Methods – Page 2 – Ether Wave Propaganda

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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The Organizational Synthesis and Periodization

In my last post on the organizational synthesis, I suggested that it was one possible alternative to a house style of history of science that emphasizes the use of case study to illuminate one sort of epistemological problem or another, without explicitly tying the subject of study to other related subjects. This stand-alone quality of scholarship is a situation we might think of as a “new internalism”. While the new internalism recognizes a certain old internalist or antiquarian frustration or futility in building linear histories of the progress of knowledge, it also fractures knowledge into islands of scholarship that do not cohere with each other in any obvious way, and thus are “internalist” in their own right.

By looking at the organization of scientific institutions and scientific projects (attacks on specific problems, traditions in experimentation or theorization, etc…), it is possible to transcend the inadequacies of strictly linear histories. I might also have added that an organizational approach would also be useful in tracking and characterizing overlaps or connections between institutions and projects in histories of science and histories of technology, business, politics, law, and culture.

Today I would like to suggest that studying the organization of science would also allow for more satisfactory periodizations. It can do so by helping to solve the “constituency” problem and the “scale” problem.

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The New Internalism and the Organizational Synthesis

Many electrons have been spilled on this blog concerning the epistemic imperative in history of science writing, and the accordant organization of scholarship according to epistemological rather than chronological problematics. Last year I spent some time arguing that this is unfortunate, since chronological problematics, broadly considered, consolidate historiographical gains and hold far more information than does the accumulation of what I like to call “galleries of practice”, which are dedicated to illustrating the variations on practices relating to “how we come to know”.

The epistemic imperative arises from a variety of locations: sociological “relativism” has used the problem to make deeper inquiries into how and why people agree; various lines of critique have sought to provide cogent reminders against the dangers of scientism; a few scholars have sought to chart the history of epistemological attitudes. Ultimately, I am increasingly convinced, the intellectual roots of the epistemic imperative matter less than the overarching fact that this structure of argument has simply become the “house style” of the history of science profession.

The house style, characterized by its use of case study to focus on the material and contingent, and by its concern for epistemological issues broadly construed, accommodates a highly interdisciplinary form of inquiry,

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Historical Insultography and Posture

All good historians know that one of the biggest pitfalls to writing good history is taking historical actors at their word. Testimony from the past is bound to be limited by the witness’ particular perspective and colored by their own interests. For example, a dispute of a scientific claim might be said to be motivated by “jealousy” by one party, where another party might claim the other was “narrow-minded”. Reckless historiography simply takes actors at their word without getting the view of the other side.

Historians are thus challenged to adopt an analytically useful posture to find some way to resolve the problem. One possible posture is to parse all the evidence to “get to the bottom of things”. (One sees this a lot in really old-school historiography, especially out of Britain.) Another possible posture is to see the existence of the controversy as an opportunity to examine some broader issue. Following the epistemic imperative, one might dilute actors’ positions, to show that their position was “not universal” or “limited” or “influenced by tacit interests”. A very common posture is a variation of this: to use controversies to triangulate out a detached position by simply acknowledging the existence of disputes: “but their actions were not without controversy”. For some reason, it has become popular to just assume that narrating a controversy in such a way as to invert the actors’ broad claims is useful historiography regardless of the place of the particular controversy in broader history.

One gets the impression from the historiography that the history of science is nothing but conflicting and contested claims—the Great Inversion of “science’s” claim to be the ultimate model of open and collaborative society—a

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Kjeldsen on Rheinberger via Epple

Continuing on last week’s discussion about the sufficiency of current methodology, I’d like to take a look at Tinne Hoff Kjeldsen’s piece, “Egg-Forms and Measure-Bodies: Different Mathematical Practices in the Early History of the Modern Theory of Convexity,” from the latest Science in Context (free issue!), and particularly the function of her invocation of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s array of “epistemic things”.

For those not familiar with the modern theory of convexity, fear not. I’m mainly interested in the topic because it is central to the mathematical theory of linear programming, which is an important part of the canon of operations research techniques, and Kjeldsen, a historian of mathematics, is the top expert on the subject. She has a long line of papers explaining how the rather discontinuous history of convexity theory can be understood in terms of its development as parts of mathematicians’ varying projects—what she has previously referred to as different “tasks”. Her work is extremely useful to people like me who need to figure out what any of this has to do with military doctrine-building and radical British scientists—you’d be surprised—and are reluctant to spend too much time on the nitty-gritty details on the history of things like convexity theory.

