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This is my last post on Will's picture, but by no means the least. My aim here is to identify gaps or inconsistencies in Will's picture, with a view to exploring these issues on this blog in the future. This post ends with a list of ten questions for future posts.
Moderates
One self-acknowledged gap in Will's picture is the coverage of “moderates”: historians who have defended older ways of doing the history of science or expressed reservations about newer trends. Examples are Geoffrey Cantor, Charles Rosenberg, and Frederic Lawrence Holmes. These are good examples, but without looking at historians such as these in more detail, it is hard to know whether they were isolated voices or whether they formed coherent traditions.
In my view there are two traditions that are worth a closer look. One could be called the “Kuhnian school”: it is represented by writers such as Holmes, John Heilbron, Jed Buchwald, and Russell MacCormmach; and its main organ is the journal currently known as Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, of which Heilbron and MacCormmach have been long-term editors. It specialises in fine-grained studies of individual discoveries and in more wide-ranging accounts of the evolution of scientific disciplines.
The second might be called the “Cambridge school.” It is linked to the school of the same name in the history of political thought, a school named after the UK university that was once home to Quentin Skinner, the most well-known member of the school. The history of science version of the Cambridge school specialises in quasi-philosophical discussions on how to do the history of science, with special emphasis on the problem of understanding alien cultures. It is more fashionable these days than the Kuhnian school, and more concerned with methodological questions in the history of science.
These traditions raise an issue that WT does not deal with in much detail. Suppose that WT is right that some recent historians and sociologists of science have exaggerated the methodological gains that the discipline has made since about 1970. In that case, what are the real gains that historians made before and after that point? Both the Kuhnian school and the Cambridge school have opinions about what these gains were. One of my interests on this blog is to assess those opinions. Presumably the history of science that comes out of those two schools is better than history of science in, say, 1900. But in what way is it better, exactly?
Real gains versus fake gains.
A related question is how the exaggeration occurred in the first place. By what rhetorical procedure have real gains been transformed into over-blown gains? The question is important because if we could identify the procedure we could apply it in reverse in order to recover the real gains from the hyperbole.
One general procedure that WT identifies is not so much to exaggerate the gains but to exaggerate their novelty. As WT put it: “Historians of science have themselves become appallingly poor historians of their own profession so as to amplify the significance of recent insights.”
Another general procedure is to write history itself (rather than the history of the profession) in such a way as to lend a kind of world-historical importance to recent gains. WT has suggested that this role may be served by the “theodicy of modernity” – the idea that “scientific progress had outstripped moral progress, leading to the incidence and prospect of various evils.”
I suggest that another general procedure has also been widespread in recent decades. It consists in presenting thematic gains as methodological gains. A thematic gain consists in identifying an aspect of science that has been neglected so far by historians and that can in principle be applied to a wide range of cases throughout the history of science. There is a long list of such themes: architecture, diagrams, pedagogy, instruments, objects, geography, bodies, laboratories, standards, conversations, food...
Often these gains are genuine: the theme is genuinely interesting and has been genuinely neglected. The gains only start to ring false when they are presented, explicitly or otherwise, as gains in method. That is, when they are presented as fundamental changes in the way the we do the history of science, changes to which one must adhere on pain of doing bad history.
Internal history of science
One of the bad habits of present-day history of science, according to Will's picture, is a tendency to downplay the intellectual side of science in favour of social, political, and cultural factors. This part of WTs view came through most clearly in his spirited defense of a call (by the outgoing President of the History of Science Society) for putting the “science” back into the history of science. There and elsewhere WT appears to argue for what used to be called “internal” history of science.
In my view Will's picture leaves three unanswered questions about internal history of science.
The first question is terminological. WT does not often use the terms “internal” and “external” history. Usually he writes about “epistemological” as opposed to “sociological” history, about “philosophy” versus “anti-philosophy”, or about “intellectual history” or “the history of ideas.” Do all these terms have different meanings, or are they different names for the same thing? If they have the same meanings, why not stick with the old-fashioned distinction between “internal” and “external” history? If they mean different things, and hence refer to different historical projects, which of these projects (if any) are better than the others?
I suspect that this terminological question is related to the following more substantial question: how we can justify internal history of science after everything that has been learnt about past science over the last forty years or so? WTs defense of internal history of science is, I think, two-fold. Firstly, as claimed here, it is simply obvious that intellectual factors like reasons and evidence are part of any complete explanation for the beliefs and actions of past scientists. Secondly, as claimed here, historians can legitimately “abstract” these factors from the many non-intellectual factors that are also (just as obviously) part of any complete explanation of past science.
I agree with this defense as far as it goes. The problem is that it doesn't go very far. What historians have discovered over the last few decades, according to a common view, is precisely that intellectual factors are much more closely intertwined with non-intellectual factors than historians of science used to think. WT seems to share this view, acknowledging for example the “clear and powerful links between scientific methods of argumentation and the moral economy in which those arguments took place.” The conclusion that is often drawn from this common view is that the process of abstraction that WT recommends is not legitimate. So the question remains of how to reconcile the legitimacy of internal history of science with the fact that much recent progress has been made by apparently denying its legitimacy.
The third question concerning internal history of science is one about the “brush with sociology” that I summarised in this post. WT suggests, roughly, that sociology forged an alliance with history by artificially dividing historians of science into “internalist” and “externalist” camps. The question is whether this division really was artificial. Did sociologists like Stephen Shapin and Barry Barnes exaggerate the degree to which historians before circa. 1975 had separated themselves into these camps? Or was there a genuine separation, with genuine hostility between the two separated groups?
