Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 11 – History and Historiography of Science

Useful Portraits in the Mid-Century Social Sciences

My meditation on whether there is a “whig” narrative permeating the historiography of the social sciences may give the impression that I have a fundamental objection to the Cold War Social Science (CWSS) volume. In fact, I like the book a great deal. Rather, as someone who is probably among the top 20 people worldwide with practical use for the book, thinking about a “whig” narrative helps me articulate what aspects of it are the most useful.

Having worked for some time in the history of the related subjects of operations research, systems analysis, and decision theory, I have become intimately familiar with the argumentative tropes that permeate their historiography, and which overlap with the ones surrounding the social sciences of the Cold War era. These include the supposed historical existence of: a faith in science, a particular authority attributed to formalized knowledge, and a systematic discounting of tradition and cultural peculiarity.

Even if I didn’t think these tropes were seriously misleading (though I do), the simple repetition of them in different contexts would not be very helpful to me. Locating the tropes within a general narrative allows me to identify what those tropes would look like in a different segment of the narrative (say, a post-1970 history, or the history of a different field), and thus what things I “already know,” even if the precise details are foreign to me. For example, I am not especially well versed in the history of psychology, but if the stories historians tell me about it conform to the general narrative I already know, then they are not really telling me much that is useful beyond making me aware of perhaps a new proper name or two, which I will probably promptly forget. By this criterion, a good portion of CWSS is not especially useful.

But much of it is. Here I will briefly discuss what I personally found to be the most useful pieces in the volume.

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CHoSTM Moving to King’s College London

This has been a pretty terribly kept secret, but now that the arrangements have been settled and the press release is out, us folks at Imperial can finally officially say: this summer the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine is moving a couple of miles east to the History Department at King’s College London, where the intention is to expand it into a major center for historical research in our field — the official press release (which you can read below the fold, or at the King’s news site) compares it to Harvard, MIT, and Cambridge.

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New Article in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences

My new article, “Strategies of Detection: Interpretive Practices in Experimental Particle Physics, 1930-1950,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42 (2012): 389-431, is out. Click here to download a free pdf copy (15MB—lots of images). I’ll talk more about the contents of the paper in future posts. For the moment, I’d just like to publicly jot down some thoughts about the origins and thinking behind the paper, which I think is a useful exercise to do for all new publications.

The paper is self-consciously a testing ground for ideas about how to build a more synthetic historiography. First, it’s an attempt to develop a way to find interesting historical “objects” to periodize and interrelate in the history of scientific practice. In doing this, I am trying to build explicitly on the foundations for “mesoscopic” history that were laid by Peter Galison (my PhD advisor) in his big book,Image and Logic (1997). Other attempts to do this sort of thing have tended to look for very large “objects”, such as John Pickstone’s “ways of knowing” or Galison and Lorraine Daston’s attempt to classify and periodize concepts of “objectivity”. I am arguing for the importance of looking at things that are smaller, but which are not simply “local”, and things that are less “epistemic” in nature, but which nevertheless provide us with insight into past scientific arguments. These are the titular “strategies of detection”.

Second, the paper is also an attempt to summarize the already considerable past gains in the historiography of experimentation in particle physics (which is dominated by Image and Logic), and then to go deeper, retaining and extending some gains while challenging and revising others. If we imagine historiographical progress as existing along two axes of “depth” and “breadth”, this paper aims to further progress along the depth axis, while contributing only slightly to the breadth axis. But I started work on this paper while putting together the topic guide on particle physics for my Array of Contemporary American Physicists resource, which looks for new gains mainly along the breadth axis. So, in my mind, ACAP and “Strategies of Detection” are complementary branches of my thinking about the central problem of historiographical synthesis.

A few notes on the paper’s origins below the fold.

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Are the social sciences concerned with the definition of social and political ontologies?

