History and Historiography of Science

Book Club: Objectivity, Pt. 1

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison argue in their recent book Objectivity that “objectivity” is not a transcendental concept: it “has a history”.  It therefore must have come into existence at a certain point in time.  They further argue that the character of objectivity has both transformed and fractured with time, and that the transformation, fracturing, and collection of different notions of objectivity can be periodized.  To demonstrate their case, they analyze scientific imagery and its production through time, as surveyed by assembling a gallery of scientific “atlases” (collections of images meant to convey a body of scientific knowledge).

Objectivity is, I think, an important work of historiography that addresses head-on problems associated with the historiography of the gallery of practices: how to write analytical long-term (“mesoscopic”) histories of scientific practice, how to write histories that do not depend on a strict narrative of causality, and how to write about science as a cultural and intellectual activity without questioning the ultimate validity of scientific work.  In addition to their scattered commentary toward these points throughout the book, see a distillation of their position last year in Victorian Studies.

Reviews suggest that the book will be a widely-read touchstone.  I believe this presents a danger to a historiography that is not sufficiently reflective.  Rather than critically reflect on the book’s strategies, there is a danger that historians will now be inspired to “go fishing” for instances of “truth-to-nature” or “mechanical objectivity” in the histories that they themselves study.  Those who do so may deploy Daston and Galison’s methodological insights directly, or may question or problematize their periodizations by finding contrary examples.  But I believe a more productive exercise is questioning the methodology in toto as an approach to the historiographical problems the book explicitly seeks to address.

The book is certainly broadly-researched and its presentation is extremely erudite, and it contains useful insights.  But I disagree with Daston and Galison as to what these insights are.  I believe the presentation in Objectivity is grounded on a few interrelated assumptions.  First, the practice of representation constitutes a fundamental act of science, a presentation of what scientists believe the scientific object must look like as seen through the scientific eye.  Second, there is, therefore, a

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The Historiographical Idea of the Automaton-Scientist

"Go Robot: Do Science!"

For the Gallery of Practices to be productive it must be read.  For the Gallery to be created, elements, or portraits, must be selected.  The danger of the Gallery is that the same thing that is read from the Gallery will be the same ideas informing the selection of its elements.  We will take away a conclusion about the relationship between science and the Cold War because we have selected events indicative of our preconceived understanding of what the relationship between “science” and the “Cold War” was like.

However, there is also a danger that even if a reading of the Gallery manages to escape the principles of its construction—say by constructing a gallery from some broad survey—it is still possible to abstract an idea or practice from the Gallery that makes little sense removed from a system of ideas of which it was initially a part.  Instead, the idea becomes incorporated in a system imposed on the Gallery by the historian’s interpretation, much as a Whiggish narrative of history imposes present ideas on the past.

In the last few years, there have been attempts to develop a history of the morality and virtues of the sciences—the history of the “scientific self”.  In The Scientific Life (2008), Steven Shapin drew upon a gallery of historical rhetoric for evidence of changing attitudes concerning whether scientific figures have been morally equated with or separated from ordinary people.  Similarly, in their book Objectivity (2007), Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have assembled a gallery of scientific “atlases”—collections of images designed to acquaint readers with a body of scientific knowledge—and have connected representational strategies, via a history of ideas about “objectivity”, to a history of the “epistemic virtues” that have inhabited scientific personas .

By making representation a matter of moral imperative rather than a matter of intellectual choice of representational strategy based on a concordant choice of representational goals—such epistemological deliberations do not appear in histories belonging to the Great Escape historiography—Galison and Daston makes sense of perceived patterns in these representational practices by drawing on a longstanding historiographical idea: the automaton-scientist.

The thesis of this post is that the historiographical idea of the automaton-scientist functions as a way of automating history, if you will, by relieving

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The Gallery and the Renaissance Episteme

Can progressive historiography co-exist with the Gallery of Practices?  Possibly, but the challenges seem to be great.  Peter Galison seems to have thought along similar lines, judging by his “Ten Problems” piece in an issue of Isis last year.  Here is how he put the issue:

Back in the postwar period, James Bryant Conant hoped that the Case Studies in Experimental Science that he organized would, by a kind of Baconian generalization, lead to a general understanding of scientific method. But it is hard to see this Baconianism emerging from microhistories today. Microhistory is supposed to be exemplification, a display through particular detail of something general, something more than itself. It is supposed to elicit the subtle interconnections of procedures, values, and symbols that mark science in a place and time, not as a method but more as a kind of scientific culture. This then leads to a hard question: What does it mean to aim for exemplification without typicality? And if case studies are the paving stones, where does the path lead?

