Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 29 – History and Historiography of Science

Blog Watch: STS Observatory

A quick note to direct attention to Jon Agar’s rapid-fire series on science in 2008-2009 over at UCL’s STS Observatory. The blog was extremely quiet over the summer, so if you’re not a regular visitor, it’s worth checking back in. Essentially, Agar (who just took over editing the British Journal for the History of Science, by the way) is testing out material for the end of his new book on Science in the Twentieth Century (see his intro post here). It’s a useful exercise to see what one might imagine constitutes a snapshot of “science” at a point in time at this point in history. Early posts focused on headline-grabbers, but the last couple of posts are taking a bit more of a systematic or nuts-and-bolts approach to the subject matter.

Foucault, Ginzburg, Latour, and the Gallery

This post is an expansion on my previous post on Lorraine Daston’s discussion of the proliferation of microhistories that are “archivally based and narrated in exquisite detail” but that seem to serve no clear end. I largely agree with her assessment of this trend as an unsatisfactory state of affairs, as well as with her linking of the trend to a divergence from a prior era of productive dialogue with the other fields of science studies. However, she makes two key claims with which I disagree:

“…in large part because of the mandate to embed science in context, historians of science have become self-consciously disciplined, and the discipline to which they have submitted themselves is history” (808).
“Insofar as there has been a counterweight to these miniaturizing tendencies in recent work in the history of science, it has been supplied not by science studies but by a still more thoroughgoing form of historicism, namely, the philosophical history of Michel Foucault” (809).

I do not believe historians of science have in some way exchanged science studies for history, and I believe the historicism associated here with Foucault represents a continuity with the scholarship of the ’80s.

Let’s start with the intertwined set of highly productive conversations that took place around the ’80s (which we are beginning to revisit on this blog, and of which Daston was a part). Participants understood their gains to be generated by studying things like “practice not ideas”, “instruments”, “cultures of the fact” and so forth, which are slogans that make sense if you have a

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Daston on the Current Situation

Cheers to Darin Hayton over at PACHSmörgåsbord for keeping his eye on Critical Inquiry, where, in a nicely timed coincidence, Lorraine Daston has a new article (paywall protected), “Science Studies and the History of Science,” dedicated to many of the same issues we regularly explore here. Take a look if you can.

Daston notes—and I concur—that after a brief period of lively interaction, history of science and science studies drifted apart in the 1990s. In the article, Daston portrays the science studies disciplines as listless and adrift, while the history of science has fled for the greener pastures of straight history, a move that has placed the history of science on safer, but tamer ground (the history of science now lacks “a certain yeastiness that at once intrigued and rattled the neighboring disciplines of history, philosophy, and sociology, as well as the sciences” p. 811, fn).

According to Daston (echoing a point made in Objectivity and in co-author Galison’s “Ten Problems”), “Gone are the case studies in support of one or another grand philosophical or sociological generalization about the nature of science; in their place a swarm of microhistories have descended, often archivally based and narrated in exquisite detail” (809). I agree with the sentiment, but Daston believes the current passion for archive-mongering indicates our dedication to historiographical methodology—she notes the “improved craftsmanship of [our] footnotes”. This serves mainly to

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Cosmology and “Synoptic” Intellectual History

The influence of anthropological ideas on historiography is widely acknowledged, if too often boiled down to a slogan: “approach history as a stranger,” or “know the past on its own terms.” On this blog, Chris Donohue has been revisiting the problems informing the interpretive approaches of Malinowski’s “functionalism” and Lévi-Strauss’ “structuralism”. By grounding ritualistic behaviors in issues of social cohesion and cognitive strategy, these approaches bring sense to activities that, on their surface, seem arbitrary. Applied to familiar societies, they also form part of a trend stretching over a century that makes our own social behaviors seem less explicitly rational, if not altogether less rational. For historians of science, this is of great interest, because it helps reanalyze scientific practice in ways removed from overt scientific reasoning.

Moving beyond scientific practice as simply a particular mode of reasoning was part and parcel of the Great Escape from the philosophy of science. But I’d now like to move beyond the limitations of abandoning philosophy, to concentrate more on the generative ideas in the same historiographical period (roughly, the fabled ’80s), which have ceased to be articulated now that that period’s gains have themselves been boiled down to basic slogans.

The most important anthropological concept that has vaporized into the atmosphere is the cognitive cosmology, an idea which holds that every society, or really every individual, necessarily creates their own sense of what is in the world and how the world works, which allows people to cope with their surroundings. I’d like to very roughly sketch out a preliminary sense of how this idea worked in the historiography.

