{"id":8058,"date":"2011-03-24T05:32:57","date_gmt":"2011-03-24T09:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etherwave.wordpress.com\/?p=8058"},"modified":"2011-03-24T05:32:57","modified_gmt":"2011-03-24T09:32:57","slug":"shapiro-vs-schaffer-on-newtons-prism-experiments-pt-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/2011\/03\/24\/shapiro-vs-schaffer-on-newtons-prism-experiments-pt-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Shapiro vs Schaffer on Newton’s Prism Experiments, Pt. 2"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Alan Shapiro (hssonline.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Pt. 1 of this post<\/a>, I discussed Alan Shapiro’s 1996 criticism of Simon Schaffer’s 1989 piece “Glass Works” (first discussed on this blog here<\/a>).\u00a0 Shapiro argued that deficiencies in Schaffer’s portrayal of objection to Newton’s experiments derived from Schaffer’s “constructivist” methodology, which made him pay too much mind to disputes over experimental results, and not enough to others’ apparent ability to replicate Newton’s experiments, nor to the theoretical context of those experiments.\u00a0 Per Shapiro, these factors actually led to a record of reasonable success in securing assent around Newton’s work, even among Newton’s intellectual competitors.\u00a0 I argued that taking Schaffer’s paper to constitute a fully adequate history of the reception of Newton’s work spoke past the point of Schaffer’s commentary, which was intended to elucidate historical strategies specifically surrounding instances of failure to attain assent over experimental results.<\/p>\n

In this post, I want to expand on the key strength of Shapiro’s criticism: the importance he ascribed to synthetic accounts of history, which contrasts with the historiography of commentary espoused by Schaffer.<\/p>\n

In his criticism, Shapiro opts simply to recount the entire history of the reception of Newton’s work on colors, so as to take a full account of the range of responses to that work over time.\u00a0 The resulting sense of perspective is in turn to reveal the weaknesses in Schaffer’s account:<\/p>\n

Rather than attempt to counter Schaffer’s claims point by point, I will present an alternative account of the acceptance of Newton’s theory and its experimental evidence and at essential points show how Schaffer’s account either is contradicted by the evidence or fails to explain it.\u00a0 Focusing on Newton’s critics tells us little about his supporters who are largely ignored by Schaffer.\u00a0 It is easy to understand why historians of science devote so much attention to controversy.\u00a0 It provides a natural narrative, defines crucial issues, and identifies a body of easily located, coherent sources.\u00a0 However, by insufficiently pursuing the response of the entire scientific community<\/em> to a controversy and by ignoring those who do not enter the fray, historians may fail to recognize equally important but uncontentious elements of the science of the period that can provide powerful reasons for accepting novel claims.\u00a0 Moreover, since dissenters attain greater notoriety than quiet supporters, undue focus on controversy can easily distort the historical picture. (61-62, my emphasis)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Again, Schaffer’s piece concentrated specifically on features of controversial episodes, so to compare it point for point to Shapiro’s reception history is not entirely fair.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the comparison may be worthwhile: the question of the fullness of an account calls to mind Schaffer’s dispute with Bruno Latour<\/a> over the reception of Louis Pasteur’s work.\u00a0 In that dispute, Schaffer chastised Latour for explaining Pasteur’s success without reference to his ability to overcome the challenge of Robert Koch.\u00a0 For Schaffer, a proper frame of historical explanation had to include a full array of challengers<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Shapiro quite rightly observes that historians who identified with the constructivism saw comparatively little need to include supporters<\/em> within the frame of inquiry.\u00a0 The reason for this, of course, is that controversy is supposed to reveal narrative elements that might otherwise be hidden — which is part of what I called the “cult of invisibility” in Pt. 1.\u00a0 Schaffer invokes its catechism accordingly: “It is misleading to treat the authority of such experiments as self-evident, for this obscures the detailed\u00a0 character of the experimental controversy.\u00a0 The ground of such authority was often the matter in dispute.\u00a0 The resolution of such disputes masks the process by which agreement is accomplished” (Schaffer, 68).\u00a0 “Prisms have become so uncontentious that it is now hard to recapture the sense of their contingent and controversial use” (Schaffer, 70).\u00a0 So Schaffer illustrates some argumentative strategies developed when the prism experiments were brought into dispute.<\/p>\n

Leave aside for the moment Shapiro’s very important point that assent and the reasons for it may be even more hidden.\u00a0 What does this illustration tell us about the place of these disputes in history?\u00a0 Without a full sense of the spectrum of reactions to Newton’s work, or the reasons underlying assent, it is difficult to gauge.<\/p>\n

