History and Historiography of Science

Neglected Connections between the Histories of Science and Economics, Pt. 1

Although historians of science have not traditionally shown a strong interest in the history of economic thought, developing such an interest would make good professional sense, in particular because epistemological issues in economics and the natural sciences have long been intertwined in less than obvious ways.  Historians would do well to familiarize themselves with historical epistemological debates around economic thought, such as the Methodenstreit of the 1880s, because important ideas like “science”, “objectivity”, and “impersonality” have meanings that, in much of the historical commentary on them, were specifically associated with debates surrounding the validity of social scientific abstraction, and the important distinctions that were made between the goals of theorization and normative practice.

Aside from brushing up on the historical meanings of certain terms, historians of science also have an opportunity to lend additional clarity to the historical connections between thinking about science and thinking about politics, society, and economy.  Intellectual historians and philosophers of economics, and of science more generally, have studied the more explicit historical debates surrounding political economy and its connections to the methods of science, say, in the thought of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) or Karl Marx (1818-1883).  Additionally, the transfer of metaphors between domains has received good attention, particularly in the area of evolutionary theory: from the economics of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) to Charles Darwin (1809-1882), or from evolutionary theory back into Herbert Spencer’s (1820-1903) social theory (on this blog, also see Chris Renwick’s discussion of Patrick Geddes).

There is further important work to be done in straight-up intellectual history, but additional opportunities may be found in the history of intellectual practices that provide the context in which ideas make sense.

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Sketch: UK Agricultural Research and Education

Joseph Henry Gilbert (1817-1901)

It is difficult to trace the lineage of agricultural research in Britain without the bottom falling out from underneath your feet, putting you in freefall until you land with a thud in the eighteenth century.  Since this is well outside the scope of my project, I will just note a few reference points before scrambling back toward the twentieth century: the growth of experimental farming by “improvement”-minded landowners (good ol’ Turnip Townshend and co.), the 1791 foundation of the Veterinary College of London (later the Royal Veterinary College), and the 1796 foundation of the Sibthorpian Chair of Rural Economy at Oxford through the benefaction of John Sibthorp (1758-1796), who was Sherrardian Professor of Botany there from 1784 until his death (having replaced his father, Humphrey, who held the post from 1747 to 1783).

A Board of Agriculture existed in England from 1793 until it was wound up in 1820.  The Royal Agricultural Society of England was founded in 1838, and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons was founded in 1844.  For reference, the Board of Longitude was wound up in 1828, the Royal Astronomical Society was founded in 1820, the British Medical Association was founded in 1832, and the Chemical Society of London was founded in 1841.

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EWP 2011

Me doing some EWP-related reading during some downtime on my honeymoon in Hawaii last July. No, seriously, this is relaxation for me!

Happy New Year everyone!  In retrospect, it has been very convenient for me that I started this blog on January 1, 2008, because that way the new year provides a good occasion for reflection on blogging past, present and future.  At three years into this project, things have slowed down a little.  Once upon a time, I managed a few posts each week.  Now I try to get in one.  However, they tend to be longer, and, I think the ideas are better developed than they once were, which really was the whole point of the exercise.  What was once a scattershot series of observations and complaints has become a more fully worked out critical viewpoint, which I can draw upon in day-to-day conversations and writing.

However, one year ago, this viewpoint was already reasonably well worked out.  My new year’s blogging resolution is once again to stop leaning so hard on the crutch of methodological introspection. 

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Clericuzio on Alchemy, Chemistry, Medicine, and Natural Philosophy

First off, for readers interested in current efforts to refine historical knowledge about early modern natural philosophical programs: there is a project blog, founded this past August, being run out of the University of Otago in New Zealand, called Early Modern Experimental Philosophy.  Do read.

