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Why are even the best historians of science shy about doing history for its own sake? According to WT, part of the answer lies in a game of leap-frog that history played with sociology between about 1970 and 1995. In the first leap, sociology vaulted forward on the back of history. On the second leap, history returned the favour. This exchange did some good for historians. But it also did them harm—some of which historians could have anticipated if they had been more clear-eyed in their application of sociology to history.
The first leap
WT finds evidence for the first leap in work by Barry Barnes and Stephen Shapin in the late 1970s. At the time Barnes and Shapin drew upon the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas to push what WT calls “socio-epistemology,” an attempt to use the resources of sociology and anthropology to explain the beliefs of scientists, and especially the outcomes of scientific controversies.
Socio-epistemologists thought that traditional history of science had neglected this project, and indeed that socio-epistemology could explain this neglect as a species of taboo or fetish. But Shapin and Barnes also saw history as a valuable proving ground for their views. Hence “the success of social epistemology was bound up with its ability to forge an alliance with historiography.”
Shapin, Barnes and others forged this alliance by dividing historians into two factions, the “internalists” and “externalists”; talking up the successes of the latter; and then retrospectively attributing those successes to their own insights. The division into two factions was a ruse that “took years to successfully engineer” because many historians had a foot in both internalist and externalist camps, and because the methodological advances that historians had made up to then amounted to an “amorphous change” rather than a “coherent shift.”
Nevertheless, by inventing a coherent shift the socio-epistemologists could “predicate the successful continuation or even culmination of that [shift] on the acceptance of socio-epistemology as an articulation of the essential insights governing it.” Sociology was now necessary for the future success of history. The first leap was complete.
The second leap
Why did historians accept this loss of disciplinary autonomy? This brings us to the second leap. As noted above, sociologists accomplished the first leap by talking up the successes of “externalist” historians. This flattery had two important features. Firstly, it was vague, or “intellectually amorphous.” It was not clear exactly what were the methodological virtues that ensured the success of externalist historians.
The vagueness of these virtues meant that almost any historian could lay claim to them, and at the same time accuse almost any other historian for failing to display them. Sociologists gave historians an all-purpose instrument of self-praise, “a powerful rhetorical device that lends cogency to the claims of whoever purports to have the ability to ride the new wave.”
Incidentally, this helps to explain the current poverty of methodological thought that WT sees in the history of science: “anyone espousing a 'new' historiography [can] cast opponents as antiquated and their protests as evidence of their high-strung antiquity, without needing to consider the deeper contours of the dispute.”
The second feature that sociologists emphasised is that the “new wave” was a big one. Before sociologists came along, historians were just scholars making steady methodological gains. With help from sociologists, they were the lead actors in a drama of world-historical importance. Sociologists helped them find evils in the world--historiographical, historical, and contemporary--that could be explained or assuaged by the insights of socio-epistemology.
I've summarised the resulting explanations of evil or "professional theodicies" in an earlier post. WT notes that like all theodicies, the historians' are normative--ironically so, given the claim of socio-epistemologists to eschew the normative assessments of past science that were once made by internalist and Marxist historians of science. Historians have “retained from Marxist thought [the idea] that invisible ideas are responsible for mentalities that produce or sustain specifically pathological polities or societies.” The historians leapt towards normativity, not away from it.
The brush with sociology did some good
Historians did make some gains when they rode to glory on the backs of sociologists. “One of the greatest challenges we have is to write about science as culture. The sociology of science has undoubtedly helped us to do that.” Sociology has given us specific ideas, like tacit knowledge and the negotiation of boundaries, to meet this challenge. Shapin himself deserves credit: “no one, to my mind, better articulated how integral things like proper institution-building and proper etiquette have always been to ensuring the construction of proper knowledge.”
Furthermore, some specific historiographical advances can be put down to the mutual engagement of sociology, history, and anthropology. An example is Simon Schaffer's treatment of 18th-century natural philosophy as a “general scheme ... that flowed into questions … of life, body, mind, epistemology, ethics, society, theology, and politics.” Schaffer, whom WT includes among the theodicists, was as good as anyone at showing the coherence of the strange-seeming world views of past actors, such as that of the astronomer William Herschel. In his emphasis on such world views Schaffer was partly inspired by the notion of a "cosmology" as studied by anthropologists like Douglas and as deployed by socio-epistemologists like Barnes and Shapin.
