have not tended to see these discussions as the really historically interesting things that they do. It's just the petty details of institution-building, or whatever. For them, it's still primarily about big discoveries and Nobel Prizes or hagiographies telling the "human side of the story" or whatever. And now, here we are, finally, with a pretty good grip on these issues, and we've gone and scared all those deep thinking scientists off. It'd make the writing of the history of 21st century science a lot easier if they had a strong interest in publicizing their debates about these deeper issues and articulating them better. So, that's, I think, what I was trying to get at yesterday.

Where did all the scientists go?

2008-03-19T09:14:00.010-04:00

A bedtime story.

Once upon a time, most historians of scientists were Scientists who took an interest in history. They had a close relationship to the Philosophers. In fact, the origins of the field are usually traced to Harvard President James B. Conant's desire to find out How Science Works. They did some pretty good work, but took too many things to be Obvious that were actually quite Problematic. So, some Analysts became involved, and made some Notable Contributions. Soon the Analysts only wanted to talk amongst themselves, and eventually the Science Wars broke out, and this made the Scientists go away, and thus the Analysts had the history of science all to themselves. The End.

I think most everyone now agrees that the science wars were absurd; but I haven't heard much talk of rebuilding from the rubble. Frankly, I miss the scientists (yes, of course, there are plenty who are still around, but we're painting in broad strokes here). Sure, they weren't the best historians in the world, and most of them weren't willing to follow the rest of us into some really interesting questions, but there are a lot of deep thinkers out there among their ranks. Here at the AIP, we are actually closer to them than to academic science studies. But much of the talk seems to be "heritage this" and "preservation that" (commensurate with the fact that the History Center is basically a co-entity with the fabulous Niels Bohr Library and Archives). Going back to square one, there's a reason why there was so much enthusiasm for the history of science after World War II, and it wasn't all about justifying public expenditure. I'll compact the way I see it into a pithy sentence: history makes us more aware of the assumptions underlying practices (whether in history or today).

I think we need to put more effort into putting out the kinds of studies that scientists actually find professionally interesting. Personally, I know Dave Kaiser's work on Feynman diagrams, which is read in the physics community, and also managed to receive the HSS Pfizer Prize. Hopefully if we do good enough work and practice good enough outreach, we might see some more interesting discussions about practice in the scientific communities as well. Then maybe the philosophers can come in from the cold, too. That's not really my field, though. I just don't want scientists to think of what I do as an antiquarian enterprise.

New Title

2008-03-17T11:54:00.004-04:00

OK, how about "Waves in the Ether"? It seems a little corny, but it is appropriate for both the history of science and its internet medium. "Ether Wave Propaganda" is also a contender, but I'm not sure the pun on "propagation" is apparent enough, and, even if it is apparent, whether it's not too cutesy to use a pun. Anyway, I'll put it up there on a trial basis to see how the aesthetics are.

Edit: You know what? I kind of like the propaganda title better. Let's see how that works.

Wave Three in the Sociological SEE

2008-03-17T08:45:00.012-04:00

By far the most interesting thing cropping up in my semi-annual journal review will not be featured in the History Center newsletter, because it is not directly concerned with physics. It is the recent Studies in History and Philosophy of Science dedicated to Harry Collins, Robert Evans, and Mike Gorman's attempt to create "Wave Three" in the sociology of science, which Collins calls Studies of Expertise and Experience (SEE) (originally outlined in a 2002 article by Collins and Evans in Social Studies of Science). To recap, Wave One is the "science is a special form of knowledge" associated with Merton et al.; Wave Two is the "no it isn't" SSK trend that I've been rambling about here as a central motivator of the case study literature found in the history journals.

Wave Three is designed to correct the obvious and longstanding shortcomings in Wave Two by focusing on the social dynamics of "expertise" rather than "truth-production"--that is, roughly, trying to explain not only how knowledge is validated by society, but the mechanisms by which it actually becomes useful. Before descending into the usual sociological hell of illustrative case examples, labyrinthine jargon, and funny diagrams (here, things like the "Periodic Table of Expertises"), the three of them come up with some useful ideas, particularly one about "interactional expertise", which they seem to view as a generalization of the Galisonian "trading zone".

Effectively, interactional expertise deals with knowledge exchange between groups who overlap, whose knowledge is relevant to each other's activities, but who are not part of the same expert community. It also puts knowledge in the framework of decision-making rather than knowledge-production, which has some interesting possibilities I could talk about later. (It also suggests they may simply be covering ground that Herbert Simon covered in A dministrative Behavior 60 years ago during the supposed heyday of Wave One).

I think the Wave Three'ers are a little hamstrung by their seeming unwillingness to discuss epistemology (a remnant of the old antagonisms with the philosophers?), but it still strikes me as salubrious given the historiographical trends produced by Wave Two. (Conveniently, it also meshes quite well with some ideas appearing in my dissertation and forthcoming book, but that's a topic for a time when the book is much nearer to the printing press!)

Edgerton's Justification Criterion

2008-03-14T09:55:00.005-04:00

David Edgerton has a new short article on including the history of chemistry in the history of twentieth century science and technology, which can be found here. It's pretty much in-line with Edgerton's usual arguments, but in light of the discussion I've been having with myself here, concerning justification criteria, I'd like to point out just how strange Edgerton's primary justification criterion is in our profession: economic importance. I recommend taking a look because it's a very quick, concise look at the way he views the history of science and technology.

Edgerton's criterion has a lot to do with his longstanding effort to show that a 20th century understanding of "science" cannot be separated from the fact that most scientists were involved in the production of technology (but he also claims that this isn't a new phenomenon). By concentrating on what we view as the crucial problems of "knowledge" we miss out on most of the history of science and its relationship to society. He would argue that we don't have historiographical gaps to fill--we have an entire cosmos of science that we haven't even made an effort to understand, because it doesn't accord to our accepted notions of what is historiographically significant in the history of sci/tech.

Edit: Edgerton sends me along the important caveat that his idea of justification can include many things beyond economic significance, and not just things that can be evaluated quantitatively. This is true, and you'll find arguments for cultural and political significance as well as economic significance in his work.

I've always been most impressed by his frequent arguments for economic significance, though, because so few scholars ever even think to address it.

Us vs. Them: a vacuous revolution?

2008-03-13T16:04:00.009-04:00

With the last lecture of History 174 before spring break behind me, it's time to attend to that semi-annual task here at the AIP: putting together a list of physics-related articles to appear in the past half year for the History Center newsletter. The opportunities for blog posts abound! Aside from the obvious questions about the current state of the history of physics (which I'll argue about another time), one thing that's popped out at me is a question I've been thinking about, and that is the fallout from the "science wars". Here's a crackpot theory: did the science wars serve to make science studies circle the wagons and start seeing the world in terms of a united "us" versus "them"?

Who are "they"? Well, anyone who commits grave historiographical errors, particularly scientist-writers. This occurs to me reading Matt Stanley's review of three recent Einstein books in the Winter 2008 issue of the recently-renamed Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (formerly "...in the Physical and Biological Sciences"). Einstein is an incessant font of pop history, which provides trained historians with many opportunities for valid criticism. Here, Stanley criticizes attributions of Einstein's revolutionary effect on science to Einstein's revolutionary attitude (among other sins, such as citing the AIP website!).

But, I wonder if this isn't like picking on the weak kid on the playground. Do we cut ourselves off from internal improvements by attacking outsiders? Is this the reason why we still think it constitutes good scholarship to give the lie to naive positions? Have the science wars morphed into a "1984"-style perpetual war against an unseen enemy? Will it continue until all the reductivist running dogs are eliminated once and for all? Shouldn't we just let the pop historians do their thing, while we do ours? I mean, it's not as though articles in HSNS are going to change pop historians' bad habits.

Matt's a great historian, and I don't think he does this, but it still seems to me that attacking weak foes in our professional past or on the outside of the profession will not sharpen our abilities as much as attacking the much stronger scholars within the profession.

This idea is basically the same notion I was working with when discussing the justification for the production of a continual steam of narrow case studies.

Still thinking about blog titles...

2008-03-12T12:40:00.003-04:00

I realize this blog has a lame title, but I've been waiting for a good title to find me. Preparing my lecture on natural history from Buffon to Darwin, I'm thinking about "Discourse on Style" after Buffon's discussion of the same name. Too obscure? Is it appropriate to what we're trying to do here? We'll see if it still seems like a good idea later on.

Online Debate for Fun

2008-03-11T13:23:00.004-04:00

In case you all are wondering what happened to Jenny: A) she's been in French archives, and we all know what that's like, and B) she's trying to organize an online debate featuring some of her Paris colleagues, probably in Google chat, concerning: "some topics in history - methodologies in history, the Enlightenment and philosophical inquiry, British vs. French schools of thought, etc." So, you know, petty details stuff! Stay tuned for details on date and time. Main points summarized here, but since it's online all are welcome to take part.

Enlightenment in 50 Mins. or Less!

2008-03-11T11:06:00.007-04:00

Going back to History 174, in my chemistry lecture, I basically just claimed that, despite efforts to incorporate chemistry within physical philosophy, the basic methodologies were never radically altered from the alchemical period up to (and really beyond) Dalton; new kinds of experiments were done, and new conceptual schemes emerged, but, in practice, the sort of "natural history" methodology of chemistry remained fairly constant. Special thanks to Jan Golinksi's "Chemistry" entry in the Cambridge History of Science Vol. 4.

