Traditions of Practice: Mesoscopy, Materiality, and Intercalation July 31, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in History as Anti-Philosophy, Methods.Tags: Andrew Warwick, David Kaiser, Peter Galison, Simon Schaffer
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If there are no guides to the construction of the history of science: if the task is more than identifying precedents to the present, if narratives of class interest or other overriding social determinants of scientific knowledge are rejected, and if (as the Great Escape has it) philosophy is no guide to how knowledge develops and spreads, then the danger arises that history drops into a deeply contingent state that can only be successfully analyzed at the most local level.
Arriving in this position, one must resolve the absurdity by asking: what sorts of things can be the subject of historiography? I would reply that science studies has successfully argued that traditions of practice constitute the possible objects of historical inquiry. If definable physical conditions can persist through history (mountains are a nicely tangible example), then certain definable practical reactions to those conditions can also persist (climbing the mountain, digging mines, etc…). Such practices can be broken down into analytically useful categories: technology, technique, tactic, policy, arguments and knowledge claims, rhetoric, imagery, etc. Properly characterized varieties of these practices can be given useful labels (e.g. “empire-building” as a national policy).
Specific choices concerning how to deploy these practices in varying situations are informed by the history of ideas. Ideas may be decoded through a careful analysis of how practices are selected based upon historical appreciations of the character of situations faced (“imperialism” suggests territorial acquisition as a response to international economic (more…)
Primer: Imperial College July 29, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: Alfred North Whitehead, August Wilhelm Hofmann, George Thomson, Hannah Gay, Henry De La Beche, Justus Liebig, Robert Strutt, Thomas Henry Huxley
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Dean Thomas Henry Huxley
While much of the history of science necessarily focuses on centers of elite learning, a thorough understanding necessitates examination of the broader foundations of scientific culture. In the 18th century, the French state established a new emphasis in technical education and augmented it following the Revolution, most notably with the École Polytechnique. In the 19th century, various German-speaking states emulated the model by establishing the Technische Hochschule, soon followed by the Americans with the foundation of institutions such as the Case School of Applied Sciences, the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Carnegie Technical Schools, as well as technically-oriented universities such as Johns Hopkins and Chicago.
The British also followed this trend, although perhaps not with the zeal of other nations. The Royal College of Chemistry (RCC) was established in London in 1845 out of the same national anxiety that had already produced the British Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as out of admiration for the German laboratory chemistry of Justus Liebig (1803-1873) of the University of Giessen—the College’s first hire was Liebig student August Wilhelm Hofmann. The Royal School of Mines (RSM) opened in 1851, following urging for such an institution by, among others, noted geologist Henry De la Beche, the director of the new Geological Survey of Great Britain. The two institutions were officially amalgamated in 1853, while retaining distinct identities.
In the latter half of the century, the development of the London technical schools became an important topic for those concerned with the development of science in Britain as a resource for the state and nation. From 1881 until his death in 1895, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), best known now as an ardent proponent of Charles Darwin’s natural selection and for science in general, became dean of the RSM and the RCC. In 1881, he tellingly renamed the latter the (more…)
Latour and the Semiotic Phenomenology of Science and Society July 26, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in History as Anti-Philosophy.Tags: Bruno Latour, Harry Collins, Lev Tolstoy, Louis Pasteur
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No discussion of historiography and the Great Escape from the philosophy of science can long exclude Bruno Latour, though it is important to remember that Latour urges: “I cannot claim [the honor] of being a historian…. I use history as a brain scientist uses a rat, cutting through it in order to follow the mechanisms that may allow me to understand at once the content of a science and its context” (Pasteurization of France, p. 12).
