History and Historiography of Science

HSS Highlights

Only a few cacti were seen in downtown Phoenix, and I am jealous of those who got a chance to get out of the city.

In the narrow space between my HSS trip, and an upcoming Thanksgiving trip, I wanted to quickly fit in a quick recap of some of the highlights of HSS.

Indiana University’s Bill Newman introduced the winner of this year’s lifetime-achievement Sarton Medal, John Murdoch.  Murdoch works on medieval and ancient science in a history of philosophy vein.  He came to Harvard in 1957, and when I was there (2002-07) his courses were of a rather different mode of pedagogy than the rest of the department.  As a 20th-century historian, I didn’t know him very well personally, but it was good to see HSS sustaining its effort to recognize and promote intellectual and philosophical history, and to bring it back into the mainstream of what we do.

[Edit, October 2011: John Murdoch died in September 2010.  An eloge written by Newman (paywall) appears in the September 2011 Isis.]

One of the big difficulties of keeping specialized intellectual history in the mainstream of a profession that has—rightly—branched out into cultural history, is how to make that work understandable and usable to those who aren’t intensively engaged with it.  On this note, I was enthused to learn about Newman’s web project,  “The Chymistry of Isaac Newton” (aka chymistry.org).

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By the Time I Get to Phoenix

Just a quick note to say I won’t be doing any posting until next week, because I’ll be at the History of Science Society conference in Phoenix.  I’ll be presenting my paper, “The Past, Present, and Future of West Antarctica: Research on the Behavior of a Continent, 1957-1990,” in the Saturday morning session, as part of the panel “Producing Knowledge for Policy: Research Program Planning and Scientific Assessments”.  Other presenters are Clark Miller, Keynyn Brysse, and Jessy O’Reilly (who is working on the integration of WAIS research into climate change assessments).  Naomi Oreskes, UCSD historian and scholar on the science, politics, and rhetoric of climate change, will be doing commentary.  The full program in pdf is here.

Now, because I can already feel the impatient demand for a YouTube clip from America’s finest era of woodenly-produced televised entertainment:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUg5p3BncuQ]

Chris Renwick on the History of Thinking about Science

Today we have the second guest post by Chris Renwick, who starting in January will be a lecturer in modern British history at the University of York.

In one way or another, most approaches to history of science share a common intellectual assumption: that science can be related to the contexts in which it is produced, even if historians can’t agree about what’s important when talking about those contexts. Indeed, such is the importance of this contextualist point that it is often seen as a crucial moment in moving history of science away from the wholly discredited study of great men and their ideas. When, though, did this shift take place and who was responsible for it?

Ever since I started out as graduate student, I’d assumed, like many others, that the effort to relate science and its contexts was originally the gift of Karl Marx and Marxism. After all, who doesn’t know the story of the letter in which Marx explained how Charles Darwin had transplanted Victorian society onto the natural world (though, for the record, the letter we always attribute to Marx was actually written by Engels) or the legend of Russian physicist Borris Hessen’s presentation on Isaac Newton to the Second International Congress of the History of Science at the Science Museum in London in 1931? However, in considering this issue recently I’ve come to the conclusion that something is missing from our understanding of the history of history of science and that it tells us something important about the intellectual trajectory of the field.

Ashley Montagu (1905-1999)
Ashley Montagu (1905-1999)

Part of what sparked my interest in this issue was a 1952 book, entitled Darwinism: Competition and Cooperation, by the British-American anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who played a leading role in the production of the famous 1950 UNESCO statement on race. In that book, Montagu argued that it wasn’t Marx or Marxists who first grasped how to relate science to its socioeconomic contexts but Patrick Geddes—the Scottish biologist, sociologist, and town planner whom I’ve spent a great deal of time studying (see pages 29 to 31 in particular). To illustrate his point, Montagu picked out a passage from Geddes’ late 1880s article on “Biology” for Chamber’s Encyclopaedia:

The substitution of Darwin for Paley as the chief interpreter of the order of nature is currently regarded as the displacement of an anthropomorphic view by a purely scientific one: a little reflection, however, will show that what has actually happened has been merely the replacement of the anthropomorphism of the eighteenth century by that of the nineteenth. For the place vacated by Paley’s theological and metaphysical explanation has simply been occupied by that suggested to Darwin and Wallace by Malthus in terms of the

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Blog Watch: STS Observatory

A quick note to direct attention to Jon Agar’s rapid-fire series on science in 2008-2009 over at UCL’s STS Observatory.  The blog was extremely quiet over the summer, so if you’re not a regular visitor, it’s worth checking back in.  Essentially, Agar (who just took over editing the British Journal for the History of Science, by the way) is testing out material for the end of his new book on Science in the Twentieth Century (see his intro post here).  It’s a useful exercise to see what one might imagine constitutes a snapshot of “science” at a point in time at this point in history.  Early posts focused on headline-grabbers, but the last couple of posts are taking a bit more of a systematic or nuts-and-bolts approach to the subject matter.

Foucault, Ginzburg, Latour, and the Gallery

This post is an expansion on my previous post on Lorraine Daston’s discussion of the proliferation of microhistories that are “archivally based and narrated in exquisite detail” but that seem to serve no clear end.  I largely agree with her assessment of this trend as an unsatisfactory state of affairs, as well as with her linking of the trend to a divergence from a prior era of productive dialogue with the other fields of science studies.  However, she makes two key claims with which I disagree:

  1. “…in large part because of the mandate to embed science in context, historians of science have become self-consciously disciplined, and the discipline to which they have submitted themselves is history” (808).
  2. “Insofar as there has been a counterweight to these miniaturizing tendencies in recent work in the history of science, it has been supplied not by science studies but by a still more thoroughgoing form of historicism, namely, the philosophical history of Michel Foucault” (809).

I do not believe historians of science have in some way exchanged science studies for history, and I believe the historicism associated here with Foucault represents a continuity with the scholarship of the ’80s.

Let’s start with the intertwined set of highly productive conversations that took place around the ’80s (which we are beginning to revisit on this blog, and of which Daston was a part).  Participants understood their gains to be generated by studying things like “practice not ideas”, “instruments”, “cultures of the fact” and so forth, which are slogans that make sense if you have a

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Daston on the Current Situation

Cheers to Darin Hayton over at PACHSmörgåsbord for keeping his eye on Critical Inquiry, where, in a nicely timed coincidence, Lorraine Daston has a new article (paywall protected), “Science Studies and the History of Science,” dedicated to many of the same issues we regularly explore here.  Take a look if you can.

Daston notes—and I concur—that after a brief period of lively interaction, history of science and science studies drifted apart in the 1990s.  In the article, Daston portrays the science studies disciplines as listless and adrift, while the history of science has fled for the greener pastures of straight history, a move that has placed the history of science on safer, but tamer ground (the history of science now lacks “a certain yeastiness that at once intrigued and rattled the neighboring disciplines of history, philosophy, and sociology, as well as the sciences” p. 811, fn).

According to Daston (echoing a point made in Objectivity and in co-author Galison’s “Ten Problems”), “Gone are the case studies in support of one or another grand philosophical or sociological generalization about the nature of science; in their place a swarm of microhistories have descended, often archivally based and narrated in exquisite detail” (809).  I agree with the sentiment, but Daston believes the current passion for archive-mongering indicates our dedication to historiographical methodology—she notes the “improved craftsmanship of [our] footnotes”.  This serves mainly to

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Revised Manifesto

I’ve been past due in revising this blog’s mission in light of better articulations of what it is I want to achieve with it and why, and why I’m critical in the ways that I am.  Not mentioned is that the blog is intended mainly to revise my own thinking in a way that if others are interested in what I’m thinking about, they can have access to it.  But, hey, aim high, right?  Also, there is now no mention of the blog dealing with the concerns of early-career scholars, nor who can be a contributor (seeing as we have not exactly been flooded with requests!).  The new “manifesto” with updated contributor biographies can be found in the About tab.