But today was the Enlightenment. Since entire courses are dedicated to the Enlightenment, how does one cope? Well, first, you keep your eye on what all this has to do with the scientific enterprise rather than drift off into a summary of the Enlightenment. Thus, science is a template for the overthrow of authority and the building up of new knowledge. Pit stops at salon culture, the Encyclopedia, deism/atheism. Then, you address the new political economy as a quasi-Newtonian theorization based on the actions of individual actors: Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Rousseau, Smith (yes, it was that fast, basically project sumamries rather than discussions of individual philosophy). Then, you sum up with different governmental interpretations of Enlightenment thought: enlightened despotism, Jefferson's rationale for independence, Jefferson's and Hamilton's differing ideas about government, and the rationalized populism of the French Revolution/metric system (thanks Ken Alder)/Napoleonic code. Then you end up with some hand-waving about the role of rationality in governance, with a comparison of the sensibilities underlying Tinker v. Des Moines and the French ban on religious dress in schools as the cherry on top.

Presto! Thematic Enlightenment Pie. It's an old family recipe!

Mirowski's blog, plus new OK blog

2008-03-09T18:51:00.004-04:00

A quick Google search reveals Phil Mirowski is now posting excerpts from his forthcoming book, ScienceMart (with a Haraway-esque "TM" attached to it), online in blog format. Which is lame: in my utopia all blog posts are original off-the-cuff remarks. Still, we'll link to the Viridiana Jones Chronicles at left. Also, some folks at the University of Oklahoma are putting together a new online grad student journal in the history of science--this is also at left. Looks like 2008 is the year of the blog in history of science.

Why we should all read Phil Mirowski

2008-03-09T14:31:00.006-04:00

I don't want things to get too cynical here at the History of Science Blog, so today I want to talk about an author on my top 5 most exciting historians list, Philip Mirowski of Notre Dame (an arch cynic himself). Mirowski does history of economics, and also has a training in economics. Operations research, my speciality, is an area that Mirowski's done quite a bit of work in, so I've had some decent exposure to his work.

Nobody writes like Mirowski. He's not at all disciplined as a writer (to his detriment) and is extraordinarily sarcastic, especially toward historical actors. He has a strong agenda; namely to demonstrate how economics lost its epistemological soul, which means his work gives off strong whiffs of Whiggism (Steve Fuller points to him as an exemplar of "Tory" history). The place to start with him is unquestionably his compilation, The Effortless Economy of Science? which leads off with his autobiographical reflections, "Confessions of an Aging Enfant Terrible".

I pretty adamantly disagree with most of Mirowski's conclusions; I don't think he takes the epistemology of economic theory seriously on its own terms (we could get into this, but that would take a full-on essay; in short, he feels these terms were borrowed from other fields along with their analytical techniques). But this also reflects why I think Mirowski is so exciting--his arguments are ones that can be disagreed with. No "I write only to highlight a discourse"; no "science is not context-independent" here. His argument runs along the lines of: let me show you, step by arduous step, how the context of economics robbed it of a soul independent from physics and information theory. Stringing piece after piece of evidence together he puts together such a strong narrative that it bleeds into the genre of conspiracy theory.

Mirowski is also an author with an oeuvre--his work is much richer if you read it as part of an ongoing project. As one of only several authors in the history of economics to move beyond the march-of-theories paradigm of writing, he probably waves the sociology of science magic wand a little too strenuously, but he seems to see his primary battle as being with the philosophers of science (again, see Effortless Economy, especially his broadside on Kitcher), and I think the sociologists see themselves as an antidote to the idea that science has a coherent philosophy (he likes his Feyerabend).

As I've said, I tend to see the sociologists and philosophers as all of a kind, but unlike a lot of the sociology school, Mirowski functions incredibly well as an historian, too. To get books like More Heat Than Light, and Machine Dreams, close reading is rewarded. History is not merely window dressing on a basic Latourian sociological point. In the case of the latter book, you need to do a lot of brushing up on material behind his narrative to even have a chance of getting what's going on, because he makes no effort to explain his historical references. But history should hinge on the details, and if an author at least shows how you have to really understand the ins and outs of the history to see what's going on, that author has done their job. Nobody writing seriously on the history of OR or economic theory can afford to ignore Mirowski's narratives. I'll probably say more about the goals of his oeuvre at a later date.

Hobbit History: A Case Study

2008-03-07T11:20:00.010-05:00

Fair warning: long post.

Reading over C. S. Lewis' The Discarded Image, the following passage popped out at me about his opinion of the relationship between medieval literature and medieval conceptions about the historical-philosophical Model of the universe that they had. Seeking to explain "why the authors so gladly present knowledge which most of their audience must have possessed," he observes: "One gets the impression that medieval people, like Professor Tolkien's Hobbits, enjoyed books which told them what they already knew." He tries on a number of theories as to why this might be, but concludes: "The simplest explanation is, I believe, the true one. Poets and other artists depicted these things because their minds loved to dwell on them. Other ages have not had a Model so universally accepted as theirs, so imaginable, and so satisfying to the imagination."

I think we have a Historical Model about science and context that maybe we just kind of like to remind ourselves about again and again through case study. I will present the case for the prosecution against the 2006 HSS Distinguished Lecture, "The Leopard in the Garden: Life in Close Quarters at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle" by Richard Burkhardt of Urbana-Champaign, as appearing in the December Isis. The lecture is sort of a behind-the-scenes look at the history of the governance of the museum in the late-18th, early 19th century, especially under George Cuvier. I have nothing against the piece, as such. It's charming and well written. But I would also claim there's absolutely no reason to read it because we already know roughly what it says.

We get to the main claim to importance here: "From a somewhat more nuanced perspective [beware the word "nuance" because it will usually alert you to the presence of a nearby "naive position"], we might also think about the power the museum exercised over its scientists. Perhaps by the nature of its resources and practices, it disposed its scientists to think and act in certain ways but not others. Pursuing the phrase in a Foucauldian direction [novel claims are sure to come], we could consider how the museum's structures and practices served to discipline the French populace, ordering their behavior and fixing their place in the social order."

This last bit might be sort of interesting, if the significance of the museum could be demonstrated, but the "French populace" never actually appears, nor does the museum directors' assessment of their impact on the populace. We are largely left to infer the relationship between the museum and the French populace, by the actions of the museum directors and our innate (edit: "enlightened"?) understanding of museums as loci of knowledge/power. He seems to make the connection primarily in the museum's ability to control the specimens, but, as I say, the effects of this control in the minds of the populace is not dealt with.

Anyway, hijinks ensue for 18 pages until we get to the moral of our story: "In our daily lives, as well as in our historical researches, we are continually reminded of the ways in which the cultivation of scientific knowledge and its dissemination are tied to specific times, places, and interests." Say it with me, everyone: science is not context-independent.

Yes, it was a wild ride. Agendas were not only politically negotiated, they were also constrained by their material circumstance in ways pretty well consistent with our extant knowledge of the social relations of 19th century natural history. The acceptance of "progressive" scientific theories was resisted by those in positions of political power. Heck, the Hottentot Venus even dropped by for a visit, as much of an opportunity for bourgeois Europeans to project their notions of the exoticness of other races onto her body as ever.

I did learn that the Paris museum did not push Lamarckism, and that in the period of Darwin, it fell back on Lamarckism as a conservative position, so that adds a data point to my understanding of natural history presentation in that era--but that could have been demonstrated in a few sentences. Further, the historical significance of this data point is not clear.

Now, this is a distinguished lecture, which means that it is an opportunity to please an audience tired after a long day of hearing talks, and what better way than by presenting a pleasant story demonstrating unchallenging themes with which we ought to be familiar. So, the piece may say something about history of science audiences, but I would claim that it is actually quite representative of history of science writing regardless of audience, in that demonstration of the influence of social context on scientific knowledge is the key to receiving a polite response; nothing further is required; nothing further will receive particular reward.

Had I been in Vancouver, I'd have probably skipped out to get a beer with my colleagues. Tell me something surprising, and you've got my attention. Your honor, the prosecution rests.

Coming soon: Why Philip Mirowski is a mad genius; and Jenny and Will invite some folks over for a debate on French versus Anglophone analytical traditions (if I understand her proposal right). Also, I'd at some point like to take a look at Ronald Binzley's intriguing case for mid-20th century Catholic science in the same issue of Isis as Burkhardt's piece.

On the couch: etiquette

2008-03-06T12:29:00.004-05:00

In recent analysis, we often make a point of mentioning the emotional or moral qualities of the scientist--what about the emotional or moral qualities of the historian? As more red dots appear on my map, and as I pile on the posts, I start to feel a little nervous about these little grains of thought I'm sending out into the void at a ratio now of about 7 posts to one of Jenny's. I've received some nice encouraging feedback from people I know. But, still, as the only history of science blog that makes a point of talking regularly about what constitutes good and bad (or boring) work, I start to worry that I sound like an ass, and that I'll never get another job, etc. What is it that makes me so awesome that I can talk about what history should or should not look like?

The long and short of it is that I'm writing as though I were participating in a culture that I wished existed, as though everyone in science studies had their own blog, and traded ideas about what they liked and didn't like. What I have in mind when I blog is something like the culture of criticism that exists in film or music--not high-minded critical theory, but the hooks and jabs and freestyle speculation that take place at sites like The A. V. Club over topics about what it is we like and don't like in our pop culture. I've encountered this raucous atmosphere when I've visited certain places, like Imperial College in London, but I haven't found it much elsewhere. I have from time to time asked people to justify their work, but if you do that in the wrong crowd, it's like you've kicked their dog. I was once accused of being "uncollegial"--but what makes our little community different from any other community where people get up on a stage and present their creativity to the world? Isn't it healthy to ask what makes our work worth the price of admission? I want a culture of vigorous criticism because I love what I do, and because when I write, I try to emulate what I like out there (which is a lot), and to avoid what I don't.

Next: looking at a high profile target--the 2006 HSS Distinguished Lecture. Are we out to reform the world or to fulfill the needs of our audience?

