Let Us Now Praise Bill Cronon March 27, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club.Tags: Frederick Jackson Turner, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, William Cronon
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For those who haven’t heard, the Republican Party of Wisconsin is (ab)using the freedom of information process to request copies of emails on historian William Cronon’s University of Wisconsin account. This followed the appearance of a blog post Cronon wrote about the influence of a right-wing policy think tank on recent Republican legislative proposals. A few days later, Cronon published a historically based criticism of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Wisconsin Republicans in the New York Times, making a carefully limited comparison to Joe McCarthy. The Republican tactics almost seem designed to make sure the shoe fits. While they are within their rights to file their request, the lack of any apparently pressing reason for wanting to root through a professor’s emails smacks of petty vengeance and intimidation.
Bill Cronon has already received a lot of support from the academic community and beyond. But I thought this might be a nice opportunity to reflect on what is so remarkable about his work, which speaks to his outstanding integrity as a scholar. I’m going to focus on Nature’s Metropolis (1991), which is an exemplar of good history-writing — certainly in my personal top-5 — but one could also profitably read Changes in the Land (1983), which only rises to the level of very good. (more…)
Shapiro vs Schaffer on Newton’s Prism Experiments, Pt. 2 March 24, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Alan Shapiro, Bruno Latour, Edme Mariotte, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Robert Hooke, Robert Koch, Simon Schaffer
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Alan Shapiro (hssonline.org)
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). 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. 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. 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.
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.
Shapiro vs Schaffer on Newton’s Prism Experiments, Pt. 1 March 20, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Alan Shapiro, Harry Collins, Isaac Newton, Richard Westfall, Robert Boyle, Simon Schaffer, Steven Shapin, Thomas Hobbes
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This post is a response to this comment by Michael Bycroft on a 2009 post on Simon Schaffer’s well-known 1989 “Glass Works” paper, which brought to my attention a reply published seven years later by historian of optics Alan Shapiro: “The Gradual Acceptance of Newton’s Theory of Light and Color,” Perspectives in Science 4 (1996): 59-140.
“Glass Works” was itself a commentary on a large body of Newton scholarship, most especially Richard Westfall’s biography, Never at Rest (1980). It explicitly made use of Harry Collins’ sociology of “calibration”, which pointed to the necessity that instruments and experimental procedures gain trust before assertions based on experimental results can be accepted. Schaffer and Steven Shapin had previously used this insight in Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985) to call attention to the basis of Thomas Hobbes’ criticism of experimental philosophy as well as to the intellectual, literary, and sociological strategies Robert Boyle used to gain assent over experimental results.
Unlike Schaffer’s commentary, Shapiro assembles a synthetic history of the acceptance and replication of Newton’s important experiment showing the elongation of the light of the sun when passed through a prism, as well as his two-prism experimentum crucis, which demonstrated that white light was composed of differently refrangible rays. (more…)
Neglected Connections between the Histories of Science and Economics, Pt. 2 March 9, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Alfred Marshall, Andrew Warwick, Augustin Jean Fresnel, Bruno Latour, Carl Menger, Charles Babbage, Crosbie Smith, E. Roy Weintraub, Friedrich Hayek, George Airy, George Peacock, Gustav Schmoller, Jed Buchwald, John Gascoigne, John Herschel, John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, Karl Popper, Max Weber, Philip Mirowski
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Part 1 of this post argued that the historical relations between natural scientific and economic thought require additional attention. It suggested that in the Enlightenment period both were subsumed within the epistemology of philosophical systems-building and the generic argumentative structure of “economy”. Although David Hume’s theory of morals was not economics, per se, in a separate post I used his example to demonstrate how the argumentative construction of a social economy had to face similar intellectual problems as chemistry, botany, and (what was thought of as) physics.
Part 2 emphasizes the importance of logical or argumentative space in economic thought, as exemplified by — but by no means limited to — mathematical inquiry. I want to argue that economics continued to adhere to the argumentative strategy of system-building familiar from 18th-century natural and political philosophy. Meanwhile, though, most natural sciences took a separate path toward argumentative rigor applied to a tightly constrained space of argumentation, such as that defined by laboratory phenomena. Political economists were deeply influenced by the natural sciences’ newly enhanced commitment to rigor, but interpreted that commitment in novel ways within the relatively unconstrained argumentative space of political economy.
Will Thomas
Christopher Donohue
