{"id":13651,"date":"2015-04-15T07:50:21","date_gmt":"2015-04-15T11:50:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/etherwave.wordpress.com\/?p=13651"},"modified":"2015-04-15T07:50:21","modified_gmt":"2015-04-15T11:50:21","slug":"scientists-and-the-history-of-science-the-shapin-view","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/2015\/04\/15\/scientists-and-the-history-of-science-the-shapin-view\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists and the History of Science: The Shapin View"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post incorporates\u00a0some general impressions I’ve developed over the last several\u00a0years, but\u00a0<\/span>is most immediately motivated by Steven Shapin’s negative\u00a0<\/span>Wall Street Journal\u00a0<\/em>review<\/a><\/span>* of physicist Steven Weinberg’s new book\u00a0<\/span>To Explain the World<\/em>. I’d like, though, to make clear at the outset that this\u00a0post isn’t really concerned with whether or not Shapin’s\u00a0review did justice to Weinberg, specifically. I’m not especially interested in Weinberg’s views, and they are not\u00a0something that worries or perturbs me.\u00a0Shapin’s review is of interest here because it is written\u00a0in a tradition that does see\u00a0in histories\u00a0such as Weinberg’s the operation of larger forces that should be a cause for concern.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Steven<\/a>
Steven Shapin<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A much earlier work in this tradition was the\u00a01968 book\u00a0Science in Modern Society<\/em>, written by the Marxist\u00a0science journalist J. G. Crowther (1899\u20131983). In it, Crowther criticized a trend he saw in academic scholarship\u00a0toward a\u00a0“disembodied history of scientific ideas.” In his view, science could only be governed to serve the best benefit of society if the unvarnished history of the “social relations of science” was understood. Crowther believed\u00a0that narrowly\u00a0intellectualized history concealed\u00a0those relations, and thus\u00a0constituted\u00a0“a long-range natural protective action, by dominant interests that do not wish to have the social and political implications of their scientific policy comprehensively investigated.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Comparatively, Shapin plays\u00a0down the dangers<\/em> of improper history, but inherits Crowther’s\u00a0perspective insofar as he regards macroscopic forces as responsible for such history. I<\/span>n Shapin’s view, the shortcomings of Weinberg’s specific history, as well as\u00a0Weinberg’s concentration\u00a0on what\u00a0he regards as\u00a0powerful about science, are, depressingly, simply what is\u00a0to be expected when a scientist—any\u00a0<\/em>scientist—attempts to write the history of science.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

According to Shapin, the scientific community uses a mythological view of history to attempt to control\u00a0the prestige and authority of science, crowding out healthier, more sensitive, readings. In his review he writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

What is interesting is that these different stories about the historical development of science persist, with no prospect that professional historians of science will ever own their subject as, say, art historians own the history of art. Science remains almost unique in that respect. It’s modernity’s reality-defining enterprise, a pattern of proper knowledge and of right thinking, in the same way that—though Mr. Weinberg will hate the allusion—Christian religion once defined what the world was like and what proper knowledge should be. The same circumstance that gives science its immense modern cultural prestige also ensures that there will be an audience for its idealization and celebration.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Shapin’s view here derives from the belief of some mid-twentieth-century critics\u00a0that “science” had reached a point of crisis. Science’s\u00a0purportedly authoritative features—its rigorous methodology, its objectivity, its commitment to free and constructive debate—had all been subjected to intense\u00a0doubt. Scholarship affirmed that naive images of science<\/a><\/span> simply could not withstand scrutiny.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rather than suppose that existing ideas about the features of science required refinement, many of these\u00a0critics<\/span> reckoned<\/a><\/span> those\u00a0ideas actually described\u00a0an “ideology of science” that was used rhetorically to bolster science’s social status by claiming it was removed from society. If the benefits of science were to continue to be realized, the critics asserted, this fragile ideological vision would have to be discarded, and the epistemology and sociology of the subject would have to be placed on entirely new\u00a0foundations. If scientists protested,\u00a0such protest only served\u00a0as\u00a0evidence of their adherence to, and dependence on, their\u00a0crumbling ideology.<\/span><\/p>\n