In a move typical of the Great Escape, though, Latour relies on historiographical coherence to deny philosophy its place. It is significant that Latour begins his work The Pasteurization of France (1988, a translation and revision of 1984′s Les Microbes: Guerre et Paix) by drawing a parallel with Tolstoy’s historical debunking of the Napoleonic Wars as playing out according to the design of genius military architects. History, in all its contingency, can know no architecture, despite those who would impose one retrospectively: “Even if few people still believe in the naive view, courageously defended by epistemologists, that sets science apart from noise and disorder, others would still like to provide a rational version of scientific strategy, to offer clear-cut explanations
(more…)
Primer: Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Problem of Mind July 26, 2009
Posted by Christopher Donohue in EWP Primer, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Arnold Gehlen, Auguste Comte, Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Edmund Leech, Hans Jonas, James Frazer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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Claude Lévi-Strauss (b.1908-), according to the well-known anthropologist, the “functionalist” and student of Bronislaw Malinowski, Edmund Ronald Leach, is the most famous representative of the first of dual traditions of social anthropology. The founder of the first tradition was the British anthropologist Sir James Frazer (1854-1941). According to Leach, Frazer was a man “of monumental learning who had no first-hand acquaintance with the lives of primitive people about whom he wrote.” (Claude-Levi Strauss, 1) Rather than study a culture in minute detail, Frazer wished to understand the primitive consciousness on a world-historical scale. The progenitor of the second tradition was Bronislaw Malinowski who “spent most of his academic life analyzing the results of research which he had himself had personally conducted over a period of four years in a single small village in far off Melanesia.” Malinowski was far more interested in how an individual communities social systems “functioned” than in developing a grand narrative of the primitive consciousness. Although not in the “style” of Frazer, Levi-Strauss is more concerned with the discovery of true “facts” about a general “human mind.” He is less concerned, according to Leach, with the “organization of any particular society or class of societies.” For Leach, this difference is “fundamental.”
Leach, while disagreeing with much of Levi-Strauss’ work, nonetheless had a sound understanding of Levi-Strauss’ argument. According to Leach, structuralism begins with the biological faculties, quite similar to the philosophical anthropology of Hans Jonas and Arnold Gehlen in Germany, articulated around the same time. The phenomenon perceived by the human mind, “have the characteristics which we attribute to them because of the way our senses operate and the way the human brain is designed to order and interpret the stimuli which are fed into it.” As man is consistently (more…)
A Message from the President July 21, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Bernard Lightman, George Smith, Graeme Gooday, Jane Maienschein, Jed Buchwald, John Lynch, Steve Fuller, Steven Shapin
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HSS members have just been alerted that the new e-newsletter is out. First off, I think it’s good the newsletter is only online, but their new floating table of contents is not working for me, because it obscures the text on my computer at work even when the window is fully expanded. You can shrink the screen contents by hitting Ctrl-minus, and that clears it up. Or you can just access the pdf version. This year’s HSS preliminary program is included (look for my session Saturday morning!)
Jane Maienschein
What I want to post about real quick before I take off to Colorado on vacation until next week is Jane Maienschein’s message as outgoing president of HSS. First off, a tip of the hat for the following: “We have to embrace a range of scholarly products, including well-crafted blogs that have more impact and reach a larger audience than the typical academic book, public presentations, and collaborations with scientists.” Quite true, although I would emphasize the possibility for having real-time, open scholarly conversations rather than audience reach.
Second, an important and possibly controversial point: Maienschein observes that a major priority for her was getting the history of science to reconnect with…. the history of science! “I worried that the profession had become so diverse and diffuse that it lacked the energy to carry the field forward. In particular, I saw too much of a swing toward a version of the social history of science that seemed to forget the science. I imagined I might help bring back a balance of interests – science at the core, along with plenty (more…)
Schaffer on Cometography, Pt. 2: Hermeneutics and Historiography July 17, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in History as Anti-Philosophy, Methods, Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Bruno Latour, C. P. Snow, Christian Wolff, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Isaac Newton, Simon Schaffer, Steven Shapin, Voltaire
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Hermeneutical conundrum
I. After reading Simon Schaffer’s “Comets and Idols”, I find myself using the word “hermeneutics” a lot more than I used to. In general, you can get your point across just fine talking about “interpretation”. However, when it comes to Isaac Newton, and writing the history of his ideas, the history of how he presented his ideas and himself, the history of how others drew on his ideas, and the history of how others presented how they were drawing upon his ideas—not to mention the act of writing the history of all this—the pithy phrase “Newtonian hermeneutics” (p. 209) acquires a certain appeal.