But on the whole the brush was harmful
Nevertheless, in WTs view the historiographical gains owing to sociologists have been exaggerated. Historians had made a number of these gains on their own: “we never mention prior historical theorists like Quentin Skinner, who offer many of the same lessons [as sociologists do] without all the quasi-philosophical hoopla.” Indeed, sociologists sometimes simply quoted the lessons of past historians of science.**
Another complaint is that, apart from these re-invented wheels, few of the theories dreamt up by sociologists are applicable to history. Those theories “play a vaguely inspirational role, more a matter of footnotes and casual conversation than real engagement.” They offer a “vaguely salubrious anti-Whiggism” but nothing more.
Above all, the historiographical losses owing to the brush with sociology have been ignored or downplayed. These losses are just those bad habits that I summarised in an earlier post: the narrow project of unveiling the evils caused by the ideology of science; the debilitating reliance on case studies; the ill-conceived project of public enlightenment; and the over-emphasis on sociological as opposed to philosophical aspects of science.
The last of these bad habits is the one with the most obvious link to the sociology of science. Boundary studies in that discipline have rightly emphasised the rhetoric that occurs on the margins of science. But at the same time they have distracted historians from the reasoning behind the rhetoric. “Absent studies of ideas away from the boundaries, only polemics will tend to be visible.”
WT notes further that sociologists tend to study the “closure” of scientific disputes and not their aftermath. This seems to be because “the subsequent career of ideas that have achieved authority (in the form of technologies, policies, pedagogy, etc.) is apparently regarded [by some sociologists] as a trivial extension of some initial task of closure or appropriation.”
The losses are apparent in the decline of literature on natural philosophy. In the 1980s and early 90s, this literature contained lively discussions from a wide range of authors about the nature and plight of natural philosophy, a coherent tradition of thought that pre-dated modern science. “In 1990 it was perfectly possible to understand works stretching from Schaffer to [historian of physics Jed] Buchwald in methodology and focus as comprising a single, complex, thriving historiography.”
Unfortunately, in the melting-pot of the socio-epistemic imperative “all these [past scientific] practices reduced down to an interconnected but undifferentiated soup of science, culture, politics, and religion.” Historians lost not only the distinctions between different strands of natural philosophy, but also the idea (which motivated the whole literature in the first place) that natural philosophy in the 18th century was something different from the science of the 19th century. The same trend--towards integration under a single, quasi-philosophical theme without differentiation between varied traditions or projects or practices--can allegedly be found in Simon Schaffer's oeuvre in the 1990s.
Historians should have seen this coming
Alarm bells should have rung a long time ago. From the beginning there was a “conflict of interest” between the project of sociologists and that of historians. “Sociologists did not intend to be the servants of historians; they wanted to construct a new and better language for talking about the relationship between knowledge and society.”
Moreover, from as early as the 1980s sociologists seemed to recognise the conflict. Sociologists like Harry Collins started saying that their disinterest in the role of argument and evidence in science was just a methodological preference. These “special relativists” or “methodological relativists” did not make clear how their project related to historian's project of giving full accounts of past science. Should historians be methodological relativists also? Just about the early stages of scientific disputes, or about all stages? Collins did not say.
To be fair on Collins, historians did not ask these questions either. Instead they added methodological relativism to the armoury of critical insights that they now deploy as explanations of past and present evils. “Methodological relativism enjoyed a second career in STS as a kind of crucial critical (rather than methodological) insight, where others’ failure to apprehend it is habitually used to explain various discords in the science-society relationship.”
Another warning signal was that the “new” sociology was not as new as it appeared. The leading figure of the old sociology, and the foil for the new, was Robert Merton. The new sociologists contrasted their explanations of the beliefs of scientists with Merton's explanations of the norms, values, and institutions of science. Some of the new sociologists even denied that science had any norms. According to Michael Mulkay, for example, “there was no evidence that either norms or counter-norms were institutionalized within a functioning reward system in science.”