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Primer: Patrick Geddes

About a month ago, we spotlighted University of Leeds history research student Chris Renwick’s recent Isis article on the Spencerian influence on Patrick Geddes as a piece of writing that both nicely situates itself in the literature and in historical context, and highlights the importance of the history of ideas in science history. Word got back to Chris, and he has graciously agreed to do a couple of guest posts for us. The first kicks off the return of our “Primer” (formerly “hump-day history”) series.

Guest post by Chris Renwick

Encompassing natural and social sciences, as well as social reform projects that left their mark on cities including Edinburgh and Bombay, Patrick Geddes’ career was wide-ranging, long, and—some might say—characterised by a failure to make the most of his ability to unify seemingly disparate fields with evolutionary theorising.

After leaving Scotland to train as a biologist under “Darwin’s Bulldog,” T. H. Huxley, in the mid-1870s, Geddes first made his name with a series of experiments, conducted in France, Italy, and England in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Like many biologists of his generation, Geddes was unconvinced by the case Darwin had made for natural selection as the prime mover in evolution. Instead, Geddes—inspired by a range of thinkers, including the much-maligned Herbert Spencer—emphasised the importance of cooperation and mutually dependent relationships in evolutionary development. To support these views, Geddes examined relationships in the natural world that biologists often called parasitic. On separating “parasites” from their hosts—in particular, algae that lived in the tissue of flatworms—Geddes found that neither was able to live as effectively as they could together. He therefore

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Leftovers: Practical Strategy as Fractional Philosophy

After working through my thoughts about the historiographical aims of Objectivity and whether or not the history of science’s turn away from the philosophy of sciences impoverishes its ability to write a history of ideas, I have one leftover question I don’t really know what to think about, and it is expressed nicely in Martin Kusch’s review of Objectivity as he confronts their attempt to construct a “historicist” history without being “relativist” (possibly, I may be misunderstanding).

(Here, by the way, “historicist” means that concepts, such as objectivity, are not transcendental, a meaning to be distinguished from a historical determinism, as in the Marxist dialectic.)

According to Kusch:

Only a century ago, and thus very much in the period at issue in Objectivity, the relationship between historicism and relativism was extensively discussed among the likes of Dilthey, Heidegger, Husserl, Nietzsche, Rickert, Simmel and Windelband. Whatever emerged from this eventually abandoned debate, it certainly included the insight that the historicist can avoid relativism only by either positing a telos of historical development or treating the views of different periods as components of one overall truth. Neither option now seems particularly attractive.

Kusch defends relativism here as something not to be equated with skepticism. I have to admit I haven’t read enough of Kusch to know his opinions on the matter, but, having read enough of Harry Collins to understand how relativism informs his specifically sociological project (and with their jointly-written book still on my to-do list), I think I understand the defense as having to do with generating additional layers of explanation describing why rational actions can only make sense within specified social preconditions.

Rather than try and explain my understanding of what they mean by relativism any further at this point, I want to focus on the unattractiveness of seeing different views as components of an “overall truth”, because this is how I tend to see practice as informed by, or at least conforming to, philosophy, as discussed in my last post. The basic idea here

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Escape’s End, or: Philosophy and the Art of Historiography Maintenance

This book makes no pretense of giving the world a new theory of the intellectual operations. Its claim to attention, if it possesses any, is grounded on the fact that it is an attempt not to supersede, but to embody and systematise, the best ideas which have been either promulgated on its subject by speculative writers, or conformed to by accurate thinkers in their scientific inquiries.

—John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, 1843

While he ended up caught in a bloody tangle of barbed wire and killed, I heartily approve of Steve McQueen’s clever orchestration of a mass escape from a Nazi POW camp culminating in a heroic motorcycle chase. It is, though, perhaps needless to say that academic life is not the film of The Great Escape, historians are not Steve McQueen, and the philosophy of science is not a POW camp (however much it may have felt like one at points in the past). We do, however, risk a similar outcome in our own Great Escape.

The rationale underlying the Great Escape was the overbearing influence the philosophy of science apparently exercised on historians’ reconstruction of history. These histories perhaps concentrated too strongly on contributions to a history of ideas and not enough on the actual concerns of the people who made those contributions. They rendered certain topics of historical importance such as astrology unworthy of historians’ sustained attention, and narrated history in a language of discovery and proof that made the shape of science seem inevitable and the matter of the reception of discoveries a simple question of vision or blindness.

