The links between science studies and British “declinist” discourse April 22, 2013
Posted by Will Thomas in British Science-Society Critiques.Tags: Bertrand Russell, C. P. Snow, David Bloor, David Edgerton, David Kaiser, Francis Bacon, Hilary Rose, J. D. Bernal, J. G. Crowther, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Karl Mannheim, Steven Rose, Thomas Kuhn
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In trying to characterize the roots of contemporary history of science and science studies, one of the crucial features I have hit upon is their presentation of science, and particularly its place in society, as historically and continually beset by a widespread failure to understand the nature of science and the science-society relationship.* This failure structures narratives which involve various tensions, confusions, and failures of policy and morality, all of which ultimately necessitate the latter-day formulation of an iconoclastic critique of science. These narratives, in turn, have the effect of inflating the apparent present-day novelty and cogency of these professions’ central critical insights.
Now, this has long been an interesting issue for me, partially because it actually mirrors a major point in my work on the history of operations research, scientific advising, systems analysis, and related developments in World War II and after. These developments were often cast as representing a realignment (or potential realignment) of the relationship between “science” and “the state”. As David Edgerton has pointed out, the purported need for such a realignment is a characteristic feature of narratives of British national “decline,” which explain that decline at least partially in terms of a national failure to appreciate and take proper advantage of science. C. P. Snow’s 1959 book The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution is a well-known manifestation of this narrative, but it was widespread before and after Snow’s contribution.
A big question that has weighed on me is whether that older discourse is directly related to the contemporary one. Recently, while working on the conclusion of my book, I believe I found what may be a “golden spike” linking the two discourses buried in radical British science journalist J. G. Crowther’s (1899-1983) Science in Modern Society (1967, in which operational research features prominently) and Hilary Rose and Steven Rose’s Science and Society (1969).
History-Philosophy Relations, Pt. 2: The Weltphilosophie of Historical Epistemology February 16, 2013
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Alfred Nordmann, Allan Franklin, Andrew Pickering, Augustine Brannigan, David Bloor, David Gooding, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, Gerald Holton, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Harry Collins, Ian Hacking, Kent Staley, Larry Laudan, Lorraine Daston, Martin Kusch, Michel Foucault, Peter Galison, Simon Schaffer, Steve Woolgar, Thomas Kuhn, Trevor Pinch
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Rheinberger’s history of historical epistemology
The program of “historical epistemology” represents one of the more ambitious and thoughtful projects espoused by historians of science in recent years. The self-conscious efforts of people like Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Lorraine Daston, and Peter Galison to renew interest in epistemological questions among historians is laudable. And their point that epistemology is something that is invented rather than transcendental—and thus historically variable in its content—is surely a correct observation, at least from a historiographical standpoint.
That said, I have never been fully comfortable with the history produced by historical epistemology. To date, the program has received the most intensive scrutiny from philosophers. A good example is Martin Kusch’s 2010 paper, “Hacking’s Historical Epistemology: A Critique of Styles of Reasoning”.* My own interest in the subject has less to do with the integrity of historical epistemology as epistemology (a subject I am happy to leave to philosophers), as it does with its Weltphilosophie and its conception of the history-philosophy relationship.
Kuhn’s Demon, or: The Iconoclastic Tradition in Science Criticism January 21, 2013
Posted by Will Thomas in Ideology of Science.Tags: Allan Franklin, Augustus de Morgan, Barry Barnes, Bruno Latour, David Bloor, Gerald Geison, Gerald Holton, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, James Watson, John Maynard Keynes, Louis Pasteur, Mary Jo Nye, Michael Bycroft, Michael Mulkay, Michael Polanyi, Nicholas Wade, Peter Medawar, R. A. Fisher, Rebekah Higgitt, Robert Merton, Robert Millikan, Simon Schaffer, Stephen Brush, Steve Fuller, Steven Shapin, Thomas Kuhn, William Bateson, William Broad
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The message that scientists are human and that science is messy is crossing the ether once again. Of late there has been a certain degree of excitement percolating among historians and science-studies scholars over the #OverlyHonestMethods hashtag on Twitter. It seems that scientists are sending out tweets about their work that happen to nicely coincide with the images of science that historians would like to present to the world. Twitter is, of course, the world hub for “trending” topics, and this particular trend is already simmering down. But, before the moment is completely gone, it might be worthwhile to reflect briefly on the history of the ideas 1) that there exists a dominant image of science as a pristine and rigidly ordered activity, and 2) that the negation of this image would be broadly beneficial to scientists and society.
Is it idol-smashing time again already?
Harry Collins, Methodological Relativism, and Sociological Explanation, Pt. 1 July 19, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Bruno Latour, David Bloor, Harry Collins, Karl Mannheim, Larry Laudan
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When I was at SEESHOP5 in Cardiff last month, I had an opportunity to talk a little with Harry Collins about the history of his work, its relationship to the history of science, relativism, radicalism, and STS.
People involved in Collins’ “Sociology of Expertise and Experience” (SEE) project would like their work to inform future STS scholarship. However, by their estimate, STS has been reluctant to take up SEE. This has led the SEE crowd to chart their own course, distinguishing their work as committed to a constructive deliberation about the nature and social operation of expertise, which they would contrast to an argumentation-averse, and ultimately nonconstructive critical orthodoxy prevailing in STS.
Now, STS distinguishes itself by a sort of ambivalently* radical relativist intellectual position, descending from the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) project of the late-1970s and 1980s. By attempting to define the bounds of expert authority, the SEE project is often taken to be a retreat from STS-brand radicalism to a more traditional set of ideas about expertise. It has sometimes been paired with Bruno Latour’s own apparent retreat (pdf) around the same time as the SEE project got started, in the early 2000s.
