Galison's "Ten Problems" – Ether Wave Propaganda

Historians, what are they good for?

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,

Galison’s Q’s #10: Scientific Doubt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Galison’s Q’s #4: Fabricated Fundamentals

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

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

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

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

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