History and Historiography of Science

Kuukkanen on the Philosophical Foundations of the Historiography of Science

The Twitterverse has brought to my attention a new article by philosopher of history Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen of Leiden University: “The Missing Narrativist Turn in the Historiography of Science,” History and Theory 51 (2012): 340-363 (paywall).

Like Lorraine Daston’s 2009 article in Critical Inquiry (with which Kuukkanen does not engage), Kuukkanen’s piece covers the oft-plowed ground of the relationship between the social studies of science and the historiography of science. Recall that Daston takes the rather unorthodox view that historians have exhausted the insights of the social studies of science, and have therefore turned to the mainstream history discipline, which she believes explains our present surfeit of disconnected microhistorical case studies. Kuukkanen takes a more traditional view in that he believes that present historiography remains a fairly direct product of science-studies thinking. However, he also peculiarly believes that, due to this influence, we historians have not embraced the “narrativist turn” taken by other historians, which is to say, we believe the way we write about our subject matter is the way to write about it, and so we myopically fail to open ourselves to the possibility of alternatives.

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At the ETH Zürich on Monday

The “tau” of physics (image from nobelprize.org)

On Monday, 1 October, at 10am, I will be giving a seminar at the Chair for Science Studies (I guess that’s what they call a department) of the ETH in Zürich on the practices of particle detection.  I assume if you are in Zürich and you read this blog you will already know about this, but, if not, contact the department (or Max Stadler, a product of Imperial CHoSTM, by the way) for details.

The seminar will be based on my new paper “Strategies of Detection: Interpretive Methods in Experimental Particle Physics, 1930–1950,” which is forthcoming in the November issue of Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences.  The paper is basically a deep engagement with Peter Galison’s ideas, on his own territory of particle physics, concerning how “mesoscopic” histories of scientific practices can be written and developed.  I blogged a little on this subject back in 2009.  At a more nitty-gritty level, the paper also makes some new points about how cloud chamber images were interpreted, how nuclear physics knowledge was used to narrow ranges of possible interpretations of experiments using all kinds of detectors, and how interpretive practices changed markedly before and after new discoveries became routine rather than resisted (I argue, in particular, that the rise of “decay mode” analysis marked a major break in interpretive practice).  I’ll write more about this here after the article’s out.

Modernity, the Cold War, and New Whig Histories of Ideas, Pt. 1

This post continues our examination of Cold War Social Science, edited by Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens.

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One issue to look out for when addressing the history of the social sciences — and intellectual history more generally — is that scholars are apt to see themselves as in dialogue with the events about which they are writing.  As with scientists writing about their own disciplinary past, there is a felt need either to credit the past as prologue, or to distance oneself from the folly of one’s predecessors.  Such, of course, are the roots of whig history.

The implicit aim of a new whig history, which shapes much intellectual and social science historiography is, in broad strokes, to explain how anthropologists and their intellectual allies bested academic competitors, and can now lead society away from a myopic modernism toward a more harmonious, genuinely cosmopolitan future.

This narrative is fairly similar to the original Whig narrative diagnosed by Herbert Butterfield, which took history to progress away from authoritarianism to political, economic, and religious liberalism. However, the whiggishness of the present narrative can be difficult to acknowledge, because the phenomenon of whig history is actually incorporated within the narrative as an intellectual pathology arising from the same teleological modernism being cast as outdated.  It is counterintuitive that the narrative could be whiggish, because whiggism is a declared enemy of the narrative.

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Policy Lunchbox Slides

My slides from Wednesday’s Policy Lunchbox talk, “Science Policy History: Data Points, Morality Tale, or Precedent?” are available here (5MB). A crucial point, not apparent from the slides, is that neither historians nor policy analysts really have done the hard work to make the use of historical precedent in policy discussions practicable.  This is a vision of a possible future, not something we can easily do right now.  But this is something that lawyers must do as a matter of course — without a mastery of precedent, they will simply lose their cases.