For Shapin specifically, this division between historian-critic and scientist has always manifested itself as a division between, respectively, calm, mature realists, and histrionic defenders of unjustified deference, i.e., “table thumpers.”<\/span><\/p>\n

\"68747470733a2f2f662e636c6f75642e6769746875622e636f6d2f6173736574732f3135333539362f323339313931302f36346362343761322d613937302d313165332d396362302d3762326437346133343535642e6a7067\"<\/p>\n

Because, in his view, scientists are\u00a0ideologically, emotionally<\/em> incapable of seeing and portraying science as it really is and has been, it is left to professional historians and sociologists of science to pick up the pieces.\u00a0Note\u00a0the title of Shapin’s career retrospective essay collection<\/a><\/span>:\u00a0Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as If It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority<\/em>, and its introductory essay, “Lowering the Tone in the History of Science: A Noble Calling.”<\/span><\/p>\n

What I think needs to be understood is that the vision of a histrionic, ideologically entrenched scientific community clinging to unjustified social authority\u00a0may well itself be a myth created by historians and sociologists in an attempt to define\u00a0a more\u00a0heroic role for themselves.\u00a0Shapin has played an important\u00a0role in generating a mythology around\u00a0this myth.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Shapin<\/a>Shapin’s 1985 book with Simon Schaffer,\u00a0Leviathan and the Air Pump\u00a0<\/em>could have simply been a deeply insightful (if rather esoteric) high-level inquiry into certain features of mid-seventeeth-century philosophy. However, the famous last pages of the book assert\u00a0that the history is actually nothing less than\u00a0an eschatological account of how a 300-year reign of a naive understanding of experimental science came to be, and how it was bound to end:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

In this book we have examined the origins of a relationship between our knowledge and our polity that has , in its fundamentals, lasted three centuries. … We have written about a period in which the nature of knowledge, the nature of polity, and the nature of the relationships between them were matters for wide-ranging and practical debate. A new social order emerged together with the rejection of an old intellectual order. In the late twentieth century that settlement is, in turn, being called into serious question. Neither our scientific knowledge, nor the constitution of our society, nor traditional statements about the connections between our society and our knowledge are taken for granted any longer. As we come to recognize the conventional and artifactual status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that it responsible for what we know.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Readers of the book, it is heavily implied, would find themselves able to understand science with a maturity and poise that others still lacked, and would thus find themselves prepared to guide the\u00a0emergence of a new, more stable intellectual order.\u00a0<\/span>This mythology has been picked up by others,<\/span> most directly<\/a> by Bruno Latour<\/span><\/span>, who<\/span> has sought to establish himself<\/a><\/span> as the purveyor of a new metaphysics of knowledge.<\/span><\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

In rejecting such a mythology, are we thereby compelled to defer to the scientific and technological communities, and the\u00a0histories they produce?\u00a0Certainly not—it is the mythology that compels us to suppose\u00a0that\u00a0those communities demand our blind deference.<\/span><\/p>\n

The central trouble with Shapin’s view is that it basically assumes\u00a0an intellectual and ideological gap between historians and scientists, which gives rise to just such suppositions.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"graaandcanyon-1500x938\"<\/p>\n

This gap can have\u00a0historiographical consequences. It may well discourage us from assuming that past ideas that do not conform to more modern notions are unreasonable, which is certainly for the good. However, whatever the shortcomings of his own account may be, Steven Weinberg may also be justified in complaining<\/a><\/span>\u00a0that historians (with notable exceptions<\/a><\/span>) have had little interest in exploring epistemological efficacy. It is symptomatic of the gap we have constructed that if a historian did so it\u00a0might well\u00a0draw suspicions that, rather than studying a real and interesting phenomenon, he or she\u00a0was writing a “heroic” or “teleological” narrative, and could\u00a0thus be considered beholden to\u00a0the project of securing scientists’ social authority.<\/span><\/p>\n