Cambridge Histories

2008-03-05T16:20:00.004-05:00

I'd just like to say, as I prepare my lecture on alchemy/chemistry, that the Cambridge History of Science is invaluable, and I wish there were a way that the set could be made available cheaply so that historians could buy them. I see in Volume 4 that Craig Fraser's article on 18th century mathematics would have been helpful to me as well, had I had my head screwed on straight enough to pick the volume up before that lecture.

Justification for Case Histories

2008-03-05T09:08:00.006-05:00

I like to think that every time we sit down to write we have some implicit or explicit justification for what we are about to write. That there is some sort of economic reasoning as to why we choose to write about one topic rather than another. Now, in almost every single history of science seminar I've ever been to, more than 3/4 of HSS presentations, and almost every single article in our flagship journals deals with a narrowly focused case study on a topic of no obvious general interest. Aside from the fact that this style of history is an established tradition, what is the justification? Why is case history supposed to be so compelling? What are we supposed to get out of these presentations that connects up with our larger knowledge?

One argument is that it's Baconian empirical study. Eventually, we'll be able to make some bigger claim once we've been through enough microscopic study. I think empirical study of areas we know little about is tremendously important to the production of good, new scholarship. But, in terms of presentation style, this defies any efficient economy of writing--if you're going to present to a broad audience (in a department seminar or in a journal), why bother everyone with the petty details?

My more cynical theory is that these studies are self-justified because they address naive positions that for some reason we think need to be addressed, that is, there's a notion that because "people" think "science" proceeds independent of context or that it proceeds in a progressive fashion, it is therefore worthwhile to present a study showing how, to pick one of my favorite targets, some obscure 19th century natural history served the agenda of British imperialism. But, by "people" I think we mean Robert Merton or somebody nobody ever reads anymore, who supposedly represents some sort of default way that people think about science.

Is "everyone" supposed to have read Merton? Or did Merton (or maybe those pesky textbook history boxes) penetrate the "public" imagination in a way that newer science studies people have yet to do, but if we only present enough department seminars we are sure to?

I don't buy it. Nobody in the intended audience ever has any such notion of a context-independent or purely progressive science. So why undertake the study? To further reinforce what we already know about "how science works"? To make ourselves feel good by intellectually combating the evils produced by the alliance between science and 19th century imperialism (or the Cold War, or the evils of technocratic thinking, or whatever)? I can see how such things were refreshing given the state of the historiography 20-30 years ago, but why today?

I'm totally open to a good answer to this question. It's pretty rude to ask it in seminars, so hopefully this is a good forum. I'm not against the obscure case study in principle, but I think we ought to be explicit about why our case studies matter, and what they tell us that we don't already know. I'll leave a comment justifying one of my forthcoming case studies.

What I did with mathematics

2008-03-04T16:36:00.006-05:00

I want to come back to yesterday's post soon, because I have a few crackpot theories I'd like to share about the relationship between naive positions and the continued preponderance of arcane and disconnected case studies in the history of science, but, before the moment is past, I'd like first to come back to my problem with mathematics in the history of science.

Eventually, I did come across a pretty helpful book, Roger Hahn's recent biography of Pierre Simon Laplace, which did a very nice job of lucidly placing Laplace within his cultural, institutional, and intellectual context. What more could a historian ask? It leads me to suspect that there is actually a pretty decent French-language literature out there on this (Hahn's book was originally in French; maybe a post on what areas of the non-English literature need to be read is forthcoming?). I also have my curiosity piqued about a translated book by Johan Christiaan Boudri called What Was Mechanical About Mechanics? The Concept of Force Between Metaphysics and Mechanics from Newton to Lagrange, although I have no idea if it's any good.

Lamentably, my own approach largely centered on the old W. W. Rouse Ball model of presenting a series of biographies. But I spiced it up with quite a bit of exposition on the growth of methods of approximation, the development of theoretical aids to calculation (Euler's formula, the Euler-Lagrange equations, etc...), methods of data analysis, all with an eye toward representing physical phenomena in an acceptable mathematical model, which clearly departs from Cartesian/Leibnizian ideas about the justification of mathematics in direct mechanical explanation. Instead, the ability to predict and verify becomes the gold standard of what constitutes knowledge in physics.

More concretely, the development of analyses consistent with each other and with fundamental principles like Newton's laws becomes the heart of what it means to be a theoretical physicist in the 1700s and after. This shift was made possible through the analytical versatility of the growing mathematical toolkit to support the burden (say, of demonstrating the stability of the solar system), and an agreement to abandon the requirement of clear philosophical interpretation in mathematical formulation (how can you, when you're doing things like cutting off higher order terms of Taylor series?).

I really tried to drive home the centrality of an analytical toolkit to physics practice and self-identity; and also tried to give some sense of changing institutional venues; from isolated chairs at universities like Cambridge and Basel (the Bernoullis), to dedicated positions in scientific academies (Euler, d'Alembert, etc...), to the proliferation of posts in state-sponsored institutions (Ecole Militaire, Ecole Polytechnique), especially in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

I'm pretty sure it was boring and flew mostly over their heads, but I learned a lot trying to come up with a coherent story to tell about what happened to mathematics and physics in the 1700s.

Bowler and Morus/Naive Positions

2008-03-03T06:51:00.001-05:00

In History 174 we've now come to the end of Peter Dear's Revolutionizing the Sciences, a textbook which I like a great deal (and the students seemed to like it, too). For the rest of the course, the textbook is Peter Bowler and Iwan Rhys-Morus' Making Modern Science, which I generally like, but I have one major criticism that applies both to it, and to history of science writing in general, and that is its insistence on arguing against naive positions.

We're starting out with their chapter on "The Chemical Revolution", which they frame around the question of whether the chemical revolution was delayed by a century from the rest of the scientific revolution (and, of course, whether it was a revolution at all). They mount a sustained attack on the notion. This general strategy is employed throughout the book. Various historians, like Kuhn, are constantly making an appearance. I can't help but think that this is distracting to students. I would be willing to bet they have no a priori notions abut the "chemical revolution", so why burden the text by structuring it around a refutation of such notions? I believe the point of a textbook is to tell the best, most informative history we can, not to lay bare the neuroses of our profession induced in us by our battles with our forebears [edit; rereading Bowler and Morus this morning, this last clause is too extreme a description for what they clearly have intentionally deployed as an interesting framing device--but I think the statement is valid for why it might seem like a good idea to insert the "history of science profession" so prominently into a "history of science textbook"].

Really, the strategy isn't surprising, because it is, in general, a habit ingrained in our desire to elevate our own analyses by arguing against the naive positions of certain prior thinkers about science, or against the "science textbook presentation", or against "pop science", or against the notion that the progress of science is independent of its context, as if these represented a living and threatening school of historical thought. My historiography guru David Edgerton has publicly and privately criticized technology historians' habit of taking on straw men like the "linear model" (my students will read his piece against this straw man) and technological determinism. I tend to glorify mainline historians, but they, too, tend to rail against viewing developments as inevitable, and insist on looking at how events are "contingent". If we're going to improve our art, we need to avoid intellectual crutches like arguing against long-comatose naive positions.

Things That Do Stuff/New Blog Links

2008-03-02T13:45:00.000-05:00

Check out the commentary over at the Copenhagen Medical Museion blog that is critical of the recent "Things That Talk/Think/Act/etc..." trend in history of sci/tech/med writing. There are two posts, linked-to directly here and here. We are also now linking to their blog at the left, as well as the new University of Minnesota History of Science, Technology, and Medicine blog. Anything associated with my home state excites me, so this is great--hopefully they'll come up with some good stuff for the broader community, but pictures of broomball outings are always cool, too. Lamentably we never did anything like that at Harvard.

Beyond the Scientific Revolution

2008-02-29T15:41:00.000-05:00

In "Intro to the History of Science" (Jenny asked the name of my class--it's highly original!) I just did the Experimental Program (i.e. Leviathan and the Air Pump) lecture/Newton vs. Leibniz lecture, to show that the Royal Society's ideas about what constituted knowledge and how one goes about getting it were heavily contested. I've been feeding them the notion that although Newton, Boyle, and so forth had their philosophical defenders, increasingly, this program became so well accepted among a certain group of "natural philosophers", and among patrons (for whom the production of spectacle, and better technologies and techniques was a sufficient indication of knowledge) that philosophical defense was not necessary. From this point I want to steer this course toward trends in practice, rather than trends in philosophical ideas. (No Kant on my watch!--well, maybe a little, for old time's sake...)

So, where do we go next? Tuesday's lecture is on History of Mathematics in the 1700s into the early 1800s. Bernoulli! Euler! Lagrange! Laplace! Fourier! Poisson! This is sort of a masochistic move, since to the best of my knowledge there is no real precedent for fitting the history of mathematics into the history of science. (In my education, at least, the 1700s as a whole tended to get skipped over, except for maybe the Enlightenment, which is two weeks from now). Plus, the material is so technical, that I have to figure out some digestible things to say about it.

Those historians of mathematics are sort of a breed apart, aren't they? So, question of the day: how should the history of mathematics fit into the history of science as anything other than a series of discoveries. I'll be damned if I'm going to project an image of Brook Taylor, and say, "This is Brook Taylor. He invented the Taylor series" and then, God forbid, define the Taylor series mathematically. I have two strategies in mind. First, emphasize mathematics as a theory-generating tool (I'm thinking Dave Kaiser and Andy Warwick here), and, second, do something about the shifting occupations of mathematicians. So, looks like I need to know more about the pre-Revolutionary Ecole Militaire.

