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What happens when historians stop being polite…

…and start getting REAL! It’s a nice question, and a theoretical one, since historians of science, at least, tend to be a very polite lot who rarely question one another’s approach. Instead, we throw around words like “fascinating” and “suggestive”, and then go do our own thing. This is the great thing about the history of science, in that it’s a sort of meeting ground for a lot of different fields, and it’s very easy to choose what group you want to engage with. So it’s also sort of like a high school lunchroom (or MTV’s The Real World), I guess. Of course, the history of science isn’t a huge field to begin with, so further fracturing can make your intellectual circle very small indeed, and that bothers me.

The reason for this situation seems to be, go figure, deeply embedded in the history of the field (the quirks of which are well explored in John Zammito’s A Nice Derangement of Epistemes, which should really be required reading for science studies grad students). I was a history major as an undergrad, and so I basically expected the history of science to be similar. False presumption. The history of science is a field stemming from the philosophy and sociology of science, and has not typically reflected a traditional historical methodology. History, rather, has been a tool that has been used to get at the nature of science–which is a line of thought stemming from the work of the Vienna Circle and other positivists (see Zammito).

Now, motivations for getting at the nature of science have been varied. The British history of science school back in the ’60s was heavily influenced by Marxist thought filtered through the communist crystallographer J. D. Bernal, and his circle. They saw the progress of science as inevitably tied to social priorities, and wanted to reform scientific institutions to suit their Marxist agenda. Followers of this school were appalled by the rise of the Edinburgh School and SSK, which sought a more detached perspective on how science is done, without the political concerns of the Marxists. However, fresher generations of critical theorists saw tight links between the “social constructionism” preached by the SSK’ers and the critiques of French theorists like Foucault. They used the history of science to demonstrate how science as a font of legitimizing authority reinforced dominant social notions. (This clearly links to my earlier point about the Cold War historiography, and I would be remiss at least not to mention Paul Edwards’ The Closed World at some point–we can talk about that later, though).

Learning about this history has made it much easier for me to understand the books that I am reading, and reinforces why it is so important to go back to the originals to see what they have to say–because their point of view is usually a lot more nuanced than they are in the straw man form given to them by later critics. I always feel bad for Tom Kuhn, because the guy had some good insights on the development of ideas, but his original motivations have not been so important to the people who implicate him in some of these other agendas. (I link to Steve Fuller here, but one should also mention Al Gore, whose PR work on climate change is admirable–but the inspiration he draws from Kuhn is pretty bizarre).

If you thought this blog was “meta” before….

Today I want to ask “what are we doing here?” When we set out to write history, what do we hope to accomplish? There are clearly a lot of different answers that historians can give to this question, and before I go into them, I want to say that I think they are all legitimate. But I also want to emphasize that historians need to think deeply about what they are trying to accomplish, and that they try to make their goals (and audiences) more explicit. The reason is because all histories are, in some way, imbalanced, and while this imbalance has a lot to do with limitations in resources, it also has to do with differences in goals. But these imbalanced histories can be picked up by historians with an alternative set of goals and incorporated into their histories without reflection.

Let’s be more concrete. Some historians are interested in entertaining their audiences. Entertainment usually involves making one’s broad audience feel comfortable, and so historians will pick familiar figures for incorporation into their studies, will repeat familiar notions, and will favor amusing anecdotes rather than strive to represent “typicality”; and they will hype the importance of their subject (“the X that changed the world!”). That’s fine–it sells books, gets people interested, and that’s a goal I don’t begrudge.

Other historians are interested in advancing a political program of some kind. They will highlight previously marginalized topics that have not been appreciated, and, possibly, they will demonstrate how the discourses of dominant classes have conspired to conceal the history they want to tell.

I consider myself to be an analytical historian, which involves trying to assess the importance of certain subjects within certain contexts, separating what was typical from what was exceptional, and so forth.

Finally (although I’m sure one could go on), you have philosophical historians, who use case studies to highlight the way something works.

Now, historians write histories, but it is the community of historians that writes the historiography (“the literature”). In the next post, I’m going to talk about how the history of science is a field that attracts historians with remarkably diverse agendas, why this is good, why it is potentially debilitating, and how a realization of the nature of this intellectual terrain has been an essential part of my education as an historian.

The 20th century turning point presumption

Picking up on the thread about science and polity, let’s take a look at the granddaddy book on the subject, Leviathan and the Air Pump, and specifically that famous final paragraph ending in “Hobbes was right” (in a chapter entitled “The Polity of Science” by the way):

[In the seventeenth century] a new social order emerged together with the rejection of an old intellectual order. In the late twentieth century that settlement is, in turn, being called into serious question. Neither our scientific knowledge, nor the constitution of our society, nor traditional statements about the connections between our society and our knowledge are taken for granted any longer. As we come to recognize the conventional and artifactual status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know.

