Essay: Shapin and the Historiographic Life January 30, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club.Tags: J. D. Bernal, Michael Polanyi, Michel Foucault, Simon Schaffer, Steven Shapin
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Today I would like to use Steven Shapin’s account of the history of ideas relating to the moral qualities of scientists—Chapters 2 and 3, “From Calling to Job: Nature, Truth, Method, and Vocation from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries” and “The Moral Equivalence of the Scientist: A History of the Very Idea”, from The Scientific Life—to consider the difficulties committed historians may experience in using the insights of essayists in historiographically beneficial ways. I have previously suggested that Shapin is best understood as an essayist, someone who explores the consequences of possible interpretations of a topic.
To call Shapin an essayist rather than a committed historian is not an accusation or a radical suggestion, but simply an exploration of the consequences of my own interpretation of Shapin’s stated comments concerning what he is doing (hence the title of this “essay”). Shapin begins the preface of The Scientific Life by observing that his earlier application of his studies of seventeenth-century natural philosophy to the present was taken by “some of my historian-friends” as “further proof that my commitment to the purity and particularity of history was wanting” (my emphasis). He responds: “They were right.” Here the committed historian might suppose Shapin intends to rectify past wrongs, but I believe this is a mistaken reading, which presumes that he recognizes historiographically virtuous readings to be the most valuable. The observant reader will note (more…)
George Will on Science and Stimulus January 29, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.add a comment
Agree or disagree with him—I disagree with his appraisal of the blindness of economic theory in unusual situations—this column is a really nice piece of short popular writing combining a dash of history of science and medicine with epistemological, political, and economic philosophy.
Primer: Pierre Gassendi’s Natural Philosophy January 29, 2009
Posted by Christopher Donohue in EWP Primer.Tags: Galileo Galilei, Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, Rene Descartes, Saul Fisher
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Pierre Gassendi (b. 1592, d. 1655) was born at Digne, France, became a priest in 1617, and later a professor of philosophy at Aix while still in his mid-twenties. As Saul Fisher notes in his excellent Pierre Gassendi’s Philosophy And Science: Atomism for Empiricists (Brill, 2007), “Gassendi’s career as a priest is a crucial intellectual facet of intellectual constitution: his writings reflect an unbending allegiance to Holy Scripture and Church teachings, though not necessarily in orthodox doctrinal lights” (1.) In 1624, he met Mersenne, and between 1629 to 1630, while traveling in the Low Countries, he met Isaac Beeckman. In his 1632 work, Mercurius in sole visus, he described his 1631 observation of the transit of Mercury as a confirmation of Kepler’s theories. In 1632, after returning to Digne, he began a study of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus.
Gassendi spent the remaining twenty or so years of his life going between Provence and Paris due to his involvement with a group of philosophers who had gathered around the French philosopher Mersenne. As Fisher details, in the Mersenne circle, “debates ranged over numerous topics central to the dismantling of the Aristotelian and Scholastic world-views” (3.) Mersenne, an associate of Descartes, was instrumental in allowing Gassendi’s objection to Descartes’ Meditations to be included in the published appendix entitled Objections and Replies.
While some historians consider Gassendi’s signature achievement to be his revival of ancient atomism, a complete (more…)
The Rashomon Posture January 24, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Methods.11 comments
Recently, I have been advocating a deeper consideration of the importance of maintaining “chronological problematics” in history—in short, the idea that important historiographical topics are revealed and consolidated by arranging them in a coherent and sequential order. I have taken chronological problematics to be confronted by a predominance of “epistemological problematics” wherein what is necessary is to theorize categories of epistemological practices (observing, communicating, representing, etc.) and then researching and presenting different historical approaches to these practices, creating a “gallery of practices”.
Today, I would like to consider the idea that the relationship between the gallery of practices and any sort of problematics is purely implicit. Being implicit, there is no sense of historiographical responsibility to resolving problematics. In place of this commitment is what I like to call the “Rashomon posture” (Christopher prefers “Ghost Dog”).
- Would you believe a history written by Toshiro Mifune?
