History and Historiography of Science

Notes on Gerald Holton

Gerald Holton in 1961. Image credit: David Crofoot, Harvard University News Service, courtesy of the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

For the last decade, my time has been dominated by science policy and family, but I recently had the opportunity to take an extended dip back into the history and historiography of science as the staff coordinator here at the American Institute of Physics for a panel of external experts advising on the strategic direction of our Center for History of Physics (CHP) and Niels Bohr Library & Archives. To brief the panel, I did some background research into the history of these programs, going all the way back to their origins with an ad hoc committee AIP convened, chaired by Harvard University physicist and historian Gerald Holton.

Established in 1960, the Holton Committee resulted in AIP supporting a multi-year project to identify source material concerning the history of “recent physics,” led first by a physicist-historian from the Smithsonian named W. James King, and then, from 1964, Charles Weiner. The Holton Committee became an advisory committee for that effort, which, when it concluded in 1965, became the basis for CHP, with Weiner serving as director.

Notably, the AIP “recent physics” project proceeded in parallel with a similar, better-known project called “Sources in the History of Quantum Physics,” led by Thomas Kuhn, with John Heilbron, Paul Forman, and Lini Allen as staff members. The National Science Foundation funded both projects, and AIP was also involved in the “quantum physics” project as administrator of its NSF grant. What is especially notable to me is that both projects were aimed at systematically establishing a broad foundation for future scholarship rather than producing a particular output.

The AIP advisory panel I was working with has since concluded its work, but in my not-so-copious spare time I have continued to poke around in some of the research and commentary surrounding science in the U.S. in the 1960s, and particularly its frequent ambition to apply a systematic approach. This effort has also been motivated by a pair of posts I wrote here in 2012 on Robert Merton’s unsuccessful efforts in that period to build a data-rich sociology of science around Charles Gillispie’s Dictionary of Scientific Biography project and the nascent citation indexing movement led by Eugene Garfield.

My broad impression is that the NSF-funded history projects, DSB, citation indexing, and Merton’s dashed aspirations were part of a loosely coherent movement in the 1960s to “get a handle on science,” for lack of a more precise description. And Holton’s name appears with great frequency, so the purpose of this post is to do a quick survey of some of his activities in this period.

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Jan Golinski on the Personas of Humphry Davy

The time of Ether Wave Propaganda has come and gone, but happily its archives remain available, and conveniently it can still serve as a place to drop a post should the need arise.

Probably a couple of years ago now, I received in the mail an unsolicited copy of Jan Golinski’s book, The Experimental Self: Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2016). This was no doubt because I’d previously written about Golinski and Davy on this blog, particularly here. But by this time I’d moved on from academic history and did not get around to reading the book. (Currently, if you want to read me, I’m regularly writing with a talented four-person team about U.S. science policy for the American Institute of Physics here.)

However, the opportunity has come for a brief revival of EWP. I had to have a surgery on April 16 — don’t worry, I expect to be fine — and have been forced to stay home to recuperate. This means I had time to plunge back into the world of early 19th-century science, and so here at last is my review of The Experimental Self.

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International Society for Intellectual History Paper: Adolphe Quetelet’s Social Mechanics in Turn of the Century American Sociology

*Digression Begins Here*

One of the most wonderful happenings of research is finding one’s subject in unexpected places.  The idea of “social mechanics” is to be found in the philosophy of law of Rudolf von Jhering (22 August 1818 – 17 September 1892).  In the United States, Jhering most famous work was in its English translation.  Published in 1914, Law as a Means to an End (published in translation in 1914) had the following central arguments.  The first was that there was no “natural contract.” This was contrary to the jurisprudence of William Blackstone, which posited (like many others) the existence of an original contract as one of the conditions of modern society. Jhering was reacting against a very established natural law tradition.  Conversely, Jhering underscored that law was simply the most convenient organization found by man.  Morality and personhood were outside of law. It was not that law was amoral.  It was that morality was outside of law.  Law had no justification outside that it was convenient and that it provided a social function for society.

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International Society for Intellectual History Paper: The Odd Career of Adolphe Quetelet in Early American Social Theory

I will have a response to all of my Zilsel friends shortly.  It will be titled “Hunting for the Unicorn: Further Thoughts on Science and the Dissenting Sciences”

*Digression Begins Here*

One of my consistent complaints about our understanding of nineteenth century social theory in the United States is that there is little sustained efforts on these topics due to the problem of relevance.  My contention was (now some years ago in “The Nineteenth Century Problem“) that our understanding of nineteenth century American intellectual history (as very narrowly defined by the history of ideas,  so as to not include the history of social movements or ideologies) was hampered by the issue of relevance. We have a basic problem of knowing so little about nineteenth century social theory that we must resort to boot-strapping mechanisms.    

Thus, historians of ideas and historians of science would like to think that they can study anything they’d like.  But this is simply not true.  I am discussing this since many issues were addressed with my Zilsel friends last week.  One was the issue of justification of case studies and of topics for analysis.  My respondent (the extremely smart and gracious Volny Fages , who throughout put up with my bad manners) questioned why I justified my attention to the pseudosciences and even my choice of case studies.