Drawing on his writing on Newton’s understanding of cometography as part of a project to restore a long-debauched Chaldean natural philosophy, in “Comets and Idols” Schaffer takes the opportunity to reflect on the role of “sacred texts” and their interpretation in history. If natural philosophy was a chaotic mess of competing systems filled with different arrangements of matter and forces, then the sacred text serves as a rare fixed point of unalterable truth. And for some time, no text was more sacred to many natural philosophers than Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (but see also Adam Smith). Unfortunately, the interpretation of sacred texts is never straightforward, and it is by offering one’s own interpretation of the meaning of the sacred text—by uncovering what stands unspoken behind it, whether motivation, intended emphasis, methodology, hidden knowledge, or concrete ideas—and by discounting others’ “misunderstanding” or “distortion” of it that one draws upon its authority.
As Schaffer had observed before (especially with the construction of historic scientific discoveries, and with psychology’s claiming the personal equation as its own), the appropriation of history within the program one is trying to advance is an important, perhaps inevitable, tactic in building authority. (more…)
Primer: Félix Vicq d’Azyr and the Rise of Comparative Anatomy July 16, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Carl Linnaeus, Comte de Buffon, Félix Vicq d'Azyr, Georges Cuvier, Jeff Loveland, Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, Stéphane Schmitt
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Grant-writing has been preoccupying me lately, so I’m going to compress what I initially intended to be a straight plug for an excellent article in the latest SiC, and do a Hump-Day History post drawing on some of its contents: Stéphane Schmitt’s “From Physiology to Classification: Comparative Anatomy and Vicq d’Azyr’s Plan of Reform for Life Sciences and Medicine (1774-1794)” Science in Context 22 (2009): 145-193.
Félix Vicq-d'Azyr (1746-1794)
I admire the article because it demonstrates an exemplary sense of historiographical problematics, placing its subject matter within the literature as well as addressing it to a well-defined historiographical question: how did comparative anatomy become a dominant methodology within natural history circa 1800? The shift has been identified most strongly with the work of Georges Cuvier at the Museum of Natural History in Paris beginning in 1795, but the prior work and advocacy of former Buffon assistant Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton (1716-1799) and his protege Félix Vicq d’Azyr has clear importance that was widely recognized at the time, but became subsumed in later histories.
Vicq d’Azyr was born in Normandy and arrived in Paris in 1765 to study medicine. Around 1770 he attended courses at the Jardin du Roi (King’s Garden), and perhaps met Daubenton at this time. Daubenton soon became Vicq d’Azyr’s patron, and Vicq d’Azyr married Daubenton’s niece in 1773 (she died 18 months later and Vicq d’Azyr never remarried). It was around this time that the young physician decided to make the unusual turn to comparative anatomy. This led him to membership in the Royal Academy of Sciences, and he became a founding figure and permanent secretary of the Royal Society of Medicine, which was founded in 1776.
In the 1770s, French natural history still revolved around the figure of the Comte de Buffon (1707-1788, named comte in 1772), the intendant of the (more…)
Schaffer on Cometography, Pt. 1 July 10, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Alexis Claude de Clairaut, Comte de Buffon, Edmond Halley, Isaac Newton, Jérôme Lalande, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Johann Lambert, John Flamsteed, Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, Leonhard Euler, Pierre Charles Le Monnier, Simon Schaffer
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Cometary transits have always displayed the troubled relationship between astronomers, theologians, natural philosophers, and their public.
Simon Schaffer, 1987
Drawing by Honoré Daumier, 1857. From the Art Institute of Chicago
Between 1987 and 1993, Simon Schaffer published five papers on the history of cometography, meditating on some of his favorite themes concerning the links between cosmology, scientific methodology, scientific identity, epistemology, theology, politics, authority, social order, and the hermeneutics of history:
(1) “Newton’s Comets and the Transformation of Astrology” in Astrology, Science and Society: Historical Essays (1987), edited by Patrick Curry.
