Kuukkanen on the Philosophical Foundations of the Historiography of Science October 13, 2012
Posted by Will Thomas in Cult of Invisibility.Tags: Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Leopold von Ranke, Lorraine Daston, Martin Rudwick, Peter Novick, Simon Schaffer, Steve Woolgar, Thomas Kuhn, Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis
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The Twitterverse has brought to my attention a new article by philosopher of history Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen of Leiden University: “The Missing Narrativist Turn in the Historiography of Science,” History and Theory 51 (2012): 340-363 (paywall).
Like Lorraine Daston’s 2009 article in Critical Inquiry (with which Kuukkanen does not engage), Kuukkanen’s piece covers the oft-plowed ground of the relationship between the social studies of science and the historiography of science. Recall that Daston takes the rather unorthodox view that historians have exhausted the insights of the social studies of science, and have therefore turned to the mainstream history discipline, which she believes explains our present surfeit of disconnected microhistorical case studies. Kuukkanen takes a more traditional view in that he believes that present historiography remains a fairly direct product of science-studies thinking. However, he also peculiarly believes that, due to this influence, we historians have not embraced the “narrativist turn” taken by other historians, which is to say, we believe the way we write about our subject matter is the way to write about it, and so we myopically fail to open ourselves to the possibility of alternatives.
Rudwick and Newman & Principe and the Recovery of Meaning December 30, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Chymistry, Tactile History.Tags: Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, James Joule, Lawrence Principe, Martin Rudwick, Otto Sibum, Robert Boyle, William Newman
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Metallic 'vegetation', from The Chymistry of Isaac Newton website
One of the most pernicious obstacles to effective historical research is a phenomenon I like to call “glazing over” — a tendency to dismiss references encountered in documents as unimportant or incidental simply for a lack of familiarity with them, or interest in them. You just glaze over until you run across something you are already interested in.
I suspect glazing over is actually extremely common, but that people don’t like to discuss it, because the lack of familiarity it implies with basic facts still smacks of professional incompetence, or, more snobbishly, interest in overcoming the problem implies a banal interest in empirical history. This is too bad, because not only does systematic glazing over likely skew and limit our historiography in more radical ways than our awareness of our “inevitably subjective perspective” supposes; it prevents historians from taking steps as a profession to readmit factual dexterity back into our practices after a long period of privileging critical reflection.
In today’s post, I want to discuss tactile history that works to restore a familiar or palpable meaning to documentary descriptions of natural or experimental phenomena by actively revisiting or recreating what the text refers to.
Holiday & Introductory Course August 3, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Adam Kuper, Amy Dahan, Andrew Warwick, Anthony Grafton, C. S. Lewis, Daniel Greenberg, Edward Appleton, Jack Morrell, James Secord, Jan Golinski, John Gascoigne, John Hedley Brooke, Martin Rudwick, Neil Morgan, Noel Coley, Peter Bowler, Peter Dear, Robert Olby
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I am going to be doing some traveling for the next couple of weeks, and so there are likely to be no new posts in that time. In other news, starting in October, I will be teaching a year-long introduction to the history of science course here at Imperial. I’ve included a tentative lecture schedule and reading list below the fold. This isn’t set in stone yet, so comments and suggestions are welcome.
Anthropological Cosmology and Anti-Demarcationism, Pt. 2 March 18, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Natural Philosophy/Anthropo-cosmology.Tags: Barry Barnes, Bruno Latour, Charles Darwin, Christopher Hill, Clifford Truesdell, G. S. Rousseau, Geoffrey Cantor, Harry Collins, Henk Bos, Jacques Roger, Jonathan Miller, Margaret Jacob, Martin Rudwick, Mary Douglas, Paul Forman, Piyo Rattansi, Robert Young, Ruth Cowan, Steven Shapin
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There was no such thing as the historiographic revolution and this is a (too-long) post about it.
Historiographical totem?
In the late-1970s, the applicability of anthropological notions of cosmology to issues in the historiography of science could be understood as evidence of the need for an epistemology that extended into the domain of social relations. This extension entailed the notion that scientific work existed in a cultural and intellectual continuum with the society around it, and thus that attempts to demarcate scientific work and ideas were ill-founded. Society was not simply something to be scrubbed from science; legitimate scientific work was made possible through its establishment in legitimate places within society, and through the selective borrowing from society of cultural and political means of establishing legitimate claims. This, I think, was a good idea, but was it methodologically revolutionary?