But Merton had an advocate in his student Thomas Gieryn. According to Gieryn, much of the “new” sociology of science was consistent with the norm that Merton called “organised skepticism.” Moreover, Merton anticipated the new-wave sociologists in his conviction that “even truths were held to be sociologically accountable.”
But one does not need to rely on his students to find a rather different Merton than the one portrayed by the “new” sociology: it is enough to consult his reaction to The Triple Helix, a no-holds-barred account of the discovery of DNA that supposedly lifted the veil on the dysfunctional aspects of science. Finally, Merton's interest in the creation of a digital archive of second-tier scientists shows that he was ahead of the game when it came to historiographical (rather than socio-epistemic) projects.
Some alarm bells were rung. A notable critique of the prevailing approach, indeed a "lost masterpiece" in recent historiography, is a 1982 review by Geoffrey Cantor of an important book on the history of 18th-century science. Charles Rosenberg is another of the "moderate critics" who pop up occasionally in WTs discussions. Without a detailed study of critics such as these, it is hard to say how numerous or influential they were. But on the whole WT suggests that the dissenting voices were just that: protests against an approach to the history of science that came to dominate in spite of those protests.
***
This rounds off my attempt to summarise Will's picture. The next post turns from summary to assessment.
**WTs example is the sociologist Harry Collins citing a line used by the historian of science Joseph Agassi. The line is that historians should avoid "being wise before the event"--that is, they should avoid explaining a historical event using lessons that could only be learned after the event. I would add that Joseph Agassi in turn got the line from the philosopher of science Francis Bacon.
Expand post.
Pourquoi même les meilleurs historiens ne font-ils pas l'histoire des science juste pour l'histoire ? D'après WT, la réponse se trouve dans un jeu de saute-mouton auquel l'histoire a joué avec la sociologie entre 1970 et 1995. Sur le premier saut, la sociologie a bondé avant avec l'aide de la sociologie. Sur le deuxième, l'histoire a rendu la pareille.
WT trouve des épreuves du premier saut dans un œuvre de Barry Barnes et Stephen Shapin qui a paru vers la fin des années soixante-dix. A l'époque Barnes et Shapin ont fait usage du travail de l'anthopologue Mary Dougles pour promouvoir ce que WT appelle « la socio-epistémologie », un projet d'utiliser les ressources de la sociologie et de l'anthropologie pour expliquer les resultats du projet scientifique, et surtout le bilan des controverses scientifiques.
Les socio-epistémologues ont déclaré que l'histoire des sciences traditionelle avait negligé ce projet, et en outre que la socio-epistémologie pouvait expliquer cette négligence comme une espèce de fetishe ou de tabou. Le point crucial est que les sociologues ont consideré l'histoire comme un important banc d'essai pour leur point de vue. Voici pourquoi, comme WT le dit, « le succès de l'epistémologie sociale s'est appuyé sur son capacité de forger une alliance avec l'histoire. »
Les sociologues ont atteint ce but en divisant les historiens des sciences en deux factions, lesquelles ils ont appellées « les internalistes » et « les externalistes. » Ils ont fait la promotion des réussites des derniers, et attribué rétrospectivement ces réussites à leurs propres idées. L'identification des deux factions a été un stratagème qui « a pris des années à aboutir » parce que beaucoup d'historiens ont eu un pied dans chacun des deux campes, celui des internalistes ainsi que celui des externalistes. De plus, les avances méthodologiques que les historiens ont fait répresentait « un vague changement » et non pas « une étape décisive ».
Néanmoins, ayant éveillé l'idée d'une étape décisive, les socio-epistémologues ont pu annoncer que « la prolongation ou même la couronnement de cette étape [appuyerait sur] l'acceptation de la socio-epistémologie comme une elucidation des idées qui avaient guidé cette étape. » Voici comment la sociologie est devenu indespensable à l'essor de l'histoire des sciences. Le premier saut s'acheva.
Pourquoi les historiens des sciences ont-ils accepté cette assaut sur leur indépendence ? Ceci nous amène au deuxième saut. On a vu que les sociologues ont executé le premier saut en promouvant les faites d'armes des historiens « externalistes ». Cette flatterie a eu deux aspects importants. Premièrement, elle a été vague, « intellectuellement informe. » On ne savait pas exactement ce qui ont été les vertus méthodologiques qui ont garanties le succès des historiens externalistes.
