EWP Book Club – Page 3 – Ether Wave Propaganda

Wang on PSAC, Pt. 3: Attitudes and Ideas in the History of Policy

In Pt. 2 of this look at Zuoyue Wang’s In Sputnik’s Shadow, I critiqued Wang’s adherence to a central analytical rubric pitting an “enthusiasm” for technological “fixes” against a more reserved “skepticism”. I argued that the rubric led to misleading interpretations of selected quotes. It modified, rather than moved beyond, a questionable narrative of 20th-century ideas about the relationship between politics and science. Finally, the narrative mainly seemed to function as a way of explaining why good reason often fails to prevent bad outcomes — as might be expected given the narrative’s origins in historical polemics.

Nevertheless, readers of this book who are prepared to disagree with certain aspects of it can and should still find a great deal that is useful. My more pressing concern is what aspects of history are simply forgotten because they can only be found by probing beyond what the enthusiasm-skepticism rubric can parse.

One key issue is the characterization of the importance of the President’s Science Advisory Committee as fulfilling an almost unique role as scientific skeptics in a government apparently otherwise enamored with the prospect of technological fixes to policy problems. However, this creates the impression that those whose general attitudes are labeled enthusiastic held a belief in something like what we might call “technology without policy”.

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Wang on PSAC, Pt. 2: Enthusiasm, Skepticism, and Theodicy

In Part 1 of this look at Zuoyue Wang’s In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America, I suggested Wang’s use of a dichotomy between technological enthusiasm and technological skepticism as his central analytical rubric held the book back from being as illuminating as it might have been. Part 2 explains how it does so.

As I noted in Pt. 1, the enthusiasm-skepticism rubric clearly has a moral resonance: enthusiasm is bad, skepticism is good. Once a moral dichotomy has been established, historiography easily fades into “theodicy” — an explanation for why there is evil in the world. The theodicy of science basically goes like this: if science, or indeed knowledge, is supposed to make the world a better place, then why does it fail to do so? Why does it sometimes seem, or threaten, to make the world worse? A common mid-to-late-20th-century version is: why did scientists fail to stop the Cold War?

No sane historian would actually phrase the question this way, but using the enthusiasm-skepticism rubric more-or-less implies the question, simply because the rubric’s terms are one answer to the problem of theodicy. Blind enthusiasm for science and technology as a simple “fix” can result in evil. Skepticism can prevent that evil. Where skepticism fails, enthusiasm may prevail. This line of reasoning rose in reaction to Enlightenment thought, often to reinforce the legitimacy of religious ethics and tradition-based government in the face of an idolatry of reason (see, for example, Chris’ post on Maistre, or Schaffer and Golinski on attempts to constrain scientific “genius”, or Schaffer on the criticism of Whewell). Importantly, though, this critique is mainly just a modification or inversion of the Enlightenment argument. Where the Enlightenment pitted the potential of rational governance against superstition and arbitrary authority, the enthusiasm of rationality and technology is simply recast as an impostor, a new form of “faith” to be overcome by those purporting to represent a truly rational response to the evils of the world.

What this rather elaborate critique has to do with PSAC is that the instantiation of a group scientists at the highest level of power, the White House, becomes the scene for an important confrontation of good and evil, or reason and blindness. Historiographically, this rubric translates into mundane, but still very important, consequences that manifest themselves in style and composition: it defines what questions are worth asking, which explanations and descriptions of historical events and ideas suffice, and which ones will suggest the need to ask other questions and bring in additional context in order to feel satisfied that an adequate understanding of past events has been reached.

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Wang on the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), Pt. 1

Though a visible and important office in American policy history, and though, historically, it has been much discussed, PSAC has garnered surprisingly little analysis by historians. Thus Zuoyue Wang’s In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (Rutgers UP, 2008) automatically constitutes a valuable contribution to the historiography.

