Category: Uncategorized

I like to think that every time we sit down to write we have some implicit or explicit justification for what we are about to write. That there is some sort of economic reasoning as to why we choose to write about one topic rather than another. Now, in almost every single history of science seminar I’ve ever been to, more than 3/4 of HSS presentations, and almost every single article in our flagship journals deals with a narrowly focused case study on a topic of no obvious general interest. Aside from the fact that this style of history is an established tradition, what is the justification? Why is case history supposed to be so compelling? What are we supposed to get out of these presentations that connects up with our larger knowledge?

One argument is that it’s Baconian empirical study. Eventually, we’ll be able to make some bigger claim once we’ve been through enough microscopic study. I think empirical study of areas we know little about is tremendously important to the production of good, new scholarship. But, in terms of presentation style, this defies any efficient economy of writing–if you’re going to present to a broad audience (in a department seminar or in a journal), why bother everyone with the petty details?

My more cynical theory is that these studies are self-justified because they address naive positions that for some reason we think need to be addressed, that is, there’s a notion that because “people” think “science” proceeds independent of context or that it proceeds in a progressive fashion, it is therefore worthwhile to present a study showing how, to pick one of my favorite targets, some obscure 19th century natural history served the agenda of British imperialism. But, by “people” I think we mean Robert Merton or somebody nobody ever reads anymore, who supposedly represents some sort of default way that people think about science.

Is “everyone” supposed to have read Merton? Or did Merton (or maybe those pesky textbook history boxes) penetrate the “public” imagination in a way that newer science studies people have yet to do, but if we only present enough department seminars we are sure to?

I don’t buy it. Nobody in the intended audience ever has any such notion of a context-independent or purely progressive science. So why undertake the study? To further reinforce what we already know about “how science works”? To make ourselves feel good by intellectually combating the evils produced by the alliance between science and 19th century imperialism (or the Cold War, or the evils of technocratic thinking, or whatever)? I can see how such things were refreshing given the state of the historiography 20-30 years ago, but why today?

I’m totally open to a good answer to this question. It’s pretty rude to ask it in seminars, so hopefully this is a good forum. I’m not against the obscure case study in principle, but I think we ought to be explicit about why our case studies matter, and what they tell us that we don’t already know. I’ll leave a comment justifying one of my forthcoming case studies.

Check out the commentary over at the Copenhagen Medical Museion blog that is critical of the recent “Things That Talk/Think/Act/etc…” trend in history of sci/tech/med writing. There are two posts, linked-to directly here and here. We are also now linking to their blog at the left, as well as the new University of Minnesota History of Science, Technology, and Medicine blog. Anything associated with my home state excites me, so this is great–hopefully they’ll come up with some good stuff for the broader community, but pictures of broomball outings are always cool, too. Lamentably we never did anything like that at Harvard.

Thanks Will for inviting me to this online forum. I am glad to provide some contrast and ahem, some color to this discussion on history, pedagogy, and what it means to be a young scholar working in academia in a slew of historically-related fields. I think it is great that there are more and more graduate students and scholars who are interested in pushing the boundaries of how we write, teach, and conceive of history either in the classroom, in a dissertation, or in an academic community as a whole.

Will and I actually first met in a history of physics class at MIT. I think I was the only non history of science person in that class (by history of science, I am also including a number of STS people as well). The class covered Cold War American physics and was a great exercise in seeing how historians of science pursued their topics, articulated their arguments, and focused on science as theories, experiments, institutional developments, and as visual practices and representations.