Science in the History of Science: An Opposing Perspective

A couple of weeks ago, I approved of outgoing HSS president Jane Maienschein’s desire to put more science back into the history of science, while suggesting that the difficulties in doing so were more deep-seated than is perhaps generally appreciated.  I thought it was odd to have to defend the idea that scientific ideas should be at the core of the history of science profession, but there are indeed opposing views.  Darin Hayton at PACHSmörgåsbord, the blog of the Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science, offers one here.

Hayton’s position seems to be that because science is a cultural activity, and because “science” can only be defined epistemologically, a history focused around the history of “science” can only be defined around retrospective constructs of what properly constitutes scientific topics.  By insisting that science is culture, the knowledge of properly scientific cultures becomes just one kind of knowledge among many.  Thus, by including other cultures arbitrarily excluded in philosophical definitions of science, the discipline can be opened up to include such historically important but epistemologically unvalidated topics as astrology, demonology, and witchcraft.

I would like to respond with three observations.

First, Hayton seems most exercised by the possibility that advocacy for intellectual aspects of history has consequences for valid subject matters of historical inquiry.  He therefore supports a definition of the history of science that opens the field up to practically any topic whatsoever. 

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Hump-Day Hiatus

We’re almost a year into our hump-day history project here at Ether Wave Propaganda.  We’ve farmed a few out (and are still hoping to farm more out), and Chris has been a big help in putting together some posts in the course of his own diverse researches.  Personally, I’ve learned an awful lot, and I’m happy to note that the series has been our most popular, and it keeps our archived posts in healthy exercise.  However, it’s also a hell of a lot of work getting up to speed on topics, especially when one reaches outside one’s specialty, and to try and be at least somewhat fair to a topic and its literature.  We’ve left a lot of areas ill-covered.  Biology has, for the most part, proven too intimidating and foreign a literature for me to venture into.

Anyway, getting the posts in on time has been a spotty affair lately, and I’m moving from my current apartment down to Capitol Hill next week—sadly, the historian of physics will no longer live on Newton Street!  That’s going to take up time.  Plus I’m frankly a bit fatigued with research and need to keep my eye closely on the ball with some projects at work that are coming to a boil at the moment, so cushy postdoc intellectual detours will have to take a back seat.  Long story short, it’s a good time to take a little break.  Like James Bond, Hump-Day History will return, possibly under a less taxing name, in a few weeks.  In the meantime, we’ll keep posting in other series at regular intervals, Chris might have a primer or two to post, and, if you’re hankering for some mathematics and astronomy primers, particularly in the Renaissance and early modern periods—another area where we’re a bit sparse—frequent commenter Thony C has been issuing some nice posts at his blog The Renaissance Mathematicus.  Do check it out if you haven’t already.

We Like Science (we just don’t believe in it)

I generally don’t worry too much about contemporary science issues on this blog, but a recent poll from the Pew Research Center (pdf), in conjunction with the AAAS, brought to my attention by Physics Today, seems to bear relevance for issues pertinent to what the public objectives of science communication (including science studies work) ought to be, as well as on the problem of what tea leaves we can read to divine the character of the relationship between science and society.  The results are interesting.

First off: Americans like science!  Fully 84% of people surveyed think science has a “mostly positive” effect on society; and 70% think scientists contribute “a lot” to society’s well-being, behind only teachers (77%) and members of the military (84%).  No word on historians….

Interestingly, only 17% think that American science is the best in the world (relating to how frequently we’re told we’re falling behind?)  47% think American science is “above average”. (The numbers are rather higher when scientists themselves are polled.)  Since 1999 America’s achievements in science and technology has slipped from 47% thinking it is this nation’s “greatest achievement” to only 27%, but it still tops any other individual response.  Civil rights, incidentally, rose from 5% to 17%.

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