Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 7 – History and Historiography of Science

Hiatus: Operations Research on the Brain

I have a number of things blog-related, some of them fairly exciting, that are cooking at the moment. That said, site stats indicate there’s not as much interest in new posts as there was a year or two ago. I don’t know if this is an across-the-board phenomenon with history of science blogs, or if it’s just a reflection of EWP posts’ current pace and subject matter. But, at any rate, it doesn’t seem like anyone will be terribly disappointed if I put new posts on the back-burner until the new year.

My main reason for doing this is that I have to commit my now-precious spare time to working on my longstanding interest in the intertwined histories of operations research, systems analysis, decision theory, and the proliferation of scientific advisory positions during and after World War II. Happily, I am now in a position where I have to format my book manuscript, Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America, 1940-1960, for publication. Coincidentally, I have also recently been named to the History and Traditions Committee of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), which should also take up a little time. So, in addition to “machine philosophy” and other topics of the moment, look for a number of operations research-related goings-on in 2014.

New Article in Climatic Change

I am pleased to say that my article, “Research Agendas in Climate Studies: The Case of West Antarctic Ice Sheet Research,” has appeared in its Online First edition in the journal Climatic Change. It is behind a paywall, but Springer’s rules do allow me to post a prior submitted version* of the article, accompanied by the statement: “The final publication is available at http://link.springer.com.” Click here to access the prior version.

This was a secondary project for me that I have long wanted to turn into a more sustained research program. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) has a special interest for climate scientists because it rests on bedrock that is below sea level, and may well therefore be unstable. It could disintegrate even though the ambient temperature is—and will continue to be—continually below freezing. (Thus, WAIS is a rather different beast from the Greenland Ice Sheet, which sits on bedrock that is above sea level, but is prone to melting.) If WAIS were to disintegrate it would raise sea levels by at least 3 meters. The trouble is that the long-term glaciological behavior of such “marine” ice sheets is not especially well understood. So nobody knows for certain how stable WAIS really is, or how long it would take to disintegrate. It could be only a few centuries, or it could be millenia.

Goals

It was important to me that I try to reach scientific audiences with this paper. However, I was not really interested in conveying a particular “humanities” approach—I wanted to try and develop a historical picture that would have a more natural appeal to scientific audiences by engaging with the intellectual substance of their work. Thus, I used history here to illuminate some of the contours, or “agendas,” of research that have shaped scientists’ understanding of WAIS. Scientists are generally aware of the existence of such contours. But those contours seem to inhabit an intellectual space above the level of the individual scientific paper, and yet they are not typically captured in review articles. Thus they are ill-articulated, and play an ill-defined role in scientific work. This then seemed to me an ideal place for the history of science to play a role.

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Schaffer on Gestural Knowledge and Philosophical Ideologies, and Their Historiographical Ramifications

In “Experimenters’ Techniques, Dyers’ Hands, and the Electric Planetarium” (1997), Simon Schaffer makes a set of ambitious arguments concerning how 18th-century natural philosophy regarded knowledge that is dependent upon, and sometimes tacit within, manual labor. His entryway into this problem is the frequently ineffable manual skill required in early electrical experimentation, and the intriguing coincidence that two of the most prominent early 18th-century electrical experimenters, Stephen Gray (1666-1736) and Charles Dufay (1698-1739), were, respectively, a former Canterbury cloth dyer and overseer of the Gobelins dye works in Paris.

dying silk — From Hellot, Macquer, and Le Pileur d’Apligny, The Art of Dying Wool, Silk, and Cotton, 1789 English edition

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Schaffer on Stephen Gray and Granville Wheler’s Electric Planetarium

Over the span of a number of articles Simon Schaffer wrote in the mid-to-late 1990s, he forcefully argued for the existence and importance of a particular historical phenomenon, prevalent in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was natural philosophers’ and projectors’ use of mechanical devices to attempt to gain intellectual authority over others’ ideas and labor, which was to be accomplished by making that authority appear to emanate from the machines themselves, rather than from the deft manipulation of the social settings in which those machines were deployed. Although Schaffer only used it a couple of times, I am using his term “machine philosophy” to refer to his conception of this strategy. I will further explain his arguments concerning machine philosophy—and, of course, offer my opinion of those arguments—in future posts.