In Rashomon (see the Kurusawa film trailer here), conflicting, self-interested perspectives in a murder trial present no possibility of reconciliation, leading those who hear of the trial into despair about the possibility of truth and the human capacity for goodness. For examples of the Rashomon posture on history of science blogs, or at least a nod toward it, see Michael Gordin’s Hump-Day History post on Dmitrii Mendeleev; or Michael Robinson’s post “The Smudgy Window of History”, especially the last paragraph; or History of Economics Playground where we can replace Rashomon with Lawrence Durrell.
The idea behind the Rashomon posture is to sanction a vision of historiographical responsibility wherein study can be layered on top of other studies, each espousing a different perspective on the past, none of them advocating a set (more…)
HET and Science Studies January 22, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: David Kaiser, Ivan Moscati, Mary Morgan, Philip Mirowski, Roy Weintraub, Wade Hands
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This post has a couple of motivations. I’ve been following with interest the conversations over at the History of Economics Playground about the relationship between the History of Economic Thought (HET) and the science studies disciplines (see here for instance). I’m particularly struck by the facts that many in the HET camp view the historical analysis of the impact of context as a distraction, and that eminent economists frequently show up to scold the rogues. This contrasts to the history of other scientific professions falling under the HSS umbrella, where intellectual interaction between historians and scientists is pretty much at a low ebb.
The second motivation is that I’m now pushing toward completion of my book manuscript on operations research and associated “policy sciences”. While sweeping up my chapter on the rise of OR and decision theory, I wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything pressing on Kenneth Arrow, (more…)
Primer: The Length of the Meter January 21, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre, Jean-Charles de Borda, Ken Alder, Pierre-François-André Méchain
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In the late-18th century, the relationship between political thought and rational inquiry was at high tide. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson built the case for American independence as a matter of the people being impelled by causes that had their roots in “self evident truths”. We have discussed the relationship between Joseph Priestley’s radical politics and his understanding of natural philosophy on this blog. Nowhere, however, was the relationship so clear and so important as in Revolutionary France.
In the years after the first stages of the Revolution in 1789, ecclesiastical and hereditary authority was systematically erased from the French state so as to be replaced by a government founded upon reason, acting in the interests of the French people. High on the agenda was the reform of weights and measures. At the time of the Revolution, it was estimated that there were some eight hundred names for measuring units, which with local variants spun out into some 250,000 different standards.
Famously, the French invented the metric system to bring some coherence to this system, and, in the words of Condorcet, to provide measures that would be valid “for all people, for all time”. Some of the aspects of the new (more…)
Schaffer and the End of Natural Philosophy January 16, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: David Gooding, Joseph Priestley, Simon Schaffer
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As we’ve moved along in our Simon Schaffer project, an underlying set of general historical concerns has emerged from reading his articles (plus Leviathan and the Air-Pump) together, which is the way arguments work and develop in natural philosophy. Although the various subgenres of natural philosophy had varying sets of rules permitting cosmologies of varying stability, the history of natural philosophy could be told in a very organic way by examining the progression of ideas within cosmologies. Some ideas could be specific, such as the restorative role of comets, or very general, such as the idea that fundamental aspects of the universe could evolve with time. Religious views were a part of, rather than connected to or constraining natural philosophy.
Schaffer’s arguments helped make over a century worth of history make more sense, because they elucidated why natural philosophers’ arguments made sense to them. In pursuing this project, he was a part of a break with prior historiography, which had ignored or sought to explain away the ideas and practices in the past that didn’t make sense. What had motivated this new break was the epistemic insight that the inquiries of prior eras, both “good” and “bad”, made sense on account of their connectedness—not their disconnectedness—from their surrounding culture. This insight has now become so mainstream in the history of science community, its manifestation so much a part of why we write, that it is actually Schaffer’s long-time-scale historiographical sensibilities (which were actually part of his more classical training) that seem remarkable and exciting to me.
Not so to Schaffer:
(He gets to the most relevant bit right away, but the whole 37 minutes is worthwhile. Also, plenty more of the four hour interview at YouTube, or Alan Macfarlane’s web site.)
