All good historians know that one of the biggest pitfalls to writing good history is taking historical actors at their word.\u00a0 Testimony from the past is bound to be limited by the witness’ particular perspective and colored by their own interests.\u00a0 For example, a dispute of a scientific claim might be said to be motivated by “jealousy” by one party, where another party might claim the other was “narrow-minded”.\u00a0 Reckless historiography simply takes actors at their word without getting the view of the other side.<\/p>\n
Historians are thus challenged to adopt an analytically useful posture <\/em>to find some way to resolve the problem.\u00a0 One possible posture is to parse all the evidence to “get to the bottom of things”.\u00a0 (One sees this a lot in really old-school historiography, especially out of Britain.)\u00a0 Another possible posture is to see the existence of the controversy as an opportunity to examine some broader issue.\u00a0 Following the epistemic imperative, one might dilute actors’ positions, to show that their position was “not universal” or “limited” or “influenced by tacit interests”.\u00a0 A very common posture is a variation of this: to use controversies to triangulate out a detached position by simply acknowledging the existence of disputes: “but their actions were not without controversy”.\u00a0 For some reason, it has become popular to just assume that narrating a controversy in such a way as to invert the actors’ broad claims is useful historiography regardless <\/em>of the place of the particular controversy in broader history.<\/p>\n One gets the impression from the historiography that the history of science is nothing but conflicting and contested claims—the Great Inversion of “science’s”\u00a0 claim to be the ultimate model of open and collaborative society—a throwback to very particular criticisms of very particular claims of people like Karl Popper and Robert Merton, which were themselves made for very particular reasons.\u00a0 A popular triangulation from the Great Inversion is to use an “on the whole” argument—a sort of resort to statistical regularity without statistical measure.\u00a0 On the whole, science has been good and beneficial, but, yeah, it’s true there have been some overhype, screw-ups, and abuses.<\/p>\n Marxists, traditionally, have taken a strong stand against this kind of “use-abuse” argument, because it implies a fundamental neutrality in science and technology, which they view as inevitably politicized—a line of critique taken up by generations of critical theorists and postmodernists.\u00a0 Marxists and postmodernists have a stake in subverting, or at least deconstructing, the fundamental assumptions that define what constitutes “use” and what constitutes “abuse”.\u00a0 These lines would note that if “most” science is not controversial, it very well might be, or even should <\/em>be, if the more fundamental political conflicts were made explicit, if subverted insults were given a voice.\u00a0 It is, by the way, this alleged fundamentality of the political nature of science and technology that gave such heat to “technological determinist” insults some decades ago.<\/p>\n Once you get to this point, you sort of reach an impasse, and historical debates tend to follow the line of historical insults.\u00a0 “Technology and management are lined up against the worker!” “If they’re so lined up against workers, why do workers line up for jobs in our factory!?” and what not.\u00a0 We’re back to jealousy and narrow-mindedness, just in new clothes.<\/p>\n Once we hit these points where the historical debates devolve into “Was the Soviet Union trustworthy?” or “Should humans have ever taken up agriculture?”, I’m of the opinion that historians really need to step back and reevaluate what it is they’re doing, and start looking at whatever local issues and “mesoscopic” trends prompted the hand-waving analysis in the first place.\u00a0 This is the point where historical rhetoric starts to conceal underlying more concrete historical ideas, and it is just where the historian needs to take up the initiatve and start characterizing just what those ideas were.<\/p>\n If we’re looking at 18th-century natural philosophy, the insult “speculative” tended to get thrown around a lot, usually by either side of any given debate.\u00a0 In that period, it’s nearly pointless to try and mediate who was speculative and who was not.\u00a0 As Simon Schaffer has pointed out<\/a> in some detail, accusing someone of invoking “occult” explanations was more common than people actually managing to avoid occult explanations for issues like pneumatology.\u00a0 What’s at play are competing ideas for how not to be speculative, and how not to invoke occult causes, when in fact, everyone did both.\u00a0\u00a0 Similarly, following the French Revolution, “rationality” and “utopianism” don’t tend to be useful analytical terms.\u00a0 Someone may invoke their “rational” approach to distinguish themselves from someone else’s unsubstantiated claims, but others might, in turn, claim that the so-called rational approach represented a naive utopian rationalism; in other words, that it was the rationalists’ claims that were unsubstantiated.\u00a0 The Great Inversion is pretty much rehash of this earlier round of insult trading.<\/p>\n The historiographical craft constantly struggles to escape from these terms.\u00a0 At once, one does not want to dismiss altogether the possibility that insults had some foundation, but one doesn’t want to take them at face value either.\u00a0 By digging down two or three levels of specificity, one usually can uncover what ideas were really at stake (e.g. different interpretations of “pneumatic” phenomena) beneath the unspecificity of the rhetoric of insults (e.g. occult causes).\u00a0 Charting these specific ideas and problems seems to me the safest way of subverting the influence of historical insults over our craft, without denying the poignancy of historical controversy.\u00a0 Specifically how this is to be done should be an issue of intense discussion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" All good historians know that one of the biggest pitfalls to writing good history is taking historical actors at their word.\u00a0 Testimony from the past is bound to be limited by the witness’ particular perspective and colored by their own interests.\u00a0 For example, a dispute of a scientific claim might be said to be motivated<\/p>\n