Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 45 – History and Historiography of Science

Cowboys, Scientists, and Curators

Will has been reminding me of my inactive presence on this blog so I finally decided to get my act together and contribute something more history of science-ish.

Having been inspired by Will’s numerous reviews on the recent Isis from June 2008, I thought I would tackle Jeremy Vetter’s essay (in the same issue) “Cowboys, Scientists, and Fossils,” which underscores several history of science questions about the tensions between local collaborators and experts from the “outside,” including professional collectors, scientists, and museum curators. While American paleontology in the early 20th century is not exactly a specialized interest of mine, it does, however, dovetail into some of the similar challenges faced by European geologists in the early 19th century (some of whom I do study). I did read the work of Robert Kohler a long time ago whose books Lords of the Fly and Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology stimulated my scholarly curiosity about how contestations in the field affected the bigger picture of making science and whose concepts are echoed in Vetter’s ideas about the status of the field site as a place of contentious negotiation. The intervention of

Read More…Read More…

The Hierarchy of Needs

In the following paragraphs, I argue that historians or philosophers must necessarily write about a thing according to a series of rules or a ‘hierarchy of needs’ so that their account (consisting of a narrative, a series of propositions, a taxonomy, etc.) may be considered as both valid (internally coherent) and as useful (generally applicable) by and for the work’s perceived public. That a specific study of Galileo or Descartes assumes a specific form in response to the needs of the wider scholarly community and emerges as a mediated product of the individual scholar’s realization that he or she must satisfy a series of ‘needs’ in order for that argument to be accepted by the wider community has a specific intellectual genealogy. The idea of the meditated and individual but nonetheless universally valid judgment can be traced back to the later days of the enlightenment with the fleeting supremacy of the romantic absolute subject that bridged the gap between individual intuition and understanding. This allowed the individual judgment to have the same force of assent as those judgments accorded to the work of reason alone (Kant’s ‘inter-subjective validity’).

The shared understanding that a particular narrative exists within a specific discipline attains visibility in every work of history or philosophy that situates itself in the ‘literature.’ In this way, every work of scholarship is by its very nature a work of intellectual atavism, a rehearsal of intellectual formulations to be defensively considered and offensively discarded. Scholars appeal to literature to formulate a series of propositions from which they will depart. It is the habit of scholars to say, “historians of (subject) have noted x, while, in the following work, I will note y and z.” The degree to which such a statement represents the body of work in question is less important in comparison to how the author uses the previous literature

Read More…Read More…

Announcing: Hump-Day History

Here at Ether Wave Propaganda, we usually tackle obscure topics, which will primarily interest those people familiar with the history of science profession and its literature. Because the role of pop history has become a topic in the blogosphere, and because we’ve now been kindly linked to from some science blogs, starting next Wednesday we’re going to be posting weekly “Hump-Day History Lessons”: accessible vignettes from the history of science to help get regular non-historian visitors through the thick part of the week.

Historians tend to hear simple statements that have great interest to scientists and science enthusiasts, say “Joseph Fourier discovered global warming”, and suddenly, for unclear reasons, we get all excited and start dancing around, chanting bizarre things like “whig! whig! teleological claim!” (On Fourier and his link to climate science, click here). But we’re also interested in refreshing ourselves on the basics, and communicating what we view as “good history” to larger audiences. So, be sure and check in next Wednesday when we’ll start our new experiment with a discussion of “Aryan physics”, a concept pushed by antisemitic Nobel-Prize-winners during the Nazi era.

Isis Round-Up, Pt. 2

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, a number of scholars, including Steven Shapin, Martin Rudwick, Mario Biagioli, and Raine Daston, demonstrated the clear and powerful links between scientific methods of argumentation and the moral economy in which those arguments took place. That is, scientific arguments obey rules of etiquette (initially derived from courtly and gentlemanly culture) that dictated who could make what kinds of claims and in what manner. Turning this mirror away from science and on ourselves in the history biz, it’s worth asking what our moral economy of argumentation looks like. What follows is speculative.

