Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 16 – History and Historiography of Science

Live at Leeds: Maximum HPS

Thanks to everyone from Leeds — and Manchester! — for coming out, and for the fine hospitality. Good night, and see you next time!

Apologies for the lack of substantive posts lately. My new introduction to the history of science course is starting on Monday, and I’m now in the final stages of overhauling my book manuscript. Priorities, you know. Also, I’m heading up to the University of Leeds on Wednesday to kick off the seminar season with a talk entitled “Perspectives on the Possibility for a Science of Policy after World War II”, 3:15pm in the Department of Philosophy, Baines Wing G36 (alas, I don’t think I could fill the Refectory!). Do come around if you happen to be in the neighborhood.

My book (present title: Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America, 1940-1960) is on a topic that has received a decent amount of attention. But, to my mind, this attention seems mainly hung up on the idea that the history being told must hinge on some variation on the standard “what happens when you try to apply science to policy?” question. This was a point I originally made in a BJHS article back in 2007. My talk will boil down the central point of my book, which is that we need to distinguish different scientific activities from each other, and start to understand how they were built around different tasks, different methods, different notions of what gave knowledge integrity as “science”, how that integrity related to practical decision-making, and what implications that had (or, more often, did not have) for polity in general. Most significantly, these differing ideas complemented not only each other but traditional decision-making methods, probably more often than they were in competition.

Book Review: Leo Beranek’s Riding the Waves, and George Cowan’s Manhattan Project to the Santa Fe Institute

The following book review appears in Isis 102 (September 2011): 581-582.

Leo Beranek. Riding the Waves: A Life in Sound, Science, and Industry. x + 230 pp., figs. Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2008. $24.95 (paper). George A. Cowan. Manhattan Project to the Santa Fe Institute: The Memoirs of George A. Cowan. 175 pp., illus., index. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010. $18.50 (cloth)

William Thomas

Leo Beranek and George Cowan are both important figures within the history of the twentieth-century physical sciences. However, neither was so important that his memoirs will be of widespread historiographical interest. Therefore, rather than gauge how the standard caveats regarding the autobiographical genre may apply to these books as works of history, it is better to consider their usefulness as resources that historians can draw on to suit their own purposes.

Beranek is an acoustician who earned a doctorate in engineering at Harvard before World War II. During the war he became the head of the electro-acoustic laboratory based at Harvard. Afterward he served as the technical director of the acoustics laboratory at MIT, before steadily diverting his efforts, in the 1950s, into his highly successful engineering consulting firm, Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN). In the 1970s, as president of the investment group Boston Broadcasters, Incorporated (BBI), he helped develop an ambitious programming strategy for Boston’s WCVB Channel 5 TV station.

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The Weirdest Guest — William Z. Ripley: Economist, Financial Historian, and Racial Theorist

William Ripley’s (October 13, 1867 – August 16, 1941) long career as a writer, public servant, and academician presents nightmarish problems of reconstruction for the historian. Ripley, at one time vice president of the American Economic Association, was an expert on railroads and trusts, a competent historian of the financial history of colonial Virginia, an astute observer on the labor problem in both Europe and America, and, with the publication of the Races of Europe (1899), one of the preeminent sociologists of his day.

The longevity of Ripley’s influence poses problems for the scope of the academical truism of the “revolution” brought about by Boas’ cultural relativism, as well as the intriguing connections between the Oxford School of Anthropology and American racial theory. Such was the enduring reputation of Ripley’s work that it was revised in 1946 by Carlton Coon, an important twentieth century physical anthropologist who taught at Harvard. Coon’s mentor, Earnest Albert Hooton, a student of R. R. Marett, was a nasty piece of work, producing works in the same mental universe as Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920).

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Merton on the Reception of Watson’s The Double Helix

For many decades now, various critics have supposed that the relations between science and society suffer because of the prevalence of an unrealistic view of science as something that is abstract and dehumanized. This supposition licenses the critics to deploy therapeutically realistic images of science to deliver their audience from their false idols into a state of mature understanding.

In his paper, “Should the History of Science Be Rated X?” Science 183 (1974): 1164-1172, Stephen Brush supposed the history of science could play just such a “subversive” role in science education. At that same time, according to some stories, the history of science itself had to be rescued from ne’er-do-well myth-spinners working as philosophers of science, Mertonian sociologists, and, of course, American scientists justifying their work to society and Congress.

All of this overlooks the fact that our entire society had already been freed from its illusions by James Watson’s best-selling 1968 memoir, The Double Helix.

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Robert Ranulph Marett, Eugenics, and the Progress of Prehistoric Man

R. R. Marett’s account of the progress of prehistoric man in Progress and History (1916), edited by Francis Sydney Marvin, had the object of assuring his audience that no matter how savage individuals were in the past they still grew, through gradual biological adaptation and an increasing awareness of divinity, into full grown Englishmen.

Robert Ranulph Marett (1866–1943)

Marett is remembered, if at all, for succeeding E.B. Tylor as Reader in Anthropology in Oxford in 1910, and for proposing a primal stage of religious worldview, pre-animism. This elaborated on Tylor’s evolutionary scheme of psychic development. Marett, like Lucien Levy-Bruhl, considered the primitive mind to be a uniform entity which ordered reality in a distinct way from that of modern man.

