DOUBLE
REFRACTION
Looking twice at the history of science

Friday, May 25, 2012

Why do they do it if there's something wrong with it?

version française -----------------------------------------------
If it is broke, why not fix it?
In previous posts on Will's picture I have said what historians do now according to that picture, and what is wrong with what they do now.

If something is wrong, why don't things change? Some answers are predictable: the situation makes historians feel good, and at any rate it can be rationalised. Others are deeper, arising from two entrenched habits. Firstly, our lack of methodological reflection means that we do not recognise the problem. Secondly, our poor record-keeping means that we forget aspects of our own past work, the work of past historians, and the past in general.

There are rationalisations. This post “presents a few fairly satirical guesses as to why we might tell ourselves working in this way makes sense today.” For example, we tell ourselves that that all we need are more case studies, forgetting the difference between collecting pieces in a box and assembling a puzzle. Alternatively, all we need are more critical insights like the one about the neglected role of hats in history. Or perhaps we need more public outreach--after all, ideologies don't disappear overnight. A different tack is to deny that improvement is possible: history is not a science, and the idea of a coherent historiography is a positivist dream.

It keeps the professional peace. In other places WT makes some guesses as to why the bad habits really persist. One is that they block conflict. Neither the critical insights nor the case studies are worth arguing over, the former because they are too vague and the latter because each study deals with different people, periods, and events. Rather like Robert Boyle after the English Revolution, historians are averse to conflict after the bitter and fruitless exchanges that made up the science wars.

The result is an “anodyne grande entente” in which criticism, one of the pistons of progress, is reserved for people outside the profession. Historians talk a lot about interdisciplinarity but shy away from the “amicable clashes” that make such interaction worthwhile.

It makes us feel important. Perhaps we aim “to make ourselves feel good by intellectually combating the evils produced by the alliance between science and 19th century imperialism (or the Cold War, or the evils of technocratic thinking, or whatever).” Early on WT put forward this “cynical theory” as a tongue-in-cheek conjecture. But the tongue came out of the cheek in posts like this one about the “almost absurdly heroic myth we have made up about ourselves.” According to Will, this myth stokes our righteousness by making our ideas seem newer and more virtuous than they really are. More on this form of amnesia below.

It does have some limited historiographical value. On a more positive note, case studies can have some genuine historical value by contributing to “localized historiographies” of canonical people or discoveries. Perhaps the fulfilment of this worthy goal has obscured the larger project of linking together the various localized historiographies.

Methodological complacency. Historians do not engage in much reflection about their methods, making it hard for them to recognise the rut they are in and even harder for them to get out. Past practitioners “tended to think deeply about the tools they used, and had a clear notion of what they hoped to accomplish with them in both the short and long run.” Nowadays, methodological awareness consists in scanning the work of colleagues for the right “critical insights” and brow-beating non-historians for their failure to appreciate those insights. Things like fact-checking and good handling of evidence are considered secondary. “Within this community, it is desirable that works produced have factual integrity. But the real premium is on their sublimity.”

In one post WT seems to say that “craft” rather than “methodology” is the real problem. “To continue to act as though methodology were still our most pressing problem is to ignore the question of how we might attain and retain understanding through better historiographical craft.” Is WT being inconsistent? Not, I think, in any matters of substance. Only in his use of the terms “craft” and “methodology.” In the phrase “methodological complacency” I use “methodology” broadly to include matters of “craft” such as how to organise data in a book, what to include in footnotes, etc.

Amnesia about recent historiography. As noted in my previous post, historians do not maintain a navigable archive of past work in the field. This failure not only impedes real progress, but gives us the illusion of progress by disguising repetition as novelty. The result of this “slipping timeline” is a sequence of newly-invented wheels. One example is the failure to keep a record of the critical insights that have emerged so far, ensuring that the “sublime image” is also a “repetitive image.”

Another example of repetition-as-novelty is “cargo cult historiography.” The idea here is that because we have forgotten the debates in which our current tools were forged, we use them willy-nilly without care for their strengths and weaknesses. “Dances understood to have once brought rain [are] repeated,” but the rain no longer comes.

Amnesia about old historiography.Another instance of repetition-as-novelty is the ill-treatment of past historians of science. Christopher Donohue writes that current practice “robs previous historiography of the conceptual rigor it rightfully possesses.” WT is no less frank: “Historians of science have themselves become appallingly poor historians of their own profession so as to amplify the significance of recent insights.”

This amnesia sometimes occurs locally. For example, Stephen Shapin is ticked off for “suppos[ing] the poverty of prior historiography to provide himself with a fresh canvas” in a book dealing with industrial science in the twentieth century. Another local example is the sociologist Robert Merton, to whom we falsely attribute naïve views about the role of things like jealousy and selfishness in scientific work, and whose work is wrongly considered to be incompatible with later sociology of science. Finally, historians of technology prior to about 1980 are widely believed to have been technological determinists when in fact they were not, according to David Edgerton.

The amnesia also occurs globally. This is just to say that the historiographical theodicy mentioned in my first post in this series is false. According to that theodicy, past history of science was inept, and this ineptness was due to the intellectual prejudices of the historians who wrote it.

According to WT, these claims are doubly embarrassing for the profession. They are wrong, or at least exaggerated; and they are wrong for the same reason that old historians are supposed to have been wrong, namely they are myths that validate the current tastes of the profession. The message is clear: “we have to stop making up fairytales about ourselves and our brave battles against intellectual strawmen.”

This ill-treatment of past historians of science is exacerbated by the current emphasis on ornament and evangelism as against factual integrity. Past authors did not share our taste for ornament and evangelism, and for this reason we are apt to ignore those authors or even fail to recognise their work as history. But the loss is ours, since many past authors did have a taste for factual integrity.

The last three sentences in the previous paragraph are my take on the argument in this post, which distinguishes between “good work” and “good history” and suggests that our obsession with the former causes us to neglect past instances of the latter.

Amnesia about the past in general. Finally, other people in the past are treated in the same way as past historians. For example, policy scientists in the twentieth-century are thought to have laboured under the prejudice that their work was “impersonal, appealing to universal truth.” Not so, according to WT: “I see much of my work as a systematic attack on the idea that policy scientists ever harbored such an idea.”

This is part of a larger problem that WT labels the “twentieth-century turning point presumption.” The presumption is that some time in the mid-late twentieth-century there was a kind of intellectual epiphany that replaced the old, naïve views about science with the set of critical insights that we now hold so dear.

According to EWP, one problem with this presumption is that it is false, or at least misleading. Another problem is that it is vague, suffering from a “mobile periodisation.” That is, the naïve views are said variously to have emerged in seventeenth-century England, Enlightenment France, Victorian England, and even as late as the Cold War. “This is a game in which scholars of all periods can participate.”

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At the beginning of my last post I noted that WT has some ideas on the route by which we arrived at the cul-de-sac of history of science in the present day. The job of the next post is to trace this route as WT conceives it.
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