History and Historiography of Science

Shapiro vs Schaffer on Newton’s Prism Experiments, Pt. 2

Alan Shapiro (hssonline.org)

In Pt. 1 of this post, I discussed Alan Shapiro’s 1996 criticism of Simon Schaffer’s 1989 piece “Glass Works” (first discussed on this blog here).  Shapiro argued that deficiencies in Schaffer’s portrayal of objection to Newton’s experiments derived from Schaffer’s “constructivist” methodology, which made him pay too much mind to disputes over experimental results, and not enough to others’ apparent ability to replicate Newton’s experiments, nor to the theoretical context of those experiments.  Per Shapiro, these factors actually led to a record of reasonable success in securing assent around Newton’s work, even among Newton’s intellectual competitors.  I argued that taking Schaffer’s paper to constitute a fully adequate history of the reception of Newton’s work spoke past the point of Schaffer’s commentary, which was intended to elucidate historical strategies specifically surrounding instances of failure to attain assent over experimental results.

In this post, I want to expand on the key strength of Shapiro’s criticism: the importance he ascribed to synthetic accounts of history, which contrasts with the historiography of commentary espoused by Schaffer.

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Shapiro vs Schaffer on Newton’s Prism Experiments, Pt. 1

This post is a response to this comment by Michael Bycroft on a 2009 post on Simon Schaffer’s well-known 1989 “Glass Works” paper, which brought to my attention a reply published seven years later by historian of optics Alan Shapiro: “The Gradual Acceptance of Newton’s Theory of Light and Color,” Perspectives in Science 4 (1996): 59-140.

“Glass Works” was itself a commentary on a large body of Newton scholarship, most especially Richard Westfall’s biography, Never at Rest (1980).  It explicitly made use of Harry Collins’ sociology of “calibration”, which pointed to the necessity that instruments and experimental procedures gain trust before assertions based on experimental results can be accepted.  Schaffer and Steven Shapin had previously used this insight in Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985) to call attention to the basis of Thomas Hobbes’ criticism of experimental philosophy as well as to the intellectual, literary, and sociological strategies Robert Boyle used to gain assent over experimental results.

Unlike Schaffer’s commentary, Shapiro assembles a synthetic history of the acceptance and replication of Newton’s important experiment showing the elongation of the light of the sun when passed through a prism, as well as his two-prism experimentum crucis, which demonstrated that white light was composed of differently refrangible rays. 

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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.

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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. 

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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.

Some Thoughts on the Study of Historical State Expertise

Although I identify as a historian of science, my current project to survey expertise in the British state makes no real effort to distinguish between scientific and non-scientific forms of expertise.  In a subsequent post I intend to elaborate on my beliefs that such distinctions have not mattered much to historical actors either.  For now, however, since I don’t want to extend my survey to basically anyone with specialized skill, which would include, say, clerks, I’ve needed a working definition: anyone a) whose input affects the design of a policy, or b) who must apply a policy in concrete situations.

To my comfort, I soon found this bifurcated view of expertise casually expressed in conversations within the British civil service.  One inquiry into the worth of a research branch of the Agricultural Land Service of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries asked for comments on its work’s bearing on either the “formulation” or the “administration” of policy.  I’ll be on the lookout to see whether this pairing is a term of art, or simply an off-the-cuff way of distinguishing obvious functional divides in bureaucratic work.

From the wartime "Growmore Leaflet" No. 62, "Beating the Wireworm"

Another issue is the overlapping of expertise and representation.  In British agriculture, the importance of location was well appreciated, and knowledge of local conditions was considered a form of expertise to be consulted as a matter of course in the formulation and administration of agricultural policies.  Bodies such as the Agricultural Improvement Council (AIC) sought out membership that represented the full diversity of farming conditions in the English and Welsh countryside (Scotland and Northern Ireland even had their own separate advisory bodies).  Likewise, it went without saying that the powerful National Farmers’ Union was always to have at least one representative on the council.  The National Union of Agricultural Workers also had a representative throughout the AIC’s existence.  Later a land agent was included as well.

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The Agricultural Improvement Council for England and Wales, 1941-1962

From time to time, as part of my survey of expertise in the British state project, I will post here some raw research results until the time arises when I can create a more permanent home for them.  Recently I have been looking at the Agricultural Improvement Council (AIC) for England and Wales.  This post contains a complete list of AIC members, and some background information, which I have assembled from archival files and do not believe to be readily accessible elsewhere.

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Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay, and Economic Determinism

Brooks Adams (1848-1927)

Russell Kirk (1918-1994) noted that Brooks Adams was “an eccentric.” Adams was disgusted with American society in his day and thought inertia was “social death.” He believed the only solution to the ills of society was progress and change, denouncing capitalists and bankers in much the same language as Karl Marx.  Adams, much like Marx, was to Kirk, an “economic determinist,” but unlike Marx, he “detested the very process of change which he urged society to accept,” and “longed hopelessly for the republic of Washington and John Adams,” condemning “democracy” as both “a symptom and cause of social decay.”  Adams’ “detestation” of capitalism stemmed from his aversion to “competition,” enjoining his fellow man to seek stability and order.  According to Kirk, however, Adams’ dream of harmony was subverted by his own understanding of historical laws, as “by the logic of his own economic and historical theories, permanence is never found in the universe.”  Kirk underscored that the persistent theme throughout Adams’ four works — The Law of Civilization and Decay, America’s Economic Supremacy, The New Empire, and The Theory of Social Revolutions — was man’s imprisonment by economic forces and civilization as the product of ceaseless centralization (The Conservative Mind, 367-9)

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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:

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David Hume on the Reduction of Sentiments

This post illustrates some points concerning how arguments were constructed in 18th century philosophy, which I made in my last post on the historical science-economics relationship.

Last summer I was staying over at someone’s house and happened to notice an old college copy of David Hume (1711-1776), I think An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), sitting on a bookshelf.  With a little downtime on my hands, I decided to have a quick skim.  What struck me at the time was Hume’s use of historical events and poets’ observations as facts or phenomena that could be fit within a more systematized theory of human sentiments.  I was going to write about that, but, going back, either I wasn’t reading the same thing, or Hume just doesn’t use the device as much as I thought (preferring more vague references to common experience and opinion).  So, never mind that.

What did grab me on re-reading is Hume’s well-known argument against a reduction of human sentiment to self-interest, per Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) among others.  Hume framed his criticism in an interesting way:

An Epicurean or a Hobbist readily allows, that there is such a thing as a friendship in the world, without hypocrisy or disguise; though he may attempt, by a philosophical chymistry, to resolve the elements of this passion, if I may so speak, into those of another, and explain every affection to be self-love, twisted and moulded, by a particular turn of imagination, into a variety of appearances. But as the same turn of imagination prevails not in every man, nor gives the same direction to the original passion; this is sufficient even according to the selfish system to make the widest difference in human characters, and denominate one man virtuous and humane, another vicious and meanly interested.

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