Beyond that, the gap has made it difficult to think of scientific culture as anything other than a\u00a0blithe culture<\/a><\/span>, incapable of sensitive self-reflection on the nature of science, and on its place in society, and badly requiring the intervention of a critical elite<\/a><\/span>. This discourages historians from the search for, and the vigorous exploration of, traditions of critical reflection within the sciences, and also the many ways that scientific research has meshed effectively with other cultures and institutions.**<\/span><\/p>\n

It also discourages historians from reflecting on the adequacy of their own critical tools. We are trained to regard scientific and technical cultures as pervaded by reckless hype machines. While science studies has certainly been criticized by scientists for its supposed failings, no one, to my knowledge, has seen fit to lodge the much more damaging complaint that the discipline is running a (comparatively miniature and less effective) hype machine of its own, continually boasting of the superiority of its critical tools, without those tools ever being subjected to serious independent critical analysis.<\/span><\/p>\n

While the effects of the divide\u00a0that has been established between scientists and historians should not be regarded as all-encompassing, I do believe\u00a0it is real, that historians share a substantial fraction of the blame, and that its effects have been corrosive. <\/span><\/p>\n

While I would not regard scientists as well positioned to offer reliable macro-scale histories, I believe they can play an important role in a well-functioning historiography. Such a partnership is not easy—a lot communication is needed to\u00a0build a common ground of knowledge and perspective, and to reconcile intentions.<\/span><\/p>\n

A few\u00a0of us, myself very much included, are working hard to build this common ground. I value and respect many of Shapin’s scholarly insights, but our\u00a0task would certainly be easier if\u00a0powerful figures in the profession\u00a0were more interested in cultivating that ground.*** Instead the tendency is still to nurse sectarian tendencies, tearing that ground apart—and, most corrosively,\u00a0encouraging others to tear it\u00a0apart—with facile and self-justificatory diagnoses\u00a0of some general scientific\u00a0mentality.<\/span><\/p>\n

In my follow-up post, I will outline how an alternative, more positive vision of the historian-scientist relationship can\u00a0function.<\/span><\/p>\n

—<\/span><\/p>\n

*The review if behind a paywall, but you can access it if you do a Google search such as Shapin Weinberg wsj that brings it up as a search result.<\/span><\/p>\n

**It may be a sign of the contrarian streak running through the history of science that a great deal of attention has actually been paid to the ways that scientific and religious thought have meshed much more\u00a0harmoniously than many suppose, while the modern history of “science and politics” is still routinely portrayed as turbulent and tenuous.<\/span><\/p>\n

***Notably, in some instances, such as in his\u00a0The Scientific Life<\/a><\/span>\u00a0<\/em>(2009), Shapin\u00a0has<\/em> cultivated such ground, offering a sensitive and sympathetic portrayal of social relations within the research and technology complex—to the point of anticipating blowback from science studies colleagues. See this post<\/a><\/span> for explanation of how this sympathetic position fits within Shapin’s larger\u00a0goal of establishing a mature view of science.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post incorporates\u00a0some general impressions I’ve developed over the last several\u00a0years, but\u00a0is most immediately motivated by Steven Shapin’s negative\u00a0Wall Street Journal\u00a0review* of physicist Steven Weinberg’s new book\u00a0To Explain the World. I’d like, though, to make clear at the outset that this\u00a0post isn’t really concerned with whether or not Shapin’s\u00a0review did justice to Weinberg, specifically. I’m<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… Scientists and the History of Science: The Shapin View<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[190,679,1359,1385,1386],"class_list":["post-13651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bruno-latour","tag-j-g-crowther","tag-simon-schaffer","tag-steven-shapin","tag-steven-weinberg"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13651\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}