History and Historiography of Science

Galison’s Questions, #1: What is Context?

In the latest Isis Peter Galison address “Ten Problems in History and Philosophy of Science”. This is the sort of thing where it’s easy to just nod and agree, yeah, these are good questions–and then never worry about it again. The blog format seems to be a good way to respond quickly and publicly. It’d be nice if there was some sort of more widespread way to respond, but, lacking that, I’ve decided to tackle Galison’s questions here, in a new series of posts. So, bust out your copy of Isis, and play along.

Galison’s first question is “What is Context?” He observes that the escape from externalist-internalist debates has resulted in an appeal to context. But, to phrase it in a Seinfeldian way: what’s the deal with context? Does it cause events, does it provide resources, what? Philosophers refer to the context of a work by refering to other works. Historians refer to the non-textual environment surrounding a text we are interested in. “What kind of thing is a candidate for context?” “How does a contextual explanation work?”

It so happens I recently pontificated on this issue, so I’ll just expand on my previous point. Basically, I think context can entail pretty much anything. The trick, in my mind, is to avoid exchanging your subject for its context. Let’s say you’re writing about a science in the context of imperialism, I’ve seen far too many accounts where it is actually irrelevant what science is being talked about, because the paper, ultimately, is about imperialism, not the science. The point of the paper is to show that the science was reflective/a product of its imperialist context. But, using this strategy, we don’t really learn much about the context either, because it basically just uses things everybody already knows about imperialism (or whatever) to illustrate the case in point, almost always: “context matters”.

So, that brings it to the question: how does context matter? Here I think, if we are truly interested in the science in question, we cannot, unequivocally, beyond a doubt, set out to study “Science X as _____”. The word “as” is nice, because it allows us to see things as they do not immediately appear to be, but it’s also one of the most abused crutches in historiography. In my mind, the thing we need to do is get back to studying X in and of itself in light of as many different contexts as seem pertinent, and then discuss the ways in which they matter or do not matter, and maybe even attempt to assign significance to them.

Let’s take, say, a theory to be our example. We might write about a theory in the context of some experiment. The theory is designed to explain the experiment. However, one very nice trend in the historiography has been to not take the theoretical context for granted. Let’s discuss the theory in the context of previous theories. What theory-making tools does the theory in question make use of? Thus we have now started to discuss the history of various theory-making traditions, which is, clearly, at least as important in explaining any given theory’s existence/form/style/whatever, as the experiment that actually provided the impetus for this particular theory.

Context doesn’t always have to be the cliches we already understand (and should probably reconceptualize or even unlearn) from any given historical era. In fact, I think I disagree with Galison. Internalism vs. externalism should not die; we just don’t need to be purists about it. Ultimately, we can call some contexts unequivocally internal and some contexts unequivocally external, and some will be more difficult to define. But, I think we need to defend the attention we pay to certain contexts. We can say Science X would not have looked the same without its imperialist context. Well, sure, and I wouldn’t exist if my mother had never met my father. What’s your point?

R&D, please

A couple of weeks ago, in my Intro to History of Science course, I gave a lecture on the rise of research and development as perhaps the most socially significant arm of the scientific enterprise. It was one of my favorite lectures of the semester. In some ways it extended off the “culture of invention” lecture that I gave with my industrial revolution lecture, but emphasized how tightly intertwined laboratory/workshop work had become with the invention/development culture.

The invention lecture emphasized loose connections, and was given in the same week as the 19th century physics lecture–the non-textbook readings of the week were from Smith and Wise’s Lord Kelvin biography on William Thomson and the telegraph. The R&D lecture started off with the fairly familiar story of BASF and the German chemical industry and the emphasis at places like the KWG on more applied kinds of research. I also brought in Dave Kaiser’s recent work on the growth and “suburbanization” of physics in the postwar period as being specifically oriented around R&D-type activities (which he doesn’t devote much attention to, emphasizing the pedagogical angle instead).

However, I began the lecture by emphasizing the complexity of the relationship between “basic science” and “applied science”–where a “simple narrative” tells you basic leads to applied, the “complex narrative” has more to do with basic science facilitating the leap from technology to improved technology, than with unveiled secrets of nature leading to fabulous new technologies. I emphasized that the complex narrative was well-understood by anyone with real knowledge of R&D activities. David Edgerton’s “The Linear Model Did Not Exist” was the reading for the week (along with a 1928 article in United Empire called “Scientific and Industrial Research” by British science administration luminary, Henry Tizard).