Indeed, Galison thinks it is possible to perpetuate the case study program and not end up anywhere we necessarily want to be:

Conversely, after the remarkably successful buildup of microhistorical cases, one can ask after the limits of localism. That is, suppose we continued to fill our journals with ever more case studies, packed encyclopedias with dozens of microscopic inquiries into every laboratory, field station, and observatory of any weight anywhere. Would there be, in principle, a residue? Would there be kinds of questions that simply could not be accessed even through the objectives of the most assiduous application of our fine, 1000x historical‐philosophical microscopes?

As far as I’m concerned Galison has already answered these questions entirely adequately in Image and Logic (1997), where he identified “mesoscopic” traditions of practice as a key subject of historical inquiry.  However, historians have not seen the mapping of traditions as a historiographical imperative.  This includes Galison, whose recent book with Lorraine Daston, Objectivity (2007, on which more later), relies on a Gallery-based approach.

Inasmuch as the historiography embraces “practice”, the analysis of Big Ideas still seems to dominate scholarly concerns.  Abandoning the traditional

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Historiography versus Historical Non-Fiction

So, seriously, what’s up with all this methodological introspection?  What does it actually accomplish?  Is it really necessary?  Wouldn’t it all just go away and start looking like fever-dream logic if I simply relaxed and devoted myself to augmenting my own corner of the literature?

Useful cliche

To an extent, the productivity of methodological introspection is a question of faith—its value only becomes apparent once one begins to accomplish things that one could not do before.  For example, I don’t think I ever really appreciated the severity of the tensions between the philosophy and sociology of science, and its consequences for history, until recently.  It’s only been in the past month or so that it has become necessary for me to speak of the “socio-epistemic” imperative.  This was previously the “epistemic” imperative, and, before that, the “epistemological” imperative—a formulation that I can now see was totally absurd, given the bête noire view of philosophical epistemology that still motivates historians’ professional sensibilities thirty years after the Great Escape (as so neatly expressed by Iwan Rhys Morus).  But, I could never have gotten this far without laying out those initial off-target notions first.

Puzzling out these sensibilities and their changes through time allows me to understand what is going on in the literature I read, why other scholars

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Revised Manifesto

I’ve been past due in revising this blog’s mission in light of better articulations of what it is I want to achieve with it and why, and why I’m critical in the ways that I am.  Not mentioned is that the blog is intended mainly to revise my own thinking in a way that if others are interested in what I’m thinking about, they can have access to it.  But, hey, aim high, right?  Also, there is now no mention of the blog dealing with the concerns of early-career scholars, nor who can be a contributor (seeing as we have not exactly been flooded with requests!).  The new “manifesto” with updated contributor biographies can be found in the About tab.

Professional Theodicy and Synthetic Narrative

The term “theodicy” is getting a lot of exercise here recently, so, to review: a theodicy is a philosophical explanation for why there is evil in the world in spite of the existence of a benevolent deity, as in Leibniz’ Theodicy.  A theodicy almost necessarily draws on problems of free will, the hope of knowledge, and its attendant dangers.  Transforming theodicy into historical narrative, it becomes possible to periodize these themes.  Sometimes this narrative functions as an origin story (as in Genesis and the stories of Prometheus and Pandora’s Box).  Following the Enlightenment and French Revolution—just as geology and cosmology began to acquire temporal elements—more recent human history could be periodized in terms of an overarching balance of knowledge, morality, and wisdom, as in the criticism of Joseph-Marie Maistre.

Since Maistre’s time, historiographical theodicies have frequently used rationalism or scientism as explanations of evil.  Following the rise of the Soviet Union and the Nazi Party, conservative thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper regularly drew connections between the post-French Revolution thought of Saint-Simon and Comte through to Marxism, logical positivism, modernism, and the rise of totalitarian regimes.  Chris Donohue has written about this trend on this blog, and he is responsible for getting me into the topic.

Science studies has imported similar narratives of theodicy linking the philosophy of science (positivistic and otherwise), the historiography of science, and the authority of science in society.  The sociology of knowledge has, in recent years, functioned within this theodicy as a kind of deliverance from evil, restoring a true historiography undistorted by philosophy’s arbitrary elevation of science to a coherently identifiable, objective, uncultural, and therefore privileged activity.  It is the contention of this blog that this theodicy has reduced the scope of historiographical inquiry to ornamentation of socio-epistemic issues privileged by the theodicy’s narrative.  Abandoning a study of ideas for a study of practices consonant with the theodicy, our professional theodicy now deeply inhabits our historiographical synthesis.

Witness Iwan Rhys Morus’ essay review of Patricia Fara’s new book Science: A Four Thousand Year History in the latest History of Science, which he edits.  Historical explanation of evil is present and unusually explicit: “Up until the 1960s, historians

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Science in the History of Science: An Opposing Perspective

A couple of weeks ago, I approved of outgoing HSS president Jane Maienschein’s desire to put more science back into the history of science, while suggesting that the difficulties in doing so were more deep-seated than is perhaps generally appreciated.  I thought it was odd to have to defend the idea that scientific ideas should be at the core of the history of science profession, but there are indeed opposing views.  Darin Hayton at PACHSmörgåsbord, the blog of the Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science, offers one here.

