History and Historiography of Science

Medieval Book Culture

Reposted from the History 174 class blog:

Here I’d like to address the background question of what all this has to do with science. I got today’s lecture largely from Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park’s book, published in 1998, called Wonder and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. This is a really clever book, and demonstrates just what we have to gain from abandoning whig notions of history. Rather than try and reach back into the soup of books that come to us out of the middle ages and either brush it off entirely, or to try and pick out things that look like science, Daston and Park take all of these books as part of a unified intellectual culture. Literate people used to read devotional texts, bestiaries, and travel narratives all together, and they assembled knowledge indiscriminately from them–they didn’t relegate knowledge about the natural world to one defined set of books and read another set for entertainment. They all participated in a “model” of the universe, to use Lewis’ term, that informed and was informed by poetry, hagiography, philosophy, etc… Daston and Park choose to trace changes in this bookish culture not by trying to pick “science” out of it, but by tracking changing attitudes toward “wonder”–was it something that created a simple admiration for God’s creation? was it something that suggested the need for a preternatural or supernatural explanation? or was it something that was supposed to be expunged through rational explanation (as, they argue, happened with the rise of science).

Next lecture we’ll talk about astronomy, which was an extremely technical profession, but we have to understand that “natural philosophy” as it began to cohere in the 1600s, encompassed all kinds of non-technical subjects like natural history and geography as well as astronomy, and we have to understand where interest in those subjects came from. The answer is medieval book culture.

(For the super-interested, also check out William Eamon’s Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture)

Isis

So, the new Isis (December ’07) just found its way to my desk. It contains an article on 19th century natural history, and an article linking science and empire (although American, not British here). I always get the profoundest sense of deja vu whenever one of these suckers arrives for some odd reason.

More off the beaten track is an article on the teaching of science within the mid-twentieth century American Catholic context, but, I have to confess, I’m not exactly dropping everything else in my rush to read it.

Historians and Wikipedia

Take a look at an entry on our neighboring Advances in the History of Psychology blog. It has to do with a dispute over whether an article on the history of psychology over at Wikipedia should feature a large section on medieval Arabic psychology. Clearly discussing medieval Arabic “psychology” (especially in the terms used by the writer) commits various presentist sins in the name of drawing attention to non-Western scholarship in history. The post deftly raises questions about how well professional historians and enthusiasts–whose “historiography from below” (to use David Edgerton’s term) is valuable, but frequently analytically problematic–can get along in close quarters. It also sort of brings up the point earlier made here about the historiographical issues involved when historians of different agendas cross paths. Interestingly, when I referred to activist historians, I was thinking academically, but the post very clearly shows where the popular and activist history trends can come together.

Ancient and Medieval Philosophy

Cross-posted from my class blog for History 174 at UMD:

We went pretty quickly through lecture today. It’s sort of a bind–because in order to understand the context of science, as it starts to happen in the 1500s and 1600s, you really have to set up this philosophical background. Philosophy/Theology was the most important knowledge in that time period, and for people who studied natural philosophy using new methods (such as quantitative measurement, which, you’ll recall, was only an accidental quality in the main tradition), the primacy of these Platonic and Aristotelian philosophical traditions was something they 1) could draw inspiration from, but 2) had to contend with as something that was always going to overshadow whatever claims they made.

So, we cover it quickly as necessary background, which means your responsibility is to pick out the most basic issues, and to make sure you use section to come to a proper understanding of them. Why are things we consider important, like quantitative measurement, considered merely accidental? But, also understand why it made sense not to worry about them–because, in a world where things were thought to tend to happen, but did not necessarily have to happen, being precise wasn’t such a big deal, because the formal qualities of something were what explained their tendencies. It’s certainly confusing, so make good use of section.