I was especially satisfied with the lecture, because I don’t think it would appear in too many courses or historical overviews, and yet is both simple to understand and extremely important. I pointed out that even though R&D dominated scientific culture, and to a remarkable degree in the postwar era, Bowler and Morus devote pretty much zero attention to it. Their “Science and Technology” chapter ends just when the story is getting interesting! Beyond the scope of the class, I don’t think we’ve come to terms with R&D as a part of scientific culture, which is a part of our continuing historiographical difficulty in really understanding and describing science in the 20th century in general. Edgerton’s article is not a bad place to start thinking about the issue–a draft of it can be found here (see #41 under articles).

Holmes, Part 4: Teleology? Why not!

In the epilogue to Frederic Holmes’ “Between Biology and Medicine” lectures, he addresses some of the general criticisms he received after his lectures. Two of them had to do with whether he was being “teleological” which seems to be used here as a synonym for “Whiggish”. By conceptualizing his lectures as what “led up to” intermediary metabolism, was he not being teleological and attributing motivations to his actors that they did not hold? Holmes therapeutically observes that we must “guard vigilantly” against this kind of reading of history, but defends himself in a couple of ways.

First “the unrecognized biases of hindsight inevitably shadow all historical narrative.” This is an uncomfortable point; we are always led in our investigations of the past by the concerns of how something came to be. I think I agree. It is only once we are immersed in the concerns of the past that we can look around and say, “Well, actually, they seem to be a lot more concerned with these other things…” But, this doesn’t change the fact that Holmes is reading a precursor history of “intermediary metabolism” stretching back to the 1850s, while it wouldn’t really congeal as a field until the 1930s–why is this legit?

So, second, Holmes is interested in the development of “fields” and “disciplines” and “investigative pathways” and “streams”. I think it’s true that none of his actors ever really take up a directed line of research in physiological chemistry; rather they pass through it. So, is it the author’s imagination that such a stream even exists? I think Holmes makes a convincing point to say “no”; the actors recognized the issue, but, for various reasons of discipline and specific investigative problems (e.g., difficulties in making progress on the problem of lactic acid formation in tissues) they pursued other paths.

I think this issue can best be resolved through some hypothetical situations. If the 1850s chemists and physiologists had seen the work of the 1930s, would they have recognized it as a contribution to their field, or would they have looked at it in bafflement and incomprehension–as incommensurable with their paradigm, or, alternatively, as irrelevant to the discourses that they engaged in? Holmes, I think, would argue that they would have seen it as significant–and here is where we must distinguish teleology from Whiggishness.

Teleology suggests a purposeful process; and people are purposeful creatures. It is when we read purpose onto nature that we commit teleological fallacies. While there have been some notions that science represents a blind process, I don’t think there are many who would deny that there is some envisioning of the potential results of future research programs. While they would certainly not have envisioned “intermediary metabolism” in all its details, they did have concerns about the chemical processes of cells, which they only marginally addressed for reasons that are explainable in terms of scientists’ choice not to pursue the program more rigorously.

So, in taking a teleological view, is Holmes being Whiggish? Maybe a little insofar as he chose to pursue this topic rather than another that would have been more significant at the time, but not insofar as he is addressing concerns that would have been foreign to the historical actors. Thus the emphasis on disciplinary formation–disciplinary formation represents a choice of what problems should be solved; and he shows that even though they could have addressed the problems of metabolism (roughly what the Germans were calling “Stoffwechsel” at the time), they chose not to.

So, at any rate, the product is an informative history of 19th century laboratory physiology and chemistry. Maybe there are better, more informative narratives to follow that will tell us about these traditions, but looking at it through the lens of the relatively minor field of physiological chemistry, while Whiggish in its choice, still represents a legitimate perspective on past events. Until I stumble across something better on this topic, this is my go-to, canonical source. If any experts in the area can recommend a better, more informative go-to source, I’m very much open.

But it’s a tough area to represent, so I’m not sure there are better sources. As Holmes closes the book: “These criticisms… reinforce my belief that a deeper historical examination of how the fields and disciplines of science have arisen and are sustained is crucial to our understanding of the nature of science [I’d rephrase that to “history of scientific knowledge”]. They also make it all too clear that the magnitude of the undertaking is greater than historians of science have so far attempted.”

