Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 5 – History and Historiography of Science

Introducing Vice Versa / Biosocial Science from Italian Criminology to American Post-War Studies of Prejudice

This is my first post for my new blog, Vice Versa. In this post I expand on a project I began at EWP—a reconstruction of the languages of the inquiry into nature and society from Henry Buckle to the work of E. O. Wilson. At EWP, I detailed how socio-biology was in reality a number of related inquiries in constellation with distinct genealogies, methodologies, worldviews and rules of evidence. Here, I interrogate Robin Fox’s claim to the neologism of “biosocial” to describe his inquiry. Rather than take Fox at his word that his biosocial science is a unique invention, I trace the origins of the term to turn of the century discussions of biological determinism in Italian criminology and in the work of education reformer Maria Montessori.

Once there, I then follow biosocial to its embedding within behaviorist psychology and finally within post-war discussions of racial prejudice. My examination of the term biosocial is not exhaustive—Kingsley Davis used it to define his view of man as an evolved social organism—but I use a case study approach to emphasize how biosocial has always been used to highlight the importance of the social as well as the environmental and to interrogate the boundary between the biological and the natural. Much like social selection, biosocial has been utilized since the origins of the social sciences to contend with deterministic explanations.

Schaffer on Machine Philosophy, Pt. 5b: Automata and the Enlightenment

This post concludes my look at Simon Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Schaffer (Chicago University Press, 1999).

As detailed in previous posts, Schaffer’s interest in 18th-century automata in this piece is mainly a means of making larger points about the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment, and its links to an emerging economic order of industrialism and managerialism. In doing so, he contributes an interpretive gloss that joins an existing general historiography of Enlightenment ideology, with a historiography of the automaton creations of such figures as Jacques de Vaucanson (1709–1782), Pierre Jaquet-Droz (1721–1790), and John-Joseph Merlin (1735–1803). This post discusses this second facet of the history.

For Schaffer, the key questions are: 1) what interests did automata engage, allowing them to proliferate as objects of display and fascination? and 2) in what ways did they speak to the concerns of philosophers and other commentators of the period, making them into salient metaphors and objects of intellectual reflection?

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Meetings of People: Rivers & Diffusionism

Another stellar Grote Club post by Simon Cook—this time on psychologist and anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers and his ‘conversion to diffusionism’, explained through the decisive influence of the writings of H. M. Chadwick and those of the archaeologist William Ridgeway. Simon rightly contends that in order to explain anthropology at Cambridge c. 1910s we have to cast aside our anachronistic notions of anthropology as a modern discipline in order to admit the contributions of Chadwick and Ridgeway, whom by modern definitions of anthropology are not anthropologists at all.

John Grote: Victorian Philosophy in the Modern World

An excellent post by John Gibbins, author of John Grote, Cambridge University and the Development of Victorian Thought (Imprint Academic, 2007). John is the foremost expert on this significant Victorian figure. Here he explains the man behind the Grote Club, the inspiration behind this new venture in intellectual history, and provocatively connects Grote’s ideas to significant international currents in the history of ideas. In future posts for the Grote Club blog, I will be exploring Grote’s influence in 20th century American and British social science circles.

The Intellectual Worlds of Henry C. Carey, Part 1: Some Methodological Notes and the Scientific Sources of the American School of Political Economy in the United States

Henry C. Carey (December 15, 1793 – October 13, 1879) was an economist from Philadelphia whose The Harmony of Interests: Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial (1851) has attracted considerable attention for his critique of Ricardian and Malthusian economics. Like Daniel Raymond (1786–1849, who was the first sustained critic of Adam Smith, Thomas R. Malthus and David Ricardo), Carey found in particular Malthus and Ricardo’s laissez-faire outlook and quietism concerning class conflicts, and the unequal distribution of wealth between social classes factually incorrect and morally dubious. Instead, according to Jeffrey P. Sklansky in The Soul’s Economy (2002), Carey contended that “capitalist development naturally leads to class harmony rather than strife and that the free growth of market relations would result in the breakdown of class distinctions altogether, whether between master and slave or between employer and employee…” (80).

