Gone Fishing June 19, 2008
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.add a comment
Just so any regular visitors don’t wander off permanently, I’m going to be visiting family in Minneapolis and then on vacation in Ireland until July 4th, and might not be checking in until then.
Discovery, Begone! (or not) June 19, 2008
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Jed Buchwald, Thomas Kuhn
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I’ve been thinking about what might prove canonical for early 19th century physics, and I am imagining that Jed Buchwald’s book on the wave theory of light is going to be on there. Now, studying this or that side of a epochal debate in science (you could also talk about, say, vulcanism vs. neptunism, or catastrophism vs. uniformitarianism, vitalism vs. mechanism, whatever) is a different sort of history from something like Smith’s look at the development of the massively influential energy physics program.
As Smith so ably demonstrates, energy was very much a program (tentative definition: a directed and deliberately strategized attempt to conceptualize knowledge within a certain scheme); whereas we might discuss the epochal debates as “approaches” to subjects. If we look at competing and incommensurable approaches to a problem, it’s easy to write a history of their conflict, but only at the danger of losing the motivations of the actors involved, who may or may not be invested in the conflict (even while taking the occasional pot shot across the divide). We should probably concede that it is possible for ostensibly conflicting approaches to co-exist more-or-less peaceably. Therefore (problems of unequivocally defining “moments” in science aside) it is possibly improper to look at this or that result as proving the validity of one approach over another, or at least doing damage to opponents, because the debate might not really be within the actor’s most immediate set of concerns.
In other words, by framing our narratives in terms of an epochal debate, we impose an external set of concerns on the historical actors, which is a form of Whig history, even if we are careful to not view actors as proceeding methodically toward the “correct” conclusion. Which is not to say we shouldn’t have books about epochal debates. Indeed, they are crucial to defining the traditions in which scientists/philosophers/etc. work. We merely need to be careful about understanding what these narratives are and are not saying about what actors were up to.
All this I think is fairly second-nature now. What has been primarily accomplished is to set certain vocabularies and certain formulations of historical scenarios off-limits. “Discovery” is a big off-limits area. Most books (including Smith) trip all over themselves to note that Kuhn’s efforts to identify multiple moments of discovery of a concept like the “conservation of energy” is pointless, because it takes the principle to be a pre-existing entity that exerts a magnetic force on actors, and diverts attention away from things like efforts to build credibility for the concept, and leads to the misleading condemnation of those who didn’t “get” the discovery right away.
So, I figured, maybe we should just forget about words like “discovery”; but then I was dealing (for other reasons) with 20th century elementary particles, and found that there’s no really compelling reason to not use the term to refer to the detection of something that was not there previously. Why shouldn’t Chadwick have discovered the neutron? If something is discovered in an intellectual environment in which one would expect a discovery along those lines, then the notion of discovery can be (although not necessarily is) clear cut.
All of which gets me thinking about one of the few belabored aspects of Smith’s book, which is his clear conceptual indebtedness to early Latour and Biagioli, in the development of networks of credit and credibility. The sociological literature tends to portray this as a sort of building of alliances to achieve acceptance, but it seems to me that it serves an intellectual function as well, which is building the robustness of a concept or method, arguing consistency with other ideas, and demonstrating novel applications to various kinds of problems.
I’ve been meaning to talk about robustness for awhile now, because I think it will prove important. Building alliances not only builds more widespread recognition, it also tests one’s ideas to see if they jibe with other accepted or proposed ideas and observations. So, Thomson, by fitting his energy ideas into geological and religious ideas, builds upon the robustness of the network of theories. Kuhn, in discussing paradigm shifts, emphasized the building of discrepancies between observations as leading to the breakdown of a paradigm. But the reception literature (such as Warwick’s take on the reception of relativity) has emphasized how isolated new views are within very robust explanatory schemes, and how problematic it is to expect an entire field to abandon these schemes for new and undeveloped ones. This argues for an importance of robustness above truth value in both sociological and philosophical realms.
Anyway, my point is, we use the term robustness already. It may be time to start thinking a little more deeply about what we mean by it. End of rambling post.