History and its Discontented

2008-02-25T04:50:00.000-05:00

Thanks Will for inviting me to this online forum. I am glad to provide some contrast and ahem, some color to this discussion on history, pedagogy, and what it means to be a young scholar working in academia in a slew of historically-related fields. I think it is great that there are more and more graduate students and scholars who are interested in pushing the boundaries of how we write, teach, and conceive of history either in the classroom, in a dissertation, or in an academic community as a whole.

Will and I actually first met in a history of physics class at MIT. I think I was the only non history of science person in that class (by history of science, I am also including a number of STS people as well). The class covered Cold War American physics and was a great exercise in seeing how historians of science pursued their topics, articulated their arguments, and focused on science as theories, experiments, institutional developments, and as visual practices and representations.

Regarding Will's earlier post, I find that philosophy and literary theory do tend to make themselves quite prominent in the field of architectural history, which is what I am currently pursuing. They also tend to find their ways into art history as well. I think Will's idea of philosophy and literature is still somewhat mixed together. One can find both transhistorical questions and the constructions of categories (subjectivity, bio-life, politics of the image, phenomenology of space) in both areas. Again, I am also using philosophy and literature here as somewhat generalized fields of study. Foucault as a philosopher employing history is one thing, and Stephen Greenblatt on history is something different altogether. For example, I think New Historicism is something that a lot of different graduate students study - those in comparative literature, art history, history, etc. Hayden White's work also attracts many types of readers. Another instance of this trans-disciplinary concept is the formation of the canon, a known set of universalized standards that are taught as being the exemplary works in a discipline, whether it be a Manet or a novel by Toni Morrison.

I am not sure if I quite like the term transhistorical - I think history operates both in the macro, long durée and in the micro moment. Trans implicates that one is breaching a temporal protocol in examining a historical event or phenomena. Examining "how disciplines develop" can also be an exercise in institutional history. How did biology develop as a classroom curriculum in 1950s America is also a story about how a discipline develops.

I just re-read Will's line about sociologists of science and putting them into this philosophical category of history...I'm sure that they too would have something against being put into this box. Anthropologists of science have their methods and uses of history as well. Most of them, however, rely mainly on ethnographic evidence and interviews for their work.

I do agree with Will on finding concrete facts and archival evidence to fill out these seemingly meta-narratives that rely on conceptual questions rather than the who, what, where, how and why of how something occurred. It is also tough to write an excellent history with an innovative intepretation of facts. The historiography that currently exists in the history of science is now filled with these books that are much more provocative in their historical interpretation and use of sources. I personally think that this combination of broader questions about concepts in the history of science coupled with good original research is where the field is headed next...

Philosophy, Literary Studies, and History

2008-02-23T10:46:00.001-05:00

Welcome Jenny! Also, welcome to all the people showing up on our map. Looks like we've got some interested readers from all over the place, even some international visitors. Excellent!

I just thought I'd say a few more words about what I mean about philosophy/literature vs. history; since these are probably some overly coarse categories. When I talk about philosophy, I mean the use of history to illustrate transhistorical questions (or at least long-term questions) of "how disciplines develop", "how experiments end", "how facts are constructed" and that sort of thing, so I'd throw the sociologists of science into this philosophy category as well (which I know can be like putting cats and dogs together in the same box, but, to an historian, they can appear to have similar uses for history). What I mean by literature, I tend to mean Foucauldian archeology type questions, like tracing "how objectivity is considered", "how the body is represented", "how the notion of space evolves". I see the categories as blending when narratives are constructed, say, about "how the social construction of facts differed in 17th century England versus in 19th century France as represented in the language of etiquette in scientific texts".

I'm not so interested in these questions. They're important, but, as someone coming straight from history, I want to know "what was Warren Weaver thinking when he wrote 'Comments on a General Theory of Air Combat' and how does that relate to his partnership to Claude Shannon?" or "What happened to physics in the twentieth century?" The philosophical/literary questions can have a lot of impact on these more directly historical kinds of questions--our historiography has become much more effective because of their development over the last 20-30 years--but to arrive at satisfactory answers, we also need more concrete narratives filled with specific events and individual motivations. That's the sort of history I like to write, and that I think is the most relevant to outsiders. I see the philosophy/literature angle as more of a means to an end than an end in and of itself. Others disagree.

Creative Disciplinary Tensions + New Contributor

2008-02-21T12:34:00.000-05:00

Awhile ago now I was discussing the need for historians with different intellectual agendas to make their agendas clearer in their writing, and how the history of science, as a small field, has an unusually dense number of agendas--pop history, philosophical/literary studies, advocacy, historical analysis, etc. I would tend to say that the bulk of the history of science most of us read focuses on iconic case studies, which has essentially nailed the field into a case study mode of writing. The tensions created by this mode usually pass without mention making it difficult for a coherent historiography to emerge. And part of the reason for this blog is to think about ways the historiography can start telling narratives again--whether in writing, or by designing classes (which dominates my time, and thus, blog posts these days).

However, I've found,that whenever I've amicably clashed with historians with different styles and agendas, the result has usually been fruitful. I mentioned yesterday that my TA has this sort of philosophical/literary streak. He can go on for ages about the role of shipwreck in science-related literature, and I think he's been peppering my students with Augustine even now that we're into the 1600s. But he's a great TA, and gives the student a very different view of things. Similarly, I have a pair of papers under review that I wrote with Lambert Williams, who is definitely concerned with philosophy-related issues--"how disciplines develop" and that sort of thing. He has a conference coming up this spring that will include philosophers and art historians and the like on the decoherence of disciplines. I've always enjoyed working with him.

But, this enjoyment inevitably results from the clash--you just can't be exposed to the ideas; there has to be a tension, where you feel that your point of view is actually better than theirs, which is an attitude that is usually frowned upon in my experience in academia. But I find if you trust the person enough to remain friendly with you after all is said and done, you really gain from the experience.

It's in this spirit that I eagerly await the arrival of our new poster, Jenny Ferng, a grad student at MIT currently residing in Paris, whom I know from my time in grad school. She melds the studies of architecture and science, and definitely fits in the philosophy/literature mold. I don't think our object is to butt heads here, exactly, but hopefully we'll get some fun contrast when we both talk (more or less) about the subject of how to write better history, which is what this blog's all about.

More on the Scientific Revolution

2008-02-20T09:34:00.000-05:00

Again, the folks at the Advances in the History of Psychology blog have a discussion going that pertains to what we have here. In this case, it's about Copernicus and his relationship to the scientific revolution, and thus the creation of science. It's centered on a pop history claim that “a scientific psychology rests on the assumptions generated by the Copernican revolution,” namely, the “promoting [of] objectivity in the study of human affairs.” Obviously, the idea that Copernicus had much to do with the use of "objectivity" in the study of "human affairs" (astronomy??) is daft. Still, worth taking a look at.

Actually, this also pertains to the intellectual tensions between me, the consummate historian, and my TA, who is much more into philosophy. We figured out last week that we can use our disagreements about what needs to be emphasized (ideas vs. institutions, etc.) to enliven discussion sections. Apparently the students were amazed that the two of us had vehement and legitimate disagreements about class material. (We actually figured out how to use this tension to our advantage while discussing [i.e. arguing bitterly about] what he was talking about in section re: Copernicus!) More soon!

Continuity and Discontinuity in class

2008-02-19T13:03:00.001-05:00

Sorry for the delay in posting--we just had the history of early modern medicine class today. At Harvard the history of medicine and history of science are sort of two separate worlds in the same department, so I had to do a lot of research to figure out what I was going to say today. Anyway, I enjoyed putting the lecture together and the students seemed to like it, too. In a nutshell, it was about the shift from the medical tradition corresponding to Galenic theory to anatomical-mechanistic views of medicine. The students are asking good questions--one student actually asked about a point I thought about including in the lecture but didn't (if disease was seen as personal, what did they make of obvious contagions like plague?--Thank you Cambridge History of Medicine for preparing me for that one!); and, in response to my end of lecture homily about Robert Hooke's self-experimentation with physic, another asked about the continuities with the Galenic tradition. I promised a blog post on it, and I think it's worth reposting in full here, even though, again, it's long and all pretty standard for the professionals.

Reposted from the History 174 class blog:

I want to take a look at a larger "historiographical" issue present in the last lecture on mapmaking and navigation and today's lecture on medicine. By "historiography" I mean the art of writing history. One really big issue in historiography is whether to emphasize continuity or discontunity--is history (particularly the history of ideas) populated by gradual transitions from one way of thinking to another, or is it marked by sudden breaks? There is a traditional notion that in the 1600s we have what we call the "scientific revolution"--a sudden break with past philosophy and superstition marked by a turn toward experimental method and new theories. Some scholars have argued that the "scientific revolution" didn't exist for various reasons. Some wish to emphasize the persistence of older methods and ways of thinking (the fact that Newton was into alchemy tends to get trotted out here). Feminist scholars point out that for women the scientific revolution might not only not have been a significant event, but may have been harmful (the turn from midwifery to authorized medicine, for example; or the growth of the prestige of science as validating a secondary position for women in society through theories in the social sciences, etc.)

I think it's pretty clear that for practical historical purposes the scientific revolution existed, primarily because it was a self-conscious event. A socially significant group of people started turning to icons like Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes, and held them up as heading toward a new way of understanding the world, and, "inspired, they went out and performed wondrous deeds" (anyone ever seen 24 Hour Party People?--great movie; that's a reference to the film's narrator's description of the musical reaction to the Sex Pistols' first Manchester concert). Anyway, the participants in the scientific revolution saw themselves as revolutionary; and, as we will see with the French Enlightenment of the 1700s, the idea that modern science represented a clean break with the past had political implications.

