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<\/p>\nSo, seriously, what’s up with all this methodological introspection?\u00a0 What does it actually accomplish?\u00a0 Is it really necessary?\u00a0 Wouldn’t it all just go away and start looking like fever-dream logic if I simply relaxed and devoted myself to augmenting my own corner of the literature?<\/p>\n
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To an extent, the productivity of methodological introspection is a question of faith—its value only becomes apparent once one begins to accomplish things that one could not do before.\u00a0 For example, I don’t think I ever really appreciated the severity of the tensions between the philosophy and sociology of science, and<\/em> its consequences for history, until recently.\u00a0 It’s only been in the past month or so that it has become necessary for me to speak of the “socio-epistemic” imperative.\u00a0 This was previously the “epistemic” imperative, and, before that, the “epistemological” imperative<\/a>—a formulation that I can now see was totally absurd, given the b\u00eate noire<\/em> view of philosophical epistemology that still motivates historians’ professional sensibilities thirty years after the Great Escape<\/a> (as so neatly expressed by<\/a> Iwan Rhys Morus).\u00a0 But, I could never have gotten this far without laying out those initial off-target notions first.<\/p>\n Puzzling out these sensibilities and their changes through time allows me to understand what is going on in the literature I read, why other scholars choose the topics they do, why they treat them in the way they do, and what other people seem to think the literature accomplishes.\u00a0 This allows me to evaluate for myself what it does and does not accomplish, what picture it builds up, what it ignores, and, bit by bit, what the overall picture of history looks like, what is contradictory in this picture, and what simply remains unknown.\u00a0 All of which affects how I approach my own work.<\/p>\n Once you start peeling back the layers of this onion, your previous thinking seems so bounded.\u00a0 Though you also know that your current <\/em>thinking will surely appear just as naive once you peel back another layer (once you undergo another paradigm shift?), you know you’re accomplishing something, that you’re not just reformulating some overarching state of ignorance in new language, because, again, you can do <\/em>more.\u00a0 Most of all, you feel cheated that anyone could possibly have let you think five layers ago that you had a good appreciation of what history looked like and how to write and teach about it.<\/p>\n To move from layer to layer, it is necessary to operate through a problematic<\/em>.\u00a0 A problematic is a synthesis that generates contradictions and insufficiencies of explanation, which require focused investigation and reconceptualization for their solution.\u00a0 Thus not only does it require a constant attempt at synthesis, it requires one to challenge one’s own thinking, and to challenge specific claims and language of others.\u00a0 This is what I think of as the practice of historiography<\/em>.<\/p>\n Historiography, I believe, should be thought of in contradistinction to the writing of historical non-fiction<\/em>.\u00a0 Where historiography is almost necessarily combative, non-fiction writing tends to be more passive in its professional engagement.\u00a0 The main goal is to produce a competent (perhaps elegant<\/a>) written work on a topic of personal interest.\u00a0 Since ferreting out inconsistencies and insufficiencies is not a priority in this literature, one tends to read others in a more inspirational, we’re-all-in-this-crazy-profession-together mode.\u00a0 The extant literature supplies possible themes that might be drawn out from the historical record, as well as facts and examples one might refer to in one’s own work.\u00a0 Citation functions here more often as a courtesy than as a crucial lifeline back to essential points in an argument.<\/p>\n The playfulness of interpretation found in postmodern theory tends to mesh well with historical non-fiction writing, to the point where I think it is fairly easy to confuse the two (and thereby to blame<\/em> postmodernism for a lack of historiographical impetus in the literature).\u00a0 Postmodernism’s defusing of certainties, the disassembling of grand narratives, and the emphasis on literary theme over historical explanation all accord with non-fiction writing’s emphasis on not making the study speak beyond the boundaries of its distinctly localized representation (the new internalism<\/a>), except <\/em>insofar as it highlights some broader issue in a way that is fervently non-committal toward causality.<\/p>\n Historical non-fiction, in a rebellion against older histories of ideas, tends to eschew ideas in favor of “practice”.\u00a0 Yet, for academic writers, there is still a scholarly imperative to address ideas in some way.\u00a0 This means that some broader project tends to be invoked usually as preface or epilogue, with a thick slice of dry reportage sandwiched in between.\u00a0 The reportage is meant to be a portrait to be hung in the scholarly gallery<\/a>.\u00a0 What the gallery <\/em>is imagined to accomplish—whether the improvement of public education about science, the development of a sociology of knowledge, the old Marxist revelation of resonance between science and its economic and political culture—is a question always slightly beyond the pale of what the individual portrait can legitimately speak to (and we will deal with this issue in upcoming posts).<\/p>\n In any event, the choice <\/em>of topic and the manner <\/em>of presentation always imply some larger narrative—whether it is a history of Western politics and morality (generally inverted Whig<\/a> in character so the history can serve as morality tale), or a professional theodicy<\/a>, or, indeed, the old-school historical narratives, or some hybrid of all three.\u00a0 The larger narrative is always<\/em> there whether spoken or unspoken.<\/p>\n These narratives tend to come out in prefaces, epilogues, and revealing snippets in between, and, to my mind, are revealing of just how badly fractured our discipline has become.\u00a0 This becomes clear when even simply superb <\/em>feats of research and writing run into clumsy contextualization, as in Hal Cook’s assumption<\/a> that speculation was on the wane by 1700 (actually the dawning of the golden age of conjectural natural philosophy), or in Deborah Harkness’ assumptions concerning<\/a> Bacon’s program for natural philosophical reform and the absence of mid-1600s cultures of practical science (to take two examples we’ve already dealt with on this blog).\u00a0 As a historian of the 20th-century, I should not be able <\/em>to spot contextualization flaws in that corner of the scholarly literature.<\/p>\n To my mind, if you plan to go about writing history in a scholarly way, it’s better to face the history of ideas head on, as best one can, rather than let them enter totally unannounced.\u00a0 Once you enter the world of historiography, though—once you start worrying about things like what the philosophers of science were really concerned about, and what a good synthesis looks like—there’s really no stopping, because dissatisfaction with one’s own understanding as well as with the broader historiography’s understanding of historical change becomes habitual.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So, seriously, what’s up with all this methodological introspection?\u00a0 What does it actually accomplish?\u00a0 Is it really necessary?\u00a0 Wouldn’t it all just go away and start looking like fever-dream logic if I simply relaxed and devoted myself to augmenting my own corner of the literature? To an extent, the productivity of methodological introspection is a<\/p>\n