Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 38 – History and Historiography of Science

The Rashomon Posture

Recently, I have been advocating a deeper consideration of the importance of maintaining “chronological problematics” in history—in short, the idea that important historiographical topics are revealed and consolidated by arranging them in a coherent and sequential order. I have taken chronological problematics to be confronted by a predominance of “epistemological problematics” wherein what is necessary is to theorize categories of epistemological practices (observing, communicating, representing, etc.) and then researching and presenting different historical approaches to these practices, creating a “gallery of practices”.

Today, I would like to consider the idea that the relationship between the gallery of practices and any sort of problematics is purely implicit. Being implicit, there is no sense of historiographical responsibility to resolving problematics. In place of this commitment is what I like to call the “Rashomon posture” (Christopher prefers “Ghost Dog”).

Would you believe a history written by Toshiro Mifune?

In Rashomon (see the Kurusawa film trailer here), conflicting, self-interested perspectives in a murder trial present no possibility of reconciliation, leading those who hear of the trial into despair about the possibility of truth and the human capacity for goodness. For examples of the Rashomon posture on history of science blogs, or at least a nod toward it, see Michael Gordin’s Hump-Day History post on Dmitrii Mendeleev; or Michael Robinson’s post “The Smudgy Window of History”, especially the last paragraph; or History of Economics Playground where we can replace Rashomon with Lawrence Durrell.

The idea behind the Rashomon posture is to sanction a vision of historiographical responsibility wherein study can be layered on top of other studies, each espousing a different perspective on the past, none of them advocating a set

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HET and Science Studies

This post has a couple of motivations. I’ve been following with interest the conversations over at the History of Economics Playground about the relationship between the History of Economic Thought (HET) and the science studies disciplines (see here for instance). I’m particularly struck by the facts that many in the HET camp view the historical analysis of the impact of context as a distraction, and that eminent economists frequently show up to scold the rogues. This contrasts to the history of other scientific professions falling under the HSS umbrella, where intellectual interaction between historians and scientists is pretty much at a low ebb.

The second motivation is that I’m now pushing toward completion of my book manuscript on operations research and associated “policy sciences”. While sweeping up my chapter on the rise of OR and decision theory, I wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything pressing on Kenneth Arrow,

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Primer: The Length of the Meter

In the late-18th century, the relationship between political thought and rational inquiry was at high tide. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson built the case for American independence as a matter of the people being impelled by causes that had their roots in “self evident truths”. We have discussed the relationship between Joseph Priestley’s radical politics and his understanding of natural philosophy on this blog. Nowhere, however, was the relationship so clear and so important as in Revolutionary France.

In the years after the first stages of the Revolution in 1789, ecclesiastical and hereditary authority was systematically erased from the French state so as to be replaced by a government founded upon reason, acting in the interests of the French people. High on the agenda was the reform of weights and measures. At the time of the Revolution, it was estimated that there were some eight hundred names for measuring units, which with local variants spun out into some 250,000 different standards.

Famously, the French invented the metric system to bring some coherence to this system, and, in the words of Condorcet, to provide measures that would be valid “for all people, for all time”. Some of the aspects of the new

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Schaffer and the End of Natural Philosophy

As we’ve moved along in our Simon Schaffer project, an underlying set of general historical concerns has emerged from reading his articles (plus Leviathan and the Air-Pump) together, which is the way arguments work and develop in natural philosophy. Although the various subgenres of natural philosophy had varying sets of rules permitting cosmologies of varying stability, the history of natural philosophy could be told in a very organic way by examining the progression of ideas within cosmologies. Some ideas could be specific, such as the restorative role of comets, or very general, such as the idea that fundamental aspects of the universe could evolve with time. Religious views were a part of, rather than connected to or constraining natural philosophy.

Schaffer’s arguments helped make over a century worth of history make more sense, because they elucidated why natural philosophers’ arguments made sense to them. In pursuing this project, he was a part of a break with prior historiography, which had ignored or sought to explain away the ideas and practices in the past that didn’t make sense. What had motivated this new break was the epistemic insight that the inquiries of prior eras, both “good” and “bad”, made sense on account of their connectedness—not their disconnectedness—from their surrounding culture. This insight has now become so mainstream in the history of science community, its manifestation so much a part of why we write, that it is actually Schaffer’s long-time-scale historiographical sensibilities (which were actually part of his more classical training) that seem remarkable and exciting to me.