Yet, I want to be sure and emphasize the continuities as well. Where Ptolemy's Almagest was overturned by Copernicus and Kepler, his Geography set the pace for all later geography. There would be massive refinement of technique, but no sudden breaks in principles. Similarly, the turn from the Galenic theory of medicine to a mechanistic, anatomical model did not represent a clean break. Robert Hooke's self-experimentation with physic and his careful recording of the results was clearly representative of the new experimental tradition, but the idea of promoting therapeutic flows of sweat, vomit, etc. through physic (and diet, environment, etc.) was still well-entrenched. Similarly, the example of Vesalius' representing the vagina as an inverted penis in accordance with Galenic doctrine also shows how important entrenched ideas were in interpreting actual observations, such as those obtained through dissection. You see what you are trained to see (Descartes made the key philosophical critique of sensory knowledge, not that that necessarily made observation any more independent of ideas).

I chose this last example, incidentally, because it's also a staple of feminist history of science, which I'm not integrating into the course as much as I might. You can find the argument in either Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex on the production of ideas about sex vs. gender, or in Londa Schiebinger's (superior) The Mind Has No Sex? My go-to source for this lecture is the Cambridge History of Medicine edited by eminence gris historian Roy Porter, but Lisa Jardine's wonderfully insightful Ingenious Pursuits on the scientific culture of the latter half of the 1600s also played a big role (as it did in the previous lecture).

On the idea of scientific revolution, by the way, the classic reference is Thomas Kuhn's 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which gives us the term "paradigm shift" which is applied to the alteration of entrenched interpretations of observation (e.g., the shift from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican world view). He claimed that science proceeds along a "normal" course until its underlying ideas are totally overturned. It has more to do with ideas and less to do with the establishment of new institutional programs (which I tend to emphasize). It is still influential among novice historians (and Al Gore), although most professionals have acknowledged its insights and moved on.

Free Books?

2008-02-13T09:21:00.001-05:00

One thing's that's amazed me in the academic world is the ability to get free books. When I used to be a TA, I got free copies of the books used in the course. Then, a book review opportunity came my way, and I got a free copy of Hunter Crowther-Heyck's biography of Herbert Simon (a nicely done book--I'd like to talk about it when I come back around to 20th century historiography). Then, lo and behold, yesterday a textbook mysteriously appears in my campus mailbox, Frederick Gregory's Natural Science in Western History. Apparently publishers send professors books that they might consider assigning in their classes. For some reason, all this publisher largess still really strikes me as weird. (Being so recently out of grad school, where you generally have to pay for everything yourself, I'm pretty naive about the business world, and the extent to which people find it profitable to cover the expenses of others, and to give them free things of greater value than a keychain).

Anyway, this adds to the list of available textbooks one might use in a history of science course. I haven't had a chance to look it over in detail, but it appears pretty comprehensive and has a sophisticated view of most things you'd want to talk about, though this diminishes as time passes. For instance, it's clear we still can't tell coherent narratives about 20th century science--this textbook (and the historiography in general) seems to imply that more than half of it had to do with atomic bombs.

But I don't think I'd use this text, mainly because it looks like a science textbook or a high school history textbook, with sections only a few paragraphs in length, and some illustrations of experiments that look like they were done with Microsoft Paint. The reason I like Dear is because it's a textbook that doesn't feel like a textbook. It follows more in the vain of the better history overviews, like the aforementioned history of Ireland by R. F. Foster. And, according to my TA, the students are now showing that they're entirely capable of handling the material in the more scholarly format it's being presented in.

Ingenious Pursuits

2008-02-11T08:43:00.000-05:00

I'm preparing my lecture on "Navigation and Exploration" for Thursday, and it's turned out to be a much more coherent topic in the history of science than I'd initially anticipated. Right now I think I'm going to do a two part lecture, 1) the 1500s; and 2) the latter half of the 1600s. Part I deals with the rise of cartography and the use of latitude and longitude, the importance of Ptolemy's Geography (which I didn't previously realize), and the close connection with astronomy in the field of "cosmography" (which I also didn't previously realize is important). I'm using John Rennie Short's 2004 book, Making Space: Revisioning the World, 1475-1600, which covers most of what you'd like to know, although it's a bit short on the technical details and is more of a tour of different kinds of maps and atlases. Still, it's useful.

For Part II, I'm talking about the competition for precision; so clocks, detailed observatory studies and the like. I'm using Lisa Jardine's Ingenious Pursuits. Ken Alder assigned this book for my undergrad Intro to the History of Science course. I'm not assigning it, because I think the more you take into the book, the better it is, and my students are not taking much into the course. I remember not getting much out of it at the time. Now, however, I find it very interesting from a historiographical point of view. Basically, as a tour of a scientific culture, I really, really like this book. It very nicely shows how practical problems and theoretical concerns were totally intertwined in Royal Society culture. But the book is totally unstructured, and hard to follow unless you pay close attention and have some familiarity with the structure of 17th century society. But, just within the first several pages, you can see how the work of the Ordnance Office, the foundation of the Royal Observatory, and the writing of Newton's Principia are all very closely related. By weaving these things so tightly together, it helps the reader get into the heads of the participants, and, if you pay attention, how they each had different concerns--the scholarly astronomer Flamsteed versus the worldly astronomer Halley for instance.

You sort of get the same picture out of a book like Smith and Wise's Energy and Empire, on William Thompson, who is an equally multidimensional figure as the early Royal Society fellows. But that book tends to segregate its characters' intertwined concerns, even as it emphasizes the importance of that intertwining. As a means of historiographical presentation, the differences of approach are worth thinking about.

Copernicus? Copernicus!

2008-02-09T10:20:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure how useful or interesting it is to repost the lecture recaps here in full. Presumably if you're at all interested in this blog, you'll know the general details, so unless otherwise worthwhile, I'll go back to saying a few words about the lectures. Thursday's lecture was on astronomy; it went fast, but I think I gave some more information about what lecture was about upfront, and did some more repeating of concepts (it's easy to forget that even the most elementary stuff is totally new to this crowd). So, we're getting there as far as lecture style goes. The title of this post reflects my view that there should be a musical about Copernicus--imagine his name being sung, first as a question, and then as triumphant affirmation and you'll get the picture (or maybe not). Moving on...

I subtitled my astronomy lecture "From the Copernican Revolution to the Telescopic Revolution"; I've never seen the topic framed in just this way, but the themes will be familiar to a history of science crowd. Basically, it addresses the question, if Copernicus' placement of the sun at the center of the universe was so revolutionary, why did it take 120 years for what we call the "scientific revolution" to really cohere? So, moving between two technical revolutions, I show why the latter revolution seemed to really fulfill the promise of what the former might have implied, and use the intervening period (particularly Tycho Brahe) to illustrate the movement of astronomy from a technical field to one that had something to say something about the universe and how we can come to know about it.

I try and show how Copernicus was cagey about the status of his claim. He believes in the reality of his sun-centered universe, but he's still an astronomer. He probably doesn't believe in the reality of his epicycles and epicyclets, but uses them to save the phenomenon as any good astronomer would. And he's nervous about stirring up the philosophical waters. He uses quasi-philosophical arguments to defend his moving earth (De Revolutionibus, Book 1, Ch. 8), but insists in the dedication to the pope "astronomy is written for astronomers". 70 years later Kepler, and especially Galileo were after bigger fish, and Galileo paid the price for that--but astronomy was already on a path it could not easily turn its back on. Nothing new here, obviously, but that's how I'm presenting it to the class--90 years of astronomy history in one big gulp. We must, after all, move on to the self-perceived revolutionaries (my "Galileo, Bacon, Descartes" lecture), and the technical evolution of navigation and mapmaking, this coming week.

Finally, I've been at this blog for over a month now and am still having fun, so I'm trying to arm twist a few friends into joining in. Once I figure out what contributors I can get, I'll probably try and publicize it a little more, and maybe get a decent blog title thought up.

History of Science course Cliff's Notes

2008-02-07T16:38:00.000-05:00

I think my students are getting a little blown away this early in the semester with what I have to admit is some fairly heavy stuff. We had our first sections Tuesday, and my TA showed me "one of the better" quizzes. "But Christopher," I said, "this person didn't get anything right!" At least they filled in the blanks. Now, mind you, I'm telling my students exactly what will be on the quiz. If the topic isn't on my nifty Powerpoint lecture slides or mentioned three times in the textbook (and we haven't gotten to the first textbook, Peter Dear, yet), it won't be on the quiz--and these slides are made available on the course website. Nevertheless, I'm told, the students looked at my TA "as though he had two heads" when handed the quiz.

Anyway, I'm convinced that once it sinks in that the class isn't going to be "nifty background for science majors" they'll be up to the task. But I'm also giving them online Cliff's notes to help them through the material. I thought I'd repost these here as well as my background posts, just to demonstrate what I'm up to in a bit more detail. As a warning, these will be sort of on the long side.

Reposted from the History 174 Blog

Today's lecture blew by quicker than I thought, and with a topic as vague as medieval literary culture, a number of you seem to feel that a little more road map might have been nice. I'll go over a few main points here, but my first point is not to worry too much. We're still in background material, and so if you just come away with some impressions of what the medieval book culture looked like, that should be OK to get along with. But, here's a quick recap:

1) There are a lot of different kinds of medieval books that were not well distinguished from each other: books of hours (devotional instruction manuals) blended into hagiographies (saints' lives), which blended into history and bestiaries (for example, a bestiary might discuss St. George's encounter with the dragon), which blended into "books of secrets" (such as The Secret of Secrets, which was supposed to be a letter from Aristotle to Alexander the Great), which were supposed to reveal hidden, occult knowledge about the way the world worked, but might also have practical advice on statecraft.