I’ve mentioned that writing around the epistemic imperative has a museological quality designed to ornament and advertise the profession’s (more…)
Primer: The V-2 Rocket and Atmospheric Science January 14, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: David DeVorkin, Erich Regener, Ernst Krause, Fred Whipple, James Van Allen, Robert Godard, Wernher von Braun
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For as long as there has been a concerted tradition of inquiry around the natural world, natural philosophers and scientists have dragged instruments up church towers and mountains and floated them aloft in balloons to ascertain how things are different at high altitudes. This tradition grew rapidly in the early decades of the 20th century as ballooning technology improved, and as physicists, astronomers, chemists, and meteorologists decided that differences in the gaseous composition of the atmosphere, (more…)
Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform January 14, 2009
Posted by Christopher Donohue in EWP Book Club.Tags: Charles Lyell, Georges Cuvier, Martin Rudwick
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Worlds Before Adam (Chicago, 2008) by Martin J.S. Rudwick is the cumulative synthesis of a distinguished career and a prolegomena for the future efforts of historians. Worlds Before Adam (WBA) is a narrative of the “reconstruction…of an eventful geohistory, which is in fact congruent with what geologists in the twenty-first century accept as valid.” Rudwick’s account begins with Baron Cuvier and “culminates” in the formulation of glacial theory, which included the “utterly unexpected inference of an exceptional and drastic Ice Age in the geologically recent past.” This inference, more than any other, Rudwick argues, “forced geologists to recognize the contingent character of geohistory as a whole” (7.) (Page numbers throughout are to WBA.) Rudwick notes that the narrative framework “will convey the strong sense of unity of purpose and scientific progress that participants experienced” (8.)
The narrative presented in WBA is a continuation of Rudwick’s Bursting the Limits of Time, which traced the “gradual development of the practice of geohistory within the sciences of the earth.” In the eighteenth century, Rudwick argued in Bursting the Limits of Time, geohistory was “an infrequent and marginal feature of scientific research.” Within a few decades, geohistory became the “defining element” of the new science of “geology.” Geology “became the first truly historical natural science” by “deliberately transposing methods and concepts from the human sciences of history itself.” The hereto obscure, mysterious, and unfathomably deep prehistory of the earth in the late eighteenth century began to be conceived as “reliably knowable” (2.) The scientific research described in Bursting the Limits of Time demonstrated that it was “feasible in principle to gain reliable knowledge of the earth’s history long before the earliest human records” (6.) In the early nineteenth century, the concern of WBA, geologists took the historical approach “for granted” and were thus able to “reconstruct systematically and in detail what course geohistory had in fact taken….” (6.) WBA takes as its “starting point” the sense among practitioners that the “earth’s deep or prehuman geohistory could in principle be reconstructed almost as reliably as…the history of the ancient Greeks and Romans.” While Bursting the Limits of Time was given to the inquiry of the “sheer historical reality of the deep past, WBA has as its focus both the geohistorical and the causal” (3.) Geologists addressed the causal once they could take the historical reality of geohistory for granted. (more…)
Philosophy, Sociology, and History: A Pocket History January 10, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Methods.Tags: Andy Pickering, Bruno Latour, David Bloor, Harry Collins, Herbert Butterfield, Karl Popper, Quentin Skinner, Robert K. Merton, Thomas Kuhn, William Whewell
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To understand the history of the history of science profession, it is very important to understand its contentious and evolving relationship with the philosophy and sociology of science, not to mention the history of philosophy. Here I’d like to outline a quick “pocket” history of the relationship between history, philosophy and sociology, and beg the tolerance of connoisseurs for boiling the points down so recklessly.
Karl Popper
Traditionally, the history of science has been of interest on account of its ability to reveal and demonstrate ideas about epistemology. William Whewell’s The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History (1840) followed quickly on his History of the Inductive Sciences (1837). Epistemology-oriented philosophers before and since have deployed cases from the history of science as illustrations of their theories about the progression of knowledge, and contain a normative element about how reliable knowledge can best be achieved.
In the 20th century, positivist philosophers and Karl Popper’s anti-positivist theory of the progress of science suggested clear demarcations between proper application of method and straying away from that method. History could illuminate these debates. According to a Popperian history of science, we don’t start from basic truths and build up; we start from a sort of primeval error and confusion (such as with the Aristotelian philosophy, which had been thoroughly trashed by Enlightenment philosophers) and, eliminating false beliefs, proceed toward truth. What is interesting in any progressive history is the origins and acceptance of accepted ideas. So, let’s say we read William Herschel, we easily pick out the discovery of Uranus (more…)
Will Thomas
Christopher Donohue
