Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 42 – History and Historiography of Science

Primer: Darwin

Today we present a guest post by Michael Robinson of the University of Hartford, manager of the science-and-exploration blog Time to Eat the Dogs (where this is cross-posted), and author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture.

Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882), expert in barnacle taxonomy, lived his life as an omnivorous reader, letter-writer, and pack-rat. He attended college and traveled abroad, married his cousin Emma, and settled at Down House. There he wrote books, doted on his many children, and suffered bouts of chronic dyspepsia.

We don’t remember Darwin much for these details, eclipsed as they are by the blinding attention given to his work on evolution. But they are worth noticing if only to make a simple point. Darwin did not live life in anticipation of becoming the father of modern evolutionary biology, a status that seems almost inevitable when we read about Darwin’s life. Despite the distance of time and culture which separates us from Darwin, he lived his life much as we do: working too much, getting sick and getting better, fretting about others’ opinions, and seeking solace among his friends and family.

In spite of the scrutiny paid to evolution, or perhaps because of it, we continue to see Darwin through a glass darkly, distorted by a body of literature that, despite sophisticated analysis and a Homeric attention to details, reduces his life to the prelude and post-script of the modern era’s most important scientific theory. This is not to beat up on the “Darwin Industry” which has produced a number of superbly researched, balanced portraits of Darwin. But the nuance of such works cannot overcome the weight of Darwin as a

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SEE Q&A (5): Policymaking in Waves 2 and 3

We continue our 8-part Q&A with Harry Collins and Rob Evans concerning their Sociology of Expertise and Experience project. Once again, we note that Collins and Evans crafted their answers jointly. This is not a spontaneous exchange.

Will Thomas: The problem of expertise in policymaking has long been a concern to scholars such as Sheila Jasanoff (The Fifth Branch, Science at the Bar, etc.) and Yaron Ezrahi (Descent of Icarus [out of print]), and, more recently, for Bruno Latour (The Politics of Nature). Drawing on the insights of SSK, they have argued that scientific experts cannot be called on to offer non-politicized policy recommendations, because scientific consensus-building is itself a political process. Instead (to paint with a broad brush), effective policymaking can only take place when facts and political concerns are negotiated simultaneously. Pretending otherwise only opens the door to the systematic sowing of doubt concerning the validity of even a large-majority consensus (as we can see on classic issues such as global warming, the cigarette-cancer link, and evolution in science education).

I notice you don’t engage with this literature directly. Is this a fair reading of the literature, and do you see yourselves as extending it, addressing difficulties presented by it, or answering different questions entirely?

Rob Evans and Harry Collins: To repeat, Wave 2 of Science Studies shows (and Collins has made a considerable contribution to showing it) that it is impossible to have a pure science free of the influence of ‘extra-scientific factors’ including politics. To that extent all technological decisions in the public domain must be influenced by politics whether we notice it or not. Where Wave 3 departs from the previous work is in what are taken to be the implications of these discoveries. The predominant mode of thinking coming out of Wave 2 is that, because scientific and technological decisions are a continuation of politics, the ideas of a scientific/technological decision on the one hand, and a political decision on the other, cannot be separated. It follows that Wave 2 treats the very notion of the scientific and the political as constructed.

Wave 3 says it is a mistake to draw this implication. Though it is the case that there can be no pure science separate from politics it does not follow that politics and science are the same or that institutions for technological decision-making are simply political institutions albeit with

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A Fluid Taxonomy of 20c. Sciences

One of my ongoing concerns is the problem of writing a coherent history of 20th-century science and technology. As I’ve been working on assembling names for my web project on notable post-1945 American physicists (on which Christopher is assisting me), I’ve been trolling through the National Academy of Sciences’ database of deceased members. Living members are helpfully grouped by section, and we’ve simply taken members of the “physics” and “applied physical sciences” sections. Deceased members, on the other hand, are not so grouped, so I have to look everyone up and sort out the physicists from the psychologists, anthropologists, chemists, geneticists, and so forth.

