Narrow and Broad Historiography and Self-Interested History October 19, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Arne Hessenbruch, Simon Schaffer
11 comments
At the beginning of the year, I posted on the “instrumental uses of history”, intending the post to set the tone for this year’s blogging. It referred to the polemical and heuristic uses to which history is put, and the likely distorting effect these uses have on historical portraiture. The post supposed the inevitability of this state of affairs and the futility of sustained work against it.
Subsequent posts have focused on the importance of taking the history of polemics seriously, as well as on the history of science community’s strong interest in the history of polemics. I have argued that this interest relates to how those polemics are seen as arising from, and revealing of, how science and technology operate in society: by securing the cultural and political, as well as intellectual, assent.
I have argued that these ideas are thought to run contrary to past and popular historiography, which is imagined to render systematically invisible not only these polemics, but the social and material circumstances that so often give rise to polemical encounters. In this way, the past and popular historiography is thought to depend on a false (or at least deeply selective) image of science, technology, and society to assemble its history. The image is one wherein the final form of ideas and the criteria on which they are judged acceptable are taken-for-granted in specifically self-interested ways. Accordingly, recovery of a realistic image of science is thought to be not only an imporant historiographical task, but also a form of portraiture with innate virtues (as I argued at Whewell’s Ghost). (more…)
Talks in London on the 28th October 17, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.9 comments
If you happen to be in London these days, and you are free on the 28th, you could make your way over to Greenwich, and pay six-to-eight quid to hear Simon Schaffer’s talk, “Acting at a Distance: The Venus Transit Expeditions and the Establishment of Empire” at the National Maritime Museum. It is part of the Royal Society’s lecture series, Science and the Maritime Nation, which is running this month.
Or, you could skip the obligatory inspirational lesson on “how fraught and fragile” the transit expeditions’ “attempts to make science and empire work together” were, download his Tarner lectures on astronomy, hear/read his take on the transit expeditions here, read Thony C’s very nice summations of the frustrations of an 18th-century transit expedition here, and then feel free to come and see me, free-of-charge, at Imperial College in South Kensington, as part of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine’s seminar series.
My talk will be entitled “Some Facets of the 20th-Century-Problem in Historiography: Scientists, Policymakers, Experts, and Analysts”, and will be at 4:15pm, Sherfield Building, 5th Floor Seminar Rooms. Hopefully drinks afterward. My talk will begin with an overview of my work on operational research, policy analysis, and decision theory, and some of the new conclusions I was able to draw from that research. However, it will then move into the difficulties of studying very big topics (i.e., the “20th-century problem” which is a term that has gained a modicum of traction in discussions around here), the dangers of adhering to classical historiographical expectations of what tensions will inhabit those topics (science! politics! where-oh-where will the boundaries be drawn this time?) and some possible strategies for dealing with this historiographical problem, i.e., the internet. I will discuss blogs as a way of keeping the historiographical pot stirred, and ACAP as an example of addressing a big topic in a preliminary way. This will lead into an introduction of my brand new research project: a broad survey of forms of expertise used in the British state, 1945-1975, on which much more anon. It’s a whirlwind, but I figure it will be more interesting than a boring old lecture on a single topic.
By the way, Whewell’s Ghost contributor Rebekah Higgitt will be doing a lecture, “The Admiralty’s Observatories: Greenwich, Cape, Rossbank” on November 4th at the NMM. I will not be lecturing on that day, so by all means do go and check it out.
Is There a Conflict of Interest between STS and History of Science? October 8, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Susan Leigh Star
10 comments
A brief satire:
Q: If you’re an STS scholar, how do you participate in a policy debate?
A: (1) Identify some place where somebody can plausibly be accused of over-certainty and reductionism in their assertion of a solution to a policy problem. (2) Deploy your meta-knowledge of how controversies work to accuse participants in policy debates of over-certainty and reductionism. (3) Feel increasingly satisfied with your meta-knowledge that over-certainty and reductionism are the root causes of policy failure.
If aversion to reductionism is indeed the central critical feature of Science and Technology Studies (STS, occasionally “Science, Technology, and Society”), the danger of reductionism is taken to be augmented by the prospect that science and technology carry a certain public authority that can potentially disguise this reductionism. This authority is thought to be based on the prospect that science and technology enjoy a certain separateness or distinction from the rest of culture and politics. The central authority-based failure to detect reductionism is taken to lead to follow-on varieties of failure, particularly: the structural failure of formal methodologies to cope with suitably complex and uncertain phenomena, the moral failure of methodologies to take into account divergent social and intellectual perspectives and values, and the failure of methodologies designed to resolve social problems and controversies to transcend controversy themselves.
Technological Determinism, Scientific Reasoning, and Leslie White October 1, 2010
Posted by Christopher Donohue in History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Carl Mitcham, Franz Boas, Jacques Ellul, Jan Patočka, Leslie White, Lewis Mumford, Martin Heidegger
4 comments
For the French philosopher Jacques Ellul, the sum of technological accomplishments in contemporary civilization formed the “Technique,” which was the “new and specific milieu in which man is required to exist” and which replaced “nature.” This milieu was artificial, autonomous, self-determining, not directed towards any specific end but only established through specific means, and interconnected to such a degree that all of its elements are impervious to analysis by its constituent parts ( In Philosophy and Technology, ed. Carl Mitcham, Robert Mackey, 86.)
Leslie White (1900-1975)
Technology, according to Ellul, had become the all-pervasive material reality and rationality which defined the superstructure of contemporary society. Culture or politics, according to Ellul, does not determine the growth and development of technology. Rather, it is technology or technique which determines the culture or political life of a society. Nor was the understanding of technology as autonomous rationality a concern of French philosophers. German philosophers were as concerned with interaction of technology and human freedom and were as anxious to establish its roots in the philosophic and scientific thinking of the West.
Will Thomas
Christopher Donohue