Check out the online lecture notes from a full course on Ancient philosophy at the University of Washington: http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/320Lecture.html

I used these notes to help me prepare my lecture–they’re pretty detailed, and might help you make sense of the concepts. On the Medieval period, I can recommend for basic explanation as well as extracts from Christian, Islamic and Jewish traditions, Philosophy in the Middle Ages, by Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh, which was the textbook used in a course I took on this topic (don’t ask me why) my freshman year as an undergrad. I relied on it heavily to make sure I wasn’t saying anything patently false about this profoundly esoteric topic.

Hope you’re having fun. It won’t all be this intense!

WT

Roots of Modern Science

The first lecture in my history of science course is tomorrow. There’s not a lot to say about it–it’s a pretty standard intro lecture–except that I’m going to be introducing some terms at the outset to try and smooth the academic concept shock as we go along. So, students will be getting working definitions of: whig history, epistemology, ontology, teleology, and reification. Not being a big student of the philosophy of science, myself, (with the exception of whig history) I’ve never had these formally explained to me: I picked them up one by one, once I decided that I really, really needed to have a solid definition in my head. So, I think it will be useful to lay them out at the outset. But we won’t be hitting up the philosophical pedigree of each; I’ll just be giving some idea of what we’re talking about when we bandy these terms about as if they were the most obvious things in the world.

Now, the Thursday lecture is going to be on the philosophical roots of modern science. For a specialist in 20th century science, this is pretty far removed from what I ordinarily do. My big saving grace here was my seemingly unjustifiable decision as an undergrad to take the first two of three History of Philosophy courses offered in Northwestern’s philosophy department–Seeskin and McCumber, this post’s for you! At absolutely no point did I ever think that my freshman year course on philosophy in the middle ages (a profoundly weird topic) would prove useful later on. And yet, here I am dusting off my old Presocratic Reader, and my knowledge of Augustine and the Scholastics, and my other textbooks, conjoining them with other things I’ve picked up by osmosis in grad school, to put together a workable overview of the key conceptual traditions.

Conceptual traditions is key–I’m going to start out with a little discussion of the Pythagoreans and the Atomists and a few others to say that some of what they say is recognizable to us as resembling what we believe about the universe and how to investigate it, but then point out that they don’t really represent a consistent tradition that we can follow through to modern science. It’s really Plato and Aristotle that represent the crucial traditions that we can follow through bifurcated Middle Ages manifestations (Neoplatonism by way of Augustine; and the Arabic preservation of Aristotle). Later natural philosophers might pick up and read some of the other schools and identify their own ideas with them, but I think it would be too much to say that they were selecting one tradition over another as though off a menu. Their primary aim would be trying to give an intellectual framework to practical knowledge–this would be a reaction to the literary tradition of the Middle Ages extending beyond philosophy, and its failure to distinguish credible from not credible knowledge. We deal with that tradition next week.

That’s a rough overview–this blog is a thinking space, not an official source of course information.

More on yesterday’s Grand Narrative

I’ve been wondering since yesterday if I was being ridiculous in claiming that the 20th century represented a return to a medieval model intertwining natural knowledge with mainstream thought. If this argument were to have any legs at all, I would have to say that there would have to be two turning points. First, science would have to turn away from mainstream philosophy. I think you could argue that the 17th century turn to mechanism represented such a point–natural philosophy turned toward an instrumental sort of knowledge (I think this is borrowing off of Peter Dear). I think you could then argue that it takes until the 2oth century for instrumental knowledge to really enter the mainstream of economic and political life, although this probably happens earlier in England, and, to a lesser extent, Germany and France.

Anyway, I doubt this line of thought is really worth pursuing, but that’s what blogs are for.

How to begin…

Starting in with discussion about the upcoming course, I guess I’ll just say a few words about the course structure. As an “Introduction to the History of Science” I’m trying not to make things too fancy. I’m not going to muddy up the plot-line too much. This will be, unabashedly, the history of what we understand to be the modern scientific enterprise–not the history of knowledge about the natural world. Thus it’s largely a European story (with some detours into the Arabic-speaking world early on, of course) until the 20th century. Because, if we were to take some kind of weighted average, the most “science” does take place in the 20th century, I’m also trying to expand coverage of more recent events to try and address just how radically the character of science has changed in the last century–not just the well-known advent of “big science” but also diversification in the topics of scientific inquiry; diversification in methodology, and, above all, the full-scale integration of science into the fabric of society.