Canonical: Nye, Warwick, Smith June 18, 2008
Posted by Will Thomas in Canon Building.Tags: Andrew Warwick, Crosbie Smith, Mary Jo Nye
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Today’s canonical entries in the history of 19th century physics:
1. Mary Jo Nye, Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics, 1800-1940 (1996)
2. Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (2003)
3. Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (1998)
Every good field needs an “orientation” text, and, in my experience, for this corner of history, Nye is it. Read chapters 1, 3, and 4 before Warwick and Smith, if you’re not familiar with the territory. Taking some advanced electricity and magnetism helps, too, to get a little “Fingerspitzengefuehl” in how physicists came to use mathematics in this period.
Warwick and Smith basically cover what has to be the most important shift in the history of physics in the 19th century, which is the importation of 18th century analytical techniques use in what was called “rational mechanics” primarily to study orbits (but also ordinary mechanics and hydrodynamics), as the route to the creation of valid theories. The primary entry point for analysis into non-mechanical physics is the science of energy, which established the fields of thermodynamics and electricity and magnetism. These two books, read in this order, will pretty much tell you everything you need to know about this shift, at least in Britain (German physics will be coming up).
Warwick is in my top 3 favorite history of science books of all-time, and is an excellent account of the cultural and intellectual shifts necessary to make physics into the heavily mathematical science that it has since become. Very few authors ever discuss the uses of mathematics, let alone the experience of using them. Warwick does both in a way that illustrates the watershed shift in what it meant to be a physicist, and what it meant to offer a physical theory, that took place in this period.
Smith (which I’ve actually never read before now) discusses the “program” that provided the entry point for this new kind of physics, the “North British” idea of energy, which drew on Continental engineering theory and the experimentation of James Joule, recruited little-known work by Mayer and Helmholtz on conservation of “Kraft”, systematized it in the fairly new Cambridge mathematical tradition, jibed it with geological theories about the history of the earth and the sun and attendant religious sensibilities, thereby creating an intellectual and social program (we should talk about this word “program” in the future; I find it very useful, but exploring its connotations would be worthwhile) that was capable of cementing a new scientific tradition.
Both works incorporate recent concern for social context in enlightening and highly specific ways. Both are extremely informative narrative accounts of topics of immense importance. Both concentrate largely on Britain, so we’ll need to supplement them with works addressing what was taking place on the Continent (I really would like to find a good source on 19c. French physics–any suggestions?). Still, these books beautifully illustrate what one could argue to be the most important change in physics over the course of the century, and if you had to choose just two books to read on the history of physics in this period, I think you could make a case that these would be the two to read. We’ll look at some good supplements in future posts.
The Canon Game: Preliminary Observations June 17, 2008
Posted by Will Thomas in Canon Building.Tags: C. S. Lewis, Paul Forman, Thomas Kuhn
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I’d like to start talking now about possible canons, but, before we get started, I want to make a few observations about what I, personally, would expect out of a canon. I think for a lot of people the idea of a canon is a little repulsive, because it suggests that there is a batch of writings (usually old ones) up on a pedestal that cannot and should not be touched or questioned, and that serve as models for all us mere mortals. I also think a lot of people think of a canon as works serving as methodological milestones. Thus, obviously, we’d have to start with Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions or something, and move on from there. In my previous post on the Forman thesis, I rejected this view, arguing that milestones, however influential they may have been in their day, are not best suited to guide future inquiry.
I’m a believer in the inevitable existence of things that must logically exist whether they are acknowledged or not. The idea of the inevitable rationale underlying policy plays a big role in my research on the policy sciences. I think the same applies to a canon: one always exists whether we want it to or not. Even if we don’t have a specific set of writings we’ve all read, there is a certain constellation (or “model” to borrow once again from C. S. Lewis’ framing of medieval literature) of arguments and strategies that are derived from set of writings, as well as certain key ideas about the “Enlightenment” or the “Victorian era” or the “Cold War” within which we may write. Thus, we are best off to acknowledge the necessity of canonical literature, and to ask the questions: what does it do for us, and is there a better one available?
I believe that a canon should help us mine the available historiography, which is actually very deep, and build on it. One theme I’ve been circling around is the tendency of historians of science to do a remarkable impersonation of 19th century Homesteaders in going further and further afield from the actual history of science to find new land to till. This is fine, but are we exploiting the land we’re already on to its fullest? A properly selected canon can be very revealing of the richness of the historical terrain that is available to us.