Not so to Schaffer:

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EppQw9JHD8″]

(He gets to the most relevant bit right away, but the whole 37 minutes is worthwhile. Also, plenty more of the four hour interview at YouTube, or Alan Macfarlane’s web site.)

I’ve mentioned that writing around the epistemic imperative has a museological quality designed to ornament and advertise the profession’s

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Primer: The V-2 Rocket and Atmospheric Science

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emMIM3CKGtQ]

For as long as there has been a concerted tradition of inquiry around the natural world, natural philosophers and scientists have dragged instruments up church towers and mountains and floated them aloft in balloons to ascertain how things are different at high altitudes. This tradition grew rapidly in the early decades of the 20th century as ballooning technology improved, and as physicists, astronomers, chemists, and meteorologists decided that differences in the gaseous composition of the atmosphere,

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Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform

Worlds Before Adam (Chicago, 2008) by Martin J.S. Rudwick is the cumulative synthesis of a distinguished career and a prolegomena for the future efforts of historians. Worlds Before Adam (WBA) is a narrative of the “reconstruction…of an eventful geohistory, which is in fact congruent with what geologists in the twenty-first century accept as valid.” Rudwick’s account begins with Baron Cuvier and “culminates” in the formulation of glacial theory, which included the “utterly unexpected inference of an exceptional and drastic Ice Age in the geologically recent past.” This inference, more than any other, Rudwick argues, “forced geologists to recognize the contingent character of geohistory as a whole” (7.) (Page numbers throughout are to WBA.) Rudwick notes that the narrative framework “will convey the strong sense of unity of purpose and scientific progress that participants experienced” (8.)

The narrative presented in WBA is a continuation of Rudwick’s Bursting the Limits of Time, which traced the “gradual development of the practice of geohistory within the sciences of the earth.” In the eighteenth century, Rudwick argued in Bursting the Limits of Time, geohistory was “an infrequent and marginal feature of scientific research.” Within a few decades, geohistory became the “defining element” of the new science of “geology.” Geology “became the first truly historical natural science” by “deliberately transposing methods and concepts from the human sciences of history itself.” The hereto obscure, mysterious, and unfathomably deep prehistory of the earth in the late eighteenth century began to be conceived as “reliably knowable” (2.) The scientific research described in Bursting the Limits of Time demonstrated that it was “feasible in principle to gain reliable knowledge of the earth’s history long before the earliest human records” (6.) In the early nineteenth century, the concern of WBA, geologists took the historical approach “for granted” and were thus able to “reconstruct systematically and in detail what course geohistory had in fact taken….” (6.) WBA takes as its “starting point” the sense among practitioners that the “earth’s deep or prehuman geohistory could in principle be reconstructed almost as reliably as…the history of the ancient Greeks and Romans.” While Bursting the Limits of Time was given to the inquiry of the “sheer historical reality of the deep past, WBA has as its focus both the geohistorical and the causal” (3.) Geologists addressed the causal once they could take the historical reality of geohistory for granted.

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Philosophy, Sociology, and History: A Pocket History

To understand the history of the history of science profession, it is very important to understand its contentious and evolving relationship with the philosophy and sociology of science, not to mention the history of philosophy. Here I’d like to outline a quick “pocket” history of the relationship between history, philosophy and sociology, and beg the tolerance of connoisseurs for boiling the points down so recklessly.

Traditionally, the history of science has been of interest on account of its ability to reveal and demonstrate ideas about epistemology. William Whewell’s The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History (1840) followed quickly on his History of the Inductive Sciences (1837). Epistemology-oriented philosophers before and since have deployed cases from the history of science as illustrations of their theories about the progression of knowledge, and contain a normative element about how reliable knowledge can best be achieved.