The test of the validity of any idea is whether it can change the outcome of a process in some specific way. A scientific idea can help create a successful experiment or an improved technology. The idea of social epistemology could be tested as could much sociology and philosophy of science by running it through the historical record and seeing if it rendered it more coherent. In other words (to use a Latourian formulation), the success of social epistemology was bound up with its ability to forge an alliance with historiography.
The socio-epistemology advocates took no chances on getting lost in the shuffle, and apparently decided to tie the success of their program to a beneficial historiographical sea change. In a 1983 article discussing possible implications for science education, Steven Shapin and Harry Collins even used the title “Experiment, Science Teaching, and the New History and Sociology of Science” (my emphasis; reprinted in Teaching the History of Science (1989), eds. Michael Shortland and Andrew Warwick). However, the existence of this shift as a coherent entity, and the placement of socio-epistemology within it, should not be taken for granted. The idea took years to successfully engineer. (more…)
HSS Highlights November 24, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Alex Csiszar, Graeme Gooday, John Murdoch, Martin Rudwick, Mary Morgan, Michael Barton, Michael Robinson, Milena Wazeck, Naomi Oreskes, Norton Wise, Robert Bud, Sharon Kingsland, William Newman
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Only a few cacti were seen in downtown Phoenix, and I am jealous of those who got a chance to get out of the city.
In the narrow space between my HSS trip, and an upcoming Thanksgiving trip, I wanted to quickly fit in a quick recap of some of the highlights of HSS.
Indiana University’s Bill Newman introduced the winner of this year’s lifetime-achievement Sarton Medal, John Murdoch. Murdoch works on medieval and ancient science in a history of philosophy vein. He came to Harvard in 1957, and when I was there (2002-07) his courses were of a rather different mode of pedagogy than the rest of the department. As a 20th-century historian, I didn’t know him very well personally, but it was good to see HSS sustaining its effort to recognize and promote intellectual and philosophical history, and to bring it back into the mainstream of what we do.
[Edit, October 2011: John Murdoch died in September 2010. An eloge written by Newman (paywall) appears in the September 2011 Isis.]
One of the big difficulties of keeping specialized intellectual history in the mainstream of a profession that has—rightly—branched out into cultural history, is how to make that work understandable and usable to those who aren’t intensively engaged with it. On this note, I was enthused to learn about Newman’s web project, “The Chymistry of Isaac Newton” (aka chymistry.org). (more…)
Primer: Jean-André de Luc’s Christian Geology April 2, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: Comte de Buffon, James Hutton, Jean-André de Luc, Martin Rudwick
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Click for Hasok Chang's page on De Luc
It was nice timing that Michael Robinson happened to bring up at his blog the relationship between Biblical and physical (i.e. “biological” to be somewhat anachronistic) accounts of human history and race. I’ve just been going over Martin Rudwick’s fantastic Bursting the Limits of Time (2005), and had decided to write a post on Jean-André de Luc (1727-1817), a devoutly Christian natural philosopher of the Earth’s history, and coiner of the term “geology”.
De Luc came from a family of Genevan clock-makers, and had a background in precision engineering. He was well-known for his design of a portable barometer, and established his reputation as an authority on meteorology. In 1773 he moved to England, where he resided for the rest of his life, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society and a “reader” (i.e. mentor) for Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III.
In the mid-to-late eighteenth century, the discipline now understood as geology was comprised of a variety of natural historical and natural philosophical fields of study: mineralogy, physical geography, geognosy (the study of the contents of the earth, related to mining), and the “physics” of the earth (which dealt with qualitative discussions of the earth’s mechanisms). An important intellectual activity in this period was the construction of vast logical “systems” that connected causal and historical explanations to account for observations, thereby establishing a potential comprehensive “theory of the Earth”. It was to describe this last activity that de Luc deployed the term “geology”, to distinguish it from more expansive cosmologies, which attempted to account for the workings of the entire universe.