2) Books were not "books" as we know them. Except for the Bible, they were copied and rearranged, quoted and reproduced in whole or in part without attribution--and different copies of the same book might contain different material. Sometimes authors impersonated other wiser authors, so some books were supposed to be by "Aristotle" but we now know that they were written by someone we can only call "pseudo-Aristotle"

3) Books, except in matters of religion, were not supposed to tell you anything practical. The most important medieval "truths" were spiritual ones, so oftentimes their contents were supposed to offer a moral or be interpreted symbollically. In some cases, they were simply meant for entertainment, to provoke "wonder" in the minds of the readers (more on this later). Books were not intended to be scrutinized for whether or not they were "true" (as we would interpet the term), and so blended fact and fiction indiscriminately.

4) It was widely believed that the Ancients (and Biblical figures) knew everything important and wrote it down, but that that knowledge was lost as books were lost and text was corrupted (say, by a careless scribe). The key point is this: knowledge (including the allegorical kind) was supposed to be directly tied to the words the Ancients had written down--not an unusual thought for a culture where the Bible was considered the ultimate authority. Scholarship mostly involved preserving and reassembling this Ancient knowledge, not creating new knowledge.

5) Not all literary traditions followed this trend. Some authors wrote from personal experience. Gottfried of Franconia's book on trees and wine mixed literary sources with his own reports indiscriminately. Theophilus, in his book "On the Various Arts" spoke entirely from his own experience. Frederick II (Holy Roman Emperor), in his book on falconry, openly scorned the literary tradition that valued text over experience. But, for the most part, knowledge gained from practical experience was passed on orally (say, within a guild)--it was not tied to book culture.

6) Ultimately, the medieval literary culture did not fade away but coexisted with a new experienced-based literature. We can see this in travel narratives. William of Rubruck aimed to report back to Louis IX as accurately as he could what he found out in the east. Marco Polo's narrative (actually written down by someone experienced in writing chivalric romances), on the other hand, sought to please and entertain as well as inform his audiences. Marco Polo's description of exotic wonders created a large audience for John de Mandeville's Travels, which were totally untrue and replicated the earlier conventions of the bestiary and the hagiography.

[Plus some general tips on using sections to their advantage, etc.]

Medieval Book Culture

2008-02-05T12:57:00.000-05:00

Reposted from the History 174 class blog:

Here I'd like to address the background question of what all this has to do with science. I got today's lecture largely from Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park's book, published in 1998, called Wonder and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. This is a really clever book, and demonstrates just what we have to gain from abandoning whig notions of history. Rather than try and reach back into the soup of books that come to us out of the middle ages and either brush it off entirely, or to try and pick out things that look like science, Daston and Park take all of these books as part of a unified intellectual culture. Literate people used to read devotional texts, bestiaries, and travel narratives all together, and they assembled knowledge indiscriminately from them--they didn't relegate knowledge about the natural world to one defined set of books and read another set for entertainment. They all participated in a "model" of the universe, to use Lewis' term, that informed and was informed by poetry, hagiography, philosophy, etc... Daston and Park choose to trace changes in this bookish culture not by trying to pick "science" out of it, but by tracking changing attitudes toward "wonder"--was it something that created a simple admiration for God's creation? was it something that suggested the need for a preternatural or supernatural explanation? or was it something that was supposed to be expunged through rational explanation (as, they argue, happened with the rise of science).

Next lecture we'll talk about astronomy, which was an extremely technical profession, but we have to understand that "natural philosophy" as it began to cohere in the 1600s, encompassed all kinds of non-technical subjects like natural history and geography as well as astronomy, and we have to understand where interest in those subjects came from. The answer is medieval book culture.

(For the super-interested, also check out William Eamon's Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture)

Isis

2008-02-04T15:58:00.000-05:00

So, the new Isis (December '07) just found its way to my desk. It contains an article on 19th century natural history, and an article linking science and empire (although American, not British here). I always get the profoundest sense of deja vu whenever one of these suckers arrives for some odd reason.

More off the beaten track is an article on the teaching of science within the mid-twentieth century American Catholic context, but, I have to confess, I'm not exactly dropping everything else in my rush to read it.

Historians and Wikipedia

2008-02-01T13:48:00.000-05:00

Take a look at an entry on our neighboring Advances in the History of Psychology blog. It has to do with a dispute over whether an article on the history of psychology over at Wikipedia should feature a large section on medieval Arabic psychology. Clearly discussing medieval Arabic "psychology" (especially in the terms used by the writer) commits various presentist sins in the name of drawing attention to non-Western scholarship in history. The post deftly raises questions about how well professional historians and enthusiasts--whose "historiography from below" (to use David Edgerton's term) is valuable, but frequently analytically problematic--can get along in close quarters. It also sort of brings up the point earlier made here about the historiographical issues involved when historians of different agendas cross paths. Interestingly, when I referred to activist historians, I was thinking academically, but the post very clearly shows where the popular and activist history trends can come together.

Ancient and Medieval Philosophy

2008-01-31T12:43:00.001-05:00

Cross-posted from my class blog for History 174 at UMD:

We went pretty quickly through lecture today. It's sort of a bind--because in order to understand the context of science, as it starts to happen in the 1500s and 1600s, you really have to set up this philosophical background. Philosophy/Theology was the most important knowledge in that time period, and for people who studied natural philosophy using new methods (such as quantitative measurement, which, you'll recall, was only an accidental quality in the main tradition), the primacy of these Platonic and Aristotelian philosophical traditions was something they 1) could draw inspiration from, but 2) had to contend with as something that was always going to overshadow whatever claims they made.

So, we cover it quickly as necessary background, which means your responsibility is to pick out the most basic issues, and to make sure you use section to come to a proper understanding of them. Why are things we consider important, like quantitative measurement, considered merely accidental? But, also understand why it made sense not to worry about them--because, in a world where things were thought to tend to happen, but did not necessarily have to happen, being precise wasn't such a big deal, because the formal qualities of something were what explained their tendencies. It's certainly confusing, so make good use of section.

Check out the online lecture notes from a full course on Ancient philosophy at the University of Washington: http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/320Lecture.html

I used these notes to help me prepare my lecture--they're pretty detailed, and might help you make sense of the concepts. On the Medieval period, I can recommend for basic explanation as well as extracts from Christian, Islamic and Jewish traditions, Philosophy in the Middle Ages, by Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh, which was the textbook used in a course I took on this topic (don't ask me why) my freshman year as an undergrad. I relied on it heavily to make sure I wasn't saying anything patently false about this profoundly esoteric topic.

Hope you're having fun. It won't all be this intense!

Roots of Modern Science

2008-01-28T11:15:00.000-05:00

The first lecture in my history of science course is tomorrow. There's not a lot to say about it--it's a pretty standard intro lecture--except that I'm going to be introducing some terms at the outset to try and smooth the academic concept shock as we go along. So, students will be getting working definitions of: whig history, epistemology, ontology, teleology, and reification. Not being a big student of the philosophy of science, myself, (with the exception of whig history) I've never had these formally explained to me: I picked them up one by one, once I decided that I really, really needed to have a solid definition in my head. So, I think it will be useful to lay them out at the outset. But we won't be hitting up the philosophical pedigree of each; I'll just be giving some idea of what we're talking about when we bandy these terms about as if they were the most obvious things in the world.

Now, the Thursday lecture is going to be on the philosophical roots of modern science. For a specialist in 20th century science, this is pretty far removed from what I ordinarily do. My big saving grace here was my seemingly unjustifiable decision as an undergrad to take the first two of three History of Philosophy courses offered in Northwestern's philosophy department--Seeskin and McCumber, this post's for you! At absolutely no point did I ever think that my freshman year course on philosophy in the middle ages (a profoundly weird topic) would prove useful later on. And yet, here I am dusting off my old Presocratic Reader, and my knowledge of Augustine and the Scholastics, and my other textbooks, conjoining them with other things I've picked up by osmosis in grad school, to put together a workable overview of the key conceptual traditions.

Conceptual traditions is key--I'm going to start out with a little discussion of the Pythagoreans and the Atomists and a few others to say that some of what they say is recognizable to us as resembling what we believe about the universe and how to investigate it, but then point out that they don't really represent a consistent tradition that we can follow through to modern science. It's really Plato and Aristotle that represent the crucial traditions that we can follow through bifurcated Middle Ages manifestations (Neoplatonism by way of Augustine; and the Arabic preservation of Aristotle). Later natural philosophers might pick up and read some of the other schools and identify their own ideas with them, but I think it would be too much to say that they were selecting one tradition over another as though off a menu. Their primary aim would be trying to give an intellectual framework to practical knowledge--this would be a reaction to the literary tradition of the Middle Ages extending beyond philosophy, and its failure to distinguish credible from not credible knowledge. We deal with that tradition next week.

That's a rough overview--this blog is a thinking space, not an official source of course information.

More on yesterday's Grand Narrative

2008-01-25T08:53:00.000-05:00

I've been wondering since yesterday if I was being ridiculous in claiming that the 20th century represented a return to a medieval model intertwining natural knowledge with mainstream thought. If this argument were to have any legs at all, I would have to say that there would have to be two turning points. First, science would have to turn away from mainstream philosophy. I think you could argue that the 17th century turn to mechanism represented such a point--natural philosophy turned toward an instrumental sort of knowledge (I think this is borrowing off of Peter Dear). I think you could then argue that it takes until the 2oth century for instrumental knowledge to really enter the mainstream of economic and political life, although this probably happens earlier in England, and, to a lesser extent, Germany and France.

Anyway, I doubt this line of thought is really worth pursuing, but that's what blogs are for.

How to begin...

