Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 43 – History and Historiography of Science

Primer: Lyell’s Principles of Geology

For today’s post, I want to talk about one of the most influential books in the natural sciences, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published in three volumes from 1830 to 1833. Lyell (1797-1875) was an English gentleman, who turned to scientific study at university after originally intending to train to be a barrister. His entry to geology came at a time when the field was becoming increasingly professionalized; Principles was his attempt to bring some philosophical rigor to the subject, to lend it further respectability as a modern, 19th-century “science”, that is, the sense that the term now connotes.

By the time Lyell wrote the Principles, mainstream geological opinion (and also some religious opinion) accepted that Biblical chronologies could not be maintained in light of fossil evidence. Debates had thus turned to the various problems of “deep history”, such as: what had happened in the past, how the earth began and whether it was headed for an end, and whether geological history followed a clear progressive arc

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SEE Q&A (2): Expertise and Authority

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: Your main concern in moving in the direction of SEE relates to a long-standing concern with the authority that knowledge bestows, and particularly Wave Two’s concern with dismantling the notion that scientific knowledge possesses an authority inherent to itself. Would you say that the problem of authority has been the central motivation behind the sociology of science? Is the unlimited extension of expertise to “folk knowledge” “folk wisdom” , which you criticize, a logical consequence of the Wave Two approach?

Rob Evans and Harry Collins: Chacun a son gout. We can’t speak for others, but for us the problem has never been one of authority. Instead, what is at the centre are the questions posed by the philosophy and the sociology of knowledge: How do we have knowledge and is there any way of making it secure? Understanding how science works is essential for understanding these more fundamental questions. It is true that the motivations of some of those who came into science studies was more directly connected with ideas of socially responsible science—the Society for Social Studies of Science’s most prestigious award is named after J.D. Bernal after all—but for us any changes to the idea of science have emerged as a consequence of the uncovering of the social nature of knowledge not the other way round.

For Collins, the discovery, in the early 1970s, that science could not have the authority and certainty that the old models of Wave One suggested, because replication by itself could not settle disputes, was just that—a discovery (albeit an exciting one given the dominance of Wave One thinking at the time). In some ways, it is a shame that science cannot live up to the old model—life would be so much simpler. Of course,

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SEE Q&A (1): Why is this a new wave?

Ether Wave Propaganda is pleased to present as a special serialized feature this Q&A session with Cardiff sociologists Harry Collins and Rob Evans regarding their Sociology of Expertise and Experience (SEE) program. As a special feature, it will not adhere to the usual length restrictions we try to keep on posts, and, therefore, will run unusually long. Also note that this post does not represent a spontaneous exchange. Collins and Evans have asked for clarifications on the original questions, and have carefully crafted joint responses. They have also asked me to ask them to modify their responses if I deemed them inadequate or wrong, so as to make the Q&A as useful as possible. I saw no need to do so for the first question.

Will Thomas: SEE is an attempt to move beyond the sociology of knowledge into a sociology of expertise, and is explicitly formulated as a “third wave” in the sociology of science. What is it that most distinguishes SEE from other attempts to move beyond the initial insights of SSK, such as the Actor-Network Theory, or Pickering’s “mangle”?

Asked to clarify what I had in mind as the proposed novelty in ANT and the Mangle, I replied:

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Primer: Einstein!

OK, I fess up, I’m pulling out my reserve tank of things I can write about if I haven’t given sufficient thought to the weekly Hump-Day History post. Having been a teaching assistant in a course called the “Einsteinian Revolution”, I think I can rattle off a quick 900-1,000 words on the guy!

Credit: AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, W. F. Meggers Gallery of Nobel Laureates

There is, of course, a historiographical industry surrounding Einstein. Legions of science history enthusiasts are well-aware of his personal biography, his scientific work, his role as a scientific diplomat, his political advocacy. There’s nothing that I can write here that would be considered remotely new or exciting, so this one goes out to all those who haven’t yet joined the thousands of Einstein groupies out there, those who know him mostly as an icon. (Certified groupies may feel free to cluck their tongues at the insufficient characterizations offered here).

Let’s focus on the significance and genius of Albert Einstein. As he himself often pointed out, as a day-to-day physicist, he was comparable in talent to the best minds of the theoretical physics community of his day. Where Einstein needs to be considered the best mind of his era is in his ability to conceptualize the fundamental questions at the heart of physical inquiry. Conceptually, there were only a few other physicists in his time who could even really be considered in his league.

Einstein’s interest in the conceptual problems of physics extends from his snotty lack of regard for the graduate training in physics he received

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Q&A (Intro): The Use of Sociology

As I’ve suggested in my posts on Simon Schaffer’s early works, sociology, whether we acknowledge it or not, is an essential component of historiographical work. The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) program, initiated in the 1970s, has led to some remarkable improvements in historiographical method, essentially by requiring historical explanation for things that were previously taken for granted because knowledge produced by scientific method was assumed to speak for itself. Where prior scholarship might have simply assumed that good scientific work diffuses on its own (and those who didn’t see that it was “good” were just intellectually deficient), suddenly educational background, the efforts of scientists to “sell” their ideas, resonance with scientists’ religious or intellecutal convictions mattered in understanding the history of science (what I call the “Reception Revolution”). Similarly, it became inadequate to claim that those who were simply “more curious” or who “looked harder” at nature saw new things; the ability to see new things (at least in all but the most obvious cases) required some understanding of what projects those scientists were undertaking, what training prepared their minds to see what they saw. And, most famously, the policing of the borders of scientific communities became of paramount historical interest, because conclusions could only be legitimately validated by those in an appropriate moral and intellectual position (Shapin and Schaffer’s famous “Hobbes was right”). SSK was a boon to the history of science because it caused historians to ask new questions, and, lo and behold, we found good answers to the questions that we asked.