As a devout Christian, de Luc felt embattled in a community of Enlightenment-era savants who embraced deistic, or (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…)
Primer: Georges Cuvier October 8, 2008
Posted by Christopher Donohue in EWP Primer.Tags: Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Georges Cuvier, Martin Rudwick, William Whewell
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Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) was born on 23 August 1769.After an education at Stuttgart, he accepted a position as a tutor with the family of the Comte d’Hericy.During his time as a tutor, he became friends with the well-regarded agriculturalist Tessier. Cuvier became the protégé of Tessier, and through his correspondence with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, managed in 1795 to secure an appointment as an assistant professor of comparative anatomy at Museum d’Histoire Naturelle.In 1796, he began a series of lectures at the Ecole Centrale du Pantheon.In that same year, he read his first paper, entitled Memoires sur les especes d’elephants vivants et fossils, which was published in 1800.For Cuvier, 1789 was a pivotal year as it saw the completion of his first systematic work of natural history, entitled Tableau elementaire de l’histoire naturelle des animaux.The period after the publication of this work saw Cuvier devote himself to three broad lines of inquiry: the structure and classification of mollusks, the classification and natural history of fish, and finally, the natural history of fossil mammals and reptiles. (more…)
Holmes, Part 3: Does Nature Matter? April 18, 2008
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Bruno Latour, David Edge, Frederic Holmes, Martin Rudwick, Michael Mulkay, Robert Kohler, spin up/spin down
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Comparing what I’ve (poorly) called the historical arc vs. the historical reality models of writing history, Holmes goes on to discuss some of the relevant literature. Probably his main target here is Robert Kohler’s (1982, now out of print) From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline, the first chapter of which explores how “physiological chemistry” was caught in a sort of professional limbo between physiology and organic chemistry in the German university system–hence this gap between first major calls for a cell-oriented chemistry ca. 1850, and the eventual instantiation of a full-blown biochemistry ca. 1900.
Now, things get complicated here, so all this is all too-fast, too-rough recapitulation, but, long story short, Kohler’s book focuses almost exclusively on the non-scientific politics of disciplinary formation. One of Holmes’ big points is to bring the science back into the picture. “If we are to understand scientific innovation and change comprehensively, then we need studies at all levels of organization, from the individual investigator [which he goes on to defend vigorously] and the local research school to the international field; and on time scales ranging from daily experimental operations to the several decades or even much longer that are often required for scientific problems to evolve and for major domains of scientific knowledge to be acquired.” He had previously discussed Mulkay and Edge, but he’s also clearly addressing the points made by Kohler and Latour: “A research field is more than a network of communication and ties of professional interest.”
In some sense, this boils down to the usual, “but nature matters!” argument deployed against the “spin up” interpretation of sociology. Rudwick (see the last post) certainly agrees (see the latest HSS newsletter). Kohler seems to as well, and actually, in his 1982 book, seems to lament the politics of the German university that prevented biochemistry from emerging. Although Holmes gets into it, repeatedly, with the sociologists’ “spin up” arguments throughout the lectures, I get the feeling his main concern is not with proving that nature matters, but, rather, that he has his own, very historiographical agenda. He wants to know how we get down to telling histories that reveal what mattered, and thus why his approach to history is best in this case, as opposed to an approach like that used in, say, Great Devonian Controversy or From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry.
By embracing both long time spans (unlike a case study approach like Rudwick’s), and by embracing laboratory-level practice (unlike Kohler’s approach to a similar topic), Holmes aims to show how the formation of a field like biochemistry is not simply a matter of willing it into existence provided there are no political barriers, but that nature and the evolution of ideas about nature matter in determining what is deemed worth investigation. Most of his lectures are centered around constructing a narrative in which such points are pertinent. In other words, he shows how a more sociologist-friendly book like Kohler’s is actually more Whiggish than his approach, because it presumes that a field like biochemistry ought to exist, and that it was necessary for the emergence of biochemical knowledge (as Kohler himself seems to confirm). This could all be a big misinterpretation of the historiographical argument taking place, on both Holmes’ and Kohler’s parts–I read this stuff quickly–but it’s what I took away from it.
Next time: Holmes responds to some criticisms in his epilogue.