This brings up the most important point. We can think of a canon as the tool of specialists or as a general tool for all of us. I lean toward the general tool interpretation. Specialists are obligated to be familiar with an entire literature within a certain area, and would probably be inclined to pick out a game-changing paper, thus bringing us back to the pedestal conception of canon. But I think to the non-specialist these papers don’t resonate as effectively without the necessary background knowledge. A well-chosen canon will allow those who know it to be familiar enough with the terrain to speak competently about it, even if they can’t achieve “wonk” status, and thus be a receptive and discerning audience in areas outside their specialty.
Also, at least from my perspective, the selection of canonical works should focus on familiarity with history rather than methodology. I know there are many who disagree, but I’m of the opinion that unless you know the history, you’re doomed to making absurd statements; cleverness cannot save you. This has been a priority of mine, especially since teaching my intro class last semester. So, rather than start out in an area I’m really familiar with, I’d like to start with something I’m semi-familiar with, but in which I still ought to be much better schooled: 19th century physics.
Possible Internet Futures June 16, 2008
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.2 comments
In the comments to the post below about edited volumes, Michael Robinson, who runs the Time to Eat the Dogs blog, which looks at the history of exploration and its interaction with science, asks some good questions about ways forward in using the internet to develop “wonky” scholarship, that should probably be answered with a post of their own.
All questions of online scholarship start, but do not end, with Wikipedia. The Advances in the History of Psychology blog has discussed Wikipedia, and particularly the problem of sharing space with enthusiast historians. As Michael points out, this creates especially big problems for a topic like exploration, which have a lot of basic information that should take precedence over more scholastic aspects of it. Should the wonky discussions go under “Exploration,” under a special segment of “History of Science”; or maybe we need an entirely separate resource? But this isn’t a limited problem: Wikipedia’s rules demand that pages be summaries of topics–not storehouses of all available information; and it is forbidden to post original scholarship there. Wonks need to turn elsewhere.
This was the object of the STS Wiki, which seems to have turned up defunct. You can still view a cached version of it if you Google “STS Wiki”. Ultimately, I bet this is the way that scholarship is going, and that the failure for the STS Wiki is probably due to two reasons. First, it was not publicized very well (I hadn’t heard about it until I stumbled across it). Second, our profession does not currently prioritize this sort of online work. The HSS recently did some fund-raising for a bibliographer, but it would probably not be necessary to even have a bibliographer or a cumulative bibliography, if the community was more committed to spending part of their time maintaining a communal resource. This is a reverse case of the tragedy of the commons, where no commons are built, because there is no mutual responsibility for their construction, or even the coordination of their construction. Wikipedia, while open to all editors, is actually based on an intricate series of rules and conventions of format; someone needs to invent and enforce those.
But, the internet represents such a sea change in the way that information is deposited, arranged, and accessed, that I doubt a single resource will be the answer. Michael used the term “carnival of blogs”, which I like. Intellectual conversations take place in real-time or close to it; not through “round table” sessions (which always look suspiciously and disappointingly like ordinary sessions), or in quarterly intervals in journals, which is why I thought it was essential to respond to Peter Galison’s questions in blog format. I’m hoping the carnival of blogs becomes a real thing that helps replace the edited volume and supplements the peer-reviewed journal. Blog rolls and key words (which allow one to access past posts dealing with similar issues easily, and which I’ve begun to stick on archived posts here) will help make blog scholarship become more coherent, and less “thought of the day” oriented.
The great thing is that web resources don’t have to look alike, or have the same sponsorship, and can thus evolve to fulfill a variety of needs. Since this blog is sort of a DIY space for contemplation, which is sometimes fairly critical, I prefer to keep it on blogspot for the time being. But I’d also like to do something like AHP for the history of physics under the auspices of my employers at the AIP, once I’ve completed a couple of other projects. We also do need to face down the Wikipedia problem. The current state of the History of Physics article there begs for academic intervention (I’ve been working on this, actually, and plan to replace what exists with a more organized framework if no one else beats me to it). A more centralized resource could be run by HSS (in conjunction with SHOT, 4S, etc…), which could direct visitors to the various sites that fill whatever wonky or non-wonky needs they may have.