In some ways this integration (which, I would say, we can trace to the relationship between university science education and industrial R&D) represents a return to the way the medievals looked at the world; wherein knowledge of the natural was not well separated from theology, politics, history, and poetry–the most important topics of that period. I’m going to be using C. S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image to make this point about the medievals. This book is, as I understand it, a favorite of Katy Park at Harvard, and is now being used in their new year-long survey course. And it is a very nice way of jumping into the medieval mindset from which modern science emerges.

So, what I’m doing, after the introductory lecture is to give two lectures. The first will be on the classical philosophical issues. This will sort of give the high intellectual road to science, which comes via Arabic preservations of full classical texts–also pertinent are early Christian and Scholastic high philosophy. The second lecture will be on the “Medieval Model” as Lewis calls it. This is more of the broad “on-the-street” intellectual content of the early modern period, of which the early scientific sorts would also have been keenly aware. Subsequent lectures will focus on the clear craft influences on intellectuals in the early modern period.

Cumulative History

It’s now a week until my course at the University of Maryland, so increasingly this blog will be turning toward that. I’ll let my students know about it, and they can come here to look at some of the background ideas and sources behind lectures, if they like. It also makes it seem like a good time to talk about cumulative history. As I was saying earlier, the history of science does not tend to reflect historical methodology. Hence there are few textbooks. For our course, I’ll be using Peter Dear’s Revolutionizing the Sciences (which Ken Alder used when I took my first history of science course as an undergraduate at Northwestern), and Peter Bowler and Iwan Rhys-Morus’ Making Modern Science (which my AIP predecessor, Babak Ashrafi, used when he taught the same course). These are pretty good books–probably the best available for these purposes.

I’m really looking forward to teaching a “Plato to NATO” course, actually, because it gives me a chance to go back and try and assemble a coherent narrative about science. I think we need to write more long histories. When I was writing my dissertation, I was reading R. F. Foster’s Modern Ireland, 1600-1972, which I thought was a fantastic example of what such histories should look like, and was stylistically inspiring. Foster clearly incorporated historiographical insights into what his book included and how it included them.

If I were to make a sort of coarse observation about the history of science profession, it’s that there’s sort of a nervous hesitancy to paint broad pictures. One of my colleagues has noticed that we focus on the micro-level apparatus and observation, rather than on the level of the department, the university, the discipline/profession, or the nation. I can’t really say why this narrow focus exists, but I get a feeling it has to do with a reluctance to get criticized for oversimplifying historical developments–there are always more wrinkles that just have to be included, otherwise we might as well not undertake the venture of cutting a broad swathe through science; or maybe it’s that we feel we can’t say anything coherent about broad trends at all. But I’m of the opinion it’s better to write and rewrite histories rather than wait for a day when we’re confident enough to make broad statements. Following science, we should have more textbooks, certainly, but we should also have more review articles.

Anyway, busy day ahead, so I’ll cut this off fairly abruptly here.

Inverted Whiggism

I guess I’d better fess up at this point and admit to a strong David Edgerton influence, before it becomes too obvious from repeated reference. David seems to be mostly known for challenging “declinist” views of 20th century British history, and for his more recent insistence, in his new book Shock of the Old, that historians of technology need to look at technology in history as much as, if not more than, the historical ramifications (or the process of establishment) of new technologies. What I think is less well appreciated is David’s perspective on the art of historiography that informs his better-known views.

Today I’d like to talk about David’s concept of “inverted Whiggism”. Any historian worth their salt tries to avoid Whiggism, in which they read history as a process leading up to later (or present) developments. What David claims is that many critical histories, which vigorously challenge optimistic narratives, repeat contemporary critiques. These unchallenged critiques are then, themselves, repeated by subsequent historians to the extent that they become historiographical clichés that become accepted as representative of the actual historical situation.

