It’s been a good night, watching the Milwaukee Brewers and the St. Louis Cardinals on ESPN while sprawled out on the couch with the latest Isis, marinating in the humid nighttime heat of Washington, DC. Too bad I’m out of beer. The focus section of this issue asks the pointed question “What is the value of the history of science?” Can we be of use outside of our own academic interests? All in all, I’m underwhelmed, with the exception of Zuoyue Wang and Naomi Oreskes’ look at historians’ actual participation in public policy debates. (Disclosure: Naomi is overseeing my Antarctica project that I’ve mentioned from time to time, but I really do think it’s the best of the lot). I’m going to do a series of posts on this section, but, since none of the articles really captures my own view of the potential of our discipline, I thought I’d start by airing my perspective.
First off, I feel somewhat vindicated in my continual ragging on the case study approach, because the articles pretty uniformly take a view of history as relating to the “telling historical incident” rather than the analysis of historical traditions, which I think really narrows the potential contributions of the field (see my responses to the Locality versus Globality series on Galison’s Problems from the last Isis, and, of course, have a look at his original entries).
My own perspective on this issue relates a lot to my understanding of how history inflects disciplines other than science, particularly creative disciplines which seem to encourage a sort of historical geekdom among participants. Modern filmmakers, for example, know about and understand the French New Wave. They of course know the technical bits: jump cuts, hand-held cameras, the famous freeze-zoom at the end of The 400 Blows (check it out on YouTube; I’d embed it, but it’s a 4 minute clip and the shot in question doesn’t come until the end). But, they also know about its relationship to noir, Italian neorealism (Bicycle Thief), and Hitchcock. They understand how New Wave incorporated those influences and innovated beyond them; and they know how others, in turn, took up those insights and did new things with them. And many of those who understand these conversations become better filmmakers. (We could also talk about rock’s New Wave in the wake of punk, which I find fascinating, but that’s another story for another day).
Having thus exhausted my knowledge of the French New Wave, I can’t see why a similar principle wouldn’t apply in science. Why shouldn’t scientists become science history geeks, understanding the traditions, becoming connoisseurs of methods of argumentation? While I don’t think it would help them directly, by drawing on a deeper historical conceptual basis wouldn’t they be able to fit themselves within traditions, to develop a more cutting criticism of scientific work, to have better conversations between specialist groups, and maybe to innovate more new approaches? I think science gets along fine without this historical connoisseurship, but surely it would add some vibrancy to the language of scientific argumentation.
I mean, I feel I better understand what constitutes innovative scientific work the more I learn about particular scientists as part of a long and uninterrupted sequence of responses to prior approaches and as rearticulating themes over and over again. This is definitely an approach we’ve had toward the history of science in the past (Schaffer’s early work demonstrates this nicely, actually). If we could develop and maintain this connoisseurship of past scientific traditions, I think some scientists, at least, might take an interest. Anyway, maybe that, too, is an underwhelming argument, but it’s worked elsewhere, and I’ll be revisiting it when I look at the articles in this section.