The history of mathematics is a nice place to address this issue, because this history is relatively coherent from antiquity to the present in comparison to other fields of study. As a consequence, historians of mathematics have found it to be more legitimate to address transhistorical mathematical problems as addressed across large gaps of time. In venues such as the Archive for History of Exact Sciences, history maintains a sort of unusual

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Projects and Problems as Elements of History

One important theme in the history of science profession is that there is a perceived need for increased methodological sophistication. “We” (as a profession, and as a society) need to “think about science”, or more broadly, “think about knowledge and practice” in different and exciting new ways in order to really get at the history of science, and the relationship between science, technology, and society, and to avoid being misled by dubious scientific or anti-scientific claims.

Methodological sophistication is important. It has only been methodological reflection that warns us against, for example, necessarily regarding “religion” as a “constraint” on “science”, when, for example, theological issues might have been a “resource” in a natural philosophical cosmology. Or, we can now appreciate that the world did not “resist” Einstein’s relativity for some years, but rather that different communities did not understand it as important or germane to their physical projects (following Andrew Warwick on Cambridge physicists, or Peter Galison on Poincaré).

In my opinion, though, methodologically we are generally pretty sound, and have been for at least two decades, if not longer. To continue to act as though methodology were still our most pressing problem is to ignore the question of how we might attain and retain understanding through better historiographical craft. In this respect, there are some areas where we are doing very well, which need to be highlighted for those not working in them, and there are areas where we seem to be actually losing knowledge (as a community, anyway).

Rather than go into specific examples in this post, I would like to lay out what I view as the essential problems of good historiographical craft—the charting of the relationship between historical projects, “problems” in those projects, and the proper handling of the nature and role of context.

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Claims, Authority, and Spheres of Practice, Pt. 2

On initially looking at the articles on sciences in North America that BJHS has made available for free, one possible exercise that occurred to me was to draw some links between the pieces. Perrin Selcer’s piece on “standardizing wounds” in World War I (“the scientific management of life in the First World War”), my piece on World War II operations research, Jeff Hughes’ review of recent a-bomb literature, and Jamie Cohen-Cole’s piece on Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies could conceivably be linked fairly easily.

On a closer look, this exercise seemed to be less potentially useful than I initially imagined. While it might conceivably be possible to connect World War I-era wound treatment standardization to OR’s contributions to military planning, or OR to cognitive science (via decision theory), or, to go down another branch, to connect the treatment standardization issue to Christer Nordlund’s piece on hormone therapies creating improved people, it might not be wise. It would be easy to wave one’s hands around about standardization, flexibility, knowledge, and large-scale practice, but the historical picture produced would, it seems to me, be more misleading than helpful.

Though these papers might all work their way into an edited volume with a sufficiently vague theme, none of them were written with the others in mind (for obvious reasons). Importantly, though, even if the papers were more closely related, it would still be difficult to forge connections between them, because

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Claims, Authority, and Spheres of Practice, Pt. 1

By way of Advances in the History of Psychology, I just found out that, to advertise its articles of interest to historians of North American sciences, the British Journal for the History of Science has made relevant articles available for free [ed., June 2012: these are no longer available]. Among these, it turns out, is my 2007 article, “The Heuristics of War: Scientific Method and the Founders of Operations Research”. I had been thinking about discussing the problem of the authority of science as an issue in history of science writing, and it is actually a point I addressed in this article, so this seems like a good opportunity to talk about it.

My main point of contention in the article was that historiographical preoccupation with problems of boundary dispute and the authority of science had mischaracterized what is important and interesting about the history of wartime OR: “Whether the primary interest has been the deployment of scientific methodologies in new sorts of problems or else the cachet of scientific knowledge as key to scientists’ entry into new arenas of authority, a strong theme in the historiography is that

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Philosophy and the History of Science

In my earlier “pocket history” of the relationship between philosophy, sociology, and history, I noted a few key points:

Philosophers tended to use the history of science as a way to develop the philosophy of science.
Sociologists noticed that there was much in the history of science that did not fit philosophy-based history.
Sociological theories were insufficient to explain the exact path of the history of science, leading some sociologists to develop sociological epistemologies.

What should already be clear is that the history of science cannot work without interrelated philosophical and sociological elements. You don’t really know you know anything unless you can get someone else to agree with you, but you’ll have a harder time commanding agreement unless you can demonstrate that you really do know something.

What is not, I think, entirely clear is how philosophy and sociology combine to create powerful history. Historians have responded to the sociological insights by focusing intently on day-to-day practices. Experimental instrumentation, representation of objects, public lectures all became important parts of the historical examination of

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