Ultimately, it’s impossible to say what resources will fill what needs, but these things require scholars with a commitment to refashioning scholarship in novel ways, and blending the boundaries between academic, popular, and factual presentation. The best path, in my view, is to keep thinking, trying out prototypes, calling attention to new projects, and seeing what sticks.
Edited Volumes June 13, 2008
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Simon Schaffer
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Doing a little self-educating, and preparing for the canon-building series, (and procrastinating on some manuscript revisions), I thought a good idea would be to take a look at the collected works of Simon Schaffer. Everyone agrees he’s an enormously important scholar in the field, but I’ve never really heard any discussion of his approach beyond the fact that he likes to talk about experimentation and instrumentation. I don’t dispute the notion (as a grad student I had the pleasure of a one-on-one pub lunch with him and was as blown away by his grasp of the issues as anyone I’ve ever talked to), but I would like to have a little bit more of a discussion about his, erm, “shtick”, as in, what is it? That’s for a day far off.
Of course, he’s never written a solo book, which makes tracking his work down a little bit of a task. And, actually, it’s worse than that. It turns out a very significant portion of his work is in the format of entries in edited volumes, which brings me to today’s topic. First a straight-out gripe: edited volumes are a little annoying, particularly because, unless you happen to enjoy doing JSTOR searches of the Isis cumulative bibliography (which I try to avoid if at all possible), edited volumes are a good way of hiding scholarship from the uninitiated. If you don’t happen to know that an edited volume exists, it may as well not.
What do edited volumes accomplish? I get the impression that if people put together a good conference, they feel the contributions ought to all be published together, which means that there’s never more than a cursory effort to pull it all together (and the effort that is put in is usually pretty ponderous, because conferences rarely result in much that can be pulled together in any coherent way). This is especially trouble in vague, “thematic” conferences–“science and wooden boxes” or something. These always sort of hint at a broader significance, but are always more suggestive than conclusive. Not only is there no “end” to the work, there’s never any beginning. The old saw “read it for the footnotes” applies, of course.
And of course, there are also summary volumes like the Cambridge History of Science series, or 1990’s Companion to the History of Modern Science, to which major scholars also contribute. I’ve never been encouraged to sit down with these–probably I should. Are these our canon? Should they be taught in classes, or is that considered a waste of time in favor of more advanced material? They’re certainly not anything that’s ever “discussed”. It strikes me as smacking of German romanticism or something to want to discuss the adequacy and the “feel” of an overarching view of a topic without knowing what I mean by that. But it’s still probably worth addressing, because frankly I’m not sure how I should feel about this corner of the literature; which makes it a good topic for further blog inquiry.
But, here’s another thing with edited volumes. As a quick look at the edited volumes Schaffer’s contributed to indicates, there are also those edited volumes that seem to be the playground of the elite. Is it the case that the edited volume format is also where the vanguard issues of our field are defined? If so, what are the consequences of defining a vanguard within a format that emphasizes neither cumulative knowledge nor conclusive results? How are our readings of this vanguard literature changed if we do not have ready access to the background knowledge the contributors already possess? Maybe not being a master of this background knowledge is all just part of being a younger scholar, but I always like to be reform minded…
So, is there a more efficient way of proceeding with all of this? I have zero problem with the publication of intermediary thoughts and results–in fact, I think it should be done more often and more publicly, even if the thoughts aren’t entirely original (thus this blog). Wouldn’t it be nice if scholarship on topics could all be intertwined, so if you wanted straight-up facts, or a summary of argumentation, or access to the lines of scholarship on a given topic, or a given methodological approach, you could use a centralized gateway to access the collected literature and summaries thereof? As usual, I think the internet will be transforming. Maybe I’m just being lazy, but getting access to accumulated knowledge in the most compact way possible has always been a lever to better scholarly contributions.
*This post was edited from its originally posted version, mostly to take into account the summary literature.
