Uncategorized – Page 3 – Ether Wave Propaganda

Introducing The Grote Club / William McDougall on Psychology, Rationality, Childhood, and Civilization (Part 1)

The Grote Club, a new intellectual history project with Simon Cook (of Ye Machine) and John Gibbins. From the site:

John Grote, born in 1813, was Knightbridge Professor of Moral Science at the University of Cambridge from 1855 until his death in 1866. During this period he was head of the new faculty of moral science and, in so doing, set the study of psychology, logic, and the social sciences in Cambridge on a course into the modern age.

During his stewardship of the moral sciences Grote held weekly discussion meetings at his home in the village of Trumpington. After his death these meetings continued, usually held in the college rooms of one or other member of what came to be known as the ‘Grote Club’.

Today we relaunch the Grote Club as an electronic adventure in intellectual history. Our electronic discussion society is dedicated to exploring all aspects of Grote’s thought and intellectual legacy.

The legacy of Grote and his circle included a thorough revision of the moral sciences at Cambridge, leading to the transformation of the sciences of social inquiry then forming in Britain. The effects of this were most famously felt in the areas of political economy and economics, in the work of Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (1890), but it had a decisive effect on the development of modern anthropology and psychology in Britain—an effect only dimly understood through reference to the development of the fieldwork methodology and through various scholarly narratives concerned with the origins and propagation of elitism and mass psychology.

My role at the Grote Club website is to trace the legacy of this transformation of the moral sciences at Cambridge in its American contexts. I am becoming increasingly convinced that the legacy of John Grote’s moral philosophy, which became embedded at Cambridge, and was felt through W. H. R. Rivers, William McDougall, Charles S. Myers, and others, allows for a fresh perspective on the American social sciences before the Second World War. More to come in this innovative effort in Anglo-America history of scientific ideas bridging the gap between the 19th and the 20th centuries.

On the Cybersyn Article Controversy: We Need Best Practices

Evgeny Morozov recently wrote an article for the New Yorker about management cybernetician Stafford Beer (1926-2002) and Project Cybersyn, an ambitious early-1970s attempt to use information-handling technologies to manage the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende.

Eden Medina published a fine book on the subject in 2011. Morozov mentioned Medina’s book in his article, but only in an off-hand manner. Historians, writing on Twitter and the SIGCIS message board, were incensed — the article, they believed, was, in effect, intellectual theft. Morozov’s reply was a post on his tumblr describing his original research process, while acknowledging the importance of Medina’s work.

I’ll offer my own take up front: as a courtesy, Morozov should have acknowledged Medina’s book much earlier in the essay, and should have signalled to readers that it is an authoritative source on the subject. I reach this conclusion regardless of whether the essay was a proper book review or not (which has been a subject of some confusion, given that the essay was a “Critic at Large” piece, which appears in the book review section).

My conclusion is drawn from my belief that Medina’s book constitutes a canonical source. I will, however, refrain from joining my historian colleagues in their visceral disgust at Morozov’s essay, because this principle of the canonical source (as opposed to an originating source) does not actually exist. I have just made it up now, and it would not be charitable to expect people to be bound to either a principle or a canonical status that nobody has ever agreed upon or even discussed.

My proposition: if there exists a large (i.e., book-length), thorough, deeply researched treatment of a topic — even if one disagrees with aspects of it or goes beyond it, and especially if it is recent (say, the last 15 years) — one is obligated, regardless of publishing genre or venue, and regardless of whatever replication and supplementation of research one has done, to acknowledge that canonical status clearly.

Now, for an examination of some particular issues in the case at hand…

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ACAP Will Return

Update (5/3/14): Thanks to the efforts of the good people at AIP, ACAP is now back up and running at this address. There are still a few bugs remaining after the transition. At the moment, links to AIP’s photo library no longer work, since the library has migrated to a new platform. We’ll work to restore full functionality, and, in the longer term, make some improvements. However, I’m pleased to say that all of the site’s pages are currently accessible once again.

