Category: Methods

All of the methodological introspection that takes place on this site is done with an eye toward arriving at a sympathetic, charitable, and critical understanding of the way today’s history of science profession works, and to figure out what it does well and also what it does less well.

To this point, much of this introspection has involved intuiting a professional mentality—an understanding of what individual scholars feel they are contributing to the profession as a whole.  I have noted that the way scholars frame and justify their work seems to operate according to an “epistemic imperative”, the idea that what we are saying contributes to a sociological and philosophical understanding of the nature of both elite and public knowledge (thus, the “epistemological problematic“).  Exactly how work is supposed to add up into this understanding is rarely (if ever) made clear (a point also made by Peter Galison in his 10 Questions—I’m not just making this stuff up!).

Lately on this site, we have been exploring other aspects of this mentality, assuming an individualistic rather than a communitarian sensibility.  Here “the “epistemic imperative” becomes less of a serious suggestion for application of the

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I would like to consider the methodological problem of how historians read sources in terms of a tripartite taxonomy of reading attitudes: charitable, skeptical, and critical.  I take a critical reading to be a combined form of charitable and skeptical readings.  For some background, see the brief conversation that developed over at Time to Eat the Dogs.

The prerogative of the historian is to offer a critique of past events, which should be distinguished from criticism.  A critique offers an articulation and analysis of events; it may be accompanied by a criticism, but its primary concern is with arriving at an interpretation which renders the past coherent.  History is a science and not literature insofar as some critiques can render history more coherent than others.  Interpretations of coherence are subject to agreement based on an assessment of:

1. the physical reality of events of the past;
2. the psychological motivations of actors; and, most provisionally…
3. an account of the prerequisites and causes of events.

I take (1) to be reasonably unproblematic, and (3) to be extremely problematic—if ultimately most rewarding—requiring an extensive, complicated, and highly debatable taxonomy of historical “trends” as well as some physical, economic, and sociological theory of how “trends” unfold.

Concerning the possibility of agreement concerning either (1) or (3), historians must deal with the historical record,

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I think Christopher and I are slightly out-of-sync concerning the terminology of historiographic “atavism” (which is his very useful term).  An atavism is a degradation.  If we take the qualities of a historiography to be simply the contents of the historiographical archive, then atavism is impossible, since the archive cannot be destroyed (one would hope).  However, an archive is only as good as an understanding of its contents, meaning that if new historical work consistently fails to engage with its insights, the historiography is degraded simply through lack of use.

Christopher identifies the qualities of writing that he characterizes as “atavistic” scholarship.  My argument would be that certain styles of writing are more apt to risk atavism than others in much the way he describes, but that atavism itself can be traced to no single work.  It is part of the insidiousness of historiographic atavism that no individual can be held responsible for it.

The lack of accountability is related to the technique of “perspective layering”

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Historiographic atavism has the following features. As a way of introducing arguments, an atavistic chain of reasoning takes minimal consideration of the prior formulations or the prior solutions to a specific problematic. Every argument is fundamentally a novel one by virtue of its complexity or its departure from a frame of conceptualization. An atavistic claim can exist only if it reduces a prior body or school of scholarship either to a bare methodology or to a bare summary. This robs previous historiography of the conceptual rigor it rightfully possesses. Historiographic claims, while competing in reality, exist as exemplum in the atavistic narrative. Historiographic atavism is then the instrumental use of previous scholarship, particularly a recovered or hereto underutilized methodology, to underscore the novelty and the complexity of endless and non-reducible particulars. This allows every account to remain particular, correct, locally valid, and non-confrontational. All atavistic arguments present themselves as the most open of all methodologies to critique. The endless nature of the critique and this seeming freedom impedes the formulation of positions, claims, and disciplinary progress.

Historiographic atavism develops from a critical suspension of synthetic narrative. Its antithesis is the “canon.” Its historical subject is the locality. Universality or “synthesis”  is only achieved through the interconnection of  localities. These particulars, interconnected on some level to a defined ‘whole,’ are endlessly (re)producible through the work of textual or material analysis. This analysis produces particular historical subjects that are nonetheless incapable of becoming complementary or subsumable elements

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Recently, I have been advocating a deeper consideration of the importance of maintaining “chronological problematics” in history—in short, the idea that important historiographical topics are revealed and consolidated by arranging them in a coherent and sequential order.  I have taken chronological problematics to be confronted by a predominance of “epistemological problematics” wherein what is necessary is to theorize categories of epistemological practices (observing, communicating, representing, etc.) and then researching and presenting different historical approaches to these practices, creating a “gallery of practices”.

Today, I would like to consider the idea that the relationship between the gallery of practices and any sort of problematics is purely implicit.  Being implicit, there is no sense of historiographical responsibility to resolving problematics.  In place of this commitment is what I like to call the “Rashomon posture” (Christopher prefers “Ghost Dog”).

Would you believe a history written by Toshiro Mifune?

In Rashomon (see the Kurusawa film trailer here), conflicting, self-interested perspectives in a murder trial present no possibility of reconciliation, leading those who hear of the trial into despair about the possibility of truth and the human capacity for goodness.  For examples of the Rashomon posture on history of science blogs, or at least a nod toward it, see Michael Gordin’s Hump-Day History post on Dmitrii Mendeleev; or Michael Robinson’s post “The Smudgy Window of History”, especially the last paragraph; or History of Economics Playground where we can replace Rashomon with Lawrence Durrell.

The idea behind the Rashomon posture is to sanction a vision of historiographical responsibility wherein study can be layered on top of other studies, each espousing a different perspective on the past, none of them advocating a set

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Moving temporarily away from the methodological discussion on what responsibilities historical works have toward historiography, I would like to discuss some problems related to the similarities and differences between scientific knowledge, philosophy, ideas, and rhetoric in a very preliminary fashion.

The relationship between these categories varies markedly between times and subject matters.  In the 17th and 18th centuries, there was no steady distinction between “science” and “natural philosophy”.  The literature on “humans and nature” sits at a busy intersection between the sciences of biology and ecology, the impact of humans on their environment, the modern environmentalist movement, the history of human ideas about “nature”, and so forth. Many ideas in areas like psychology and medicine have often had a strong correlation with ideas held in society more broadly.  The problem should provide good fodder for posts moving forward.

Today I’ll consider some distinctions based upon the way these things are accepted and travel.  I think that we can say that “ideas” have a literary quality in that they can travel, be picked up, transformed, and deployed

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