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Andreas Libavius (1555-1616)

This post is a further look at intellectual issues surrounding the relationship between early modern “chymistry” and the pursuit of natural philosophy, as discussed in a much earlier post on the dispute between Bill Newman and Alan Chalmers concerning the nature of Robert Boyle’s chymistry.  There I understood Newman to argue that, to Boyle, philosophically important chemical knowledge deriving from experiment would have had to be fit within his mechanical philosophical framework, and that chemical taxonomies would not have fit that bill.  Of course, in the seventeenth century, natural philosophy occupied one niche amid a full array of agendas to which chemistry was relevant.  Many of these are dealt with in a recent article by the University of Cassino’s Antonio Clericuzio: “‘Sooty Empiricks’ and Natural Philosophers: The Status of Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century,” Science in Context 23 (2010): 329-350.

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On the Beeb: Lisa Jardine on Jacob Bronowski

Update. Apparently the film is now available for a further week, through the 23rd

One position I hold on this blog is that historians need to worry less about their engagement with the realm of public ideas.  The main reason I hold this position is that I think there is a tendency — albeit by no means a necessary one — to measure the quality of professional work in term of what qualities it possesses that public ideas lack, rather than against its own internal standards.  Another important reason, though, is that I am generally satisfied with the quality of public presentation of science and its history.  Yes, there is much that is of low quality, but nothing I or my colleagues say is going to change that.  In fact, though, here in the UK, rather good history of science seems to be in the media perhaps even more often than the subject actually warrants!

Lisa Jardine, notably, seems to be a very public figure, and, in general, I am a fan.  (I thought this column for bbc.co.uk, wherein she argues that history “reminds us” that real people can get hurt by things, contrary to what budget-cutting politicians may think, was a particularly superficial case for the relevance of history.)  My new fun fact learned this past week is that Jardine is the daughter of Jacob Bronowski.  Bronowski was a mathematician who is best known for popular television programs on science, most notably The Ascent of Man.  She has just made a film about him for the BBC entitled My Father, The Bomb, and Me, which is available online here — but only until December 16th, so hurry!  (I’m not sure if it’s available outside the UK.)  The video below is a hopefully more permanent clip of Bronowski, which I will discuss in conjunction with Jardine’s film after the jump.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7br6ibK8ic]

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Decision, Risk, and Values: The Philosophy of Churchman and Ackoff

A couple of months ago, I suggested a possible conflict of interest between STS and the history of science.  Effectively, the aspirations of STS to contemporary relevance is at least partially dependent on potential contributions arising from new research results.  For these results to have impetus, conclusions should be novel.  Historians of science usually see their own opportunities in confirming STS results by mining examples from history, which, as illustrative examples, are treated as effectively “lost” to the present.

However, novelty can be augmented by conveniently forgetting the history of the ideas underlying the conclusions on offer.  By mining deep history for ideas that are, in some sense, to be considered “lost” (or by seeking evidence that the ideas have never existed at all), historians can inadvertently create an “anti-history” of the subsequent history of those ideas.  A better opportunity, I would argue, is to be found in placing the claims of STS and philosophical peers within their historical traditions.  Historians could keep track of who else is currently espousing these ideas based upon much fuller accounts of their history extending to the present.

Unfortunately, historians’ bookkeeping methodologies are woefully inadequate to this task.  But it is still possible to fill in pieces of the history where the opportunity arises.  This particular post is prompted by a recent post at The Bubble Chamber, which posits a recent move in the philosophy of science, which takes efficacy as a key criterion of knowledge.  However, my own historical work on the figures of philosophers West Churchman and Russell Ackoff (who just died last year) suggests that the tradition is neither new nor lost — perhaps just misplaced by philosophers (though I trust philosophers can clarify this point).  Neither was obscure: Churchman was actually editor of Philosophy of Science from 1948 to 1958.  However, both turned from philosophy of science to operations research before ultimately winding up in the eclectic realm of “systems thinking”.

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Toulmin on Cosmology and the “Theology of Nature”

In April I finished up a series of posts on the anthropological concept of “cosmology” (meaning a coherent system of thought), and the relationships historians of the 1980s were able to draw between it and the historical practice and fate of natural philosophy — including scientific cosmology — in the 18th and 19th centuries.  (See especially Simon Schaffer’s clear 1980 argument on this point.)

