Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 10 – History and Historiography of Science

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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R. A. Fisher, Scientific Method, and the Tower of Babel, Pt. 2

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Tower of Babel (1563)

In his 1932 lecture, “The Bearing of Genetics on Theories of Evolution,” R. A. Fisher compared the fissures between different scientific techniques to God’s confounding of languages in the Biblical legend of the Tower of Babel. If the fissures in scientific method were assumed to hold the construction of an “edifice” of scientific knowledge back, much as the division of language prevented the construction of the Tower of Babel, then the obvious question was how method could be reunited. According to Fisher,

If we were to ask … what universal language could enable men of science to understand each other sufficiently well for effective co-operation, I submit that there can be only one answer. If we could select a group of men of science, completely purge their minds of all knowledge of language, and allow them time to develop the means of conveying to one another their scientific ideas, I have no doubt whatever that the only successful medium they could devise would be that ancient system of logic and deductive reasoning first perfected by the Greeks, and which we know as Mathematics.

As we saw in Part 1, the bulk of Fisher’s statistical theorization was dedicated to the problem of inductive reasoning, that is, the development of defined conclusions from well-structured observations. But it is clear that Fisher also valued deductive uses of mathematics, because it permitted different observational conclusions to be related to each other through a fully coherent language. It is just not clear what he understood the epistemological status or function of deductive knowledge to be.

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R. A. Fisher, Scientific Method, and the Tower of Babel, Pt. 1

For a paper Chris Donohue and I have been working on, I have been delving into the historiography on statistician and genetic theorist R. A. Fisher (1890-1962). The main thing I was trying to do was to make sense of the last third of Fisher’s touchstone book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930), which is a protracted eugenic explanation for why civilizations decline. When I first got onto this topic, I consulted Greg Radick about it, and he directed me to Stephen Jay Gould’s 1991 essay, “The Smoking Gun of Eugenics” (reprinted in Gould’s Dinosaur in a Haystack collection), in which Gould takes apart both Fisher’s civilizational theory as well as his 1950s-era arguments against claims that smoking leads to cancer.

If you’re interested in the specifics of Fisher’s arguments, do read Gould’s essay, or, better still, read the original. Suffice it here to say that Gould claims Fisher made bogus arguments on account of his commitment to eugenics (with a similar story for smoking). This is true, as far as it goes, but I wanted to find a “higher-order” explanation for Fisher’s civilizational theory, which would account for why he thought his arguments made sense. Fisher, after all, was a famous proponent of methodological rigor, and even prima facie his arguments about civilizational decline were, shall we say, less than rigorous.

If you’re interested in my take, you’ll have to wait until 2014 for the edited volume our essay will be in to come out (hooray for academic publishing; if you’re really interested, please do contact me for a draft copy). But the general approach I took was to delve into Fisher’s ideas about scientific methodology. Below the fold I take a meandering tour through these ideas, and the scattered historiography on them.

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Kuhn’s Demon, or: The Iconoclastic Tradition in Science Criticism

The message that scientists are human and that science is messy is crossing the ether once again. Of late there has been a certain degree of excitement percolating among historians and science-studies scholars over the #OverlyHonestMethods hashtag on Twitter. It seems that scientists are sending out tweets about their work that happen to nicely coincide with the images of science that historians would like to present to the world. Twitter is, of course, the world hub for “trending” topics, and this particular trend is already simmering down. But, before the moment is completely gone, it might be worthwhile to reflect briefly on the history of the ideas 1) that there exists a dominant image of science as a pristine and rigidly ordered activity, and 2) that the negation of this image would be broadly beneficial to scientists and society.

iconoclasts — Is it idol-smashing time again already?