I’d suggest that our moral economy is heavily influenced by the history of science’s location at an absurdly busy crossroads, through which sociology; philosophy; anthropology; art, architecture, literary, and media studies; gender, race, and colonial history; the history of technology; not to mention scientific practice, science journalism, science heritage, and popular science pass. This confluence of fields provides an enormous richness of argumentative style from which historians may draw. But it also presents some

Read More…Read More…

Isis Round-Up, Pt. 1

In the intro to this last Isis focus section, Jane Maienschein and George Smith wrote that they intended for the section to be “a start for what we hope will be a continuing and lively conversation.” Outside of niche areas, I’m not 100% sure what the last big conversation in our profession was, at least a conversation with more than one side. If there is to be such a conversation, the existential one about the use of our profession is a well-chosen place to begin.

The first problem is: how can such a conversation take place? Ben Cohen at World’s Fair wondered about just this point; John Lynch (who co-wrote the piece on science and education) replied in the comments that there was some thoughts to creating online fora, or maybe an HSS session, but that it seems to be “down to the blogs”. (John also asked the crucial question at Stranger Fruit: who in the history of science is blogging? which seems to have led, among other things, to much higher hit counts back here). Unsurprisingly, I’m a big supporter of the blog option. To me, a blogging community is sort of like a laboratory of culture and methodology. It’s less formal and less final than a journal or a conference. It’s harder to let points drop on account of the fact that any replies will be months-off. It’s more inclusive to any who are interested in participating. It can also support different rules of argumentation (more on this soon).

A community of science blogs took up the Focus section heartily, with discussion revolving primarily around to what extent the history of science can provide valuable context and a sense of motivation to scientific work, especially in scientific education, to help them see science as more than a collection of facts to memorize. See A Blog Around the Clock, “Hopeful Monster” at Chance and Necessity, David Ng at World’s Fair, and Brian Switek at Laelaps, and the comments section in all. All of these basically deal with the need for perspective on what it means to do science,

Read More…Read More…

Definitions, Professions, and Theodicy

One of the most spectacular debates that has emerged since the late 1970s has been those concerning the taxonomy and ontology of two interrelated historical periodizations, that of the “enlightenment” and that of “modernity.” In the history of ideas in both Europe and America, the duel question of “What is enlightenment?” and “What is modernity?” has been the subject of innumerable books, articles, dissertations, and conferences. The conjoining of both these questions and the interrogation of the reality of the intellectual movements they contend to signify has been the focus of recent work by James Schmidt and Graeme Garrard. Garrard, like Isaiah Berlin a generation before him, has linked the end of enlightenment and the arrival of modernity with the failure of rationality, cosmopolitanism, representative government, and the consequent rise of the totalitarian state. Thus, in this context, to define is to also narrate, explain, and defend oneself against the explanations of others.

For Garrard, political theorist Eric Vogelin, Richard Wolin, Ira Katznelson in his Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust, as well as Zygmunt Bauman in his Modernity and the Holocaust, all of whom in some ways follow Hannah Arendt, the failure of the enlightenment and the advent of modernity can help, in no small measure, to explain the ensuing failure of reason and democracy in the twentieth century. The cataclysms of the First World War, the advent of

Read More…Read More…

Quantum blog tunneling

In quantum mechanics, there’s this phenomenon called quantum tunneling, where a particle behind a barrier can spontaneously reappear on the other side of the barrier in the same way radioactive material can spontaneously emit radiation. While I’ve been away on an informative-but-tiring interview trip, this blog seems to have tunneled into new sectors of the history of science community and the science blogosphere thanks to the recent Isis series.

So, some reflection on the series and a round-up of internet reactions to the Isis Focus Series is forthcoming, but probably not until later this weekend. New visitors, welcome and we hope you stick around.

