History as Anti-Philosophy – Page 2

Philosophy of Science, Normativity, and Whig History

One of the things left behind by the historians of science who undertook the Great Escape from the philosophy of science was a claim to normative judgment. The philosophy of science could look at scientific arguments and, using the epistemological tools at its disposal, come to a judgment concerning whether or not current or historical claims were worthy of the name “science”. Through epistemology, science could consolidate and build upon its gains, which was not the case with something more subjective, like art, or (possibly) politics.

If we may say that science is, therefore, progressive, it stands to reason that, with the benefit of philosophy, we can look back on history and identify scientific works that were either progressive or regressive. This is why Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979) did not feel it was appropriate to apply his notion of “whig history” to science. The notion is also central to the thought of Karl Popper (1902-1994), who thought that it was possible for epistemology to legitimize the assertion of those claims that stood because they had not been falsified, while delegitimizing those claims that were held as certainly true on account of illegitimate (i.e., social or political) prejudice, an action that necessarily falsified other claims prematurely. The Church’s suppression of Galileo, the suppression of relativity and quantum mechanics to the benefit of deutsche Physik, or the enshrinement of Lysenko’s genetics as the official state policy of the Soviet Union all constituted sure signs of the illegitimacy of the socio-political system that made these events possible in the face of an epistemologically overwhelming challenge.

Setting Popper aside, in this general philosophical point of view, scientific progress is made possible only through proper epistemology. The interference of society or politics represents an illegitimate interference with proper epistemology. The philosopher of science therefore is in a position to make normative judgments of current science and upon science’s historical development, as well as upon the political systems that either allowed science its autonomy or that interfered with its freedom.

For much of the 20th century, this point of view was opposed mainly by a Marxist philosophy of science, which held

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Traditions of Practice: Mesoscopy, Materiality, and Intercalation

If there are no guides to the construction of the history of science: if the task is more than identifying precedents to the present, if narratives of class interest or other overriding social determinants of scientific knowledge are rejected, and if (as the Great Escape has it) philosophy is no guide to how knowledge develops and spreads, then the danger arises that history drops into a deeply contingent state that can only be successfully analyzed at the most local level.

Arriving in this position, one must resolve the absurdity by asking: what sorts of things can be the subject of historiography? I would reply that science studies has successfully argued that traditions of practice constitute the possible objects of historical inquiry. If definable physical conditions can persist through history (mountains are a nicely tangible example), then certain definable practical reactions to those conditions can also persist (climbing the mountain, digging mines, etc…). Such practices can be broken down into analytically useful categories: technology, technique, tactic, policy, arguments and knowledge claims, rhetoric, imagery, etc. Properly characterized varieties of these practices can be given useful labels (e.g. “empire-building” as a national policy).

Specific choices concerning how to deploy these practices in varying situations are informed by the history of ideas. Ideas may be decoded through a careful analysis of how practices are selected based upon historical appreciations of the character of situations faced (“imperialism” suggests territorial acquisition as a response to international economic

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Latour and the Semiotic Phenomenology of Science and Society

No discussion of historiography and the Great Escape from the philosophy of science can long exclude Bruno Latour, though it is important to remember that Latour urges: “I cannot claim [the honor] of being a historian…. I use history as a brain scientist uses a rat, cutting through it in order to follow the mechanisms that may allow me to understand at once the content of a science and its context” (Pasteurization of France, p. 12).

In a move typical of the Great Escape, though, Latour relies on historiographical coherence to deny philosophy its place. It is significant that Latour begins his work The Pasteurization of France (1988, a translation and revision of 1984’s Les Microbes: Guerre et Paix) by drawing a parallel with Tolstoy’s historical debunking of the Napoleonic Wars as playing out according to the design of genius military architects. History, in all its contingency, can know no architecture, despite those who would impose one retrospectively: “Even if few people still believe in the naive view, courageously defended by epistemologists, that sets science apart from noise and disorder, others would still like to provide a rational version of scientific strategy, to offer clear-cut explanations

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Schaffer on Cometography, Pt. 2: Hermeneutics and Historiography

A hermeneutical conundrum — Hermeneutical conundrum

I. After reading Simon Schaffer’s “Comets and Idols”, I find myself using the word “hermeneutics” a lot more than I used to. In general, you can get your point across just fine talking about “interpretation”. However, when it comes to Isaac Newton, and writing the history of his ideas, the history of how he presented his ideas and himself, the history of how others drew on his ideas, and the history of how others presented how they were drawing upon his ideas—not to mention the act of writing the history of all this—the pithy phrase “Newtonian hermeneutics” (p. 209) acquires a certain appeal.