Predictably, this has resulted in some problematic category issues. What to do with physical chemists, electrical engineers (especially those who won Nobel Prizes in physics)?; what separates an astronomer from an astrophysicist? when is mathematics physics-y enough to include mathematicians?

Another interesting problem that I’ve run into is that certain fields seem to have stopped being physics. Ballistics research becomes more statistical than physical. Thermodynamics, one of the great products of

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Primer: William Whewell and the “Method of Hypothesis”

William Whewell was born on 24 May 1794 and died on 6 March 1866. Harvey Becher in the essay “William Whewell’s Odyssey: From Mathematics to Moral Philosophy” gives a good sense of both the polymath quality of Whewell’s inquiries and the fundamental reality that his interdisciplinary stance reveals about Victorian science. Becher notes, in a somewhat “heroic” fashion, “During his fifty-four years at Trinity College in Cambridge University, in an age when knowledge reverberated throughout an intellectual world unencumbered by barriers erected by disciplines narrowly defined as means and ends of themselves, Whewell incessantly studied and promoted the science and pedagogy which engulfed him.” (See William Whewell: A Composite Portrait, p. 1.) Whewell wrote on subjects as diverse as geology, mineralogy, mechanics, mathematics, political economy, political theory, and architecture.

Whewell was both a founding member and one of the first presidents of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a fellow of the Royal Society, a president of the Geological Society, and was the Master, with intermittent controversy, of Trinity College, Cambridge. He exchanged ideas and letters with such well-known men of Victorian science as John Herschel and Charles Lyell, and exerted considerable influence on Michael Faraday. Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise, Astronomy and general physics considered with reference to Natural Theology, published in 1830, was an important text

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SEE Q&A (4): Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Values/Politics

Will Thomas: Is there a fact/value divide within this theory to distinguish those who participate purely as stakeholders, and those who participate as experts? Whose responsibility is it to reinterpret the claims of non-expert stakeholders within the expert framework? What are the implications of SEE for the democratic ideal?

Rob Evans and Harry Collins: There is a clear distinction between experts and stakeholders and between propositions and preferences. The language of facts and values, however, cross-cuts the distinctions we want to make. Starting with stakeholders, in the Third Wave paper we disentangle the concepts with Wynne’s sheep farmer example. The sheep farmers were both experts and stakeholders in the matter of farming practice post-Chernobyl. Those who owned the farms (let us imagine they were London based financiers), were stakeholders only. The sheep farmers had a legitimate contribution to make to the technical phase of the debate (i.e. how to measure the contamination of the sheep) in virtue of their expertise in sheep farming and Lakeland ecology. The owners of the farms did not have this expertise and so could not, and should not, contribute to this debate. Nevertheless, both sheep farmers and farm owners had legitimate contributions to make to the political phase of the debate in virtue of their stakes in the matter.

Wave Two, in contrast, has confounded stake-holding with knowledge and expertise.

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Schaffer on Temporal Evolution, Pt. 1

Finishing up our look back at some of the earliest works of Simon Schaffer, I’d like to look at the two pre-1980 works I’ve found:

1) Halley’s Atheism and the End of the World, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 32 (1977): 17-40

2) The Phoenix of Nature: Fire and Evolutionary Cosmology in Wright and Kant, Journal for the History of Astronomy 9 (1978): 180-200. (According to this web site, this is one of Schaffer’s personal favorites).

Both articles are revealing that Schaffer’s early work was specifically geared around understanding the emergence of the concept of temporal change in natural philosophical cosmologies. The development of a temporal economy of nature was a key to the development of William Herschel’s cosmology, which Schaffer discussed in a 1980 paper that I looked at back in August. But the idea of a transitory universe was longstanding. Before getting into the details, though, let’s back up and look at why this is an interesting issue in the first place.

The emergence of deep time in the 18th century was an important development in geology and the development of evolutionary concepts in the history of life (exemplified in the work of Darwin, but discussed in European thought for a century prior to Origin of Species). While, in some sense, a deep time evolutionary approach was demanded by the

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Los Alamos vs. 100,000 garages

During this past Tuesday’s presidential debate , I was interested to hear moderator Tom Brokaw ask in a follow-up to John McCain whether America should adopt a “Manhattan-like project” to address the problem of developing alternative energies, “or should we fund 100,000 garages across America, the kind of industry and innovation that developed Silicon Valley?” (“100,000” garages is apparently yet another Tom Friedman catchphrase; see here).