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John Austin, Legal Positivism, and the Debate over the Sources of Law

One of the most important developments in the understanding of law, what law is and why it is that law has authority in society, was the move away from natural law jurisprudence, articulated by Cicero, Montesquieu, and by Hugo Grotius in the nineteenth century. Natural law jurisprudence was the idea that law derived its authority due to the perfection and purpose of nature and divinity. Since true law had its origins and its sanction from nature and divinity, outside of society, it stood against whim, convention, custom, and caprice. Laws which were against natural law, against reason or justice, were not laws at all.

Early in the nineteenth century, legal positivism, espousing a narrow definition of “positive law,” or those laws enacted by the State or sovereign in the form of commands, attempted a similar style of reasoning to that of earlier natural law jurisprudence insofar as, like natural law theory, it was both rationalistic and deductive. Legal positivism in John Austin’s prose, considered law to be law (as opposed to morality and custom) if it was a command from a sovereign authority that was coercive. This meant that going against the command of the sovereign brought threat of an “evil.” Law was sovereign, moreover, if it emanated from an authority which was subject to no other, such as a king or parliament, who was habitually obeyed.

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David Apter on Ideology, Economic Development, and Social Science (1964)

David Apter in 1953 at University College of the Gold Coast, photo by Eleanor Apter. Click for Apter Collection at Yale University Manuscripts and Archives — David Apter in 1953 at University College of the Gold Coast at Achimota. Photo by Eleanor Apter. Click for a larger version at the Apter Collection of photographs at Yale University Manuscripts and Archives

Clifford Geertz’s well-known 1964 essay, “Ideology as a Cultural System” appeared in a volume called Ideology and Discontent, which was edited by David Apter (1924-2010). Apter (you might recall from this post) was a modernization theorist. His best-known work on the subject was The Politics of Modernization (1965). The appearance of Geertz’s essay in Apter’s volume should be no surprise since Geertz was himself a scholar of modernization, and served with Apter as a member of the University of Chicago’s Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations. (Relevant here is Geertz’s long discussion near the end of his 1964 essay on the political culture of newly independent Indonesia.)

Apter’s own introductory essay in the volume (titled “Ideology and Discontent,” pp. 15-46) is a discussion of the relationship between economic development, political ideology, and social science, and is very much in the tradition of the intellectual liberalism of that era. But it also zigs in certain places where you might expect it to zag, and, though it is not as lucid or valuable as Geertz’s essay, it is very much worth a read to try and get a beat on some of the contours of the kind of critical-interpretive social science in which Apter was engaged. Additionally, it is the earliest reference I have so-far come across to the “ideology of science,” which is a concept I have been tracking off and on through this blog (though Google Books informs me there are a number of earlier precedents).

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Christopher Donohue at Imperial College London on Thursday

University of Maryland PhD student and Ether Wave Propaganda contributor Christopher Donohue has been spending time this academic year in Moscow, at the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities, which is part of the National Research University Higher School of Economics. This week, he will be passing through London, and on Thursday, 10 January, he will be speaking at Imperial College London’s CHoSTM seminar. The seminar will be held, as usual, from 4 to 6pm at the Seminar and Learning Centre (SALC) on the 5th floor of the Sherfield Building in South Kensington. His talk is titled:

From ‘Natural Selection’ to ‘Social Selection’: The Differentiation and Career of a Concept in Early Twentieth-Century Social Thought.

Abstract below the fold

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Five Years in the Blog

Ether Wave Propaganda opened for business on New Year’s Day 2008, which makes it five years old today. At that time, it was one of a handful of blogs on the history of science. As the links on the right show, that number has increased markedly. Given the limitations in format and turnaround time in humanities publication, this always seemed like a promising format for scholarly communication, and I’m pleased to see that others have picked up on this point.

Still, I think there remains a lot of untapped potential in the format. For one thing, I think many more scholars need to take it up, if only to keep others apprised of what they’re up to: what talks they give, what publications are in process, what archives are being visited. At present, vague faculty web pages (with, horror, incomplete publication lists) and rumor and hearsay seem to be the most prevalent means of keeping up-to-date in our profession.

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