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For My Zilsel Friends, Gordon Tullock and Public Choice: The Dissenter as Gadfly

I. Gordon Tullock and Joseph Agassi- A Brief Digression.  

In the course of talking with Joseph on the first day of my questioning of him, I mentioned Gordon Tullock. Tullock and Joseph were good friends. Agassi met him where he was at Stanford and Tullock tried to work with Popper.  Undeterred by Popper’s inability to work with Tullock, Tullock then went on to be a post-doc at the University of Virginia (though he only had a J.D) while spending most of his later years at George Mason University.  Tullock, throughout his writings acknowledged his fondness for Popper, particularly his suspicion of dogma.  By dogma, Tullock meant almost all of economics not written by Gordon Tullock.  There are many Tullock anecdotes related to me by Agassi, but one which I shared with him was Tullock’s objection to seat-belts.  Seat-belts were instituted in the 1970s to protect drivers from death.  No, Gordon responded, the way to make drivers safe is to place a knife in the middle of the steering wheel, so that if drivers speed and shop short, they will be impaled instantly. There is also a page of Tullock insults.

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For My Zilsel Friends, The Boar in the Vineyard: The Anthropology of Napoleon Chagnon

The “boar” of the title refers to Martin Luther and his heresy, referring to the famous bull of Pope Leo X.  In the early modern world, the boar stood for the problem of heresy in the faithful church.

I. The “World’s Most Controversial Anthropologist”

Napoleon Chagnon has been christened the “world’s most controversial anthropologist” by the New York Times.  Chagnon enjoys the label, it is on his faculty web site. Why is he the world’s most controversial anthropologist?  I give two reasons.  1) in a book published in 2000, “Darkness in El Dorado,” he was accused with James Neel, a well-regarded epidemiologist, of exacerbating  a measles outbreak in order to test the fitness of tribes of Yanomami in Northern Brazil and Southern  Venezuela. These charges, offered by a journalist, were dismissed by the American Anthropological Association. 2) his linking of social status, with reproductive success or of cultural success with biological success. Chagnon argued, as had his adviser and mentor the geneticist and epidemiologist Jim Neel in the 1970s and 1980 (most explicitly in “On Being Headman” in 1980) that those Yanomami villagers who were good at warfare, good at killing had high social status. Aggression and warlike behavior (through mechanisms not really explained) have become social virtues due to their biological benefits. As a result of their high social status, they enjoyed reproductive success.  They had more children than villagers less adept at warfare. Aggression persists, moreover, because it is evolutionarily adaptive and it is the result of human beings acting rationally, in the pursuit of their own self-interest as well as those of their kin.

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For My Zilsel Friends, The Dissenting Sciences

I. Some Opening Thoughts On My Motivations

My friends at Zilsel have invited me to speak on a topic which I have been working on for quite some time, through my various researches in biosocial anthropology and human behavioral ecology, behavior genetics and public choice economics (in the work of Gordon Tullock especially) the “dissenting sciences.” I keep changing my mind on what to call them, having referred to them as “heterodox” and “pariah” sciences.    

I am a bit in a muddle and I have decided to write my way out of this confusion. I have submitted two introductions to introduce my case studies.  This is a version of those introductions.

Writing on the Pseudosciences

I do this because our field not only suffers from the privacy of criticism but also the privacy of ideas.  As Will has written about many times, historians of science are too concerned with only publishing their very polished thoughts. This means that much of the knowledge of the profession is hidden from public view. This behavior is elitist.  

And now everyone reading this hopefully has a better sense of my motivations.  My thoughts on pseudoscience are a bit of a muddle, I am using this blog as a way to puzzle out this muddle, as a prelude to puzzling out some of my confusions in a talk on Tuesday.  I am deliberately not holding back my unpolished thoughts in the hopes that others will do so. 

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Making Joseph Agassi the Subject of a Scholarly Work Leads to Nothing but Questions

I am at the start of a highly interesting venture, writing about an important living philosopher of science, Joseph Agassi, the significance of his ideas and how the development of those ideas informs our understanding of the development of postwar history and philosophy of science. It is a very high-risk (people tell me) venture. I hope it works. This is not something that historians of science (or philosophers of science, sociologists of science) do very much of, in any aspect, as I will describe. There are of course numerous examples of living philosophers writing about living philosophers and living philosophers discussing dead ones. But, our history of science kin don’t really (and apologies to those who do) address the complex heritage of philosophy of science, except to suit very specific purposes. Philosophy of science is usually deployed in order to suit a methodological or theoretical approach. This is very different than writing about the philosophy of science as a historical development. Last, no one has really begun to ask, among this contemporary or just-past generation of philosophers of science, are there any worthy of attention? This is a serious problem, as it is a serious problem for my writing and thinking about Agassi.

I have argued, not explicitly, that Agassi (and his close friends, students and admirers), the development of his ideas and what that development illustrates about the course of post-war Anglo-American philosophy is worthy of a scholarly treatment, but why? I shall begin to address that in this essay. I have earlier discussed how Agassi’s influence is very hard to measure. He is now very well-cited, but does this mean that his influence is at its peak? How plausible is this when philosophy of science (but not the philosophy of the social sciences, to add complication to a complication) today is very different from when Agassi first developed the core of his philosophical research program.

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