In my last post in that series, I noted that in seeking to ground Michael Faraday’s (1791-1867) physical convictions in his Sandemanian religious beliefs, Geoffrey Cantor used the term “theology of nature” to distinguish ideas implicit in Faraday’s thought from a contemporaneous, but more explicitly reasoned “natural theology”.  To quote the subtitle to William Paley’s (1743-1805) 1802 book, Natural Theology, natural theology sought “evidence of the existence and attributes of the deity” in the study of nature.  For Faraday, though, only the certain revelation of the Bible could produce knowledge of God, making it necessary for historians to excavate his personal theology of nature.

Some time later, it occurred to me it might not be a bad idea to chase down this “theology of nature” term, which led me directly to Stephen Toulmin’s 1982 essay collection, The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature.  Aha.  Since today marks the first anniversary of Toulmin’s death, I thought it might be a good time to try to type something up that helps put Toulmin, a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, into our history of the history of science of the 1980s.

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Unfocused: Science, Technology, and the Cold War

Collectively, historians know a lot about science and technology during the Cold War.  A significant number of books and articles have been written about the ambitious technological systems developed during the era, the enormous scientific endeavors made possible by expanded state and military funding, the rise of new intellectual programs in fundamental physics and molecular biology, the expansion of geoscience and social science and the development of new methods in them, the global integration of scientific work, and the importance of digital computation, among other subjects.  Accordingly, the present is an excellent time to reflect on and consolidate what has been learned, render the history of the era more navigable, and to suggest forward-looking research programs.

Unfortunately, this past summer’s Isis Focus section, edited by David Kaiser and Hunter Heyck did not take the opportunity to do that.  The limit of the section’s synthesis essentially said what the paragraph above said at greater length, and left the rest of the space as a forum for the individual contributors to showcase their own research projects, which are taken to “exemplify” recent research trends.  In this way, this Focus section is little different from past sections, which position themselves as the beginnings of new conversation, present some new empirical work, but mainly simply recapitulate basic ideas that can be considered the agreed-upon points in an aging scholarship, while reciting the perpetual mantra that “more work is needed” for any real understanding to occur.  This blog typically does not take these sections up.  But, since Cold War-era science is my own specialty, I thought a (now rather belated) critique of this particular section might be in order.

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Preliminary Survey: Literature on Agricultural Research to 1945

The importance of agricultural research in the intellectual history of science should be self-evident.  Justus Liebig (1803-1873) was a key figure in both the development of laboratory methodology and agricultural science.  Gregor Mendel’s (1822-1884) famous experiments were in plant breeding.  Louis Pasteur’s (1822-1895) most celebrated work was on the cattle disease, anthrax.  William Bateson (1861-1926), who coined the term genetics, was the first director of the John Innes Horticultural Institution in London, 1910-1926.  Statistician, geneticist, and eugenics proponent R. A. Fisher (1890-1962) was employed by the Rothamsted Experimental Station, 1919 to 1933 (and temporarily relocated there from 1939 to 1943).  Interwar and postwar virologists and molecular biologists did a great deal of work on the economically destructive tobacco mosaic virus.

In these examples, problems of agriculture form a motivating context for contributions to biology, statistics, and other fields.  The history of agricultural research itself remains somewhat difficult to discern, even though it apparently constitutes a long, sizable tradition.  We do have some enumeration of accomplishments in research and technique, written in retrospect by practitioners.  For the case of the UK, the following resources are available:

The Archive, Navigability, and the Sum of Historiographical Knowledge

Will you reclaim history from the archive, or will the archive claim you? (Photo from Wikimedia Commons; click for the original)

Historians owe a great deal to librarians and archivists, as well as to those who have preserved their own papers.  However, “the archive” — referring broadly to books, journals, papers, artifacts, etc. — is pointless if it is not used.  We can scarcely claim to know about history if all we have done is preserve it rather than read it, publish it, and talk about it.  This post is a meditation about how it can be claimed that history is known, and how this relates to the use of the archive.

Publication, in itself, cannot be strictly identified with use.  Publication is perhaps a step above reading the archive — it is an essentially personal act that is more or less pointless unless the publication is read.  If the publication is not read, then it sits on a shelf (and maybe a server), which means that it has essentially become part of the archive itself.  Perhaps the archive has been made more accessible, but this point is moot if it is not accessed.

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