So, here’s my question: have we since attempted this in the area of 19th/early 20th-century laboratory physiology and chemistry, or have we fallen back on easier, more localized questions (which, incidentally, Galison asks about in his “10 questions”)?

New Isis!

Ah, it’s that time again: the new Isis just found its way to my desk (a little worse for wear in the mail). On first glance, this one looks pretty cool, too. Former grad student colleague Alex Wellerstein has a piece on the patenting of the bomb; also: Rebekah Higgitt and Charles W. J. Withers on women as an audience at the BAAS, over a 70 year time scale–good sign! Robert Kohler has a piece on Vernon Bailey–looks a bit narrow, but maybe it’ll be surprising. Plus, a Focus section on “Changing Directions in History and Philosophy of Science” including 10 questions from my dissertation advisor, Peter Galison. Peter usually asks good, probing questions, so should be a good read. Another talented former colleague, Deborah Coen, reviews literature on the German environment, including one by David Blackbourn, who ran a great course I took in grad school on Problems and Sources in German History. OK, this post is getting a little Harvard-centric….

Plus, coming up in 3 months, a Focus section on the relevance of the history of science. I’ll believe it when I see it, but it’s good to at least broach the topic. The blogging plate is full!

Housekeeping

Only three lectures left to go! After History 174 comes to a close (today was “Science and the Computer: Computation, Automation, Simulation, Information”), I think it will be about time to rejigger the blog a little bit, maybe harp on some people again to sign on as contributors, so we can get a more diverse dialogue going here.

One thing I’d like to see happen is a wider community of commentary and speculation. I think people take the blogging thing altogether too seriously and get intimidated, like you have to have some profound insight to blog. But I think it’s more of a place for unserious thinking, since we have to do so much serious thinking for publications. The most interesting and vital thinking seems to go on behind the scenes, so it seems like a good idea to open those conversations up a little to the public.

Anyway, to try and create a sense of there being an active blog community (no slackers!), I’ve decided to weed out a few defunct sites on the blog roll to the left. Phil Mirowski seems to have come to the end of his book promo blog, so he’s gone; it’s too bad, because I think if he ever had a real blog it would be seriously, seriously entertaining. Paul Edwards has apparently bored of writing about Infrastructuration, too, with no immediate hopes of return. However, Robert Vienneau’s “Thoughts on Economics” is updated regularly, and is usually historical in character and is also really thought-provoking–I recommend looking at it even though (especially because?) it’s not within The Biz. Similarly, the Copenhagen Medical Museion blog, Biomedicine on Display, kept up primarily by Thomas Soderqvist, is also frequently updated, and often asks really good questions.

Advances in the History of Psychology (celebrating 340 days on the web) is a little bit more newsletter-like with only occasional scholarly commentary. It is very professionally done–a model for all who want to try and reach out in this direction. Similarly, Michael Barton’s “The Dispersal of Darwin” is also usually in the newsletter vein. He’s done a great job of keeping the blog up, and his ClustrMap shows he has a wide audience. I might try and figure out some criteria for figuring out which of the (many) other popular blogs should get links.

The institutional blogs (except the Medical Museion) seems to be growing in fits and starts. The Penn Logan Lounge seems to have become a semesterly-updated seminar list, so I’m going to axe it. The University of Minnesota department blog is not updated a lot, but looks like it could become a place for reviews and thoughts–plus it’s Minnesota, and Minnesota is awesome. I’m really interested to see what the University of Oklahoma gang does with their Hydra online grad student journal/website.

I’ll be on the lookout foor more sites to put up, and will see if any of the hibernating ones spring back to life. If any readers have suggestions, please leave a comment. We’re looking for blogs dealing with the history of science, or any particular science, in at least a somewhat probing way, but the audience doesn’t have to be academic.

Harvard Conference

It’s been almost a week since the last entry, because I’ve been back up in my Cambridge, Mass. stomping grounds at a highly interdisciplinary conference on “Instability and Decomposition” put together by my friend, collaborator, and former colleague Lambert Williams. There were a lot of pretty sharp presentations on a really diverse array of topics. I gave a revised version of my Air and Space Museum talk (with even more diagrams, which seem to be going over well). This talk sets itself up in opposition to arguments where the big story is how patronage and politics shape the scientific policy advice being received. I don’t say this isn’t the case, but try and bring the analysis in new directions by reframing the motivation of policy scientists as being the improvement of policy (rather than dictation) through analysis, and by recasting policymakers as intellectual participants in the policy science process.