PSAC’s predecessor body, the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization, was established in 1951 during the Korean War. Although comprised of highly respected members of the scientific community, that committee was a marginal body, and it was replaced by PSAC following the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite and reconsideration of American government’s management of its scientific and technological resources. PSAC’s chair served as the science adviser to the President until 1973 when Richard Nixon dissolved PSAC. In 1976 Gerald Ford established a new organization, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Though its exact structure and function have varied from administration to administration, that body still exists, and its director (currently John Holdren) serves as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. Wang’s book covers this whole history, with the OSTP period as an epilogue.

In my own experience, the further one gets from World War II, the more convoluted and confusing the terrain becomes, the less helpful the historiography becomes, the more difficult it becomes to write good, coherent history. Wang’s book flips this on its head.

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Einstein’s Generation by Richard Staley, Pt. 2

Forgetting is integral to scientific advance, but neither our understanding of the process of science nor our appreciation of its historical development can accept the limitations imposed by such forgetfulness. (Einstein’s Generation, p. 420)

David Edgerton has introduced the term “anti-history” to describe inadequacies of past historical accounts, which, for the sake of advocating some point, were systematically neglectful in portraying the history of the subject they were addressing. Edgerton’s central concern is the history of science in Britain, and especially the history of the relationship between science, technology, and the British state. “Anti-historian” commentators, he argues, had cause to systematically portray the history of state science and expertise in terms of its inadequacy or absence, because they viewed the further and proper deployment of science, technology, and modernization by the state as key to future social and national progress. (See his Warfare State, 2006, and “C. P. Snow as Anti-Historian of British Science: Revisiting the Technocratic Moment, 1959-1964” History of Science 2005: 187-208).

As strong of an advocate for Edgerton’s historiographical insights as I am, I feel that the “anti-history” critique is somewhat unfair, mainly since it focuses on historical actors’ failure to be good historians, which distracts from the points they were trying to make (regardless of those points’ validity). The real force of Edgerton’s critique lands on the genealogy of historians who have continued to take those historical narratives and their terms at face value, rather than recognizing them for the instruments of commentary and advocacy that they were. In other words, the term “anti-history” fails to make a distinction between the instrumental uses of history made in everyday life and the task of the professional historian.

(I have argued on this blog that historians of science have themselves become appallingly poor historians of their own profession so as to amplify the significance of recent insights, and that this has seeped into the historical narratives we professionally produce. Edgerton made a similar point in 1993 for the specific case of the “Social Construction of Technology” program.)

In Einstein’s Generation, and exemplified by the quote above, Richard Staley recognizes the crucial function that narrative-building plays for historical actors as they attempt to comprehend and develop what they are doing, focusing on the distinction built in the early 1900s between “classical” and “modern” physics, which has subsequently been taken for granted by generations of historians.

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Einstein’s Generation by Richard Staley, Pt. 1

Richard Staley’s 2008 book Einstein’s Generation: The Origins of the Relativity Revolution is an exemplary work of progressive historiographical craftsmanship, and is very high on my personal list of best history of science books written this past decade. The book is an unabashed work of scholarship, using past historiography constructively to pose and answer a startling variety of questions that both deepen current professional understanding of certain events, and expand that understanding into largely unexplored territories. It is demanding, and will most reward those with at least some understanding of physics and of prior scholarship on both Einstein and the history of late 19th-century physics.

Einsteins’ Generation works as scholarship in subtle, but, I think, significant ways that will not necessarily be apparent at first reading, so I want to use this post to try and unpack this book’s argumentative strategies and analyze their power. The first thing I want to note is that the book doesn’t follow a “sandwich” strategy: asserting a central argument in the introduction and conclusion, and then offering a series of cases, or a long narrative, that bolsters that argument.

There are hints of a centralized anti-straw-man argument, which deflates the view of a single, radical break between a “classical” physics based dogmatically on Newton’s foundation, and a “modern” physics based on relativity and the quantum, but I don’t think this is Staley’s main intent. More to the point, I think what Staley is trying to do is use a certain style of narrative and historical analysis to create a new view of cutting-edge physics around the turn of the century, which builds on prior scholarship while departing from it in important ways.