Shapiro, notably, takes the recalcitrant Jesuits at Li\u00e8ges to be much less important than might be supposed from Schaffer’s account.\u00a0 Because of their recalcitrance, they are a “constructivist’s dream”: “Schaffer, not surprisingly, devotes much attention to [their failure to achieve replication].”\u00a0 Shapiro, however, observes, “it was of little historical significance.\u00a0 The exiled Jesuits had no support in England, where even Hooke, certainly no supporter of Newton and his theory, derided them as ‘extravagantly impertinent — who never will yeald be the matter never soe plain'” (78).<\/p>\n

One might well point to the principle of symmetry here to suggest that no actors’ claims may be dismissed (lest they be rendered invisible), but the point is not to dismiss them, but to place their historical significance in a proper perspective.\u00a0 In the present context, neither Schaffer nor Shapiro has any interest in the Li\u00e8ges Jesuits in and of themselves, only in their role as objectors to Newton.\u00a0 If we are to weigh the significance and nature of objections, however, it is important to break away from the journalistic strategy of finding the two sides of the story and then get the opposing quotes (what Shapiro calls a “natural narrative”).\u00a0 Shapiro appeals to the effect on the mind of the reader in objecting to the lack of perspective in Schaffer’s account: “he makes it appear that Newton’s theory was continually contested.”\u00a0 Shapiro by contrast is able to weigh the importance of objections against each other: “There was … only one experimental challenge to Newton’s work that mattered at the time, that by Edme Mariotte published in 1681” (61).<\/p>\n

Additionally, a synthetic perspective provides Shapiro with an opportunity to elucidate the sources of assent in Newton’s theory: “Two groups, mathematical scientists and Scottish natural philosophers, emerge as the principal supporters of Newton’s theory between its initial publication and that of the Opticks<\/em>.\u00a0 Neither group, it should be noted, had much allegiance to the Royal Society or its purported [experimentalist] ideology, which has come to dominate the interpretation of Restoration science.\u00a0 They came to support his theory without public debate or public testing of his experiments, though I will present evidence of private tests” (62).\u00a0 Shapiro goes on to discuss patterns of acceptance on the Continent following the Opticks<\/em>.<\/p>\n

We loop around again to a possible defense against these arguments.\u00a0 If the topic of investigation is specifically strategies surrounding dissent rather than assent, we might take Schaffer’s piece to be an exploratory essay into those strategies, for which purpose actors’ reasons for assent, and perhaps even the prism experiments themselves are beside the point.\u00a0 But if this is the case, it is difficult to tell what the parameters of such a history are, or where it might be expected to lead.\u00a0 Michael Bycroft (citing me citing John Zammito) brings out the crucial point in a comment<\/a> on Pt. 1: equivocally framed arguments lend themselves to defense against criticism.<\/p>\n

The point of historiography is not to create unassailable portraits.\u00a0 It is to advance knowledge of the past.\u00a0 To my mind, ultimately the most damning argument against commentary absent some specified relation to a past or future synthesis is the inability to determine the status of the historical claims being made: are they critical? supplementary? exploratory? explanatory? descriptive? aimed at a naive audience? a specialist audience? Why include some points but not others?\u00a0 Schaffer was unable to tell what Latour was arguing in Pasteurization of France<\/em>, and Shapiro was unable to parse what Schaffer was arguing in “Glass Works”.\u00a0 Yet the common thread is a concern over the distortion of the “historical picture”.<\/p>\n

With so many intelligent people unable to comprehend what anybody else is — and is not — claiming, what hope is there for constructive historiography?\u00a0 The points in question haven’t really been that difficult; they have simply been placed in interpretive frameworks that are so idiosyncratic and equivocal that the arguments become unnecessarily difficult to parse.<\/p>\n

To my mind, Shapiro’s retort to Schaffer is most notable not for suggesting the poverty of a constructivist perspective to history, but for demonstrating the value of formulating concrete claims by anchoring commentary firmly to some explicitly synthetic account.\u00a0 That way the scope, completeness, or coherence of the synthesis can be clearly affirmed or challenged.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Pt. 1 of this post, I discussed Alan Shapiro’s 1996 criticism of Simon Schaffer’s 1989 piece “Glass Works” (first discussed on this blog here).\u00a0 Shapiro argued that deficiencies in Schaffer’s portrayal of objection to Newton’s experiments derived from Schaffer’s “constructivist” methodology, which made him pay too much mind to disputes over experimental results, and<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… Shapiro vs Schaffer on Newton’s Prism Experiments, Pt. 2<\/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":[9,26],"tags":[65,190,360,668,972,1268,1271,1359],"class_list":["post-8058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cult-of-invisibility","category-schaffer-oeuvre","tag-alan-shapiro","tag-bruno-latour","tag-edme-mariotte","tag-isaac-newton","tag-louis-pasteur","tag-robert-hooke","tag-robert-koch","tag-simon-schaffer"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8058","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=8058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8058\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}