I had a couple of very good questions from the audience on what timeframes would be most useful for precedent analysis (I would say the last 20-30 years is the most important, but that doesn’t mean you can’t gain insights from going further back), and what sorts of things policy people would need to do to make such use of history possible (keep policy documents organized and available, particularly via the web, and do in-depth interviews with key parties, sealed for a period of time, if need be).

For examples of work that at least points in this direction, I suggested the work of Naomi Oreskes (naturally), and Imperial’s Abigail Woods, dealing with foot-and-mouth disease. Any other suggestions?

Jefferson’s Natural, Moral, and Political Philosophy of Race and Slavery

Update: For a great deal of excellent context concerning Notes on the State of Virginia and Jefferson’s discussions of race, please see Ricardo Brown’s new post on the subject at his blog, Until Darwin: Science and the Origins of Race.

For more on Jefferson’s relationship with his slaves, and his thinking about discipline, finance, and slavery on his own plantation, see this recent article at Smithsonian.com

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Charles Willson Peale’s 1791 portrait of Thomas Jefferson, proponent of human liberty, slave-owner, opponent of race mixing, father of mixed-race children, and self-aware hypocrite

At The H-Word, Becky Higgitt recently posted about Thomas Jefferson’s strong interest in the sciences and the cause of improvement. Thony Christie and I commented with some further thoughts about Jefferson’s education in natural philosophy, and his range of interests as an Enlightenment thinker.  Other commenters were quick to dispel any notion that Jefferson is a straightforwardly heroic figure in history (as his interest in science might imply), given his ownership of slaves, and his sexual relationship with one of them, Sally Hemings, which resulted in children. Although the comments don’t accurately portray Jefferson’s attitude toward his slaves, the fact is that he owned other human beings, and that is vile enough.

The interesting thing is that Jefferson was not simply “a man of his time,” blithely oblivious to the possibility of alternative mores.  On the contrary, he was fully convinced that he and his beloved state of Virginia were on the wrong side of history.  Now, this is most definitively not to say that what Jefferson regarded as the “right” side of history corresponds to, or is even fully intelligible to, the ideas of our own time.

A quick look at Jefferson’s philosophical discussions of slavery and race in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) nicely illustrates how he felt the proper course of history could be discerned, as well as some of the more peculiar characteristics of Enlightenment-era philosophy.  It will also illustrate that, while Jefferson thought slavery was a depraved institution, this opinion arose from his political belief in universal liberty, not his conception of race, which is, quite simply, disturbing.

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At the Policy Lunchbox in London on Wednesday

Announcement!  I will be giving a talk this Wednesday the 12th at the Biochemical Society and British Ecological Society’s “Policy Lunchbox” series from 12:30 to 2pm.  It will be at Charles Darwin House near Russell Square in London.  If you plan to come, you should let the organizers know.  Details here.

The title of my talk is “Science Policy History: Data Points, Morality Tale, or Precedent?” Spoiler alert: I’m going to be talking up the precedent angle.  (Also, I’m generally sympathetic to data points, rather less so to morality tales.)

Here’s a quick preview of some common morality tales from history:

Update: Slides here. (5.3 MB)

Cold War Social Science and the Rubric of the “Cold War”

Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature. edited by Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

I’d like to begin our look at this book with the question that Mark Solovey brings up in the title of his introductory piece, “Cold War Social Science: Specter, Reality, or Useful Concept?”  Basically, we now have a full-fledged professional historiography of “Cold War science and technology,” and a very large number of books and papers in the genre use the term “Cold War” as an adjective in their titles.  The idea, of course, is that the Cold War does not simply mark the period in which the events discussed take place, it is a (if not the) crucial context for understanding them.

As I understand the issue, we can divide up the way the Cold War matters into roughly three divisions:

  1. A lot of research was done directly in support of military and global political activities, most of it under contract with, and in some cases directly for, the military.
  2. Other research did not directly support Cold War activities, but it benefitted from state largess on the assumption that it might yield material benefit down the line, or the research was ancillary to category (1) research, and so funded as part of a broader package of work (say, theoretical mathematics related to cryptography).
  3. Other research had no relation to Cold War activities at all, but was nevertheless supported by rhetoric that linked it vaguely to the national interest, which was more apt to pique attention given Cold War anxieties.