Hayton’s position seems to be that because science is a cultural activity, and because “science” can only be defined epistemologically, a history focused around the history of “science” can only be defined around retrospective constructs of what properly constitutes scientific topics.  By insisting that science is culture, the knowledge of properly scientific cultures becomes just one kind of knowledge among many.  Thus, by including other cultures arbitrarily excluded in philosophical definitions of science, the discipline can be opened up to include such historically important but epistemologically unvalidated topics as astrology, demonology, and witchcraft.

I would like to respond with three observations.

First, Hayton seems most exercised by the possibility that advocacy for intellectual aspects of history has consequences for valid subject matters of historical inquiry.  He therefore supports a definition of the history of science that opens the field up to practically any topic whatsoever. 

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Normative Historiography and the Gallery of Practices

Inside the museums infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after awhile

–Bob Dylan, 1966

If I were David Byrne
I’d go to galleries and not be too concerned

–Crash Test Dummies, 1993

I take progressive historiographical scholarship to be generated through a chronological problematic.  By characterizing traditions (of practices and ideas) and projects as operating within defined periods and through defined constituencies, scholars can theorize and argue about the results of interactions between traditions, projects, and constituencies, and about the nature of changes in these things over time.

If this blog has its house critique, it is of the new internalism, which is a label for scholarship that creates self-standing pieces of work with no asserted historical relationship to other pieces of work.  Instead, the work often purports to address a socio-epistemic problematic, which seeks a deeper understanding of how knowledge is made and how it operates in society.  The scholarship seeks this understanding by accumulating instances of practices relevant to socio-epistemic questions in varying historical contexts.  The accumulation of such instances creates a scholarship referred to on this blog as the gallery of practices.

The object of this post is to inquire into the relationship between the creation of the gallery and the historiographical “theodicy” adopted to lend urgency to the establishment of a new sociology of knowledge (since around 1980).  In a change of thinking since I started this blog, I don’t imagine that the literature currently seeks to address questions actually posed by sociologists

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Spotlight: Renwick on Geddes (also Ideas vs Practice)

Since we’re in the middle of a fairly polemical series of methodological posts, and since a general critique of the professional function of journals fits in with this, I thought it would be a good idea to shine a quick spotlight on a recent exception to the rule: Chris Renwick’s “The Practice of Spencerian Science: Patrick Geddes’s Biosocial Program, 1876-1889” Isis 100 (2009): 36-57.

Renwick’s piece, like Schmitt’s recent piece on Vicq d’Azyr, places itself quite nicely within a literature, as well as its subject matter within history.  Perhaps not coincidentally, the subject matter is Patrick Geddes’ relationship with the ideas of Herbert Spencer, whose work falls within the ambit of the Darwin Industry.  As I have previously noted, localized historiographies—the “industries” in particular—seem to acquire a critical scholarly mass that propels them into a more rigorous problematic.

In this case, Renwick uses his piece as part of an effort to reclaim the influence of Spencer’s ideas.  Traditionally understood as not having made positive contributions to biology, and as a proponent of social Darwinism, Renwick notes that recent literature has begun to chart a more general debt to the ideas present in Spencer’s thinking, many of which had little to do with severe competition in nature or society, and, in fact, stressed cooperation as a higher form of evolutionary development.  Renwick observes Geddes’ debt to Spencer’s thought in

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Sociology, History, Normativity, and Theodicy

“For my part I see no danger of ‘the history of science losing its science’, but much literature in the social history of science has less of a connection with the sociology of knowledge than many apparently traditional exercises in the history of ideas.”

“Finally, there is a marked lack of rigour in much social history of science; work is often thought to be completed when it can be concluded that ‘science is not autonomous’, or that ‘science is an integral part of culture’, or even that there are interesting parallels or homologies between scientific thought and social structures.  But these are not conclusions; they are starting points for more searching analyses of scientific knowledge as a social product.”

—Steven Shapin, 1982

To my mind, Shapin’s “History of Science and Its Sociological Reconstructions,” (History of Science 20 (1982): 157-211) is perhaps one of the best articulations of how sociological methodology could augment historiography.  It is a manifesto for the sociology of knowledge program against critics (Joseph Ben-David, Rupert Hall, and Larry Laudan are specified).  It’s also an argument against more sterile sociology-based historiographical methods—the “social history of science”.  As pointed out in the quotes above, these methods draw no substantive connections between sociology and the intellectual production of knowledge: society is simply something that imprints itself on scientific institution-building, practice, and claims.

To put it another way, Shapin ought to be understood as an epistemological sociologist, one who in 1982 was apparently fighting against many of the same problems that bedevil us today.  No one, to my mind, better articulated how integral things like proper institution-building and proper etiquette have always been

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