I had originally thought I was going to discuss Schaffer’s “Experimenters’ Techniques, Dyers’ Hands, and the Electric Planetarium,” Isis 88 (1997): 456-483 (free) in the “Schaffer on Machine Philosophy” series. However, once I really got into the piece, I realized that he does not regard the “electric planetarium” experiment (above left) in the same vein as he regards, say, Atwood’s Machine. In Schaffer’s historical schematic, the electric planetarium would not have been part of the machine philosophy rising at that time explicitly because what authority it commanded was held to reside in the embodied skill and social integrity of the experimenter.

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John William Draper and Henry Buckle on Law and Causality

John William Draper (May 5, 1811 – January 4, 1882)

John William Draper’s own work is astonishingly particular to modern readers. He and Henry Buckle rigorously examined how mental progress was conditioned by material forces. They did so by differentiating between two fundamental realms of law. Buckle observed, “on the one hand, we have the human mind obeying the laws of its own existence, and, when uncontrolled by external agents, developing itself according to the conditions of its organization. On the other hand, we have what is called Nature, obeying likewise its laws ; but incessantly coming into contact with the minds of men, exciting their passions, stimulating their intellect, and therefore giving to their actions a direction which they would not have taken without such disturbance.Thus we have man modifying nature, and nature modifying man; while out of this reciprocal modification all events must necessarily spring” (History of Civilization in England, 18-19).

The entire purpose of his History of Civilization in England was to understand and to describe the laws of this “double modification” and their connections. The discovery of these kinds of regularities was important moreover because it provided for free will and allowed for effective social legislation. Effective social legislation required that there be a “human nature” but that this human nature be not directed by Providence or determinism, since that would render the basic moral assumptions of existing criminal codes null.

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James M. Baldwin on Society and Social Heredity

James Mark Baldwin (January 12, 1861, Columbia, South Carolina – November 8, 1934, Paris)

James M. Baldwin’s Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development: A Study in Social Psychology (1897) was noteworthy for its Darwinian argumentative framework, its emphasis on the fundamentally social aspects of mankind, society as being constitutive of the individual, and the argument that the laws of social evolution were distinct from biological evolution.

Baldwin’s work was really motivated by a massive issue: the work of Charles Darwin, particularly that of the Descent of Man (1871) provided an exceptionally attractive explanatory framework for the growth (and sometimes) progress of society. For Baldwin, however, the laws of evolution could not explain the origin and development of either social action or the development or persistence of institutions.

As he noted in Darwin and the Humanities (1909), “various attempts have been made to state the different genetic stages in the concurrent progress of the individual and society.” However, “In these attempts, it is plain, the general questions of development and evolution arise again on a different plane, and require solution in view of the fact that in their nature the phenomena are not in a strict sense biological, but psychological and social” (39.) While it was true that human beings were subject to biological laws, “it does not follow that the psychological and social processes illustrate the same laws, nor even that the action of the biological laws may not be in some way modified with the entrance upon the field of the mental and social factors” (40).

While the work of Baldwin and his contemporaries have been critiqued for their reductionism of social life to biology, in fact, much of turn of the century social theory used Darwinian theory instead to argue for the irreducibility and distinctiveness of social phenomenon, in the same manner as Emile Durkheim and his discussion of “social facts.”

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Franz Boas and His Contemporaries

Franz Boas’ (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) The Mind of Primitive Man occupies a cherished place in not only the anthropological canon, but also in anthropology’s disciplinary self-understanding. In its 1938, expanded edition, Boas’ chapters provide a very interesting glimpse at the landscape of ideas which defined early 20th century ethnography and other social sciences.