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Introducing The Grote Club / William McDougall on Psychology, Rationality, Childhood, and Civilization (Part 1)

The Grote Club, a new intellectual history project with Simon Cook (of Ye Machine) and John Gibbins. From the site:

John Grote, born in 1813, was Knightbridge Professor of Moral Science at the University of Cambridge from 1855 until his death in 1866. During this period he was head of the new faculty of moral science and, in so doing, set the study of psychology, logic, and the social sciences in Cambridge on a course into the modern age.

During his stewardship of the moral sciences Grote held weekly discussion meetings at his home in the village of Trumpington. After his death these meetings continued, usually held in the college rooms of one or other member of what came to be known as the ‘Grote Club’.

Today we relaunch the Grote Club as an electronic adventure in intellectual history. Our electronic discussion society is dedicated to exploring all aspects of Grote’s thought and intellectual legacy.

The legacy of Grote and his circle included a thorough revision of the moral sciences at Cambridge, leading to the transformation of the sciences of social inquiry then forming in Britain. The effects of this were most famously felt in the areas of political economy and economics, in the work of Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (1890), but it had a decisive effect on the development of modern anthropology and psychology in Britain—an effect only dimly understood through reference to the development of the fieldwork methodology and through various scholarly narratives concerned with the origins and propagation of elitism and mass psychology.

My role at the Grote Club website is to trace the legacy of this transformation of the moral sciences at Cambridge in its American contexts. I am becoming increasingly convinced that the legacy of John Grote’s moral philosophy, which became embedded at Cambridge, and was felt through W. H. R. Rivers, William McDougall, Charles S. Myers, and others, allows for a fresh perspective on the American social sciences before the Second World War. More to come in this innovative effort in Anglo-America history of scientific ideas bridging the gap between the 19th and the 20th centuries.

Robin Fox: Biosocial Anthropology as Philosophical Anthropology (Slightly Updated)

UPDATE: It has occurred to me that my two part argument—leveling a criticism of the philosophers’ portrayal of biosocial anthropology as censure-worthy at the expense of an understanding of the complexity of its ideas and normalizing biosocial anthropology in post-war ideas by re-categorizing it as philosophical anthropology—that I focused less on ideas and their genealogies (especially the Gellner bits) than was satisfactory. Thus, quite soon, I will analyze in depth Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger’s The Imperial Animal (1971) as both philosophical anthropology AND as an outgrowth of the re-configuration of the social sciences in the US and the UK after the Second World War. Hopefully, by the time of my review of Joel Isaac’s Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (2013) my views on post-war, Cold War American and UK social sciences will be reasonably apparent.

In a previous post, I attempted a taxonomy of post-war inquiries which interrogated the connections between the biological and social sciences in various post-war intellectual communities. Bio-social anthropology, biosocial anthropology, sociobiology and social biology were loosely defined. Part of the challenge of discussing these (mostly) post-war inquiries is in going beyond the fraught discussions over the extent that any or all of these inquiries engage in biological reductionism and biological determinism.

What is needed more is a discussion of the ideas themselves and their genealogies and, by extension, their connections to broader themes in post-war and Cold War sciences. The ideas themselves are quite complicated, and many philosophers of science, such as Mario Bunge (though much of his work is among my favorites in philosophy of science), reduce them to caricatures (intelligent distortions—but reductions which worry about their societal implications and evil intent). On a philosophical and ethical level, these ideas are troublesome and distortions—but they are with us and have been with us for some time. One can talk about the ideational content of (say) public choice theory, without the merits of its practical application. It seems impossible to talk about Hayek or Keynes outside of their virtues as policy, but this must change as well.

Biosocial anthropology, as noted in the last post, is, especially in the works of Robin Fox, part of a philosophical and social science critique against relativism in the social sciences as well as in epistemology. Such a critique draws strength from the methodological writings of Karl Popper (previously mentioned), but even more so from Ernest Gellner. Gellner is the subject of a remarkable biography by John A. Hall (that is not without its problems, and will be reviewed here shortly). Fox’s appropriation of Gellner’s ideas also points to a rather bifurcated legacy on the part of this diverse social thinker: as a philosophical critic and anthropologist and as a theorist of nationalism. Mary Douglas, whose diverse works have never been much understood by anthropologists, but whose ideas have been appropriated by diverse other fields, was deeply scornful of Gellner’s books on nationalism (as evidenced by her oral history with Alan Macfarlane). Fox seems to prefer Gellner the philosopher to Gellner the theorist of nationalism. Hall, valiantly tries to unify them. Such an account is incredibly useful, but at odds with my understanding of Gellner.