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Paul Vinogradoff, Historical Jurisprudence, and the Critique of Sociology

Sir Paul Vinogradoff (18 (30) November 1854, Kostroma, Russia – 19 December 1925, Paris, France) is remembered primarily as an early practitioner of historical jurisprudence in Russia and Britain (as distinguished from the earlier comparative, perhaps unsystematic, studies of Henry Maine), and as a historian of medieval England, particularly of the medieval village.  He was also a keen critic of late nineteenth and early twentieth century social sciences.  Vinogradoff’s understanding of the scope and method of historical jurisprudence was intimately connected with his critical gaze of the intellectual projects of Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim, among others.  Essential to his view of the role of law in the evolution of human culture was his organicist view of society, the distinction, which he shared with J.S. Mill and Alfred Marshall, between statics and dynamics, and his adoption of Weberian ideal types.

Vinogradoff was in many ways extending enlightenment thinking about the nature of society, if we consider the enlightenment to begin with Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and end with Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and as well as the nineteenth century obsession with the empirical verification  of causal historical laws,  which reached its early perfection in Henry Buckle’s History of Civilization in England.  The second tendency was crystallized in the flood of studies describing in fine-grained detail all aspects of primeval, ancient, and medieval customs and communities. Such a level of discussion was possible not only through a revolutionary increase in the variety and quality of ethnographic, archaeological, and primitive legal accounts,  but also through the adoption of an evolutionary perspective, borrowed in equal parts from Comte, Spencer, and Karl Bucher.

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Bernard Lovell: An Archival Anecdote

The death of physicist Sir Bernard Lovell on August 6th at the age of 98 has been widely reported.  I thought I would mark his passing with an anecdote about some correspondence by and about him, which I ran across in December 2000 at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) on my first ever archive trip.*

To set the scene a bit, at the time I was still an undergrad, and was impressed by the wonderful circular reading room at the IWM situated right beneath the building’s cupola, and by having to do things like acquire permission from someone named Noble Frankland to see the Sir Henry Tizard papers there.  (And I didn’t even know this was a former site of Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam!)   I was trying to come to grips with the very loaded topic of “operational research” (OR).  I gathered that wartime OR had to do with the “coordination” of research with the military’s “operational” goals, but I didn’t have a very good sense of how coordination actually happened in bureaucracies, or the complicated politics of the subject.

It turns out most people don’t, but I was particularly ill-informed.  I distinctly remember telling the staff member escorting me to the reading room that I was interested in “why Britain didn’t develop a military-industrial complex as America did”.  I was duly informed it was because there was no money.  That wasn’t exactly what I meant — what I had in mind, but couldn’t express, was why British R&D hadn’t been more strongly coordinated with military planning as it had been in America even to a fault: RAND, McNamara, and all that.  That position was also wrong-headed in its own way.  I did not realize that I was caught up in deep tropes populating the rhetoric of science in Britain, which were designed to explain its failures (as well as America’s successes and pathologies).  It was believable, though, because so much evidence, including a letter written by a young Lovell, seemed to corroborate Britain’s difficulties coordinating its scientific resources — I did not appreciate that he and others were bearers of the rhetorical tradition that had already shaped my thinking.

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The H Word

Not too long ago, the Royal Museums Greenwich historian and curator (and Imperial College PhD), Becky Higgitt, decided to undertake the occasional post for the Whewell’s Ghost blog.  Then, she became a key contributor to the Board of Longitude project blog, and then became the proprietor of her own blog, Teleskopos.  (All are on the blogroll.)  Now, I think we can safely crown her the History of Science Blog Empress with the opening of “The H Word”, which she runs with Cambridge HPS historian Vanessa Heggie, at the Guardian’s — yes, the Guardian’s — website.  The comments there already show a thirst for history of science, so good luck to Becky and Vanessa!

As for the lack of activity around here, I have some good excuses: an article revision deadline, a self-imposed article submission deadline, a grant application deadline, and the birth of my daughter Claire (our first!) all coincided on August 1st.  I’ve got some good things in store blog-wise, though, so stay tuned!