In the 20th century, positivist philosophers and Karl Popper’s anti-positivist theory of the progress of science suggested clear demarcations between proper application of method and straying away from that method. History could illuminate these debates. According to a Popperian history of science, we don’t start from basic truths and build up; we start from a sort of primeval error and confusion (such as with the Aristotelian philosophy, which had been thoroughly trashed by Enlightenment philosophers) and, eliminating false beliefs, proceed toward truth. What is interesting in any progressive history is the origins and acceptance of accepted ideas. So, let’s say we read William Herschel, we easily pick out the discovery of Uranus

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Primer: Arthur de Gobineau and the Orient

Arthur de Gobineau (July 14, 1816 — October 13, 1882) was born into a family of lesser nobility and forced to make his living in Paris at nineteen years of age. In 1843, having some minor successes as a novelist and as a serial author, de Gobineau met Alexis de Tocqueville. In 1849, when de Tocqueville was named Minister of Foreign Affairs, de Gobineau was introduced to a diplomatic circuit from which he never departed. De Gobineau was successively posted to Persia from 1855-1858 and 1861-1863, Brazil, and finally Stockholm, from 1872-1877. De Gobineau was well known for his rightist politics and considered it a great irony that he had been born on Bastille Day. He styled himself the sole remaining descendant of an ancient Norman family.

It was fortuitous that de Gobineau traveled to Paris in the 1840s. As Arthur Herman in his fine The Idea of Decline in Western History notes, “Ever since scholars had accompanied Napoleon on his conquest of Egypt in 1798 and the linguist Jean-Francois Champollion had deciphered the Rosetta stone in

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Steven Shapin’s Scientific Life

One of Steven Shapin’s longstanding concerns has been to observe the virtues governing the conduct of inquiry and the laying of claims to knowledge. His early studies focused on the behavior and status of gentlemen as an assurance that observations of matters of fact were being reported honestly and without ulterior motive. His new work, The Scientific Life, inspects the moral life of industrial research.

Shapin’s project can profitably be regarded as a reaction to Robert Merton’s sociology of science, which held that scientific inquiry can be distinguished from non-scientific inquiry by its “norms” (communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, originality, and skepticism). According to Shapin, we generate a more coherent and satisfying historical picture if we regard scientific work as a part of the culture surrounding it, and the rules of inquiry as an extension of that

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A Year in the Blog

On New Year’s Day 2008, I started Ether Wave Propaganda over at blogspot as a “thinking tool” [originally evocatively called “A History of Science Blog”]. And I think it’s worked. Going back over the past year, I’ve learned an enormous amount about how scholarship works in the history of science, how to articulate my own sensibilities within this scholarship, and, of course, I’ve learned a lot of history. The blog has given me a space to practice writing quickly, in short form, and outside my comfort zone. The luxury of never having to be “final” in my thoughts has allowed me to write abundantly and without the pressure of having to be original or please referees; but being a “professional” (har har) writing critically in a public space has also forced me to be serious with my ideas. I think most other historians of science still think it’s kind of weird, almost always distracting—and possibly dangerous—to blog, but I take heart that other quite serious academic professions are not nearly so shy. I also take heart in the existence and excellence of the other history of science blogs listed on the blogroll, all of which have chosen their own angles and kept up the good work.

My tolerant and supportive boss, Spencer Weart

But the blog could not have been as effective as it has been without other opportunities. First and foremost, there is my three-year postdoc at the American Institute of Physics History Center. Spencer Weart, the director of the center since 1974, long ago insisted that the center sponsor a well-paid postdoc lasting for this span of time, and his support of this project and the freedom from immediate responsibilities has allowed this blog to grow in the way that it has. Spencer is retiring this month and is being succeeded by Greg Good, an enormously good-natured historian of geophysics who is joining us from the University of West Virginia. My hope is that some time this year the History Center and Niels Bohr Library and Archives (headed by Joe Anderson) will be starting a blog that draws on my experience here, and mixes elements of Hump Day History, the Pauling Blog, and Advances in the History of Psychology. In the meantime, you, too, can become a fan of the Niels Bohr Library on Facebook!

I’d also like to thank the University of Maryland History Department for allowing me to teach its Introduction to the History of Science, which really forced me to construct a united picture across disciplines and time periods. And I have to thank my TA and co-blogger Christopher Donohue, a prodigious reader and a sharp

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