The only thing I want to talk about with respect to the conference is that only a couple of the talks really set up any sort of argument with the literature. There was an interesting friction between two papers, one of which framed itself using Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial critique, and another that set itself up in opposition to it (in a way that had some odd resonances with my paper, actually). Now, I don’t know the first thing about Bhabha’s critique, but it still gave the papers a little spice, a sense that something was being achieved. I find it strange that most papers don’t try and throw out a few sparks.

Anyway, Jenny wanted me to offer a few opinions on her summary of our debate last week before she posts, so I’ll do that at first opportunity, so we can get that up. And I swear I’ll get back to my string on Holmes, as well as maybe talk about R&D.

Virtual History Chat

Jenny and I just finished our first experimental online history chat–I think it was reasonably successful, and could be used for certain kinds of discussion. Largely historians (not historians of science) participated–it seemed to be agreed that some of the deeper theory-based concerns were not very high on everyone’s minds, but that there was plenty of need for new kinds of historiography that haven’t yet cohered. Maybe we’re in a period of theory hangover? Jenny will sum up in more detail soon.

Online debate on French history, theory, and the question of modernism

Apologies for my prolonged blog absence. I have not abandoned Will in his search for the history of history but was traveling abroad, which always takes time out of one’s schedule.

I am happy to announce that our online debate will debut tomorrow night, Wednesday, April 23rd, 8pm Paris time or 2pm Eastern standard time. If you have a Gmail account and would like to join our group chat room, feel free to send either me or Will an email at jennifer.ferng or gwilliamthomas. We will hope to refine this project as time goes on.

We will begin the debate with Stanley Fish’s recent essays on French theory in America.

Some other questions we hope to kick around are: how are French theorists different from French historians? Are there competing schools of contemporary French historiography today? What type of new methodologies are being used and what kind of exciting questions are being asked by graduate students and more established scholars? How do French historians compare with British historians? Is modernism still alive in the humanities or should it be? What about its relation to postmodernism?

We hope you can join us and look forward to a constructive and critical debate!

Depicting Science in Context

First: Jenny’s been away from Paris, but will be back this week, and, so far as I know, her online debate is still on. The plan is to use Google Talk Messaging, which requires either a special download, available here, or just a gmail account. If you’d like to participate or just watch, you can contact one of us on our gmail accounts: gwilliamthomas or jennifer.ferng and we’ll be sure to send you an invite. I expect it will be in the evening Paris time, so afternoon in America, on the 23rd. If you’d like to suggest possible points to discuss (really anything goes, but the idea is historiography, not even necessarily of science), leave a comment here.

Now, I wanted to discuss strategies for talking about scientific culture, which is influenced by my recent reading of Holmes, Mirowski’s More Heat Than Light (which I’m using for ideas for my lecture on economics tomorrow), and some recent emails with Paul Erickson concerning his work on game theory (which everyone interested in 20th century science should have a look at when it come out).

Here’s the historiographical problem: how do we talk about events “in their own terms”? First runs through a history tend (maybe inevitably?) to be Whiggish–how does the past presage some later understanding? The historian’s major response seems to be “to situate B within the contemporary context of X” or to show “B as a product/reflection of X”; which tends to read the history of B only inasmuch as it relates to X. Now, this in no way precludes reading B as a product of Y or Z, either, but it also doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding B “in its own terms”. This is definitively not to say that B is independent of everything else, but I do think it prevents us from taking B seriously, even as we take its cousins at the end of the alphabet entirely too seriously. Why are X, Y, and Z allowed to take on a solid meaning, and not B?

Take Mirowski–his big argument in MHTL is that 19th century economics was forged in relation to the perception of what physics was accomplishing, with neoclassical economics being a direct copy of energetics. He’s certainly right about the existence of the connections, but I rarely feel like I’m understanding the economics on its own terms, despite his valiant efforts to dispel the Whiggishness of the history of pre-neoclassical economics as striving towards some sort of obviously true neoclassical understanding. The mathematical moves the economists make might appear to mimic physics in some ways, but is there a different epistemology at work? Did the economists really think they were doing the same thing as the physicists, even if the equations are copied directly? I would tend to think not, given that their main tradition was one of political philosophy rather than mathematical physics, so I would think that the mathematics would be reinterpreted within the historically dominant tradition. A conversation for another day….