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On the Cybersyn Article Controversy: We Need Best Practices

Evgeny Morozov recently wrote an article for the New Yorker about management cybernetician Stafford Beer (1926-2002) and Project Cybersyn, an ambitious early-1970s attempt to use information-handling technologies to manage the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende.

Eden Medina published a fine book on the subject in 2011. Morozov mentioned Medina’s book in his article, but only in an off-hand manner. Historians, writing on Twitter and the SIGCIS message board, were incensed — the article, they believed, was, in effect, intellectual theft. Morozov’s reply was a post on his tumblr describing his original research process, while acknowledging the importance of Medina’s work.

I’ll offer my own take up front: as a courtesy, Morozov should have acknowledged Medina’s book much earlier in the essay, and should have signalled to readers that it is an authoritative source on the subject. I reach this conclusion regardless of whether the essay was a proper book review or not (which has been a subject of some confusion, given that the essay was a “Critic at Large” piece, which appears in the book review section).

My conclusion is drawn from my belief that Medina’s book constitutes a canonical source. I will, however, refrain from joining my historian colleagues in their visceral disgust at Morozov’s essay, because this principle of the canonical source (as opposed to an originating source) does not actually exist. I have just made it up now, and it would not be charitable to expect people to be bound to either a principle or a canonical status that nobody has ever agreed upon or even discussed.

My proposition: if there exists a large (i.e., book-length), thorough, deeply researched treatment of a topic — even if one disagrees with aspects of it or goes beyond it, and especially if it is recent (say, the last 15 years) — one is obligated, regardless of publishing genre or venue, and regardless of whatever replication and supplementation of research one has done, to acknowledge that canonical status clearly.

Now, for an examination of some particular issues in the case at hand…

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Schaffer on Machine Philosophy, Pt. 5a: Automata and the Proto-Industrial Ideology of the Enlightenment — History

This post continues my look at Simon Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Schaffer (Chicago University Press, 1999).

Pin manufacturing, detail of a plate from the Encyclopédie — The division of labor in pin manufacturing. From the *Encyclopédie*.

Pt. 4 examined Schaffer’s characterization of an ideology associated with the Enlightenment, reflected in the era’s fascination with automata. This ideology revolved around the belief that physiology, labor, cognition, and social relations could be comprehended in mechanical terms, and governed according to philosophically derived managerial regimens. Pt. 4 also explored Schaffer’s situation of his arguments within a large, diverse, and venerable historiography of the mechanistic aspirations of the Enlightenment.

Pt. 5 turns to look at the historical events that Schaffer marshaled into his history of this ideology.

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Derek Price on Automata, Simulacra, and the Rise of “Mechanicism”

Price. Click for original at Yale University Manuscripts and Archives — Derek J. de Solla Price (1922-1983). Click for the full-size photo at Yale University Manuscripts and Archives

Before we proceed further with our discussion of Simon Schaffer’s “Enlightened Automata” (1999), I’d like to go back a further 35 years to take a look at Derek J. de Solla Price, “Automata and the Origins of Mechanism and Mechanistic Philosophy,” Technology and Culture 5 (1964): 9-23. This should give us some sense of how much and how little the literature had changed by the time Schaffer wrote.

Price’s article was written in a period when historians were interested in defining and tracing the shifts in thought that they took to be crucial to the development of modern science. The tradition of scholarship is closely associated with figures such as Alexandre Koyré (1892-1964) and Rupert Hall (1920-2009), whose touchstone work, The Scientific Revolution: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude, appeared in 1954.

Probably the most important shift these authors attended to was the rise of “mechanistic” modes of explaining natural phenomena, punctuated by the philosophy of René Descartes (1596-1650) and the achievements of Isaac Newton (1643-1727). Price’s aim was to investigate the intellectual relationship between mechanistic philosophy (“or mechanicism to use the appropriate term coined by Dijksterhuis,” 10*) and the creation of sophisticated mechanisms.

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