The vision of scientific community offered in philosophy and in philosophy-derived histories was of a sort of hive mind, which assumed that, once demonstrated, scientific ideas should and would spread freely, and that, therefore, it was appropriate to ask

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Objectivity, Pt. 3: Philosophy of Science and Historiographical Empiricism

I suggested in Pt. 2 of this post that Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity fits in with themes both have been exploring over the courses of their careers, as exemplified in Daston’s Wonders and the Order of Nature (written with Katharine Park), and Galison’s Image and Logic. Both are excellent books, though very different from each other. I believe my basic disagreements with the presentation in Objectivity (as described in Pt. 1) can be characterized in terms of how elements of the presentation of those books are carried over into Objectivity. I also believe these disagreements correspond to at least some elements of Martin Kusch’s criticism of the book in his essay review in Isis.

I mentioned in Pt. 2b that Wonders is an exemplary work of historico-philosophy. What I mean by this is that its subject matter is philosophically defined, roughly as follows: 1) understanding of the world is governed by system (an “order of nature”); 2) this understanding produces expectations concerning what is likely to be seen; 3) violations of this system constitute “wonders”; 4) ethical and intellectual responses to wonders constitute a way of fundamentally distinguishing epistemic traditions.

This scheme allows us to move the history of ideas about nature beyond the philosophy of science by characterizing at a very basic level what intellectual systems can look like outside of what we would think of as a properly scientific worldview. Not only does the scheme allow us to be sympathetic to Scholastic methods that have often (though not always) been disparaged in histories of science, but also to literary and religious cosmologies (which offered intellectual resources to early natural history, which themselves have only recently begun receiving proper historiographical treatment). Daston and Park’s scheme further periodizes modern natural

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Objectivity, Pt. 2b: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Epistemology

If Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity is a product of the history of science’s Great Escape from the philosophy science, their work differs from much of the work in the Great Escape historiography in that it retains a clear interest in not only the history of ideas, but scientific ideas. As I argued in Pt. 2a, Galison’s oeuvre has concentrated on aesthetic ideals as ideas governing individual scientific practice and intertraditional conflict: image vs. logic, or, indeed, one kind of representational objectivity versus another.

Daston, even more than Galison, has likewise never seemed too tempted to abandon ideas for practice. Her work, like Steven Shapin’s work on the 17th-century, takes the relationship between epistemology and morals extremely seriously, so that it is not so much practice, but ideas about proper practice, that take center stage. I would go so far as to say that Daston’s work, much like Michel Foucault’s, functions best as a mapping of systems of socio-epistemic ideas, and tends to be a little lackadaisical concerning things like proper periodization, and, especially, constituency (“eighteenth-century notions” should be read as “the notions of these thinkers active in a certain period of the eighteenth century”). This is not to say it isn’t brilliant—it is—it just has its priorities, and readers are well-served to keep these in mind.

A nice introduction to Daston’s intellectual program is her piece “The Moral Economy of Science” from the 1995 Osiris, which (aside from stealing and redefining—i.e., appropriating—E. P. Thompson’s term “moral economy”) sketches out what

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Objectivity, Pt. 2a: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Epistemology

In his useful essay review of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity in Isis, the philosopher Martin Kusch (formerly of Cambridge HPS, now of Vienna) notes that an important feature of the book’s argument is its twin commitments to combating “relativism” and “localism” (which causes him “unease”; more on this later). I agree with his emphasis on these motivations as key to understanding the format of Objectivity‘s presentation, and believe the commitments are linked to the historiographical program of the Great Escape from the philosophy of science that began some 30 years ago.

If this story is right, once various forms and specters of epistemological determinism were removed from the history of science, local “contingency” became the watchword. To understand why any view became established in the history of science, you had to go to the local archive and uncover all the nuanced negotiations that resulted in the “construction” of this or that concept. This tended to be repellent to scientists and philosophers of science, not because it uncovered their dirty laundry, but because it tended to make the development of whatever concept was at issue appear arbitrary. Even if constructionism did not imply arbitrariness, per se, it did leave plenty of room for socio-cultural bias, or, to put it another way, for the intellectual overdetermination of scientific knowledge through the “ladening” of observations with theory or values. This overdetermination could be teased out by examining the archive, or simply by examining the “situatedness” of patronage (following the Marxists) and of the metaphors employed in scientific knowledge-building.

Even since How Experiments End (1987), Galison (not unlike fellow Escapist Latour) has been keen to defuse not only radical skepticist claims that knowledge is socially determined, but also more moderate claims attached to anti-positivist

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