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Imperial Nature, by Jim Endersby

Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science is a study of late Victorian botany and natural history centered around the career and practices of naturalist Joseph Hooker (1817-1911). Endersby avows to be less interested in the structures or mentalities which informed Hooker’s long career in botany, ending as director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, than in “considering his material practices and the objects they involved” (312.) By analyzing practices, Endersby “sets” Hooker back “on his feet,” while previous accounts, by beginning with ideas, have stood him “on his head.” Much like Marx’s purported inversion of Hegel’s philosophy into the realm of social action and into praxis, the result of Endersby’s book, is, in many ways, as concerned with ideas as those histories he is writing against.

The practices of Victorian botany in Endersby’s narrative helps to narrate the interaction between “apparently esoteric matters, like theories of geographical distribution” and “mundane matters like the practicalities of earning a living” (313.) As importantly, an emphasis on the minutiae of daily practice, for Endersby, helps underscore how Hooker’s botanical work “remade nature in empire’s image.” Hooker, Endersby details, though only briefly visiting colonial spaces- New Zealand, Tasmania, and British India-, was keen to persuade his network of colonial botanists, whose samples his work depended upon, “that he alone knew how many species of plants their land held and what each were called” (314.)

Endersby’s discussions of taxonomy and the species question in Hooker’s writing as well as his account of Hooker’s efforts to render his botany more philosophical in response to the pressures of distinguishing himself in a crowded field depend upon the situation of Hooker in the history of ideas as well as concrete daily practices.

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Objectivity, Pt. 3: Philosophy of Science and Historiographical Empiricism

I suggested in Pt. 2 of this post that Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity fits in with themes both have been exploring over the courses of their careers, as exemplified in Daston’s Wonders and the Order of Nature (written with Katharine Park), and Galison’s Image and Logic. Both are excellent books, though very different from each other. I believe my basic disagreements with the presentation in Objectivity (as described in Pt. 1) can be characterized in terms of how elements of the presentation of those books are carried over into Objectivity. I also believe these disagreements correspond to at least some elements of Martin Kusch’s criticism of the book in his essay review in Isis.

I mentioned in Pt. 2b that Wonders is an exemplary work of historico-philosophy. What I mean by this is that its subject matter is philosophically defined, roughly as follows: 1) understanding of the world is governed by system (an “order of nature”); 2) this understanding produces expectations concerning what is likely to be seen; 3) violations of this system constitute “wonders”; 4) ethical and intellectual responses to wonders constitute a way of fundamentally distinguishing epistemic traditions.

This scheme allows us to move the history of ideas about nature beyond the philosophy of science by characterizing at a very basic level what intellectual systems can look like outside of what we would think of as a properly scientific worldview. Not only does the scheme allow us to be sympathetic to Scholastic methods that have often (though not always) been disparaged in histories of science, but also to literary and religious cosmologies (which offered intellectual resources to early natural history, which themselves have only recently begun receiving proper historiographical treatment). Daston and Park’s scheme further periodizes modern natural

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Objectivity, Pt. 2b: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Epistemology

If Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity is a product of the history of science’s Great Escape from the philosophy science, their work differs from much of the work in the Great Escape historiography in that it retains a clear interest in not only the history of ideas, but scientific ideas. As I argued in Pt. 2a, Galison’s oeuvre has concentrated on aesthetic ideals as ideas governing individual scientific practice and intertraditional conflict: image vs. logic, or, indeed, one kind of representational objectivity versus another.