Galison’s Q’s #10: Scientific Doubt June 12, 2008
Posted by Will Thomas in Galison's "Ten Problems".Tags: Bruno Latour, Galison's "Ten Problems", Peter Galison, Yaron Ezrahi
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In our last episode of Galison’s Questions, we have the issue of scientific doubt. So much good scholarship has gone into showing the social processes by which scientific controversies are resolved that we seem to feed into the tobacco industry/creationism & ID supporters/warming skeptics strategy of nullifying policymaking by introducing the perception of existential doubt rather than uncertainty (of degree, of mechanism, etc…) into questions that scientists are more-or-less in agreement on.
My pithy line on this is that we now know how science looks like politics, but we don’t understand how politics looks like science. We know how we agree, but we don’t know why we are able to agree on anything, whether it is a scientific fact or a policy initiative. (Another repetition on the sociology vs. philosophy tension).
As I’ve mentioned a few times in my historiographical argument about the Twentieth-Century Turning Point Presumption, problems of scientific doubt have been taken to mean the unraveling of a consensus built up in the 17th century by framing science as somehow removed from society. (A problem to which only Bruno Latour has the answer??) As I’ve said before, I don’t believe any such consensus has ever existed in the way we often seem to think it does, and that whatever consensus has existed is in absolutely no danger of unraveling. I don’t believe we’ve reached any sort of postmodern divide wherein the divide between truth and fiction has been destroyed by mastery of discourse, or spin, or what-have-you.
The sowing of doubt has long been a staple of moral history (see the Garden of Eden story), and the relationship between doubt (inaction) and conviction of reason is also a staple of political history (not to mention literary history; see Hamlet). I believe, contrary to any notion of science losing a centuries-old luster, it is a sign of the success of science in, at long last, becoming such an indispensable element of policymaking, that it, too, has now taken its turn in the discourse of doubt in the sphere of decision-making.
Doubt has always been the tool of either overturning or defending the status quo. It is not new (Galison portrays otherwise: “we now face another kind of doubt”). What is new is a newly enhanced role for scientific specialists in decision-making that has (rightfully) never come under serious doubt in the realm of improving private decision. When the private bleeds into the public, as it must do in any political system that ultimately must defend itself to public scrutiny, uncertainty transforms into doubt, and scientific questions are transformed into political questions with a scientific gloss–but they cease to be problems which epistemology can address, and thus questions which historians of science have any special insight on versus political historians. (On this point, here’s another plug for Harvard UP reprinting Ezrahi’s Descent of Icarus, which I disagree with, but which is the essential source on this problem).
Ultimately, I think if we want to understand science in the context of decision-making, the problem of the public versus private (if it’s in the newspapers, it’s too late, we’ve already lost a clear perspective on the role of science in modern society), and the problem of localized versus general responsibility, will come up. We’ll find that science has never played a stronger role in decision-making, but only in areas where responsibility for making decisions under informed uncertainty remains localized. Our friends in the political science departments may come in handy (we have friends in the political science departments, right?)
Historical Traditions June 10, 2008
Posted by Will Thomas in Galison's "Ten Problems".Tags: Galison's "Ten Problems", Michael Friedman, Peter Galison
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I was looking through some of the other entries in Isis‘ focus section on new directions in the History and Philosophy of Science, and one of the historically-interested philosophers, Michael Friedman, made a point that accords nicely with the approach that I developed in my class and am thinking more about now.
First, some background. I’ve talked a lot here about the ways our writing emphasizes the science-society relationship in very specific ways; and I’ve written a little (especially since I’ve gotten into Galison’s questions) on the ways that other topics of broad interest to historians of science tend to revolve around science’s and scientists’ addressing of philosophical questions: the mind-body problem, the nature of space (from Kant to Einstein), the relationship between perception, cognition, expression, and reality, etc… In most cases, there is little interest on the content and “character” of science itself, taken broadly, i.e. what science is “all about” in various times and places. I’ll deal with the successes of notable exceptions when I get into the problem of the canon, but that’s the background of this excerpt of my reading of Friedman’s piece:
Following a long discussion of the history of philosophy, Friedman suddenly shifts gears, and, connecting up to Galison’s 7th and 8th questions on locality and globality, he writes,
“I want to suggest that the old-fashioned notion of tradition should, once again, be seen as central to historical inquiry. History should be seen, in particular, as the birth, unfolding, evolution, transformation, and (perhaps most important) mutual interaction and entanglement of a very large number of traditions constituting the extraordinarily complex and ever-changing fabric of human culture. Naturally, as a professional philosopher of science, the traditions in which I myself am primarily interested, and with which I am most familiar, are traditions of thought (both scientific and philosophical), but it is of paramount importance to realize that these traditions, too, are only a part of a much larger cultural whole comprehending religious, political, artistic, technological, instrumental, institutional, and many other traditions within a vast and intricately interconnected web. Just as a particular philosophical or scientific idea has the meaning it does only as a part of this larger whole, a given temporal slice or historical episode (as studied within contemporary microhistory, for example) has the meaning it does only in the context of a number of temporally extended traditions that intersect, as it were, at precisely this focal point.”