Drawing on his writing on Newton’s understanding of cometography as part of a project to restore a long-debauched Chaldean natural philosophy, in “Comets and Idols” Schaffer takes the opportunity to reflect on the role of “sacred texts” and their interpretation in history. If natural philosophy was a chaotic mess of competing systems filled with different arrangements of matter and forces, then the sacred text serves as a rare fixed point of unalterable truth. And for some time, no text was more sacred to many natural philosophers than Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (but see also Adam Smith). Unfortunately, the interpretation of sacred texts is never straightforward, and it is by offering one’s own interpretation of the meaning of the sacred text—by uncovering what stands unspoken behind it, whether motivation, intended emphasis, methodology, hidden knowledge, or concrete ideas—and by discounting others’ “misunderstanding” or “distortion” of it that one draws upon its authority.

As Schaffer had observed before (especially with the construction of historic scientific discoveries, and with psychology’s claiming the personal equation as its own), the appropriation of history within the program one is trying to advance is an important, perhaps inevitable, tactic in building authority.

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The Great Escape

This post is meant to be the first in a series concerning the relationship between the history of science and the philosophy of science, paying special attention to the influential notion within the history of science that the philosophy of science has a deleterious influence on historiography.

Philosophy, in this view, injures inquiry by removing from consideration some of science’s most important non-scientific contexts; by causing historians to attempt to investigate incoherent questions rooted in philosophically defined problems (such as those relating to moments of discovery, confirmation, falsification, and proof); and by concentrating narratives on histories of disembodied ideas (vacuum versus plenum, atoms versus continuum, myth/confusion versus reason, determinism versus vitalism/free will, mind-body questions) and on the Whiggish pedigrees of disembodied theories (the theory of natural selection, the periodicity of elements, etc…), instead of on the actions and debates of scientists themselves, which the archives reveal did not turn on these preoccupations.

Sociology played a big role in “the great escape” (as I am calling it) from philosophy. If philosophy has to do with the interaction between ideas and experience, it then has only a very narrowly defined role in the history of scientific practice. The sensibility, I think, is captured nicely by sociologist Harry Collins in his recent overview of his career-long research program on the practice of gravitational wave physics, Gravity’s Shadow (2004). Here he defends a “relativist” versus a “realist” (one might say sociological versus philosophical) perspective:

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Watch your language, Pt. 2: Galison vs. Staley

In Pt. 1, I discussed the historiographical problem of under what circumstances it is useful to criticize someone else’s characterization of history, highlighting Peter Galison’s rebuke in Image and Logic to Andy Pickering’s account of the discovery of the J/ψ particle from Constructing Quarks. I noted that Galison took exception to Pickering’s idea of “tuning” experiment to theory on the count of its adherence to an antipositivist understanding of the history of experiment as proceeding in some sort of theoretical relationship to theory rather than on its own terms. This independence of experimental tradition from theoretical concerns is part of a useful view of history Galison calls “intercalation”. I noted that the issue of theory-dependence can have political overtones, but that the issue is also important to understanding how knowledge-production works, and to constructing coherent and accurately-worded historical accounts.

But just how important is accuracy in wording? When is one making a point and when is one just nitpicking? To address this question I want to skip ahead a couple of years to a special issue of Perspectives on Science dedicated to Image and Logic in which philosopher of science Kent Staley disputed Galison’s division of modern particle detection into epistemologically distinct “image” and “logic” traditions. Galison responded in the same issue entirely confident that he was being visited by some easily vanquished ghost out of the historiographical past. Yet, to my mind, this is a dispute that Staley won. I’ll explain why, and then get on to the ultimate question of whether it matters.

First off, I should say that I’m predisposed to Staley’s argument. When I first thoroughly read Image and Logic in

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Watch your language, Pt. 1

Or, a notion concerning when, how, and why to nitpick historical writing.

I know it must seem obsequious to praise one’s advisor’s work to high heaven on a blog, but I have to be honest: Peter Galison’s 1997 book Image and Logic on the history of particle detectors is, in my mind, one of the finest works of historiographical craftsmanship I can think of. The book is well-known in the theory community for the idea of the “trading zone”, and is thus attached to the whole fashion of studying “boundary objects” and things with multiple meanings to different people, etc., etc. If that’s all you take away from the book, you, like most of its readers, are a “Chapters 1 and 9 person”. I like to think of myself as a “Chapters 2 through 8 person”, which is to say, someone who is interested in the history of particle detectors, and the way Galison presents it. MIT prof Dave Kaiser (who was a Galison student in the ’90s and assisted in the assembly of the book and knows it in intimate detail) likes to kid me for citing “chapter and verse”.

(I was discussing the “trading zone” versus “history of particle detectors” issue with my boss, Greg Good, who related to me how he once went to a talk given by Thomas Kuhn, which began with him saying the word “paradigm” and then informing his massive audience that that was the last they would hear of it, and then proceeded to discuss the history of black body radiation theory in loving detail.)

In considering the book; and the relationship between philosophy, sociology, and history; I like to think of Chapters 1 and 9 as laying out useful ideas or principles for coherent historical writing. Galison joins the sociologists in their rejection of histories written as a succession of theories, or as playing out according to some dialectic between theory and experiment. However, he has been known to chide sociologists for adhering to their own theoretical

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