2008-01-24T08:57:00.000-05:00

Starting in with discussion about the upcoming course, I guess I'll just say a few words about the course structure. As an "Introduction to the History of Science" I'm trying not to make things too fancy. I'm not going to muddy up the plot-line too much. This will be, unabashedly, the history of what we understand to be the modern scientific enterprise--not the history of knowledge about the natural world. Thus it's largely a European story (with some detours into the Arabic-speaking world early on, of course) until the 20th century. Because, if we were to take some kind of weighted average, the most "science" does take place in the 20th century, I'm also trying to expand coverage of more recent events to try and address just how radically the character of science has changed in the last century--not just the well-known advent of "big science" but also diversification in the topics of scientific inquiry; diversification in methodology, and, above all, the full-scale integration of science into the fabric of society.

In some ways this integration (which, I would say, we can trace to the relationship between university science education and industrial R&D) represents a return to the way the medievals looked at the world; wherein knowledge of the natural was not well separated from theology, politics, history, and poetry--the most important topics of that period. I'm going to be using C. S. Lewis' The Discarded Image to make this point about the medievals. This book is, as I understand it, a favorite of Katy Park at Harvard, and is now being used in their new year-long survey course. And it is a very nice way of jumping into the medieval mindset from which modern science emerges.

So, what I'm doing, after the introductory lecture is to give two lectures. The first will be on the classical philosophical issues. This will sort of give the high intellectual road to science, which comes via Arabic preservations of full classical texts--also pertinent are early Christian and Scholastic high philosophy. The second lecture will be on the "Medieval Model" as Lewis calls it. This is more of the broad "on-the-street" intellectual content of the early modern period, of which the early scientific sorts would also have been keenly aware. Subsequent lectures will focus on the clear craft influences on intellectuals in the early modern period.

Cumulative History

2008-01-22T08:58:00.000-05:00

It's now a week until my course at the University of Maryland, so increasingly this blog will be turning toward that. I'll let my students know about it, and they can come here to look at some of the background ideas and sources behind lectures, if they like. It also makes it seem like a good time to talk about cumulative history. As I was saying earlier, the history of science does not tend to reflect historical methodology. Hence there are few textbooks. For our course, I'll be using Peter Dear's Revolutionizing the Sciences (which Ken Alder used when I took my first history of science course as an undergraduate at Northwestern), and Peter Bowler and Iwan Rhys-Morus' Making Modern Science (which my AIP predecessor, Babak Ashrafi, used when he taught the same course). These are pretty good books--probably the best available for these purposes.

I'm really looking forward to teaching a "Plato to NATO" course, actually, because it gives me a chance to go back and try and assemble a coherent narrative about science. I think we need to write more long histories. When I was writing my dissertation, I was reading R. F. Foster's Modern Ireland, 1600-1972, which I thought was a fantastic example of what such histories should look like, and was stylistically inspiring. Foster clearly incorporated historiographical insights into what his book included and how it included them.

If I were to make a sort of coarse observation about the history of science profession, it's that there's sort of a nervous hesitancy to paint broad pictures. One of my colleagues has noticed that we focus on the micro-level apparatus and observation, rather than on the level of the department, the university, the discipline/profession, or the nation. I can't really say why this narrow focus exists, but I get a feeling it has to do with a reluctance to get criticized for oversimplifying historical developments--there are always more wrinkles that just have to be included, otherwise we might as well not undertake the venture of cutting a broad swathe through science; or maybe it's that we feel we can't say anything coherent about broad trends at all. But I'm of the opinion it's better to write and rewrite histories rather than wait for a day when we're confident enough to make broad statements. Following science, we should have more textbooks, certainly, but we should also have more review articles.

Anyway, busy day ahead, so I'll cut this off fairly abruptly here.

Inverted Whiggism

2008-01-17T09:10:00.000-05:00

I guess I'd better fess up at this point and admit to a strong David Edgerton influence, before it becomes too obvious from repeated reference. David seems to be mostly known for challenging "declinist" views of 20th century British history, and for his more recent insistence, in his new book Shock of the Old, that historians of technology need to look at technology in history as much as, if not more than, the historical ramifications (or the process of establishment) of new technologies. What I think is less well appreciated is David's perspective on the art of historiography that informs his better-known views.

Today I'd like to talk about David's concept of "inverted Whiggism". Any historian worth their salt tries to avoid Whiggism, in which they read history as a process leading up to later (or present) developments. What David claims is that many critical histories, which vigorously challenge optimistic narratives, repeat contemporary critiques. These unchallenged critiques are then, themselves, repeated by subsequent historians to the extent that they become historiographical clichés that become accepted as representative of the actual historical situation.

David usually works within the British case where the idea has persisted that institutional leaders and administrators, schooled in the humanities, did not take science seriously (C. P. Snow's "two cultures" argument is key to this tradition), and so did not harness science and technology properly (this was at least related to the view of Bernal and those influenced by him--see Monday's post). To back up these claims, historical actors and, in turn, historians unfurl a tremendous pile of examples of resultant failure, to the extent that it became difficult to evaluate the place of science in British society based on academic science commentary and history of science literature (though "historiography from below"--to be discussed later--often tells a different tale).

Intriguingly, compare David's disdain for "inverted Whiggism" with Steve Fuller's call for "Tory" history (see the link to his book on Kuhn in Monday's post), which essentially calls for more critique of past science. Fuller claims that because Kuhn's influential paradigm-oriented view of science validates all past science as simply operating within a different paradigm, it is therefore often given a pass from rigorous critique (I'm not at all sure about how on earth he came to see this as an historiographical trend, but it clearly has something to do with a "Cold War" insistence that military-funded science was OK! See how it all fits together?).

Anyway, Edgerton's "inverted Whiggism" seems to be close to what Fuller means by "Tory" history, but Fuller wants more, and Edgerton wants less. Fuller wants history to be an activist exercise; Edgerton, I think, would say that we can partake in better activism if we actually try and understand the past in a more rigorous way (Shock of the Old, for instance, makes a point of showing that technology in poor countries is too often ignored because it is not new). In the end, I find Edgerton's perspective more constructive.

What happens when historians stop being polite...

2008-01-14T08:47:00.001-05:00

...and start getting REAL! It's a nice question, and a theoretical one, since historians of science, at least, tend to be a very polite lot who rarely question one another's approach. Instead, we throw around words like "fascinating" and "suggestive", and then go do our own thing. This is the great thing about the history of science, in that it's a sort of meeting ground for a lot of different fields, and it's very easy to choose what group you want to engage with. So it's also sort of like a high school lunchroom (or MTV's The Real World), I guess. Of course, the history of science isn't a huge field to begin with, so further fracturing can make your intellectual circle very small indeed, and that bothers me.

The reason for this situation seems to be, go figure, deeply embedded in the history of the field (the quirks of which are well explored in John Zammito's A Nice Derangement of Epistemes, which should really be required reading for science studies grad students). I was a history major as an undergrad, and so I basically expected the history of science to be similar. False presumption. The history of science is a field stemming from the philosophy and sociology of science, and has not typically reflected a traditional historical methodology. History, rather, has been a tool that has been used to get at the nature of science--which is a line of thought stemming from the work of the Vienna Circle and other positivists (see Zammito).

Now, motivations for getting at the nature of science have been varied. The British history of science school back in the '60s was heavily influenced by Marxist thought filtered through the communist crystallographer J. D. Bernal, and his circle. They saw the progress of science as inevitably tied to social priorities, and wanted to reform scientific institutions to suit their Marxist agenda. Followers of this school were appalled by the rise of the Edinburgh School and SSK, which sought a more detached perspective on how science is done, without the political concerns of the Marxists. However, fresher generations of critical theorists saw tight links between the "social constructionism" preached by the SSK'ers and the critiques of French theorists like Foucault. They used the history of science to demonstrate how science as a font of legitimizing authority reinforced dominant social notions. (This clearly links to my earlier point about the Cold War historiography, and I would be remiss at least not to mention Paul Edwards' The Closed World at some point--we can talk about that later, though).

Learning about this history has made it much easier for me to understand the books that I am reading, and reinforces why it is so important to go back to the originals to see what they have to say--because their point of view is usually a lot more nuanced than they are in the straw man form given to them by later critics. I always feel bad for Tom Kuhn, because the guy had some good insights on the development of ideas, but his original motivations have not been so important to the people who implicate him in some of these other agendas. (I link to Steve Fuller here, but one should also mention Al Gore, whose PR work on climate change is admirable--but the inspiration he draws from Kuhn is pretty bizarre).

If you thought this blog was "meta" before....

2008-01-11T09:59:00.000-05:00

Today I want to ask "what are we doing here?" When we set out to write history, what do we hope to accomplish? There are clearly a lot of different answers that historians can give to this question, and before I go into them, I want to say that I think they are all legitimate. But I also want to emphasize that historians need to think deeply about what they are trying to accomplish, and that they try to make their goals (and audiences) more explicit. The reason is because all histories are, in some way, imbalanced, and while this imbalance has a lot to do with limitations in resources, it also has to do with differences in goals. But these imbalanced histories can be picked up by historians with an alternative set of goals and incorporated into their histories without reflection.

Let's be more concrete. Some historians are interested in entertaining their audiences. Entertainment usually involves making one's broad audience feel comfortable, and so historians will pick familiar figures for incorporation into their studies, will repeat familiar notions, and will favor amusing anecdotes rather than strive to represent "typicality"; and they will hype the importance of their subject ("the X that changed the world!"). That's fine--it sells books, gets people interested, and that's a goal I don't begrudge.

Other historians are interested in advancing a political program of some kind. They will highlight previously marginalized topics that have not been appreciated, and, possibly, they will demonstrate how the discourses of dominant classes have conspired to conceal the history they want to tell.

I consider myself to be an analytical historian, which involves trying to assess the importance of certain subjects within certain contexts, separating what was typical from what was exceptional, and so forth.

Finally (although I'm sure one could go on), you have philosophical historians, who use case studies to highlight the way something works.