This neatly encapsulates my perspective on what it means to do the history of science. In itself, Friedman is not saying anything controversial here. To demonstrate that this is what history is, is not the task of the historian. That’s a starting point, not an ending point. The task of the historian is to chart and to argue about the importance and interaction of all kinds of traditions. This means that it is important for the community, as a whole, to write about all of these traditions, and, again, for the community as a whole, to take an interest in all of these different traditions. So, yes, we should be art historians, architectural historians (Jenny promises more posts soon!), and historians of philosophy, but that doesn’t excuse us from actually being historians of more specifically scientific traditions, as well. There are, of course, lots of historians who are interested in nitty-gritty issues of science without worrying about imagery or philosophy or anything (and who probably know the key traditions intuitively), but very few who assert themselves with respect to traditions, or who feel that a detailed understanding of them, in all their multiple strands, is important for students to pick up. That’s too bad, because the more I learn about various traditions, the more I feel I actually understand the history of science. Seeing a philosopher, of all people, point this out is very encouraging.
Galison’s Q’s #9: Relentless Historicism June 7, 2008
Posted by Will Thomas in Galison's "Ten Problems".Tags: Galison's "Ten Problems", Peter Galison
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Question #9 has got to be my favorite. I hadn’t read this over in detail before putting together my thoughts on #8, but it turns out the reasoning behind this question sums up where I was trying to go with my discussion of globality better than I did. Basically Peter says that we take certain theorists seriously, while historicizing everything else: “more accounts of the development than I can count put Ludwig Wittgenstein on a transhistorical pedestal and use his claims (of family resemblance or of continuing a series) as an unmoved prime mover, wisdom without origin.”
First, let’s address the critique. Galison portrays the tendency to single out thinkers as a sort of oversight in the historicist project, but this is charitable. At our worst, I think we see ourselves in a full-out political battle royale, and historicism is our gun. If we see certain thinkers as “on our side” we will portray other thinkers as “products of their context” to invalidate their claims. Which is just dishonest scholarship.
So how should we treat old ideas? Galison provides two perspectives: we can try to be relentlessly historicist; or we can admit some structuralist means of escape. I think the latter position is inevitable, because in saying what “was done” in the past, the vocabulary we use to describe it constitutes a claim about “what can happen”.
A Marxist or a poststructuralist theorist might ask some motivation-independent question “what political program was asserted?” A Whig historian or a philosopher might ask a Platonic question: “what was accomplished?” A sociologist might ask a skeptic’s question: “what physical action do we believe was taken, never mind the intellectual significance?” All have their own vocabularies “the masculine gaze was applied” or “a theory was confirmed” or “a Type 3F truth claim was made”.
What is the poor historian to do? What vocabulary will we choose, and, thus, what structuralist interpretation of “was done” will we advocate? What will be our fundamental (arbitrary?) historical reality? This is a question for debates and tracts and the like, but it never hurts to blog about it either.
Right now we have a bricolage (if you will) of colloquial language, sociological theory, scientific theory, and philosophical theory. We have a list of “actors’ terms” and we have our modern language, which we must reconcile in making claims (of varying strength) about how they perceived and explained and responded to things that we know to have been physically possible. For example, when they claimed they received a message from God, we might say that “had an idea, and claimed that they received a message from God”.