It is consistent with a new whig history of the social sciences to suppose that, in a former era, these sciences attempted to define the ontologies of aspects of society through the application of scientific method. For example, theories of modernization defined the nature of the modern liberal society, as well as the path that “traditional” society (another ontology) would need to take to transition to a state of modernity. Such acts of definition, in turn, had the capacity to affect politics and social relations, because, historically, the act of scientific definition could privilege and reify ontologies on account of the cultural authority attributed to science at that time.

Now, however (according to this narrative), we have come to see the futility of such efforts. Instead, the object is not to define ontology, but to ascertain how ontologies are defined from culture to culture, including in the scientific culture of our social scientific ancestors. Accordingly, Cold War Social Science is divided into three sections, labeled “Knowledge Production”, “Liberal Democracy”, and “Human Nature”. The last two sections revolve around two categories of ontologies seen as being at play. The first section revolves arund the means that the social sciences used to define these ontologies, i.e., to produce “knowledge” about them.

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Louis Ridenour’s “Pilot Lights of the Apocalypse” (1945)

One of the persistent anxieties of the nuclear age has been the possibility of a catastrophic war starting accidentally. The scale of destruction that can be delivered in a short space of time means that any defense and counter-attack would have to be mounted so quickly that a counter-attack could be triggered by false evidence of attack. In fact, a Soviet colonel has just won an award from Germany for not responding when, in 1983, his early-warning systems indicated the launch of five missiles from United States territory. (The incident first became public in 1998.) That warning had been triggered by a satellite receiving confusing signals from reflected solar light.

There have, of course, been other such incidents in fact and fiction — of the latter, the films Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe (both 1964) are canonical. When I was researching my dissertation, though, I was surprised to learn that the notion of accidental nuclear war extends all the way back to 1945. While working in the Library of Congress archives, I stumbled on a November 1945 draft of a darkly humorous playlet written by physicist Louis Ridenour called “Pilot Lights of the Apocalypse”. The scenario is almost exactly the same as later incidents, real and imagined. In this case, San Francisco is struck by an earthquake, which triggers a false alarm in an operations room buried beneath the city, prompting a “hysterical” colonel to launch a counter-strike against Denmark, who then launches a strike against Sweden, and so on into oblivion.

The playlet was published in Fortune, of all places, in January 1946. It’s not unknown today, but it’s not widely known either. Thanks to Google, you can read a copy of it online from the December 26, 1945 Milwaukee Journal (Merry Christmas, Milwaukee). Discussion below the fold.

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Modernity, the Cold War, and New Whig Histories of Ideas, Pt. 3

In previous posts, I have noted characteristics historians attribute to Cold War-era social science, and have posited that the historiography of the social sciences often follows a “whig” structure. This narrative structure builds history around the social sciences’ move away from inappropriate frameworks. These frameworks privileged the sciences’ own cultural perspective, and projected it onto, and proselytized it to, other cultures by means of the sciences’ intellectual and political influence. The whig structure also (implicitly or explicitly) takes the trend of history to move toward a more passive or dialogical social scientific framework pioneered by cultural anthropologists.

The context of “Cold War America” is critical to this narrative, because it provides 1) a particular “liberal” or “modernist” cultural perspective that informed the work of the period, 2) the project of strengthening and defending liberal society at home and abroad—through a) the development of scientific theories of the nature of modern, liberal, and illiberal society, and b) the instrumental use of social science in augmenting military and diplomatic power—and, accordingly, 3) funding.

A5635-29 — Lyndon Johnson and adviser (and modernization theorist) Walt Rostow discussing Vietnam

The trouble with this narrative structure is that it tends to constrain historical analysis so that it produces stories that conform to it. At the same time, it would be difficult to sustain such narratives if the record did not at least bear some resemblance to it. The place where the record most clearly resembles this narrative is in a branch of sociology and political science known as “modernization theory”.

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Book Review: David Cassidy’s Short History of Physics in the American Century

The following book review appears in Isis 103 (September 2012): 614-615.

© 2012 by The History of Science Society, and reprinted here according to the guidelines of the University of Chicago Press. In-text links have been added by the author, and were not included in the original text.

David C. Cassidy. A Short History of Physics in the American Century. (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine.) 211 pp., tables, app., index. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011. $29.95 (cloth).

