Useful Portraits in the Mid-Century Social Sciences December 30, 2012
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Ashley Montagu, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Benjamin Spock, Carl Jung, Clifford Geertz, David Engerman, David Levy, Erik Erikson, Jamie Cohen-Cole, Janet Martin-Nielsen, Joel Isaac, John Bowlby, Leonard Bloomfield, Marga Vicedo, Mark Solovey, Michael Bycroft, Nadine Weidman, Noam Chomsky, Peter Mandler, Philip Wylie, Pitirim Sorokin, Sydney Lamb, Zelig Harris
1 comment so far
My meditation on whether there is a “whig” narrative permeating the historiography of the social sciences may give the impression that I have a fundamental objection to the Cold War Social Science (CWSS) volume. In fact, I like the book a great deal. Rather, as someone who is probably among the top 20 people worldwide with practical use for the book, thinking about a “whig” narrative helps me articulate what aspects of it are the most useful.
Having worked for some time in the history of the related subjects of operations research, systems analysis, and decision theory, I have become intimately familiar with the argumentative tropes that permeate their historiography, and which overlap with the ones surrounding the social sciences of the Cold War era. These include the supposed historical existence of: a faith in science, a particular authority attributed to formalized knowledge, and a systematic discounting of tradition and cultural peculiarity.
Even if I didn’t think these tropes were seriously misleading (though I do), the simple repetition of them in different contexts would not be very helpful to me. Locating the tropes within a general narrative allows me to identify what those tropes would look like in a different segment of the narrative (say, a post-1970 history, or the history of a different field), and thus what things I “already know,” even if the precise details are foreign to me. For example, I am not especially well versed in the history of psychology, but if the stories historians tell me about it conform to the general narrative I already know, then they are not really telling me much that is useful beyond making me aware of perhaps a new proper name or two, which I will probably promptly forget. By this criterion, a good portion of CWSS is not especially useful.
But much of it is. Here I will briefly discuss what I personally found to be the most useful pieces in the volume.
CHoSTM Moving to King’s College London December 7, 2012
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
This has been a pretty terribly kept secret, but now that the arrangements have been settled and the press release is out, us folks at Imperial can finally officially say: this summer the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine is moving a couple of miles east to the History Department at King’s College London, where the intention is to expand it into a major center for historical research in our field — the official press release (which you can read below the fold, or at the King’s news site) compares it to Harvard, MIT, and Cambridge.
Are the social sciences concerned with the definition of social and political ontologies? December 1, 2012
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: B. F. Skinner, Edward A. Purcell Jr., Edward Jones-Imhotep, Herbert Simon, Hunter Heyck, Janet Martin-Nielsen, Joel Isaac, Marga Vicedo, Michael Bycroft, Nadine Weidman, Paul Samuelson, Sharon Kingsland, Talcott Parsons, W. V. O. Quine
1 comment so far
It is consistent with a new whig history of the social sciences to suppose that, in a former era, these sciences attempted to define the ontologies of aspects of society through the application of scientific method. For example, theories of modernization defined the nature of the modern liberal society, as well as the path that “traditional” society (another ontology) would need to take to transition to a state of modernity. Such acts of definition, in turn, had the capacity to affect politics and social relations, because, historically, the act of scientific definition could privilege and reify ontologies on account of the cultural authority attributed to science at that time.
Now, however (according to this narrative), we have come to see the futility of such efforts. Instead, the object is not to define ontology, but to ascertain how ontologies are defined from culture to culture, including in the scientific culture of our social scientific ancestors. Accordingly, Cold War Social Science is divided into three sections, labeled “Knowledge Production”, “Liberal Democracy”, and “Human Nature”. The last two sections revolve around two categories of ontologies seen as being at play. The first section revolves arund the means that the social sciences used to define these ontologies, i.e., to produce “knowledge” about them.
Ether Wave Propaganda 
New Article in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences December 5, 2012
Posted by Will Thomas in Commentary Track.Tags: Cecil Powell, John Pickstone, Kent Staley, Lorraine Daston, Patrick Blackett, Peter Galison
3 comments
The paper is self-consciously a testing ground for ideas about how to build a more synthetic historiography. First, it’s an attempt to develop a way to find interesting historical “objects” to periodize and interrelate in the history of scientific practice. In doing this, I am trying to build explicitly on the foundations for “mesoscopic” history that were laid by Peter Galison (my PhD advisor) in his big book,Image and Logic (1997). Other attempts to do this sort of thing have tended to look for very large “objects”, such as John Pickstone’s “ways of knowing” or Galison and Lorraine Daston’s attempt to classify and periodize concepts of “objectivity”. I am arguing for the importance of looking at things that are smaller, but which are not simply “local”, and things that are less “epistemic” in nature, but which nevertheless provide us with insight into past scientific arguments. These are the titular “strategies of detection”.
Second, the paper is also an attempt to summarize the already considerable past gains in the historiography of experimentation in particle physics (which is dominated by Image and Logic), and then to go deeper, retaining and extending some gains while challenging and revising others. If we imagine historiographical progress as existing along two axes of “depth” and “breadth”, this paper aims to further progress along the depth axis, while contributing only slightly to the breadth axis. But I started work on this paper while putting together the topic guide on particle physics for my Array of Contemporary American Physicists resource, which looks for new gains mainly along the breadth axis. So, in my mind, ACAP and “Strategies of Detection” are complementary branches of my thinking about the central problem of historiographical synthesis.
A few notes on the paper’s origins below the fold.
(more…)