Regarding Will’s earlier post, I find that philosophy and literary theory do tend to make themselves quite prominent in the field of architectural history, which is what I am currently pursuing. They also tend to find their ways into art history as well. I think Will’s idea of philosophy and literature is still somewhat mixed together. One can find both transhistorical questions and the constructions of categories (subjectivity, bio-life, politics of the image, phenomenology of space) in both areas. Again, I am also using philosophy and literature here as somewhat generalized fields of study. Foucault as a philosopher employing history is one thing, and Stephen Greenblatt on history is something different altogether. For example, I think New Historicism is something that a lot of different graduate students study – those in comparative literature, art history, history, etc. Hayden White’s work also attracts many types of readers. Another instance of this trans-disciplinary concept is the formation of the canon, a known set of universalized standards that are taught as being the exemplary works in a discipline, whether it be a Manet or a novel by Toni Morrison.

I am not sure if I quite like the term transhistorical – I think history operates both in the macro, long durée and in the micro moment. Trans implicates that one is breaching a temporal protocol in examining a historical event or phenomena. Examining “how disciplines develop” can also be an exercise in institutional history. How did biology develop as a classroom curriculum in 1950s America is also a story about how a discipline develops.

I just re-read Will’s line about sociologists of science and putting them into this philosophical category of history…I’m sure that they too would have something against being put into this box. Anthropologists of science have their methods and uses of history as well. Most of them, however, rely mainly on ethnographic evidence and interviews for their work.

I do agree with Will on finding concrete facts and archival evidence to fill out these seemingly meta-narratives that rely on conceptual questions rather than the who, what, where, how and why of how something occurred. It is also tough to write an excellent history with an innovative intepretation of facts. The historiography that currently exists in the history of science is now filled with these books that are much more provocative in their historical interpretation and use of sources. I personally think that this combination of broader questions about concepts in the history of science coupled with good original research is where the field is headed next…

Welcome Jenny! Also, welcome to all the people showing up on our map. Looks like we’ve got some interested readers from all over the place, even some international visitors. Excellent!

I just thought I’d say a few more words about what I mean about philosophy/literature vs. history; since these are probably some overly coarse categories. When I talk about philosophy, I mean the use of history to illustrate transhistorical questions (or at least long-term questions) of “how disciplines develop”, “how experiments end”, “how facts are constructed” and that sort of thing, so I’d throw the sociologists of science into this philosophy category as well (which I know can be like putting cats and dogs together in the same box, but, to an historian, they can appear to have similar uses for history). What I mean by literature, I tend to mean Foucauldian archeology type questions, like tracing “how objectivity is considered”, “how the body is represented”, “how the notion of space evolves”. I see the categories as blending when narratives are constructed, say, about “how the social construction of facts differed in 17th century England versus in 19th century France as represented in the language of etiquette in scientific texts”.

I’m not so interested in these questions. They’re important, but, as someone coming straight from history, I want to know “what was Warren Weaver thinking when he wrote ‘Comments on a General Theory of Air Combat’ and how does that relate to his partnership to Claude Shannon?” or “What happened to physics in the twentieth century?” The philosophical/literary questions can have a lot of impact on these more directly historical kinds of questions–our historiography has become much more effective because of their development over the last 20-30 years–but to arrive at satisfactory answers, we also need more concrete narratives filled with specific events and individual motivations. That’s the sort of history I like to write, and that I think is the most relevant to outsiders. I see the philosophy/literature angle as more of a means to an end than an end in and of itself. Others disagree.

Awhile ago now I was discussing the need for historians with different intellectual agendas to make their agendas clearer in their writing, and how the history of science, as a small field, has an unusually dense number of agendas–pop history, philosophical/literary studies, advocacy, historical analysis, etc. I would tend to say that the bulk of the history of science most of us read focuses on iconic case studies, which has essentially nailed the field into a case study mode of writing. The tensions created by this mode usually pass without mention making it difficult for a coherent historiography to emerge. And part of the reason for this blog is to think about ways the historiography can start telling narratives again–whether in writing, or by designing classes (which dominates my time, and thus, blog posts these days).

