History and Historiography of Science

Category: Uncategorized

Neglected Connections between the Histories of Science and Economics, Pt. 2

Part 1 of this post argued that the historical relations between natural scientific and economic thought require additional attention.  It suggested that in the Enlightenment period both were subsumed within the epistemology of philosophical systems-building and the generic argumentative structure of “economy”.  Although David Hume’s theory of morals was not economics, per se, in a separate post I used his example to demonstrate how the argumentative construction of a social economy had to face similar intellectual problems as chemistry, botany, and (what was thought of as) physics.

Part 2 emphasizes the importance of logical or argumentative space in economic thought, as exemplified by — but by no means limited to — mathematical inquiry.  I want to argue that economics continued to adhere to the argumentative strategy of system-building familiar from 18th-century natural and political philosophy.  Meanwhile, though, most natural sciences took a separate path toward argumentative rigor applied to a tightly constrained space of argumentation, such as that defined by laboratory phenomena.  Political economists were deeply influenced by the natural sciences’ newly enhanced commitment to rigor, but interpreted that commitment in novel ways within the relatively unconstrained argumentative space of political economy.

Read More…Read More…

Dear and Jasanoff on Daston on the Current Situation

The December Isis has been published, which includes a response from Sheila Jasanoff and Peter Dear to Lorraine Daston’s 2009 Critical Inquiry article, “Science Studies and the History of Science” (paywall), entitled “Dismantling Boundaries in Science and Technology Studies” (paywall).  I posted my own two-part reaction to Daston’s piece in September 2009: “Daston on the Current Situation” and “Foucault, Ginzburg, Latour, and the Gallery” (a title that is great search-engine fodder, by the way; it is now the most visited post on this blog written by me).

I don’t really have any major new reflections here, but I will offer a couple of observations, as well as some recapitulations of points I’ve already made. 

Read More…Read More…

Blog Notes

First off, sorry for no posting the last couple of weeks.  Travel and work-related things have kept me well occupied.  New posts are in the works.

Second, for those who follow this blog’s occasional posts on the chymistry historiography, have a look at The Economist’s write-up of Lawrence Principe’s presentation at the AAAS meeting.  Also, a cbsnews.com Tech Talk post about the Economist write-up links to EWP for more information on current professional thought on the issue.  The spotlight, it blinds me!  (I got 60-70 hits off of it, which for EWP constitutes a flood.)

On this note, I’ve started to worry a little bit about the fact that there are certain topics where you can just put up a reasonably well-informed post about something, and suddenly you become an authority.  This issue comes up with my old Schaffer Oeuvre series — which may one day return — wherein by virtue of simply talking about his work at all, people know me as the guy whose comments pop up when you search for information about his writings.  I’ve received enough nice comments from people about that series that I guess I’ve gotten things right enough that I’m not too worried about it, but I do wish people who are actually well-versed in 18th and 19th-century studies would displace by some means my hobby-like interest in the subject.

Finally, speaking of nice things being said, we had Paul Lucier in to speak with us a couple of days ago.  I don’t receive a lot of feedback on how this blog is actually read and talked about, and by whom, so it was gratifying to hear from him that my post on his terrific Isis article on men of science vs. professionals in 19th-century America succeeded in generating some extra interest in that work.

My concern is that there are people out there not speaking up who have good ideas about deleterious side-effects to blogging activity.  Long story short, I think it’s time the profession as a whole started thinking quite seriously about how blogs ought to be used to talk about scholarship in a serious, responsible, and public, but short-form way.