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Norms, “Ideology”, and the Move against “Functionalist” Sociology

The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) critique of the Mertonian program to define a “normative structure of science” centered around the complaint that, by focusing on the social conditions that fostered scientific rationality, nothing was said about the sociology of knowledge-producing processes in everyday scientific work. It seems to me that SSK strategies like “methodological relativism”, and Steven Shapin’s embrace of “middle-range” historico-sociological theories, might ultimately have resulted in additions to, and a reconciliation with, the original Mertonian framework.

However, at the same time, another critique questioned the basic validity of that framework. This critique shared the SSK critique’s interest in describing actual scientific work, but, like Mertonian sociology, it focused on scientists’ and others’ sense of the essence of scientific culture without directly addressing knowledge-production processes. This critique held that, because “functionalist” ideal-type systems of scientific behavior could not actually be found in their pure form, such systems did not meaningfully exist. Legitimate sociology had to be obtained inductively from the empirical record, as studied by historians and ethnologists.

A key work here is: Michael Mulkay, “Norms and Ideology in Science,” Social Science Information 15 (1976): 637-656.

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Sociology and History: Shapin on the Merton Thesis

This post will mainly focus on Steven Shapin’s “Understanding the Merton Thesis” Isis 79 (1988): 594-605, which may be my favorite work by him.

Robert K. Merton’s “functionalist” sociology viewed “science” as a kind of Weberian ideal type — a form of thought that is identifiable by its peculiar, philosophically-defined characteristics. Merton’s sociology of science held that this thought could also be identified with social behaviors, characterized by a set of “norms”, which made the thought possible.

The Merton Thesis (which slightly predates Merton’s enumeration of science’s norms) holds that the rise of science in early-modern England could be linked to the social behaviors valued by the Puritanism of that milieu. This was the subject of Merton’s PhD thesis and his 1938 book Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England.

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Viscount James Bryce on the Marketplace and the American Intellect

The British social theorist James Bryce is chiefly known as a writer on the American party system (The American Commonwealth, 1888) and may perhaps be one of the most tolerable early sociologists of modern democracy (Modern Democracies, 1921). This will be the subject of a later post.

Bryce was quite indebted to European thinkers, even those from whom he tried to distance himself. Perhaps nowhere is the influence of Tocqueville more apparent than in Bryce’s discussion of the effect of commerce and the marketplace upon the American intellect. Here Bryce elaborates upon the conclusion of Tocqueville, that the materialism of American culture explained its lack of genius and refinement.

In the nineteenth century, capitalism and art never mixed well in the minds of social theorists. Consider for a moment the distaste of business and money expressed by John Ruskin or Matthew Arnold. If not commerce, then the natural sciences or industry were the source of the ills of the present.

The market was another sign of modernity and its triumph over history. This caused many theorists — French, German, and English, from Rousseau and Gibbon and back again — to bemoan the discontents of progress and capitalist modernity. Whether progress was worth the costs and what progress consisted of were the chief concerns of sociology at this time. It was this sentiment which welded to together the works of Weber, Simmel, Marx, and Durkheim. Bryce was no different.

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Richard Ely on Industrial Civilization and Socialism

Almost every economist who wrote from the French Revolution to the interwar period (and perhaps even to today) defined the principles of their economics or political economy along with a narrative of the development of civilization. Richard Ely was no exception.

Richard T. Ely — Richard Theodore Ely (1854–1943)

As with Smith and Malthus, in Ely’s economics the reader is treated to several prolonged discussions of why savages made tools, what herdsmen were really like, and how medieval towns came into being. Not only did economists from Adam Smith forward have to address the increasingly complexities of land, labor, and capital, as well as banking and finance, but also the emergence of a new kind of civilization, industrial civilization. Ricardo and Marx’s discussions of technology and machinery alone argue for their continuing relevance.

Ely’s Elementary Principles of Economics (1915), intended for students, began the discussion of the emergence of industrial civilization with the all-too-familiar conceit, the “hunting and fishing stage.” In this initial stage of development, economic activity is “isolated.” Ely considered the earliest stages to be “independent economy” with little exchange of goods or coordination among individuals. Ely also distinguished between two fundamentally differing views towards the natural world in human beings’ march towards civility, namely, “between uncivilized man, who uses what he finds, and civilized man, who makes what he wants.”

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Harry Collins, Methodological Relativism, and Sociological Explanation, Pt. 2

In my previous post on Harry Collins’ ideas about “methodological relativism”, I discussed how in the early 1980s Collins began explicitly using relativism as a “natural attitude” that could be used to produce “sociological explanations” of scientists’ behavior. Methodological relativism was premised on a clear delineation of tasks, which makes it appropriate for the sociologist, but not for scientists.

However, this delineation of tasks remained incomplete: in particular, the relationship between sociology, philosophy, and history of science remained confusingly unresolved. Further, it was unclear what sociological fruits would actually be obtained via methodological relativism. Finally, it left unclear what the relationship was supposed to be between the sociology of scientific knowledge and the more general sociology of knowledge, upon which STS appears to be based.

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