McCain replied with some boilerplate science policy: “I think pure research and development investment on the part of the United States government is certainly appropriate. I think once it gets into productive stages, that we ought to, obviously, turn it over to the private sector. By the way, my friends [here McCain began to ramble on about pork-barrel ‘goodies’ being attached to energy bills].” Obama was not given a chance to reply. (CNN has the debate transcript).

The historian’s instinct here might be to find the question, and certainly the response, unnuanced. My response would be, yes, but, for a public discussion, I think it’s all right, and I would not expect anything more substantial, especially in a question demanding a 1-minute response. It’s worth reflecting, though, on just what implied policy choices Brokaw packed into his question.

The two models at work here are these: the concentrated attack that includes the nation’s “best brains”, and

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Primer: Georges Cuvier

Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) was born on 23 August 1769.After an education at Stuttgart, he accepted a position as a tutor with the family of the Comte d’Hericy.During his time as a tutor, he became friends with the well-regarded agriculturalist Tessier. Cuvier became the protégé of Tessier, and through his correspondence with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, managed in 1795 to secure an appointment as an assistant professor of comparative anatomy at Museum d’Histoire Naturelle.In 1796, he began a series of lectures at the Ecole Centrale du Pantheon.In that same year, he read his first paper, entitled Memoires sur les especes d’elephants vivants et fossils, which was published in 1800.For Cuvier, 1789 was a pivotal year as it saw the completion of his first systematic work of natural history, entitled Tableau elementaire de l’histoire naturelle des animaux.The period after the publication of this work saw Cuvier devote himself to three broad lines of inquiry: the structure and classification of mollusks, the classification and natural history of fish, and finally, the natural history of fossil mammals and reptiles.

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SEE Q&A (3): Who Determines Expertise?

Will Thomas: Your book’s epigraph is from Ecclesiastes: “To everything there is a season… a time to break down, and a time to build up.” One of the key strategies of prior sociology of science has been to question the socially constructed science/non-science divide in establishing what knowledge can be considered authoritative. Through the construction of a “periodic table of expertises” you attempt to establish new normative standards of policy participation relating to whether actors have “contributory” or “interactional” expertise, and so forth. Who determines who has primary access to a given problem and, thus, what other parties have pertinent expertise? Is this purely a matter of social and political power, or are there other means of assembling teams of relevant experts?

Harry Collins and Rob Evans: The epigraph is directed at our colleagues in science and technology studies who seem to have become addicted to breaking down barriers, creating monsters that cross boundaries, always attending to detail instead of generalising, and so forth. If the fragility of all generalisations and classifications were widely accepted it would dissipate the power of science. Science, like any synthesising activity, depends on the creation of new objects and categories and boundaries. We

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Schaffer busts out the hickory

Before heading on to Leviathan and the Air-Pump, I’m heading back to some earlier Schaffer articles that I missed in my initial run-through. This includes a couple of pieces from the late-’70s, as well as what should be required methodological reading: “Natural Philosophy” in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science (1980), edited by G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (one of the more disciplined and useful edited volumes I’ve seen).

What fun! Schaffer takes out a baseball bat and goes ape on the then-extant historiography of natural philosophy, moving from specific to general critiques of it, before moving on to confirm my prior guess that he saw himself as expanding upon Foucault’s “archaeological” examination of the sciences.

Schaffer places an emphasis on the need for intellectual (indeed, epistemological) conflict to resolve historiographical flaws:

…there is an important need for alternative attitudes to natural philosophy as an historical category, not merely revisions of one or other of the unifying assertions which contemporary historiography has made. This necessarily involves a genuine confrontation with the philosophical debates on the discursive place of history of science which, significantly enough, in the work of Bachelard, Kuhn, and Foucault, have all drawn on natural philosophy in the eighteenth century for much of their evidence. Such a confrontation is overdue.

It is far more overdue today. I’ll explain why….

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