History and Historiography of Science

Charitable, Skeptical, and Critical Readings

I would like to consider the methodological problem of how historians read sources in terms of a tripartite taxonomy of reading attitudes: charitable, skeptical, and critical.  I take a critical reading to be a combined form of charitable and skeptical readings.  For some background, see the brief conversation that developed over at Time to Eat the Dogs.

The prerogative of the historian is to offer a critique of past events, which should be distinguished from criticism.  A critique offers an articulation and analysis of events; it may be accompanied by a criticism, but its primary concern is with arriving at an interpretation which renders the past coherent.  History is a science and not literature insofar as some critiques can render history more coherent than others.  Interpretations of coherence are subject to agreement based on an assessment of:

  1. the physical reality of events of the past;
  2. the psychological motivations of actors; and, most provisionally…
  3. an account of the prerequisites and causes of events.

I take (1) to be reasonably unproblematic, and (3) to be extremely problematic—if ultimately most rewarding—requiring an extensive, complicated, and highly debatable taxonomy of historical “trends” as well as some physical, economic, and sociological theory of how “trends” unfold.

Concerning the possibility of agreement concerning either (1) or (3), historians must deal with the historical record,

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Primer: Augustin Jean Fresnel

Augustin Jean Fresnel (1788-1827) was a French engineer and physicist who was a key figure in the move from an “emission” theory of light to a “wave” theory of light in the optical physics of the early-nineteenth century.  Where a “ray” of light was generally taken to be a physical, if imperceptible, thing, which could (in theory) be counted, the new wave theory took a ray to be only a geometrical construct connecting a luminous source with a point on a wave front as it traveled through an ethereal medium (ether wave propagation!).

Fresnel was the son of an architect who, having a penchant for mathematics, began training at the new Ecole Polytechnique in Paris at the age of seventeen, where he received extensive instruction in methods of mathematical analysis, chemistry, and physics—an education that gave him both a background in natural philosophical conceptualizations as well as in practical technique.

Eager to make a “discovery” of any sort, he bounced between fields early on.  After he left the Ecole in 1806, he worked as an engineer with the elite Corps des Ponts et Chausées (Bridges and Roadworks Corps) for three years, and in 1810 he

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The Ultimate in Empiricism

For those who don’t check in with the Pauling Blog, the Oregon State Special Collections has launched Linus Pauling Day-by-Day.

As our regular readers have probably gathered, I’m not very keen on the “gallery of practices” mode of historical scholarship, wherein the theory-trained scholar dives into the archive and just starts pointing out all the epistemological assumptions and practices, cultural contexts, and negotiated knowledge claims they can find in there so as to add another image to the gallery.  To consolidate gains and to synthesize history, it is necessary to gain a wide empirical knowledge of the historical terrain—a point I hope to discuss much further in the future.

Pauling Day-by-Day represents an ultimate extension of empiricism.  I’ve often thought as I’ve attempted to make sense of a historical terrain that it would be very nice if I could just throw all the correspondence and memoranda and everything into chronological order to make better sense of it.  Pauling Day-by-Day does precisely this.

Scholars who work in the biography industry will be familiar with similar efforts to figure out what Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein was doing on

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Localized Historiography

I think Christopher and I are slightly out-of-sync concerning the terminology of historiographic “atavism” (which is his very useful term).  An atavism is a degradation.  If we take the qualities of a historiography to be simply the contents of the historiographical archive, then atavism is impossible, since the archive cannot be destroyed (one would hope).  However, an archive is only as good as an understanding of its contents, meaning that if new historical work consistently fails to engage with its insights, the historiography is degraded simply through lack of use.

Christopher identifies the qualities of writing that he characterizes as “atavistic” scholarship.  My argument would be that certain styles of writing are more apt to risk atavism than others in much the way he describes, but that atavism itself can be traced to no single work.  It is part of the insidiousness of historiographic atavism that no individual can be held responsible for it.

The lack of accountability is related to the technique of “perspective layering”

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Schaffer on the Nebular Hypothesis

We’re going to be skipping around in the Schaffer bibliography a little bit now in the hopes of approaching his articles in a way that makes the most sense to me.  Today I want to look at “The Nebular Hypothesis and the Science of Progress” from History, Humanity, and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene, edited by James R. Moore (1989).  This work is fascinating to me for a few reasons.

1850 sketch of the Orion Nebula
1850 illustration of the Orion Nebula by Lord Rosse

First and foremost, it represents Schaffer’s attempt to translate his methodology for studying natural philosophical cosmologies into the era of disciplined science.  Natural philosophical cosmology was not a tightly restrained genre.  While we might say that there were identifiable sub-genres of cosmology that adhered to fairly specific methodologies and cosmological possibilities, the boundaries between these were very porous, and ideas transplanted themselves fairly easily between them.