However, I’ve found,that whenever I’ve amicably clashed with historians with different styles and agendas, the result has usually been fruitful. I mentioned yesterday that my TA has this sort of philosophical/literary streak. He can go on for ages about the role of shipwreck in science-related literature, and I think he’s been peppering my students with Augustine even now that we’re into the 1600s. But he’s a great TA, and gives the student a very different view of things. Similarly, I have a pair of papers under review that I wrote with Lambert Williams, who is definitely concerned with philosophy-related issues–“how disciplines develop” and that sort of thing. He has a conference coming up this spring that will include philosophers and art historians and the like on the decoherence of disciplines. I’ve always enjoyed working with him.

But, this enjoyment inevitably results from the clash–you just can’t be exposed to the ideas; there has to be a tension, where you feel that your point of view is actually better than theirs, which is an attitude that is usually frowned upon in my experience in academia. But I find if you trust the person enough to remain friendly with you after all is said and done, you really gain from the experience.

It’s in this spirit that I eagerly await the arrival of our new poster, Jenny Ferng, a grad student at MIT currently residing in Paris, whom I know from my time in grad school. She melds the studies of architecture and science, and definitely fits in the philosophy/literature mold. I don’t think our object is to butt heads here, exactly, but hopefully we’ll get some fun contrast when we both talk (more or less) about the subject of how to write better history, which is what this blog’s all about.

One thing’s that’s amazed me in the academic world is the ability to get free books. When I used to be a TA, I got free copies of the books used in the course. Then, a book review opportunity came my way, and I got a free copy of Hunter Crowther-Heyck’s biography of Herbert Simon (a nicely done book–I’d like to talk about it when I come back around to 20th century historiography). Then, lo and behold, yesterday a textbook mysteriously appears in my campus mailbox, Frederick Gregory’s Natural Science in Western History. Apparently publishers send professors books that they might consider assigning in their classes. For some reason, all this publisher largess still really strikes me as weird. (Being so recently out of grad school, where you generally have to pay for everything yourself, I’m pretty naive about the business world, and the extent to which people find it profitable to cover the expenses of others, and to give them free things of greater value than a keychain).

Anyway, this adds to the list of available textbooks one might use in a history of science course. I haven’t had a chance to look it over in detail, but it appears pretty comprehensive and has a sophisticated view of most things you’d want to talk about, though this diminishes as time passes. For instance, it’s clear we still can’t tell coherent narratives about 20th century science–this textbook (and the historiography in general) seems to imply that more than half of it had to do with atomic bombs.

But I don’t think I’d use this text, mainly because it looks like a science textbook or a high school history textbook, with sections only a few paragraphs in length, and some illustrations of experiments that look like they were done with Microsoft Paint. The reason I like Dear is because it’s a textbook that doesn’t feel like a textbook. It follows more in the vain of the better history overviews, like the aforementioned history of Ireland by R. F. Foster. And, according to my TA, the students are now showing that they’re entirely capable of handling the material in the more scholarly format it’s being presented in.

So, the new Isis (December ’07) just found its way to my desk. It contains an article on 19th century natural history, and an article linking science and empire (although American, not British here). I always get the profoundest sense of deja vu whenever one of these suckers arrives for some odd reason.

More off the beaten track is an article on the teaching of science within the mid-twentieth century American Catholic context, but, I have to confess, I’m not exactly dropping everything else in my rush to read it.

I’ve been wondering since yesterday if I was being ridiculous in claiming that the 20th century represented a return to a medieval model intertwining natural knowledge with mainstream thought. If this argument were to have any legs at all, I would have to say that there would have to be two turning points. First, science would have to turn away from mainstream philosophy. I think you could argue that the 17th century turn to mechanism represented such a point–natural philosophy turned toward an instrumental sort of knowledge (I think this is borrowing off of Peter Dear). I think you could then argue that it takes until the 2oth century for instrumental knowledge to really enter the mainstream of economic and political life, although this probably happens earlier in England, and, to a lesser extent, Germany and France.

Anyway, I doubt this line of thought is really worth pursuing, but that’s what blogs are for.