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Just in case you might be googling for it and not finding it, this is a very quick note about the status of the American Institute of Physics’s Array of Contemporary American Physicists website, which I created and remain responsible for editing. ACAP has been down for a couple of months following the migration of the AIP site to a new server. The configuration of the new server must be updated to accommodate the site’s coding, which was done in JSP to accommodate the peculiarities of the old server. I am working with AIP on the issue, and hope the site will reappear before too long.

The Observatory and the B-29s

Rational Action is back with the press. Part of my recent improvements involved figuring out what images I was going to use, which involved taking a day to run to the National Archives (living near Washington, DC has definite advantages). There I got some pictures that I remembered as cool-looking, but hadn’t previously bothered to get copies of. These related to experiments that the Applied Mathematics Panel (AMP), a wartime organization, did in 1944 in collaboration with the Mt. Wilson Observatory in Pasadena.

Mt-Wilson-B29-setup — Staff setting up the experiment in a local school gymnasium

Now, however, I have many more photographs than I can possibly use, and the experiments they describe occupy only about two sentences in my book, so I thought I’d share them with you here.

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Document: The Butt Report (1941)

My book manuscript, Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America, 1940-1960 is now under contract with the MIT Press. I will be revising and formatting the manuscript through mid-February, so expect to continue hearing little from me until then. I do, however, want to start trying some new experiments with this blog, one of which is to make certain unpublished government documents more widely available.

Today’s document is the so-called “Butt Report” found at The National Archives of the UK, Public Record Office, AIR 14/1218. Issued in August 1941, the report detailed, on the basis of photographic evidence, the extreme inability of RAF bomber crews to locate, let alone strike, targets in the dark. This investigation was ordered by Winston Churchill’s friend and adviser, Oxford physicist Frederick Lindemann, and was undertaken by his assistant, David Bensusan-Butt. The Butt Report is well known, having played a role in shaping subsequent debate over the aims of British bombing policy in view of technical limitations. However, I do not believe it has previously been made available in full (or nearly in full, as the last page appears to be missing).

The rules of the National Archives of the UK state that facsimile copies of its records may not be distributed without permission and the payment of a large fee. Transcriptions, however, may be distributed freely. Upon learning this, shortly after publishing this post, I quickly removed the photographic reproduction I had originally made available here. However, in December 2014 I found time to transcribe the report, adhering as closely as possible to the format of the original. Here it is:

Butt Report transcription (TNA PRO AIR 14 1218)

(Going To) Rockville

[youtube=http://youtu.be/4zgh0y9vTgY]

Summer isn’t really the time for blogging anyway, but things have been particularly quiet around here because I’ve been busy moving away from London and back to the US. This has involved finding something to do on the upcoming conclusion of my Junior Research Fellowship at Imperial College (I am not making the move to King’s with CHoSTM), finding a place to live, buying a car, and all the other elements of a major transition.

Anyway, I can now say that I’ve agreed to join History Associates, Inc. (based in Rockville, Maryland, outside Washington, DC) as a senior historian. This will involve writing a lot of rapid-fire institutional histories, and—very attractively, to me—working with a research and writing team. Of course, commercial history is a very different beast from academic history, meaning, for our purposes, that I will not be blogging at all about (or from) my work. I plan to continue Ether Wave Propaganda as opportunity permits, but, since, between family and work, time for posting will be limited, I aim to make my posts as directly useful as possible. This means worrying more about history, and less about blue-sky historiographical critique and philosophy. Naturally, this doesn’t affect Chris Donohue’s posts in any way. Regular blogging should resume before too long.

History-Philosophy Relations, Pt. 4: History as Text, Philosophy as Lexicon

Perhaps the greatest barrier to more effective relations between the history and philosophy of science is the notion that the two disciplines should have a lot to say to each other.