Ngrams and World Peace

As I think most historians will know by now, the Ngram viewer from Google Laboratories can become a compulsive pastime.  Nobody thinks it’s really all that healthy.  The data sets are not totally reliable, the numbers are meaningless, and alternative usages of words easily undermine the point one would like to make by charting the prevalence of those words in Google’s massive scanned-in library across dates of publication.  Still, it’s obvious there’s something in it, which is what gives it its appeal.  Let’s say you didn’t simply want to show how immune to vulgar enthusiasms you are by shifting immediately into academic-wet-blanket mode, or by lampooning your own compulsion by saying it’s all just good fun.  Let’s say you actually wanted to think constructively about this tool (as Dan Cohen of GMU does).  What modest uses might you make of the Ngram viewer?  Illustration of points you already know something about is a good one:

"air police" vs. "international control of atomic energy" (smoothing = 1)

A nice specific phrase search is “air police” and “international control of atomic energy”.  I choose these phrases because I am a fan of Waqar Zaidi’s recent PhD thesis, which was written here at Imperial College CHOSTM.  Zaidi argues for the central, successive place of two technologies, airplanes and atomic weapons, in the policing strategies imagined by internationalist thinkers.  He claims that although there was overriding resistance to the idea of a world air police, far from being pie-in-the-sky, the plan was taken very seriously in wide circles.  In his 1946 “iron curtain” speech, Winston Churchill devoted several lines to a fairly well-developed call for the new United Nations to be armed with just such a force:

Read More…Read More…

Neglected Connections between the Histories of Science and Economics, Pt. 1

Although historians of science have not traditionally shown a strong interest in the history of economic thought, developing such an interest would make good professional sense, in particular because epistemological issues in economics and the natural sciences have long been intertwined in less than obvious ways.  Historians would do well to familiarize themselves with historical epistemological debates around economic thought, such as the Methodenstreit of the 1880s, because important ideas like “science”, “objectivity”, and “impersonality” have meanings that, in much of the historical commentary on them, were specifically associated with debates surrounding the validity of social scientific abstraction, and the important distinctions that were made between the goals of theorization and normative practice.

Aside from brushing up on the historical meanings of certain terms, historians of science also have an opportunity to lend additional clarity to the historical connections between thinking about science and thinking about politics, society, and economy.  Intellectual historians and philosophers of economics, and of science more generally, have studied the more explicit historical debates surrounding political economy and its connections to the methods of science, say, in the thought of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) or Karl Marx (1818-1883).  Additionally, the transfer of metaphors between domains has received good attention, particularly in the area of evolutionary theory: from the economics of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) to Charles Darwin (1809-1882), or from evolutionary theory back into Herbert Spencer’s (1820-1903) social theory (on this blog, also see Chris Renwick’s discussion of Patrick Geddes).

There is further important work to be done in straight-up intellectual history, but additional opportunities may be found in the history of intellectual practices that provide the context in which ideas make sense.

Read More…Read More…

EWP 2011

Me doing some EWP-related reading during some downtime on my honeymoon in Hawaii last July. No, seriously, this is relaxation for me!

Happy New Year everyone!  In retrospect, it has been very convenient for me that I started this blog on January 1, 2008, because that way the new year provides a good occasion for reflection on blogging past, present and future.  At three years into this project, things have slowed down a little.  Once upon a time, I managed a few posts each week.  Now I try to get in one.  However, they tend to be longer, and, I think the ideas are better developed than they once were, which really was the whole point of the exercise.  What was once a scattershot series of observations and complaints has become a more fully worked out critical viewpoint, which I can draw upon in day-to-day conversations and writing.

However, one year ago, this viewpoint was already reasonably well worked out.  My new year’s blogging resolution is once again to stop leaning so hard on the crutch of methodological introspection. 

Read More…Read More…

On the Beeb: Lisa Jardine on Jacob Bronowski

Update. Apparently the film is now available for a further week, through the 23rd

One position I hold on this blog is that historians need to worry less about their engagement with the realm of public ideas.  The main reason I hold this position is that I think there is a tendency — albeit by no means a necessary one — to measure the quality of professional work in term of what qualities it possesses that public ideas lack, rather than against its own internal standards.  Another important reason, though, is that I am generally satisfied with the quality of public presentation of science and its history.  Yes, there is much that is of low quality, but nothing I or my colleagues say is going to change that.  In fact, though, here in the UK, rather good history of science seems to be in the media perhaps even more often than the subject actually warrants!