David usually works within the British case where the idea has persisted that institutional leaders and administrators, schooled in the humanities, did not take science seriously (C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” argument is key to this tradition), and so did not harness science and technology properly (this was at least related to the view of Bernal and those influenced by him–see Monday’s post). To back up these claims, historical actors and, in turn, historians unfurl a tremendous pile of examples of resultant failure, to the extent that it became difficult to evaluate the place of science in British society based on academic science commentary and history of science literature (though “historiography from below”–to be discussed later–often tells a different tale).

Intriguingly, compare David’s disdain for “inverted Whiggism” with Steve Fuller’s call for “Tory” history (see the link to his book on Kuhn in Monday’s post), which essentially calls for more critique of past science. Fuller claims that because Kuhn’s influential paradigm-oriented view of science validates all past science as simply operating within a different paradigm, it is therefore often given a pass from rigorous critique (I’m not at all sure about how on earth he came to see this as an historiographical trend, but it clearly has something to do with a “Cold War” insistence that military-funded science was OK! See how it all fits together?).

Anyway, Edgerton’s “inverted Whiggism” seems to be close to what Fuller means by “Tory” history, but Fuller wants more, and Edgerton wants less. Fuller wants history to be an activist exercise; Edgerton, I think, would say that we can partake in better activism if we actually try and understand the past in a more rigorous way (Shock of the Old, for instance, makes a point of showing that technology in poor countries is too often ignored because it is not new). In the end, I find Edgerton’s perspective more constructive.

What happens when historians stop being polite…

…and start getting REAL! It’s a nice question, and a theoretical one, since historians of science, at least, tend to be a very polite lot who rarely question one another’s approach. Instead, we throw around words like “fascinating” and “suggestive”, and then go do our own thing. This is the great thing about the history of science, in that it’s a sort of meeting ground for a lot of different fields, and it’s very easy to choose what group you want to engage with. So it’s also sort of like a high school lunchroom (or MTV’s The Real World), I guess. Of course, the history of science isn’t a huge field to begin with, so further fracturing can make your intellectual circle very small indeed, and that bothers me.

The reason for this situation seems to be, go figure, deeply embedded in the history of the field (the quirks of which are well explored in John Zammito’s A Nice Derangement of Epistemes, which should really be required reading for science studies grad students). I was a history major as an undergrad, and so I basically expected the history of science to be similar. False presumption. The history of science is a field stemming from the philosophy and sociology of science, and has not typically reflected a traditional historical methodology. History, rather, has been a tool that has been used to get at the nature of science–which is a line of thought stemming from the work of the Vienna Circle and other positivists (see Zammito).

Now, motivations for getting at the nature of science have been varied. The British history of science school back in the ’60s was heavily influenced by Marxist thought filtered through the communist crystallographer J. D. Bernal, and his circle. They saw the progress of science as inevitably tied to social priorities, and wanted to reform scientific institutions to suit their Marxist agenda. Followers of this school were appalled by the rise of the Edinburgh School and SSK, which sought a more detached perspective on how science is done, without the political concerns of the Marxists. However, fresher generations of critical theorists saw tight links between the “social constructionism” preached by the SSK’ers and the critiques of French theorists like Foucault. They used the history of science to demonstrate how science as a font of legitimizing authority reinforced dominant social notions. (This clearly links to my earlier point about the Cold War historiography, and I would be remiss at least not to mention Paul Edwards’ The Closed World at some point–we can talk about that later, though).

Learning about this history has made it much easier for me to understand the books that I am reading, and reinforces why it is so important to go back to the originals to see what they have to say–because their point of view is usually a lot more nuanced than they are in the straw man form given to them by later critics. I always feel bad for Tom Kuhn, because the guy had some good insights on the development of ideas, but his original motivations have not been so important to the people who implicate him in some of these other agendas. (I link to Steve Fuller here, but one should also mention Al Gore, whose PR work on climate change is admirable–but the inspiration he draws from Kuhn is pretty bizarre).