History in Perspective (Isis Pt. 6)

What I enjoyed most about Zuoyue Wang and Naomi Oreskes’ “History of Science and American Science Policy” is its sense of perspective and frankness about the place of history in science policy-making. They begin with a well-chosen 1986 quote from Richard Neustadt and Ernest R. May from a study on the “uses of history”: “…despite themselves Washington decision-makers actually used history in their decisions … whether they knew it or not.” I think this is true: action is based on tradition and our understanding of decisions made in the past. Therefore, a proper understanding of past events is helpful in making decisions. So, the historian should be actively involved, yes? Wang and Oreskes go on to quote John Heilbron, also from 1986: absolutely, we should “build the channels through which relevant and relevantly packaged research results of historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science and technology may flow to policy makers. … Let us come to the aid of our perplexed bretheren in the sciences.”

Not so fast. While Wang and Oreskes remain upbeat, they urge caution: “opportunities for direct involvement in science policy have remained scarce. Experience further suggests that historians who have taken up the demand have struggled to balance subtlety with clarity, nuanced appraisal with straight talk. Authentic policy-relevant history is not an oxymoron, but it is a challenge.” While it is true that historical lessons are frequently mis-interpreted (Wang presents evidence from his research on scientists who advised the President), the idea of historians of science themselves intervening is not so straight-forward as providing more informed interpretations.

Typically, Wang shows us, whenever historians have intervened in the political process, they have tried to strike an independent stance from both scientists and policymakers, but their testimony is usually called upon to take a side on pre-determined but clashing points of view. For example,

Read More…Read More…

Historians as Mediators (Isis Pt. 5)

I just didn’t get Katherine Pandora and Karen Rader’s “Science in the Everyday World: Why Perspectives from the History of Science Matter”. I don’t want to be too hard on the article, because I think it really is just a symptom of a malady that’s plaguing our profession, which I’d describe as an unwitting disciplinary arrogance. It’s hard to define, but it relates to us somehow thinking that we are the only people who really think about science and its place in society. Or at least there seems to be an implicit assumption that we’re unusually good at it. And this is common. In my look at the last focus section of Isis, for example, I responded to some of Galison’s questions about science and technology policy and ethics by wondering whether or not historians had any special perspective on the issues he mentioned (see #5, #6, and #10) versus other professions and discplines.

Here Pandora and Rader base their claims on the notion that there is a need to bridge the “scientist/nonscientist” divide, an argument that is pretty much a direct echo of C. P. Snow’s 1959 “two cultures” argument, which was bogus then, and is five times as wrong now. Basically, Pandora and Rader pretend as though “scientists” occasionally leave their “temple” to engage with “modern ‘publics'” (through popular presentations, through museums, and through educational offerings, like “Mr. Science” TV shows), and that this pretty-well unmoderated interchange can be clumsy and could benefit from some “humanistic knowledge”. We historians might have something to say—nay, our work “provides a crucial resource for professional scientists”—concerning public science issues, um, because we’ve

Read More…Read More…

Historians as Methodologists (Isis, Pt. 4)

Jane Maienschein, Manfred Laubichler, and Andrea Loettgers, in “How Can History of Science Matter to Scientists?” offer a number of cases in which the study of past experiments or chance encounters with historians have led scientists to examine their methodology and do things like question key assumptions, leading to productive scientific research. The chance encounter is a frequent spur to innovation, whether or not it is historical. These encounters can be substantive, such as reading about research in an unrelated field, or trivial: Richard Feynman told the story about how he was inspired to new research by seeing a student toss a plate in the air in a cafeteria, which led him to think about the physics of its wobble, which led to, um, magnificent things (Feynman didn’t say).

Anyway, if inspiration can come from the chance encounter, maybe the real question is how this benefit can be systematized. The reform of methodology and the questioning of assumptions reminded me of a couple of mathematician philosophers turned operations researchers I ran into in my dissertation work: West Churchman (right) and Russell Ackoff, who were students of Edgar A. Singer, who was a student of William James and a proponent of a little-known philosophy of science called “experimentalism” (which will be the subject of a talk at HSS this year by Alan Richardson; update: he’s also on the PSA program, which is joint with HSS this year, talking about Churchman and Ackoff as well: good times).

Before their turn to OR around 1950, Churchman and Ackoff proposed establishing Institutes of Experimental Method or Methodology Departments in universities, which would train multi-disciplinary “methodologists” and subject current experimental methods to systematic scrutiny to make sure they

Read More…Read More…