Schaffer liked to use the term “resource” to describe these ideas.  Certain kinds of philosophical argument became “possible” (though, of course, not

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Primer: Siderius Nuncius

Up until 1610, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) had made his living as a university mathematician, first at Pisa then at Padua near Venice.  At that time, mathematics was a relatively low university subject, primarily studied as a path toward an education in medicine, law, or theology and philosophy (Scholastic philosophy).  Subjects within the rubric of mathematics included the sciences of mechanics, optics, and astronomy.  The development of geometric and mathematical theories within these sciences constituted logical arguments, but were considered descriptive of the behaviors—rather than explanatory of the natures—of things.  Astronomy, for example, largely involved  the deployment of geometrical methods of predicting future positions of the sun, moon, and planets, leaving their physical qualities, habits of motion, and arrangement to the philosophers.

Galileo’s work in mathematics and mechanics was wide-ranging and ambitious, challenging philosophical assumptions such as that heavier objects fall more quickly, and making use of experimental trials.  He also became aware of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory of the universe (1543) while a mathematician.  Still, as a university mathematician, however much he felt his work bore upon philosophical forms of knowledge, he was not in a

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Historiographic Atavism and the Dilemma of Science Studies

Historiographic atavism has the following features. As a way of introducing arguments, an atavistic chain of reasoning takes minimal consideration of the prior formulations or the prior solutions to a specific problematic. Every argument is fundamentally a novel one by virtue of its complexity or its departure from a frame of conceptualization. An atavistic claim can exist only if it reduces a prior body or school of scholarship either to a bare methodology or to a bare summary. This robs previous historiography of the conceptual rigor it rightfully possesses. Historiographic claims, while competing in reality, exist as exemplum in the atavistic narrative. Historiographic atavism is then the instrumental use of previous scholarship, particularly a recovered or hereto underutilized methodology, to underscore the novelty and the complexity of endless and non-reducible particulars. This allows every account to remain particular, correct, locally valid, and non-confrontational. All atavistic arguments present themselves as the most open of all methodologies to critique. The endless nature of the critique and this seeming freedom impedes the formulation of positions, claims, and disciplinary progress.

Historiographic atavism develops from a critical suspension of synthetic narrative. Its antithesis is the “canon.” Its historical subject is the locality. Universality or “synthesis”  is only achieved through the interconnection of  localities. These particulars, interconnected on some level to a defined ‘whole,’ are endlessly (re)producible through the work of textual or material analysis. This analysis produces particular historical subjects that are nonetheless incapable of becoming complementary or subsumable elements

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Essay: Shapin and the Historiographic Life

Today I would like to use Steven Shapin’s account of the history of ideas relating to the moral qualities of scientists—Chapters 2 and 3, “From Calling to Job: Nature, Truth, Method, and Vocation from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries” and “The Moral Equivalence of the Scientist: A History of the Very Idea”, from The Scientific Life—to consider the difficulties committed historians may experience in using the insights of essayists in historiographically beneficial ways.  I have previously suggested that Shapin is best understood as an essayist, someone who explores the consequences of possible interpretations of a topic.

To call Shapin an essayist rather than a committed historian is not an accusation or a radical suggestion, but simply an exploration of the consequences of my own interpretation of Shapin’s stated comments concerning what he is doing (hence the title of this “essay”).  Shapin begins the preface of The Scientific Life by observing that his earlier application of his studies of seventeenth-century natural philosophy to the present was taken by “some of my historian-friends” as “further proof that my commitment to the purity and particularity of history was wanting” (my emphasis).  He responds: “They were right.”  Here the committed historian might suppose Shapin intends to rectify past wrongs, but I believe this is a mistaken reading, which presumes that he recognizes historiographically virtuous readings to be the most valuable.  The observant reader will note

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Primer: Pierre Gassendi’s Natural Philosophy

Pierre Gassendi (b. 1592, d. 1655) was born at Digne, France, became a priest in 1617, and later a professor of philosophy at Aix while still in his mid-twenties.  As Saul Fisher notes in his excellent Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy And Science: Atomism for Empiricists (Brill, 2007), “Gassendi’s career as a priest is a crucial intellectual facet of intellectual constitution: his writings reflect an unbending allegiance to Holy Scripture and Church teachings, though not necessarily in orthodox doctrinal lights” (1.)   In 1624, he met Mersenne, and between 1629 to 1630, while traveling in the Low Countries, he met Isaac Beeckman.  In his 1632 work, Mercurius in sole visus,  he described his 1631 observation of the transit of Mercury as a confirmation of Kepler’s theories.  In 1632, after returning to Digne, he began a study of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus.

Gassendi spent the remaining twenty or so years of his life going between Provence and Paris due to his involvement with a group of philosophers who had gathered around the French philosopher Mersenne.  As Fisher details, in the Mersenne circle, “debates ranged over numerous topics central to the dismantling of the Aristotelian and Scholastic world-views” (3.) Mersenne, an associate of Descartes, was instrumental in allowing Gassendi’s objection to Descartes’ Meditations to be included in the published appendix entitled Objections and Replies.

While some historians consider Gassendi’s signature achievement to be his revival of ancient atomism, a complete

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