(2) “Authorized Prophets: Comets and Astronomers after 1759,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 17 (1987): 45-74.
(3) “Halley, Delisle, and the Making of the Comet” in Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Longer View of Newton and Halley (1990), edited by N. Thrower.
(4) “Comets and the World’s End” in Predicting the Future (1993), edited by L. Howe and A. Wain.
(5) “Comets & Idols: Newton’s Cosmology and Political Theology” in Action and Reaction (1993), edited by Paul Theerman and Adele Seeff.
From his earliest publications, comets had played a role in Schaffer’s thinking about seventeenth and eighteenth-century cosmology and philosophical inquiry: they were frequently called upon to fill various cosmological roles as agents of destruction, transportation, and restoration. In these five pieces, Schaffer provided further evidence for the centrality of comets in natural philosophical problematics, and clarified the staggering variety of implications cometography could have within and beyond them. In this post, I outline a few of the features of his decidedly complex set of arguments. In its sequel, I will look at Schaffer’s historiographical thinking in (4) and (5).
Although Schaffer’s examination of cometography stretches from Tycho (more…)
Primer: Chien-Shiung Wu July 8, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: Chen-Ning Yang, Chien-Shiung Wu, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Lawrence, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Noémie Benczer-Koller, Steven Moszkowski, Tsung-Dao Lee
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Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) was born in Shanghai, China and raised nearby in Jiangsu Province. Her father had been trained as an engineer and was the director of the Ming De School for Girls at the time of her birth. Wu finished her education at her father’s school in 1922 and went on to the Soochow School for Girls in Nanjing, where she studied physics and mathematics on her own while undertaking a more classical formal education. In 1930 she registered at the National Central University in Nanjing, and received a degree in physics in 1934. She was also active in the student protests there that followed the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.
Wu did x-ray crystallography research for two years at the Chinese National Academy of Sciences in Shanghai. In 1936 she sailed to America with financial support from an uncle in order to undertake graduate education at the University of Michigan. On her way, she stopped and visited the University of California at Berkeley, where she met Ernest Lawrence (and her future husband Luke Yuan). On learning that Michigan did not allow women in its student union, she opted to pursue her PhD at Berkeley instead, receiving it in 1940 for work on nuclear decay (more…)
The Great Escape July 6, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in History as Anti-Philosophy.Tags: Andrew Pickering, Bruno Latour, Harry Collins, Imre Lakatos, John Zammito, Paul Feyerabend, Peter Galison, Steve Woolgar
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Abandoning philosophy
This post is meant to be the first in a series concerning the relationship between the history of science and the philosophy of science, paying special attention to the influential notion within the history of science that the philosophy of science has a deleterious influence on historiography.
Philosophy, in this view, injures inquiry by removing from consideration some of science’s most important non-scientific contexts; by causing historians to attempt to investigate incoherent questions rooted in philosophically defined problems (such as those relating to moments of discovery, confirmation, falsification, and proof); and by concentrating narratives on histories of disembodied ideas (vacuum versus plenum, atoms versus continuum, myth/confusion versus reason, determinism versus vitalism/free will, mind-body questions) and on the Whiggish pedigrees of disembodied theories (the theory of natural selection, the periodicity of elements, etc…), instead of on the actions and debates of scientists themselves, which the archives reveal did not turn on these preoccupations.
Sociology played a big role in “the great escape” (as I am calling it) from philosophy. If philosophy has to do with the interaction between ideas and experience, it then has only a very narrowly defined role in the history of scientific practice. The sensibility, I think, is captured nicely by sociologist Harry Collins in his recent overview of his career-long research program on the practice of gravitational wave physics, Gravity’s Shadow (2004). Here he defends a “relativist” versus a “realist” (one might say sociological versus philosophical) perspective: (more…)
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