We can find a similar argument in Yaron Ezrahi’s (lamentably out of print) The Descent of Icarus, and at least implied in numerous other works (thanks to Paul Erickson for turning me on to Ezrahi, by the way). Tom Hughes, for example, in Rescuing Prometheus, argues that large engineering projects had to be augmented by “postmodern” methods, such as participatory planning.

Now, these are some really good books, but I really think that this underlying idea about some mid-to-late twentieth century turning point (beyond modernity/faith-in-sci-tech?) is a really, really weird argument. I want to speculate it has to do with an academia-based focus on Enlightenment models of knowledge, as well as presumptions, such as those alluded to in the post about “Cold War” science. This focus contrasts with broader attitudes that seem to be based on alternative presumptions about institutional arrangements (rather than being totally naive of postmodern insights, as the literature often seems to imply). This gets back to Continental vs. English systems of governance and law, but, as usual, I’ll leave this point dangling.

The “Golden Age” of Industrial Research

In preparation for an oral history interview I am going to be doing tomorrow, I have been reading a 2004 interview a couple of other historians did with John Armstrong, a major figure in IBM research, who had some considered and very interesting opinions on a “Golden Age of Industrial Research” in the postwar era. By his reckoning, idealism about this age is highly misleading. What he believes has generally driven the idea that it was “golden” is that academic scientists were able to identify industrial research as being something that resembled their own work and that absorbed their own (increasingly large) supply of students (Dave Kaiser–once again–has some good upcoming work on the intellectual ramifications of the postwar physics “bubble”). It is these academics who have typically spoken and written the most, and thus set the terms of discourse.

He claims, though, that this recognizably academic-style arrangement within an industrial setting did little for American industry and economy (that could not have had a more substantial impact on the nation in an alternative setting), because researchers given free rein were so frequently out-of-tune with company goals. It is his claim that this point-of-view is not controversial within industrial research and management culture, but that academic scientists still hold it to be true (update: on practical relevance of this view for current education, it is worth looking at his piece, “Rethinking the Ph.D.” in the summer ’94 issue of Issues in Science and Technology).

Armstrong attributes the postwar arrangement to a misplaced faith in the linear model of science and technology, where investment in pure research is supposed to lead directly to technological applications. This argument, however, feeds what could very well be a common misperception–David Edgerton has argued that the “linear model did not exist”. What Edgerton means by this is that the idea that postwar institutional arrangements and science policy were based on an idea that science flowed downhill into technology is false. No important figure actually held such beliefs. A more typical point of view was that it was a good idea for applied science communities to have access to more theoretical forms of knowledge, and vice versa. Yet, the institutionalization of these arrangements–whether industrial laboratories should have their own “basic research” staff; or closer liaison should be kept with academic laboratories–remained undecided. Armstrong clearly prefers more recent arrangements favoring industrial concentration on development, with more basic research based in the academy. (I defer discussion of “what is basic research, and is it OK to talk about it in such terms” to another time.)

Of course, this issue is not cut and dry since industrial secrecy requirements could hamper the value of basic research for industrial laboratories, but I’ll reserve discussion of these issues for another time, since there are some interesting trans-Atlantic comparisons that deserve exploration in depth.

Philosophy, Historiography, and “Cold War” science

In yesterday’s post I sounded a fairly philosophical note, wondering about the epistemological differences between matters of fact and insights. Ultimately, though, I don’t really want to worry too much about arriving at a correct “nature of science”; instead I want to look at what our presumptions about the nature of science mean for the act of writing history. My own area of expertise is the 20th century, where questions of science and power loom very large (though the “science and empire” issue is dominated by a similar question). A common presumption is that in the 20th century, particularly in America, science boasted a strong claim to authority based on its ability to validate knowledge as “fact”. In particular, studies of the social and policy sciences have tended to stress the notion that a generic scientific method (or, in history of technology variations, “technology”) could offer “objective” solutions to America’s various problems. Similar claims have been made about high level scientific advisers–especially on questions of nuclear policy.

I find this historiography unbearably fuzzy. We find a few scientists making recommendations in one place. We find some government policies (that we probably don’t like) in another. We find some funding connecting government to these scientific studies. Suddenly we have a very large regime of science that we tend to analyze, en masse, through a “Cold War” lens. I tend to resist labeling science post-1945 as “Cold War” era science, because historiography using that label tends to gravitate automatically to historicization within the Cold War context, even as we continue to know next to nothing about the intellectual motivations behind that same science. The Cold War was certainly important, but by no means was it everything as far as science in that period is concerned.