Collins denies that SEE represents any shift in his critical position: for him it is just a shift to a different methodology and a different sort of problem. (more…)
Cultural History of Knowledge and Post-Marxist Social History of Science April 30, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Cult of Invisibility.Tags: Barry Barnes, Bruno Latour, Clifford Geertz, David Bloor, David Kaiser, Karl Mannheim, Mary Douglas, Morris Berman, Peter Berger, Robert K. Merton, Steven Shapin, Thomas Gieryn, Thomas Kuhn, Thomas Luckmann
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The Edinburgh Science Studies Unit in the early 1980s; Steven Shapin is second from the left in the back row; David Bloor is first on the left and Barry Barnes is second from the right in the front row
Circa 1980, “social” historians who explored the connections between scientific work and its political, social, and economic milieus showed an interest in how scientists selected their objects of inquiry, in the allocation of scientific research effort, and in the social function of scientific work. Unlike many historians of science, they showed comparatively little interest in the development of scientific knowledge itself. In 1982 Steven Shapin wrote that he saw “no danger of ‘the history of science losing its science’, but,” he observed, “much literature in the social history of science has less of a connection with the sociology of knowledge than many apparently traditional exercises in the history of ideas” (my emphasis).
At that time, Shapin was a key figure in a movement that was opposed to a traditional philosophy-inspired history of science, which sifted “science” out of history and narrated its progress; to a Mertonian sociology of science, which delineated the conditions in which “science” takes place; and indeed to the social history of science, which linked lines of research to social interests, but which often took research results for granted.
The Bounds of Natural Philosophy: Intellectual Characteristics March 28, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Natural Philosophy/Anthropo-cosmology.Tags: Barry Barnes, David Bloor, Geoffrey Cantor, Imre Lakatos, Mary Douglas, Simon Schaffer, Steven Shapin
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First off, apologies if some of the themes and arguments of this post have become repetitive. I find that in trying to arrive at a synthesis, it is useful to go over and over the points, making sure to try and modify a bit each time through. Ordinarily this process takes place in private, usually in notebooks, but part of the idea of this blog is to open the process to public scrutiny for whatever benefits it might produce. Readers can tune in or out as they see fit.
What were those natural philosophers thinking?
The natural philosophy problem appears to have remained a topic of serious historiographical conversation through the course of the 1980s. One big problem is that natural philosophy is a vague term: it applied to aspects of Peripatetic philosophy, but in the twentieth century Harvard physicist Percy Bridgman (1882-1961) still held a chair in mathematics and natural philosophy and was in fact a well-known writer in the philosophy of science. Some natural philosophy chairs even still exist today (Bertrand Halperin now holds Bridgman’s old chair, and they apparently still officially spell “mathematicks” with a “k”!).
Obviously, all these “natural philosophers” are doing rather different things, so historians would be ill-advised to try and look for a single definition of natural philosophy, even within delimited time periods, or to try and locate a “real” natural philosophy. One promising tactic is to apply ahistorical analytical criteria to different aspects of natural philosophical work, while allowing that natural philosophers might not have perceived the distinctions between these “aspects”.
As we have seen for the eighteenth-century heyday of natural philosophy, Simon Schaffer was keen to analyze natural philosophy in terms of a fully fleshed-out “cosmology” of ideas. Analyzing these universalizing aspects of natural philosophy makes a lot of sense: in many venues natural philosophers (being philosophers) would have been expected to draw upon their general store of learning to discourse on topics ranging from astronomy to epistemology to ethics, and to articulate the connections between these subjects. Through the 1980s, Schaffer argued (especially early on) for embracing the sincerity and importance of the particular questions posed within systems of thought, rather than seeing the cosmology or system as simply some extension of an underlying fundamental commitment or accommodation to a partisan religious, political, or intellectual program, such as atheism, royalism, or “Newtonianism”. Looking at systems of arguments in this way, one could query the underlying intellectual assumptions that governed what made particular features of these systems into coherent arguments, and thus better understand why they were formulated and argued in the particular ways that they were. As in his discussions of early Kant or William Herschel, one could also query what constituted an actual innovation within natural philosophical systematizing without whiggishly relying on later acceptance as a category of analysis. (more…)
Philosophy, Sociology, and History: A Pocket History January 10, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Methods.Tags: Andy Pickering, Bruno Latour, David Bloor, Harry Collins, Herbert Butterfield, Karl Popper, Quentin Skinner, Robert K. Merton, Thomas Kuhn, William Whewell
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To understand the history of the history of science profession, it is very important to understand its contentious and evolving relationship with the philosophy and sociology of science, not to mention the history of philosophy. Here I’d like to outline a quick “pocket” history of the relationship between history, philosophy and sociology, and beg the tolerance of connoisseurs for boiling the points down so recklessly.
Karl Popper
Traditionally, the history of science has been of interest on account of its ability to reveal and demonstrate ideas about epistemology. William Whewell’s The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History (1840) followed quickly on his History of the Inductive Sciences (1837). Epistemology-oriented philosophers before and since have deployed cases from the history of science as illustrations of their theories about the progression of knowledge, and contain a normative element about how reliable knowledge can best be achieved.
In the 20th century, positivist philosophers and Karl Popper’s anti-positivist theory of the progress of science suggested clear demarcations between proper application of method and straying away from that method. History could illuminate these debates. According to a Popperian history of science, we don’t start from basic truths and build up; we start from a sort of primeval error and confusion (such as with the Aristotelian philosophy, which had been thoroughly trashed by Enlightenment philosophers) and, eliminating false beliefs, proceed toward truth. What is interesting in any progressive history is the origins and acceptance of accepted ideas. So, let’s say we read William Herschel, we easily pick out the discovery of Uranus (more…)
Ether Wave Propaganda 