In my last post, I posited that historians might regard the philosophy of science not as a theory of science and its development, but as a lexicon that we could use selectively to describe both historical actors’ explicit reasoning and arguments, as well as the implicit reasoning informing patterns by which scientific figures have accepted, entertained, and rejected various sorts of claims. The more developed historians’ lexicon is, the more reliably will we be able to capture important intricacies of history.

Of course, this suggestion is hardly original. In 1962, when Norwood Russell Hanson (1924-1967) famously declared that “history of science without philosophy of science is blind,” and that “philosophy of science without history of science is empty” (580), he was not making a vague feel-good suggestion that the disciplines should get together, have a drink, talk more, and really get on the same page. To the contrary, he, like many philosophers, saw crucial differences between the fields, accepting:”The logical relevance of history of science to philosophy of science is nil” (585).

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Joel Isaac at Imperial College CHoSTM Seminar Tomorrow [Canceled]

Update: I’ve just learned that Joel has had to cancel. Alas.

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I’ve been extraordinarily busy lately, so I haven’t been able to spare time for a post. Maybe in a week or so I’ll be back up and running. But, for any Londoners out there, I wanted to plug Imperial College London’s CHoSTM seminar for tomorrow, 14 March 2013, since it’s being given by Joel Isaac of the Cambridge History Faculty. If you’ve been reading my recent posts on 20th-century social science, you’ll know I’m a big fan. As usual, it will be in the Seminar and Learning Centre (SALC) on the 5th floor of the Sherfield Building of the South Kensington campus, at 4:00 PM.

Philosophy as a Behavioural Science: Donald Davidson and the Analytic Revolution in Postwar American Philosophy

Abstract below the fold

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History-Philosophy Relations, Pt. 2: The Weltphilosophie of Historical Epistemology

Rheinberger's history of historical epistemology — Rheinberger’s history of historical epistemology

The program of “historical epistemology” represents one of the more ambitious and thoughtful projects espoused by historians of science in recent years. The self-conscious efforts of people like Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Lorraine Daston, and Peter Galison to renew interest in epistemological questions among historians is laudable. And their point that epistemology is something that is invented rather than transcendental—and thus historically variable in its content—is surely a correct observation, at least from a historiographical standpoint.

That said, I have never been fully comfortable with the history produced by historical epistemology. To date, the program has received the most intensive scrutiny from philosophers. A good example is Martin Kusch’s 2010 paper, “Hacking’s Historical Epistemology: A Critique of Styles of Reasoning”.* My own interest in the subject has less to do with the integrity of historical epistemology as epistemology (a subject I am happy to leave to philosophers), as it does with its Weltphilosophie and its conception of the history-philosophy relationship.

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History-Philosophy Relations, Pt. 1: The Disappearance of “Weltphilosophie” in the History of Science

In his 1962 paper, “The Irrelevance of History of Science to Philosophy of Science,” Norwood Russell Hanson referred to a longstanding concern of philosophers of science that historians of science abided by one or another deficient “Weltphilosophie“. A Weltphilosophy was an explicit or implicit outlook adopted by a historian, which “controls his selection of salient subjects, his alignment of data, his conception of the overall objective of the scientific enterprise, and his evaluations of the heroes and villains within the history of science.” According to Hanson, “Those who stress the silent operation of a Weltphilosophie in the studies of historians of science then suggest that without philosophical awareness and acuity, the reader must remain at the mercy of the historian’s unspoken assumptions.”

Do historians abide by unspoken philosophical assumptions today? Critics have often asserted that historians abide by a social constructionist epistemology, and much time and effort was expended in the 1980s and ’90s contesting its validity. According to Michael Bycroft, it is still useful to analyze and criticize social constructionism precisely because “[m]uch current research in the history of science can be seen either as an affirmation of [social constructionist] claims or as a consequence of them.” But this is one of the few points on which he and I disagree. In the past several years, I have come to believe that “social constructionism” is a rhetorical red herring, which confounds an appreciation of less well articulated changes in historical methodology, including the fact that most historians of science no longer abide by any Weltphilosophie at all.

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