With this post I’ve been doing a lot of hand waving. In future posts, I’ll take a look at some more specific works, as well as elaborate on how the “matter of fact” vs. “insight” issue bears on this question.

As a matter of fact….

Our subject is the “matter of fact”. Specifically, I’d like to start a line of thought about the role of the matter of fact in science historiography, and the notion of science as a truth-producing enterprise. The SSK program built an entire industry around tying the production of scientific facts to its political and cultural context–quite successfully, I might add. In my upcoming course the relationship between science and polity will be a theme that I continually revisit. Yet, I’ve never been able to shake the idea that the notion of science as producing or validating truth claims has always been taken a little bit too seriously. Painting science as an absolutist enterprise (whether in a positive or a negative sense) has always struck me as a fairly Continental concern, from Descartes to the Enlightenment to the postmodernists and deconstructionists, to Latour’s insistence that we need a “new constitution”.

This concern, while recognized in Anglophone thought, has never seemed to gain much intellectual traction outside of certain theory communities. Why is it that our society is so blasé about scientism? (Outside of a due caution against dogmatism, I think this is actually the correct stance). Does it have something to do with the differences between English polity and legal theory versus Roman and Napoleonic models? This issue is clearly too big to develop in just one post, so I’d just like to begin by suggesting the need to consider the epistemological differences between the matter of fact and the insight. We’ve seen a lot of scholarship on the former, but I have seen far less of the latter despite the common usage of the word “insight” to imply something other than “fact” or “truth”.

The Internet in the History of Science

To start 2008, I’ve decided to start this blog, which I’ve been thinking about for a while now. One thing that is now very clear is that the internet has the potential to transform how the academic world works. I think in the sciences, this potential is already being realized. Maybe the most prominent example is the physics Arxiv, which is a portal that physicists use to distribute journal article preprints. Of course, throughout the 20th century, physicists relied on interpersonal connections to distribute their ideas, often in the form of preprint articles, as much as they did journal circulation. Dave Kaiser’s book on the dispersion of Feynman diagrams describes this process very nicely. This process meets its logical end in the ArXiv.

What about the humanities? I think the internet provides an ideal location to organize factual knowledge in a way that one rarely finds in scholarly books. Because the premium is now on coming up with highly analytical arguments, the factual background on which those arguments are (hopefully) based is often lost. At the moment, I’m starting a new project at the AIP History Center to link together in a centralized place prominent physicists, their institutions, and research projects, along with pertinent facts (e.g. dates of residence) in a way that no existing print resource does. At the moment this knowledge is attained by scholars in an ad hoc manner as they research individual projects. I think we could do much better work if we had access to a topographical map of the physics community. But I also think the act of making this resource will also reveal important trends in the creation of physics elites, and I hope to do some writing on this in the next couple of years (see John Lankford’s admirable book on the 19th and early 20th century American astronomy community for a similar motivation. I plan to discuss this book a bit more in a future post).

I’d like to point to a couple of nice resources already available: The Galileo Project and The Newton Project. Also, take a look at the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England and the Mathematics Genealogy Project, which are two different example that bear some resemblance to what I would like to do with 20th century physics, although I’d like to do this in not quite so thorough a way given the reams of information available! Of course, Wikipedia provides a nice template and already has some nice cross-referenced information on scientists, but somehow I think having institutional direction would help keep the project focused, disciplined and quality-controlled. I’m not quite sure what I mean by this, and my boss, Spencer, and I have thought that some form of public interactivity would be interesting. Of course, I also think more blogs would be a good thing, too. In any case, it seems pretty clear to me that the current focus on journal/book publication will be supplemented and reconfigured in very significant ways in the coming years. We should be discussing what exactly is going to happen more often.

About This Blog

I’m launching this blog because there doesn’t seem to be any really major history of science blogs out there, because I think it would be nice a place where historians of science can discuss issues in public without having to go through the lengthy journal article process, and because I’m going to be lecturing an introduction to the history of science this spring at the University of Maryland, and I’d like a space where I can talk a little bit about the background of each lecture–texts I relied on to write it, prominent issues and so forth. I’ll also be talking a little bit about my current projects; mostly I want to discuss underlying issues. Hopefully, after a little while, some friends in the profession will be interested in joining, and this project can grow. But for the time being I’ll just consider it a thinking tool.