DOUBLE
REFRACTION
Looking twice at the history of science

Saturday, July 21, 2012

What do I think of Will's picture? Part I

version française -----------------------------------------------
Will's picture is, on the whole, a critical one. What do we see if we turn a critical eye on that picture itself? As readers will have gathered from the last few posts, I am broadly sympathetic to the picture. It expresses in a vivid way some issues that have been around for a while in the profession. More importantly, it brings up new issues that few others have put their finger on. But it also raises a number of puzzles and leaves a number of gaps to fill. This post is a résumé of the virtues and novelties of Will's picture as I see them. The follow-up post looks at some of the gaps and puzzles.

General virtues

Three general features of Will's picture are vividness, candour and empiricism. For vividness one need only list some of WTs neologisms: “cargo-cult historiography”, “gallery of practices”, “professional theodicy”, “the sublime image”, “the repetitive image”, etc.

Candour, in the sense of frank but friendly criticism of professional peers, is a virtue that WT holds dear: “we need to be able to argue about things until somebody has won, or, if necessary, some third way has been found, without having it devolve into existential crises of methodology or vicious knife-fights.”

As for empiricism, Ether Wave Propaganda does not contain a systematic survey of recent historians of science and their works. But it does include a thorough-going study of the oeuvre of one important author (Simon Schaffer), reviews of notable books in the field (especially this multi-post review), and remarks on some major recent writings on the current situation, including those in the Isis focus section, an important window on the state the field. To all this one can add WTs critical summaries (some of which are listed here) of articles that defined the field in the '70s, '80s and '90s.

Ideologies

These general virtues would be in vain if Will's picture contained nothing new in substance. Indeed, one danger is that the picture is passed off as just another grumble about microhistory or sociologists. In my view it is more than that. I take the four main novelties of the picture to be the idea of ideology as a driver of historiography, the opposition to general pictures of science, a description of better historiography, and an explanation of current historiography.

As per this post, ideologies are intellectual prejudices about how science works. Granted, it is not news that many historians and sociologists of science see their work, at least implicitly, as a refutation of certain general views about science. But one of WTs novel points is just how widespread is this project. It is not just a matter of refuting certain specific claims put forward by philosophers and historians, such as that there is such a thing as “crucial experiments”, “eureka moments”, or “cumulative progress.” It is not just one project for the historian of science but the project, and its assumptions lie behind the study of topics ranging from laboratory technicians to map-making.

As WT points out, one reason for the scope of this project is that historians do not see these intellectual prejudices just as abstract views put forward by recent philosophers of science, but as active forces in history. A consequence of this view is that the historian's job is not just to refute those prejudices but to also to display the things that those ideologies have hidden (from diagrams to broken instruments) and to describe the evils they have caused (from bitter controversies to environmental disasters).

Against general pictures

Another important novelty is WTs assessment of this ideology-oriented project. As I read him, his point is not that the picture of science built up by historians of science, in opposition to the scientist's picture, is false. Nor is his point that no such general picture of science is possible (although he may believe this to be the case).

His point is rather that building up such a picture of science is not the best use of the historian's time. It may be a suitable project for philosophers or sociologists, but historians have different fish to fry. Their job is to build up a picture of the historical development of science, not of the general nature of science. The two projects may well overlap, but historians have neglected the former by concentrating on the latter.

Better practice

The third novelty is to give strong hints as to what it means to carry out the historical project. To summarise, it involves navigable archives, traditions of practice, organizational syntheses, chronological problematics, and historiographical workhorses.

It is important to note that these recommendations are practical rather than conceptual. They concern (for example) the way footnotes are written and the way edited collections are organised, not the way we think about science or even about history.

It is also important that these proposals are antidotes to microhistories, but they differ from other antidotes that have been advanced for the same malady, such as “big picture” histories and accounts of the rise and fall of “epistemic virtues.” As I noted in this post, in current practice there is often a mismatch between the specificity of the case studies used and the generality of the conclusions that are drawn from them. WTs aim, I take it, is to improve the match by simultaneously making our cases less specific and our conclusions less general.

Explanations

Finally, Will's picture tries to explain how current practices arose and why they persist. I have summarised the explanatory part of the picture in these posts. Here I'll just recall two parts of this explanation that I find especially interesting.

Firstly there is the idea that sociologists of science allied themselves with the history of science in the 1970s and 1980s by exaggerating the difference between “internalist” and “externalist” historians and retrospectively attributing the success of the latter to their own, sociological insights.

A second key idea is that some historians of science have developed self-serving myths about the past of their own discipline. “Historians of science have themselves become appallingly poor historians of their own profession so as to amplify the significance of recent insights.”

***

So much for the virtues and novelties of Will's picture. The next post turns—at last!—to criticism.

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