Puisqu'elles ont été vagues, presque tous les historiens pouvaient leur prétendre, et au même temps rapprocher les autres historiens à ne pas en faire preuve. Les sociologues avaient donné aux historiens un instrument d'auto-louanges propres à toute occasions, « un outil de polémique puissant qui donne de la force aux déclarations de n'importe quel historien qui fait preuve de leur capacité de chevaucher la nouvelle vague. »
Entre parenthèse, cela fait partie de l'explication de la manque de réflexion méthodologique dans la discipline aujour'hui: « les promoteurs d'une historiographie 'nouvelle' peuvent toujours présenter leur opposition comme démodée et leurs plaintes comme tant de preuves de leur antiquité, sans aborder les questions réelles du débat. »
La deuxième aspect de la « nouvelle vague » a été son grandeur. Avant l'arrivée des sociologue, les historiens n'étaient rien que des universitaires en train de faire des avances graduelles. Dans la vision des sociologues, ils sont devenus les comédiens principals dans une drame d'une importance historico-mondiale. Les sociologues les ont aidé à trouver des maux dans le monde—des maux historiographique, historique, et contemporien—qu'on pouvait expliquer et peut-être améliorer avec l'aide des idées des socio-epistémologues. D'où les « théodicées professionelles » dont j'ai parlé dans le premier poste dans cette série.
Comme toutes les théodicées, celle-ici est normatif—une ironie vu que les socio-epistémologues prétendent abondonner les jugements de la science passée qui ont été faits autrefois par les historiens internalistes ainsi que par les historiens Marxistes. Les historiens « ont récuperé de la pensée Marxiste [l'idée que] les idées invisibles sont l'origine des mentalités qui produisent et qui soutiennent des sociétés malades et des régimes politiques injustes. » On n'a pas pas sauté de la normativité mais bien entre ces bras.
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Les historiens ont sans doute rapporté quelques fruits pendant leur contact avec les sociologues. « L'une des plus grands defis qui nous face est d'étudier la science comme une forme de culture. Indubitablement la sociologie des sciences nous a aidé à faire precisement ça.» La sociologie nous a donné des idées spécifiques, comme « le savoir tacite » et « la negotiation des limites » qui séparent les sciences, qui ont aidé notre avance sur ce front. Shapin mérite de l'admiration particulière : « à mon avis, personne n
De plus, il existe quelques avances historiographiques qui sont redevables à « l'entente cordiale » entre la sociologie, l'histoire, et l'anthropologie. Un bon exemple est le traitement par Simon Schaffer de la physique du dix-huitième siècle comme un « système général … qui a été étroitement lié aux questions … de la vie humaine, le corps, l'âme, la moralité, la société, la théologie, et la politique. » Schaffer, qui WT a inclus parmi les croyants des théodicées notées ci-dessus, a été aussi propre que personne à révéler la cohérence des mentalités insolites des scienfiques du passé, tel quecelui de l'astronome William Herschel.
Néanmoins, les bénéfices redevables ont été trop souvent exagérés. Les historiens avait déjà fait quelques avances saines sans l'aide des sociologues. « On ne parle jamais les pensurs historiographiques antérieur, comme par exemple Quentin Skinner, qui ont offert des leçons pareilles [à celles des sociologues] sans toute l'échafaudage quasi-philosophique [que les sociologues ont construite]. » En effect, les sociologues ont parfois tout simplement cité les leçons des historiens antérieurs.
A part ces roues réinventées, beaucoup des théories concoctées par les sociologues ne s'applique pas à l'étude de l'histoire. Ils « jouent une rôle vaguement inspirant, plutot au niveau des notes en bas de page et de la conversation informelle qu'au niveau de l'interaction réelle ». Ils nous offerent « une anti-Whiggisme qui à l'air vaguement salubre » mais rien d'autre que ça.
Mais par-dessus tout, l'entente avec la sociologie a suscité les mauvaises habitudes que j'ai résumées dans un poste antérieur : la poursuite bornée du dévoilement des maux qui ont été perpétré par les préjugés idéologique concernant la science ; la sur-importance qu'on accorde aux études de cas, aux aspects sociologiques de la science, et à l'édification du grand public.
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