Now, historians write histories, but it is the community of historians that writes the historiography ("the literature"). In the next post, I'm going to talk about how the history of science is a field that attracts historians with remarkably diverse agendas, why this is good, why it is potentially debilitating, and how a realization of the nature of this intellectual terrain has been an essential part of my education as an historian.

The 20th century turning point presumption

2008-01-09T09:07:00.000-05:00

Picking up on the thread about science and polity, let's take a look at the granddaddy book on the subject, Leviathan and the Air Pump, and specifically that famous final paragraph ending in "Hobbes was right" (in a chapter entitled "The Polity of Science" by the way):

[In the seventeenth century] a new social order emerged together with the rejection of an old intellectual order. In the late twentieth century that settlement is, in turn, being called into serious question. Neither our scientific knowledge, nor the constitution of our society, nor traditional statements about the connections between our society and our knowledge are taken for granted any longer. As we come to recognize the conventional and artifactual status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know.

We can find a similar argument in Yaron Ezrahi's (lamentably out of print) The Descent of Icarus, and at least implied in numerous other works (thanks to Paul Erickson for turning me on to Ezrahi, by the way). Tom Hughes, for example, in Rescuing Prometheus, argues that large engineering projects had to be augmented by "postmodern" methods, such as participatory planning.

Now, these are some really good books, but I really think that this underlying idea about some mid-to-late twentieth century turning point (beyond modernity/faith-in-sci-tech?) is a really, really weird argument. I want to speculate it has to do with an academia-based focus on Enlightenment models of knowledge, as well as presumptions, such as those alluded to in the post about "Cold War" science. This focus contrasts with broader attitudes that seem to be based on alternative presumptions about institutional arrangements (rather than being totally naive of postmodern insights, as the literature often seems to imply). This gets back to Continental vs. English systems of governance and law, but, as usual, I'll leave this point dangling.

The "Golden Age" of Industrial Research

2008-01-07T09:06:00.000-05:00

In preparation for an oral history interview I am going to be doing tomorrow, I have been reading a 2004 interview a couple of other historians did with John Armstrong, a major figure in IBM research, who had some considered and very interesting opinions on a "Golden Age of Industrial Research" in the postwar era. By his reckoning, idealism about this age is highly misleading. What he believes has generally driven the idea that it was "golden" is that academic scientists were able to identify industrial research as being something that resembled their own work and that absorbed their own (increasingly large) supply of students (Dave Kaiser--once again--has some good upcoming work on the intellectual ramifications of the postwar physics "bubble"). It is these academics who have typically spoken and written the most, and thus set the terms of discourse.

He claims, though, that this recognizably academic-style arrangement within an industrial setting did little for American industry and economy (that could not have had a more substantial impact on the nation in an alternative setting), because researchers given free rein were so frequently out-of-tune with company goals. It is his claim that this point-of-view is not controversial within industrial research and management culture, but that academic scientists still hold it to be true (update: on practical relevance of this view for current education, it is worth looking at his piece, "Rethinking the Ph.D." in the summer '94 issue of Issues in Science and Technology).

Armstrong attributes the postwar arrangement to a misplaced faith in the linear model of science and technology, where investment in pure research is supposed to lead directly to technological applications. This argument, however, feeds what could very well be a common misperception--David Edgerton has argued that the "linear model did not exist". What Edgerton means by this is that the idea that postwar institutional arrangements and science policy were based on an idea that science flowed downhill into technology is false. No important figure actually held such beliefs. A more typical point of view was that it was a good idea for applied science communities to have access to more theoretical forms of knowledge, and vice versa. Yet, the institutionalization of these arrangements--whether industrial laboratories should have their own "basic research" staff; or closer liaison should be kept with academic laboratories--remained undecided. Armstrong clearly prefers more recent arrangements favoring industrial concentration on development, with more basic research based in the academy. (I defer discussion of "what is basic research, and is it OK to talk about it in such terms" to another time.)

Of course, this issue is not cut and dry since industrial secrecy requirements could hamper the value of basic research for industrial laboratories, but I'll reserve discussion of these issues for another time, since there are some interesting trans-Atlantic comparisons that deserve exploration in depth.

Philosophy, Historiography, and "Cold War" science

2008-01-04T09:12:00.001-05:00

In yesterday's post I sounded a fairly philosophical note, wondering about the epistemological differences between matters of fact and insights. Ultimately, though, I don't really want to worry too much about arriving at a correct "nature of science"; instead I want to look at what our presumptions about the nature of science mean for the act of writing history. My own area of expertise is the 20th century, where questions of science and power loom very large (though the "science and empire" issue is dominated by a similar question). A common presumption is that in the 20th century, particularly in America, science boasted a strong claim to authority based on its ability to validate knowledge as "fact". In particular, studies of the social and policy sciences have tended to stress the notion that a generic scientific method (or, in history of technology variations, "technology") could offer "objective" solutions to America's various problems. Similar claims have been made about high level scientific advisers--especially on questions of nuclear policy.

I find this historiography unbearably fuzzy. We find a few scientists making recommendations in one place. We find some government policies (that we probably don't like) in another. We find some funding connecting government to these scientific studies. Suddenly we have a very large regime of science that we tend to analyze, en masse, through a "Cold War" lens. I tend to resist labeling science post-1945 as "Cold War" era science, because historiography using that label tends to gravitate automatically to historicization within the Cold War context, even as we continue to know next to nothing about the intellectual motivations behind that same science. The Cold War was certainly important, but by no means was it everything as far as science in that period is concerned.

With this post I've been doing a lot of hand waving. In future posts, I'll take a look at some more specific works, as well as elaborate on how the "matter of fact" vs. "insight" issue bears on this question.

As a matter of fact....

2008-01-03T08:43:00.001-05:00

Our subject is the "matter of fact". Specifically, I'd like to start a line of thought about the role of the matter of fact in science historiography, and the notion of science as a truth-producing enterprise. The SSK program built an entire industry around tying the production of scientific facts to its political and cultural context--quite successfully, I might add. In my upcoming course the relationship between science and polity will be a theme that I continually revisit. Yet, I've never been able to shake the idea that the notion of science as producing or validating truth claims has always been taken a little bit too seriously. Painting science as an absolutist enterprise (whether in a positive or a negative sense) has always struck me as a fairly Continental concern, from Descartes to the Enlightenment to the postmodernists and deconstructionists, to Latour's insistence that we need a "new constitution".

This concern, while recognized in Anglophone thought, has never seemed to gain much intellectual traction outside of certain theory communities. Why is it that our society is so blasé about scientism? (Outside of a due caution against dogmatism, I think this is actually the correct stance). Does it have something to do with the differences between English polity and legal theory versus Roman and Napoleonic models? This issue is clearly too big to develop in just one post, so I'd just like to begin by suggesting the need to consider the epistemological differences between the matter of fact and the insight. We've seen a lot of scholarship on the former, but I have seen far less of the latter despite the common usage of the word "insight" to imply something other than "fact" or "truth".

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2008-01-01T22:23:00.000-05:00

The Internet in the History of Science

2008-01-01T20:57:00.000-05:00

To start 2008, I've decided to start this blog, which I've been thinking about for a while now. One thing that is now very clear is that the internet has the potential to transform how the academic world works. I think in the sciences, this potential is already being realized. Maybe the most prominent example is the physics Arxiv, which is a portal that physicists use to distribute journal article preprints. Of course, throughout the 20th century, physicists relied on interpersonal connections to distribute their ideas, often in the form of preprint articles, as much as they did journal circulation. Dave Kaiser's book on the dispersion of Feynman diagrams describes this process very nicely. This process meets its logical end in the ArXiv.

What about the humanities? I think the internet provides an ideal location to organize factual knowledge in a way that one rarely finds in scholarly books. Because the premium is now on coming up with highly analytical arguments, the factual background on which those arguments are (hopefully) based is often lost. At the moment, I'm starting a new project at the AIP History Center to link together in a centralized place prominent physicists, their institutions, and research projects, along with pertinent facts (e.g. dates of residence) in a way that no existing print resource does. At the moment this knowledge is attained by scholars in an ad hoc manner as they research individual projects. I think we could do much better work if we had access to a topographical map of the physics community. But I also think the act of making this resource will also reveal important trends in the creation of physics elites, and I hope to do some writing on this in the next couple of years (see John Lankford's admirable book on the 19th and early 20th century American astronomy community for a similar motivation. I plan to discuss this book a bit more in a future post).

I'd like to point to a couple of nice resources already available: The Galileo Project and The Newton Project. Also, take a look at the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England and the Mathematics Genealogy Project, which are two different example that bear some resemblance to what I would like to do with 20th century physics, although I'd like to do this in not quite so thorough a way given the reams of information available! Of course, Wikipedia provides a nice template and already has some nice cross-referenced information on scientists, but somehow I think having institutional direction would help keep the project focused, disciplined and quality-controlled. I'm not quite sure what I mean by this, and my boss, Spencer, and I have thought that some form of public interactivity would be interesting. Of course, I also think more blogs would be a good thing, too. In any case, it seems pretty clear to me that the current focus on journal/book publication will be supplemented and reconfigured in very significant ways in the coming years. We should be discussing what exactly is going to happen more often.

About This Blog

2008-01-01T20:21:00.000-05:00

I'm launching this blog because there doesn't seem to be any really major history of science blogs out there, because I think it would be nice a place where historians of science can discuss issues in public without having to go through the lengthy journal article process, and because I'm going to be lecturing an introduction to the history of science this spring at the University of Maryland, and I'd like a space where I can talk a little bit about the background of each lecture--texts I relied on to write it, prominent issues and so forth. I'll also be talking a little bit about my current projects; mostly I want to discuss underlying issues. Hopefully, after a little while, some friends in the profession will be interested in joining, and this project can grow. But for the time being I'll just consider it a thinking tool.