Daston, even more than Galison, has likewise never seemed too tempted to abandon ideas for practice. Her work, like Steven Shapin’s work on the 17th-century, takes the relationship between epistemology and morals extremely seriously, so that it is not so much practice, but ideas about proper practice, that take center stage. I would go so far as to say that Daston’s work, much like Michel Foucault’s, functions best as a mapping of systems of socio-epistemic ideas, and tends to be a little lackadaisical concerning things like proper periodization, and, especially, constituency (“eighteenth-century notions” should be read as “the notions of these thinkers active in a certain period of the eighteenth century”). This is not to say it isn’t brilliant—it is—it just has its priorities, and readers are well-served to keep these in mind.

A nice introduction to Daston’s intellectual program is her piece “The Moral Economy of Science” from the 1995 Osiris, which (aside from stealing and redefining—i.e., appropriating—E. P. Thompson’s term “moral economy”) sketches out what

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Objectivity, Pt. 2a: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Epistemology

In his useful essay review of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity in Isis, the philosopher Martin Kusch (formerly of Cambridge HPS, now of Vienna) notes that an important feature of the book’s argument is its twin commitments to combating “relativism” and “localism” (which causes him “unease”; more on this later). I agree with his emphasis on these motivations as key to understanding the format of Objectivity‘s presentation, and believe the commitments are linked to the historiographical program of the Great Escape from the philosophy of science that began some 30 years ago.

If this story is right, once various forms and specters of epistemological determinism were removed from the history of science, local “contingency” became the watchword. To understand why any view became established in the history of science, you had to go to the local archive and uncover all the nuanced negotiations that resulted in the “construction” of this or that concept. This tended to be repellent to scientists and philosophers of science, not because it uncovered their dirty laundry, but because it tended to make the development of whatever concept was at issue appear arbitrary. Even if constructionism did not imply arbitrariness, per se, it did leave plenty of room for socio-cultural bias, or, to put it another way, for the intellectual overdetermination of scientific knowledge through the “ladening” of observations with theory or values. This overdetermination could be teased out by examining the archive, or simply by examining the “situatedness” of patronage (following the Marxists) and of the metaphors employed in scientific knowledge-building.

Even since How Experiments End (1987), Galison (not unlike fellow Escapist Latour) has been keen to defuse not only radical skepticist claims that knowledge is socially determined, but also more moderate claims attached to anti-positivist

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Book Club: Objectivity, Pt. 1

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison argue in their recent book Objectivity that “objectivity” is not a transcendental concept: it “has a history”. It therefore must have come into existence at a certain point in time. They further argue that the character of objectivity has both transformed and fractured with time, and that the transformation, fracturing, and collection of different notions of objectivity can be periodized. To demonstrate their case, they analyze scientific imagery and its production through time, as surveyed by assembling a gallery of scientific “atlases” (collections of images meant to convey a body of scientific knowledge).

Objectivity is, I think, an important work of historiography that addresses head-on problems associated with the historiography of the gallery of practices: how to write analytical long-term (“mesoscopic”) histories of scientific practice, how to write histories that do not depend on a strict narrative of causality, and how to write about science as a cultural and intellectual activity without questioning the ultimate validity of scientific work. In addition to their scattered commentary toward these points throughout the book, see a distillation of their position last year in Victorian Studies.

Reviews suggest that the book will be a widely-read touchstone. I believe this presents a danger to a historiography that is not sufficiently reflective. Rather than critically reflect on the book’s strategies, there is a danger that historians will now be inspired to “go fishing” for instances of “truth-to-nature” or “mechanical objectivity” in the histories that they themselves study. Those who do so may deploy Daston and Galison’s methodological insights directly, or may question or problematize their periodizations by finding contrary examples. But I believe a more productive exercise is questioning the methodology in toto as an approach to the historiographical problems the book explicitly seeks to address.

The book is certainly broadly-researched and its presentation is extremely erudite, and it contains useful insights. But I disagree with Daston and Galison as to what these insights are. I believe the presentation in Objectivity is grounded on a few interrelated assumptions. First, the practice of representation constitutes a fundamental act of science, a presentation of what scientists believe the scientific object must look like as seen through the scientific eye. Second, there is, therefore, a

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