But, to paraphrase Copernicus, sociology is written for sociologists, and historians do well to keep that in mind. Sociologists seek a sociological theory of science, but this goal has been interpreted by different sociologists in different ways since the SSK revolution. All seem committed to viewing sociology as the only lens that they are willing to use to understand scientific actions. Now, some seem to view this as a call for the sociological theory of science to be the theory of science. This has led to the theories of the “French School” and the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) program, which seek to incorporate the individual scientist’s persuading encounter with the natural world into sociological schemes, which, famously, gives agency to non-human

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Schaffer on Spectacle, Pt. 2

Having gone over Schaffer’s specific argument about the relationship between public spectacle and the need to police natural philosophy in the late-18th-century, I want to talk a little more about how I perceive his historiographical project at this point in his oeuvre. Basically, he says, he wants to “experiment” on the utility of three “fashionable themes”. These are (1) scientific production as performance, (2) the relationship between natural philosophy and natural history “(with its effect on a possible taxonomy of eighteenth century sciences)”, and (3) the shift from entrepreneurial deployment to political control of natural philosophy.

I discussed (1) and (3) last time, and Schaffer barely deals with (2), but, at the same time, I get the sense that (2) is a project Schaffer got started on but never really finished. It relates to what looks like a fairly small historiography relating to “what Geoffrey Cantor calls ‘the eighteenth century problem’—the search for a convincing description of the variety of sciences at this period.” I think this taxonomical project was important to Schaffer because it was essential to his accounting for important transitions in some

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Primer: Robert Hooke

Popular history rarely communicates the fullness of scientists’ careers, concentrating instead on key “contributions” as they are often called. In the case of Robert Hooke (1635-1703), this would be an especially unfortunate approach, because he is an unusually vibrant figure in the “Scientific Revolution” era, a cultural-intellectual force who cannot be easily boiled down to a certain discovery or insight. The casual observer may be familiar with Hooke’s Law, which states the proportionality of the force of a spring to the distance it is stretched. Others might know a few other points, such as his authorship of Micrographia (1665), which was essentially a lavishly illustrated work of popular science extolling the importance of the activities of the then-new Royal Society of London, focusing on his own observations using a microscope he designed (above). Recently, the literature seems to be encapsulating his diverse skills and interests by packaging him as a Leonardo da Vinci-type character.

Hooke initially gained a strong reputation as a designer of machinery and scientific instruments, and, beginning in 1655, he was employed by the royalist Robert Boyle in Oxford to design air pumps and air pump experiments, while the Cromwellian regime was still in place. The effects of reduced air in an evacuated chamber in various kinds of experimental set-ups quickly became emblematic of the power of

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Historiographical Balance

Last week, I posted on the possibility that there might be such a thing as definable historiographical responsibility, and that defining this responsibility might aid us in developing new kinds of inward-directed critiques (critiques of historical work rather than critiques of those outside the history of science profession proper). Specifically, defining historiographical responsibility would allow our critiques of each other to become more vigorous, but will also allow us to define new standards of critical fairness thereby bounding whatever dangers to professional civility might be presented by experimenting with a new critical sensibility.

The key to defining historiographical responsibility is the necessity of establishing a notion of historiographical balance, which must be defined around the ability of a historiography and the contributions of individual historical works to address key needs or problems. These needs or problems are potentially limitless. This limitlessness creates the need for a vigorous and continuous historiographical conversation to articulate (and rearticulate) what needs and problems the historiography seems to be addressing currently and in what proportion and how well, and what needs and problems ought to be addressed in the future. Then, it falls to criticism to determine which styles of research and writing best serve historiographical needs.

We return to the relationship of the historical work to the historiography. It seems to me that the notion of the “corrective” is nearly useless, particularly

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Schaffer on Spectacle, Pt. 1

Continuing our first career overview series on the works of Simon Schaffer, we turn to “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century” from History of Science 21 (1983): 1-43. The topic of science and “performance” is now pretty well-worn. In ’83 (a quarter of a century ago now), Schaffer referred to it as “fashionable”. But rather than jump right into the argument, I’d first like to discuss the paper’s sense of historiographical purpose.

One gets the sense that there’s a definite project at work here, as Schaffer begins by drawing on a methodological distinction that the 18th-century natural philosopher Joseph Priestley drew between “true history” and “fiction”. According to Priestley, “fiction” is illustrative of principles, where “true history” is interrogative and experimental in the same manner as science. Here Schaffer allies himself explicitly with John Heilbron against the “physicist-historians who were more concerned with progress rather than process.” This is written at a time when historians of science, inspired by sociological theory, were seeking to understand history as it happened, rather than to single out accomplishments based on a post-hoc

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Primer: Herman Kahn

I usually try not to ramble on here about the area in which I have the most expertise: the 20th-century policy sciences. I like to see what’s been done in other sub-fields, and what happened in various times and places, and I don’t want to harp on the same subject again and again. However, I thought I’d take the opportunity with this week’s Hump-Day History post to highlight a really fascinating and controversial character who is the subject of a book that is both lively and, in my opinion, important.

Herman Kahn (1922-1983) was trained as a physicist, achieved record scores on the Army’s mental aptitude tests, and in 1947 joined the RAND Corporation (founded in Santa Monica in 1946). The RAND Corporation, the first of many nonprofit policy think tanks of the postwar era, was initially envisioned as a place where far-sighted R&D projects could be conceptualized and tested for feasibility. Its

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