William Thomas

David Cassidy styles this book “a very brief introductory synthesis of the history of twentieth-century American physics for students and the general public.” As such, it “is not intended to offer a new analysis of that history or to argue a newly constructed thesis.” Nor does it “drift far from the standard, often currently definitive literature on its subject—as far as that literature goes” (p. 5).

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New Guide to UK Institutions for Agricultural Education and Research

A while ago, I assembled tentative lists of agricultural colleges, agricultural research institutes, and some related institutions in the UK in the twentieth century. Since then, I have been in contact with Carrie de Silva of Harper Adams University College, who has put together a more expansive “Short History of Agricultural Education and Research: Some key places, people, publications and events from the 18th to the 21st centuries”. She emphasizes that it is more of a tentative guide to chronology than a well-verified academic study (the same goes for my lists), so use it with due caution, and feel free to suggest amendments to her. It is nevertheless a very useful and unprecedented effort to survey the lay of the historical land on this topic. It is available here.

In Athens on Friday

On Friday, 2 November, I will be giving a talk in Athens at the Fifth International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science. The talk will be entitled “The Polemical Construction of an American Style of Scientific Policy Analysis”. For some odd reason I’m listed in the program by my actual first name, Gerald, but it’s me. The talk is part of a small session on “Transnational Economic Science after World War II”, which will also include Tiago Mata and Till Düppe, whom you may know as contributors to the History of Economics Playground blog. Unfortunately, Catherine Herfeld won’t be able to make it.

Albert Wohlstetter (1913-1997) Image from LIFE photo archive, © Time Inc.

The talk derives from my book manuscript, and it will be about how certain approaches to policy analysis started to be identified as American circa 1960. Part of the answer is that things like “game theory” and “strategic theory” were American. But part of the answer is that it became convenient for certain authors, such as the British physicist and nuclear pundit Patrick Blackett, to portray American policy positions with which they disagreed as the product of a peculiarly abstract “American” style of thinking. This style was often identified with academic economists, and understood to be disengaged from the work of people with practical experience, as well as from any realistic appreciation of human behavior. In subsequent years, the polemical origins of this claim have been forgotten, but historians still deploy it, or a version of it, as a tool of analysis.

However, the polemical tactic was actually recognized as such at the time, particularly by RAND Corporation policy analyst Albert Wohlstetter, who is best known for his 1959 article in Foreign Affairs, “The Delicate Balance of Terror” (RAND memo version here). Whatever one might think of his policy positions, Wohlstetter definitely had a keen critical sense. I would point particularly to an aptly titled 1964 essay, “Sin and Games in America”,* in which he scathingly took apart Blackett’s and others’ polemical claims about the nature and assumptions of game theory, its relationship to policy analysis and, specifically, to his and others’ policy positions.

*In Martin Shubik, ed., Game Theory and Related Approaches to Social Behavior (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1964), pp. 209-225. A similar critique can be found in an article called “Scientists, Seers, and Strategy,” one version of which was published in Foreign Affairs, another version in a 1964 book called Scientists and National Policy-Making

Modernity, the Cold War, and New Whig Histories of Ideas, Pt. 2

This post is an interlude in my look at Cold War Social Science. It paves the way for further discussion of that book, but contains no reference to its contents.

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A new whig historiography of the social sciences, which I began to describe in part 1, posits a crucial role for intellectual figures’ ideas in history. These ideas need not be the source of the broader (non-intellectualized) ideas that drive social and political trends. Intellectuals’ ideas do, however, at least have the power to reinforce such trends by helping to prevent alternative ideas from instigating change. Thus, in this historiography, past intellectuals’ ideas tend to be illiberal ideas.

The historiography is whiggish rather than anti-intellectual in that it is constructed from the narratives of intellectuals who purport to represent the advent of a genuinely liberating intellectual movement. To understand the narrative features of this historiography, it is important to understand how it retains elements of narratives generated by a long line of purportedly liberating intellectual movements, and how it claims to diverge from them.

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