Anyway, Mirowski aside, my main trouble with “in the context of X/Y/Z” is that it presumes we have a solid understanding of X/Y/Z, when what is really meant is a simple shorthand. Take “science X in the context of the Cold War”; what is usually meant is that said science “has an aroma of paranoia about it”, “benefits the military”, and/or “is expensive”–detailed understanding of Cold War historical dynamics will typically not figure. As for science X, it’s usually implicit that the science itself is understood well enough “in its own terms” and that, therefore, additional light will be shed on it by situating it within its context. But, what strikes me is that the science is usually not well understood, either because it hasn’t ever been recapitulated in a coherent narrative, or that whatever recapitulation does exist is all within the inadequate Whiggish old school/practitioner/pop historiography, which few historians in the audience will actually read (for good reasons), thus limiting the informativeness of the exercise.

So, in my mind, it’s best to go back and retell the original story, maybe in a different way, paying attention to different things, or assigning different weights to different parts of the narrative “in light of” what we know about the context. So, we still acknowledge that the thing we are studying is actually an entity in and of itself, and is not merely an artifact bearing the marks of overlapping themes and discourses. This is why I like Holmes so well–he really tries to get back to the original material and understand its intellectual project without abandoning the context. This inevitably makes for a really convoluted history, but the attempt to unravel it is, in my experience, where the really good historical arguments take place. Next time, as promised, Holmes’ epilogue.

Holmes, Part 3: Does Nature Matter?

Comparing what I’ve (poorly) called the historical arc vs. the historical reality models of writing history, Holmes goes on to discuss some of the relevant literature. Probably his main target here is Robert Kohler’s (1982, now out of print) From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline, the first chapter of which explores how “physiological chemistry” was caught in a sort of professional limbo between physiology and organic chemistry in the German university system–hence this gap between first major calls for a cell-oriented chemistry ca. 1850, and the eventual instantiation of a full-blown biochemistry ca. 1900.

Now, things get complicated here, so all this is all too-fast, too-rough recapitulation, but, long story short, Kohler’s book focuses almost exclusively on the non-scientific politics of disciplinary formation. One of Holmes’ big points is to bring the science back into the picture. “If we are to understand scientific innovation and change comprehensively, then we need studies at all levels of organization, from the individual investigator [which he goes on to defend vigorously] and the local research school to the international field; and on time scales ranging from daily experimental operations to the several decades or even much longer that are often required for scientific problems to evolve and for major domains of scientific knowledge to be acquired.” He had previously discussed Mulkay and Edge, but he’s also clearly addressing the points made by Kohler and Latour: “A research field is more than a network of communication and ties of professional interest.”

In some sense, this boils down to the usual, “but nature matters!” argument deployed against the “spin up” interpretation of sociology. Rudwick (see the last post) certainly agrees (see the latest HSS newsletter). Kohler seems to as well, and actually, in his 1982 book, seems to lament the politics of the German university that prevented biochemistry from emerging. Although Holmes gets into it, repeatedly, with the sociologists’ “spin up” arguments throughout the lectures, I get the feeling his main concern is not with proving that nature matters, but, rather, that he has his own, very historiographical agenda. He wants to know how we get down to telling histories that reveal what mattered, and thus why his approach to history is best in this case, as opposed to an approach like that used in, say, Great Devonian Controversy or From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry.

By embracing both long time spans (unlike a case study approach like Rudwick’s), and by embracing laboratory-level practice (unlike Kohler’s approach to a similar topic), Holmes aims to show how the formation of a field like biochemistry is not simply a matter of willing it into existence provided there are no political barriers, but that nature and the evolution of ideas about nature matter in determining what is deemed worth investigation. Most of his lectures are centered around constructing a narrative in which such points are pertinent. In other words, he shows how a more sociologist-friendly book like Kohler’s is actually more Whiggish than his approach, because it presumes that a field like biochemistry ought to exist, and that it was necessary for the emergence of biochemical knowledge (as Kohler himself seems to confirm). This could all be a big misinterpretation of the historiographical argument taking place, on both Holmes’ and Kohler’s parts–I read this stuff quickly–but it’s what I took away from it.

Next time: Holmes responds to some criticisms in his epilogue.