But when we say “had an idea” and “claimed”, this is a structuralist vocabulary. The question becomes, how well do we use our language? When we say “claimed” this could mean “asserted” or “hyperbolized” or “speculated” or “said” all of which contain sociological/colloquial weight. “To assert” means “to say something in the expectation of disagreement in which event you will defend your statement” whereas “to say” might imply either “to say in the expectation of being believed”. Et cetera.
What does all this boil down to? I’ve been trying to think about this for awhile, and I simply can’t articulate what I’d like to say. “Expectation” is important; so is “demonstration” and “agreement”; so is the vocabulary of likelihood. I’ll just end up by saying this. When I was in high school, I took this (terrible) cultural anthropology class that met right after a philosophy class. I doubt the philosophy class was much better, but for a week or two the question “How precise is your language?” was written up on the board for that class. Damned if that’s not a great question, and damned if Galison’s two-sided question isn’t great as well.
PS. One last point. Maybe the question is actually a little unfair. No one says we can’t both historicize and use theorists. Just because (sometimes) our object of study also happens to be the source of our methodology, doesn’t mean we have to tie ourselves in knots (as I’ve been doing over this question). Like any scholar or scientist, the best we can do is choose a vocabulary and take things into account that seem to explain our subject in a way that answers as many possible questions and provokes as few objections as possible. And I won’t theorize as to why that is!
Globality vs. Semi-Globality June 5, 2008
Posted by Will Thomas in Galison's "Ten Problems".Tags: Galison's "Ten Problems", James Conant, Jed Buchwald, Peter Galison
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These are not very descriptive terms, but they make the case well enough. I think we have to admit that we’ve never really given up on Conant’s project to explain science via historical case study. Even if we no longer pursue a philosophy of scientific knowledge, the search for theories thereof has not ceased. All the big historians still are very eager to make some kind of contributions to the big questions. Look at the scope of Galison’s questions–locality, globality, ethics, context. These are not questions about what is within the history of science, but questions that the history of science might address. They are not a path out of case study–they are a recipe for more.
The other pieces in this Isis focus section venture even further in this direction. They are permeated by trying to address the nature of reality, the nature of observation, and so forth. They are historicized, but not around scientific practice, but the philosophers who have explicitly addressed these questions: count the number of times pre-Kantian, Kantian, post-Kantian, and neo-Kantian appear… as if Kant or any other philosopher (let’s not get into the Heidegger fascination) were actually standard bearers who affected directions in scientific practice. It’s true many influential scientists (especially Germans) were influenced by these philosophical discussions. But we study them at the expense of understanding less articulated, more ingrained traditions of practice. Are we even playing a dangerous and somewhat illegitimate game by trying to read global philosophical debates (and historical epochs) onto localized practice?
If we want to be intellectual historians, are we even very good ones? Why, when we talk about the Enlightenment, is there such a fixation on Kant, even though he was a fairly marginal figure in his time? Even a cursory examination of Enlightenment science and philosophy reveals that it was not particularly Kantian. What about Hume? What about the scores of other thinkers that usually don’t make the canon, but were quite influential in their day?
But, big “global” questions aside, why aren’t key “semi-global” questions more hotly debated? The older historiography is extremely useful on certain semi-global problems. Buchwald’s book on the wave nature of light (1989) will surely go in my canon, but the topic would be considered parochial today, since it is not addressed to externalist links or the nature of observation. It would, I imagine, receive a politely glowing review in Isis (and elsewhere) and then be promptly ignored. And there are whole hosts of untapped semi-global issues–the rise of methods of argumentation in economics, the intertwining of science and engineering in the 20th century, the evolution of the concept of radiation and the proliferation of physical-chemical radiation studies, the professionalization of the 19th century laboratory (there’s got to be something on this that I’m not aware of).
All of these are extremely important, key “semi-global” issues that could use penetrating historical treatments, but I simply can’t imagine them being hot topics of conversation in colloquia, seminars, HSS meetings, and so forth. They’re too historical, too internalist, too detail-oriented, and not philosophically/sociologically global, and most definitely not capable of being treated via case study.
PS. When we get around to canon-building in a couple of weeks, I suspect we’ll find that the early modernists and maybe the history of medicine people are way ahead of everyone in addressing the semi-global, but that’s a topic for another day.
Ether Wave Propaganda 