One of Boas’ most difficult chapters was the fifth, titled: “The Instability of Human Types.” The roots of this chapter lay in his landmark 1916 essay, “New Evidence in Regard to the Instability of Human Types.” Building on the claims of not only his work on immigrants and H. P. Bowditch’s important, though forgotten, 1877 study, “The Growth of Children,” he concluded that not only was human stature variable, but more importantly, there existed variability in both the cephalic index and the width of the face. This led him to consider how far the bodily features of man can be modified by so-called physiological changes brought about by conditions in the physical and social environment.

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Schaffer on Machine Philosophy, Pt. 3: Perpetual Motion

A diagram of the purported interior of a perpetual-motion wheel built by Johann Bessler. From Offyreus, Grundlicher Bericht von dem Perpetua ac per se Mobili (1715) — A diagram of a perpetual-motion wheel built by Johann Bessler. From Orffyreus, Grundlicher Bericht von dem Perpetua ac per se Mobili (1715)

In this post we look at Simon Schaffer’s “The Show That Never Ends: Perpetual Motion in the Early Eighteenth Century,” British Journal for the History of Science 28 (1995): 157-189, in which he sets himself the task of explaining the intellectual and political viability of perpetual motion schemes, particularly in “the lands dominated by the Hapsburgs, the Empire and northern Italy” (162). This is a difficult challenge, since, as Schaffer points out, such machines had been subjected to widespread doubt and criticism from the middle of the seventeenth century. Yet, they did have a place, and what Schaffer, I think, accomplishes here is that he makes that place fit more coherently into what we know about how, in general, engineering and philosophical novelties were handled in the early 18th-century milieu.

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Schaffer on Machine Philosophy, Pt. 2: Atwood’s Machine and the Status of Newtonian Philosophy

John Smeaton’s experiment to estimate the efficiency of waterwheels. Philosophical Transactions 51 (1759).

This post continues our examination of Simon Schaffer’s “Machine Philosophy: Demonstration Devices in Georgian Mechanics” (1994). Last time, we looked at how Atwood’s Machine was used at Cambridge as a dramatic means of convincing mathematics students of the validity of Newton’s laws, which they were expected to use to explain various physical phenomena. Here we examine how proponents of Isaac Newton’s mechanics tried to use the machine to make points with audiences whose perceptions of the reach and fundamentality of Newton’s laws were varied and unstable.

First, though, let’s revisit some of the themes of Schaffer’s earlier works to see how this piece fits into a larger picture.

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Schaffer on Machine Philosophy, Pt. 1: Atwood’s Machine and the Status of Newton’s Laws at Cambridge

There’s not much time these days for researching and writing posts. But I do have little bites of time on the bus and Metro going to and from work, which lend themselves pretty nicely to article reading. I have also come back into possession of all the paper files I put into storage when I went to London, including a big stack of articles written by Simon Schaffer. Yes, folks, the Schaffer Oeuvre series has returned!

I was specifically inspired to bring the series back by Schaffer’s recent, very nicely crafted BBC documentary, “Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams,” (see a clip here), and by the realization that, when I left the series, I was just about to get to his articles on demonstration devices and automata. So, with no further ado, let’s dive right back in with “Machine Philosophy: Demonstration Devices in Georgian Mechanics,” Osiris 9 (1994): 157-182.*

“Machine Philosophy” is about the uses made of mathematician George Atwood’s (1745-1807) demonstration device (right) . The machine’s design employed a clock and counter-balanced weights hung from a low-friction pulley in order to clearly exhibit Newton’s first law of motion, and especially the quantitative predictions made by his second law, which interrelated force, mass, and acceleration. But the really difficult questions concerned what Atwood’s machine, and related machines, could and could not say concerning the intellectual status of Newton’s laws.

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