Lisa Jardine, notably, seems to be a very public figure, and, in general, I am a fan.  (I thought this column for bbc.co.uk, wherein she argues that history “reminds us” that real people can get hurt by things, contrary to what budget-cutting politicians may think, was a particularly superficial case for the relevance of history.)  My new fun fact learned this past week is that Jardine is the daughter of Jacob Bronowski.  Bronowski was a mathematician who is best known for popular television programs on science, most notably The Ascent of Man.  She has just made a film about him for the BBC entitled My Father, The Bomb, and Me, which is available online here — but only until December 16th, so hurry!  (I’m not sure if it’s available outside the UK.)  The video below is a hopefully more permanent clip of Bronowski, which I will discuss in conjunction with Jardine’s film after the jump.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7br6ibK8ic]

Read More…Read More…

Unfocused: Science, Technology, and the Cold War

Collectively, historians know a lot about science and technology during the Cold War.  A significant number of books and articles have been written about the ambitious technological systems developed during the era, the enormous scientific endeavors made possible by expanded state and military funding, the rise of new intellectual programs in fundamental physics and molecular biology, the expansion of geoscience and social science and the development of new methods in them, the global integration of scientific work, and the importance of digital computation, among other subjects.  Accordingly, the present is an excellent time to reflect on and consolidate what has been learned, render the history of the era more navigable, and to suggest forward-looking research programs.

Unfortunately, this past summer’s Isis Focus section, edited by David Kaiser and Hunter Heyck did not take the opportunity to do that.  The limit of the section’s synthesis essentially said what the paragraph above said at greater length, and left the rest of the space as a forum for the individual contributors to showcase their own research projects, which are taken to “exemplify” recent research trends.  In this way, this Focus section is little different from past sections, which position themselves as the beginnings of new conversation, present some new empirical work, but mainly simply recapitulate basic ideas that can be considered the agreed-upon points in an aging scholarship, while reciting the perpetual mantra that “more work is needed” for any real understanding to occur.  This blog typically does not take these sections up.  But, since Cold War-era science is my own specialty, I thought a (now rather belated) critique of this particular section might be in order.

Read More…Read More…

The Archive, Navigability, and the Sum of Historiographical Knowledge

Will you reclaim history from the archive, or will the archive claim you? (Photo from Wikimedia Commons; click for the original)

Historians owe a great deal to librarians and archivists, as well as to those who have preserved their own papers.  However, “the archive” — referring broadly to books, journals, papers, artifacts, etc. — is pointless if it is not used.  We can scarcely claim to know about history if all we have done is preserve it rather than read it, publish it, and talk about it.  This post is a meditation about how it can be claimed that history is known, and how this relates to the use of the archive.

Publication, in itself, cannot be strictly identified with use.  Publication is perhaps a step above reading the archive — it is an essentially personal act that is more or less pointless unless the publication is read.  If the publication is not read, then it sits on a shelf (and maybe a server), which means that it has essentially become part of the archive itself.  Perhaps the archive has been made more accessible, but this point is moot if it is not accessed.

Read More…Read More…

Narrow and Broad Historiography and Self-Interested History

At the beginning of the year, I posted on the “instrumental uses of history”, intending the post to set the tone for this year’s blogging.  It referred to the polemical and heuristic uses to which history is put, and the likely distorting effect these uses have on historical portraiture.  The post supposed the inevitability of this state of affairs and the futility of sustained work against it.

Subsequent posts have focused on the importance of taking the history of polemics seriously, as well as on the history of science community’s strong interest in the history of polemics. I have argued that this interest relates to how those polemics are seen as arising from, and revealing of, how science and technology operate in society: by securing the cultural and political, as well as intellectual, assent.

I have argued that these ideas are thought to run contrary to past and popular historiography, which is imagined to render systematically invisible not only these polemics, but the social and material circumstances that so often give rise to polemical encounters.  In this way, the past and popular historiography is thought to depend on a false (or at least deeply selective) image of science, technology, and society to assemble its history.  The image is one wherein the final form of ideas and the criteria on which they are judged acceptable are taken-for-granted in specifically self-interested ways.  Accordingly, recovery of a realistic image of science is thought to be not only an imporant historiographical task, but also a form of portraiture with innate virtues (as I argued at Whewell’s Ghost). 

Read More…Read More…