Answering this third question would mean looking in detail at the evidence that Shapin and Barnes presented, and the evidence they left out. Understandably WT has not had room to go into such detail. But without the detail it is hard to credit this part of WTs explanation of the current state of the discipline.
Social construction versus the cult of invisibilty
WT does not have much time for debates about whether “knowledge is relative” or whether “science is socially constructed” or whether “the beliefs of science are caused by nature.” Such questions were discussed in the so-called science wars of the 1990s. And in WTs view “most everyone now agrees that the science wars were absurd … What had been achieved [in these debates] were anodyne solutions to a set of historiographical non-problems.”
A consequence of this view is that in the present day historians have little to gain by taking a particular position in the social construction debate. On WTs view, we will not become better historians by persuading ourselves (for example) that science is not socially constructed after all. The root of current bad practices is not social constructivism but the "cult of invisibility" ie. the project of unveiling the harms caused by, and the things hidden by, the intellectual prejudices that past actors held about science. So instead of revisiting the SSK debate, WT advises that we search for the origins of the cult of invisibility, perhaps by tracing the history of “ideology” as an analytic term in social science.
I am not so sure that there is nothing to gain by revisiting aspects of the SSK debate. My suspicion is that the core of the “intellectual prejudices” that historians of science now set themselves against are just the beliefs that social constructionists set themselves against. Social constructionists tend to say, for example, that science is “exquisitely sensitive to its social context”, or that “experimental results can in principle always be challenged”, or that “the power of science lies in relations of trust and authority between scientists.” Much current research in the history of science can be seen either as an affirmation of such claims or as a consequence of them.
One of those consequences may be the generalised suspicion of the scientist's self-image that WT sees as widespread in the discipline. Perhaps another consequence is be the proliferation of themes that I noted above: social construction encourages the search for new themes insofar as it rules out the old themes (like data, evidence, and argument) as explanations for the beliefs of scientists.
I take WTs point that settling debates about the general nature of science is not the main job of the historian. But clearly a historian's beliefs about the general nature of science can sometimes effect the quality of the history they write. For example, historians who believe that all published scientific articles are outright lies are likely to do bad history of science. Moreover, as that example suggests, the denial of a general claim about science need not itself be a general claim. To deny that published articles are outright lies one does not need to assert that they are all innocent truths.
To sum up, it is possible that social constructionists sometimes use bad philosophical arguments to support false views about science, views that in turn effect the way we do the history of science. If that is the case, historians of science can benefit from any good philosophical arguments that replace those false views with truer ones—or simply from arguments that show a broader range of defensible general views about science than those endorsed by social constructivists.
Unity or decontextualisation?
Sometimes WT approves of historians who find similarities between the science of different epochs, and sometimes he disapproves of historians who find similarities that don't really exist. In principle there is nothing wrong with this double-edged criticism. But sometimes I have trouble seeing the difference between the works that are thus praised and criticised.
For example, in a collection of studies of scientific errors, Jed Buchwald and Allan Franklin suggest that the errors of Ptolemy can be usefully compared to those of Newton, despite the great gaps of time and culture between those two thinkers. WT seems to approve of such comparisons on the historiographical ground that they “[allow] us to establish historical explanations of why historical actors were able to come to intellectual agreement.”
So far so good. But in a different example, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have tried to compare the styles of representation of scientists widely separated by time and culture. Far from approving of this project, WT suggests that it succeeds only through an “unduly biased reading of the historical record.” WTs complaint is that “for the act of representation to be understood adequately, associated practices and argumentative ideas must be taken into account, which requires the historian to look beyond the act of representation to the particulars of the socio-intellecutal problems that the image is intended to resolve.”
It is not clear to me why this complaint can be levelled against Daston and Galison but not against Buchwald and Franklin.
Perspectivism versus repetition
There is another apparent inconsistency in Will's picture. One of WTs criticisms is that current history of science is too repetitive, constantly recycling a small number of basic insights; it worships the “repetitious image.” The other is that it is too diverse, accommodating a wide range of perspectives that make it hard to build up any coherent picture of the long-term development of science. Is it consistent to say that the current historiography of science is both repetitive and diverse?
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Ten questions
Here are ten questions that have arisen out of my survey of Will's picture, and which have been discussed in this post. The later posts on this blog will fulfill their aim if they can give at least partial answers to at least some of these questions.
1. What is the nature and evolution of “moderate” traditions like the Kuhnian school and the Cambridge school?
2. What are the opinions of these traditions about the real gains that historians of science have made in the course of the twentieth century? What do we make of these opinions? What are the merits and demerits of “pre-historic” histories of science, ie. those written before about 1960?
3. What are the thematic gains that historians of science have inflated by presenting them as methodological gains?
4. Do we need a replacement for the old terms “internal” and “external” history, and if so why?
5. How can we reconcile the legitimacy of internal history of science with the fact that much recent progress has been made by apparently denying its legitimacy? In particular, if internal history of science involves abstraction, is it any worse than the abstraction that historians of all kinds routinely perform?
6. Did sociologists like Barnes and Bloor really exaggerate the division between “internal” and “external” historians of science?
7. What do we gain from thinking about the recent historiography of science in terms of a “cult of invisibility” instead of in terms of “social construction”?
8. Are there any widespread prejudices among historians of science that can be corrected by doing better philosophy of science?
9. Is there a principled way of distinguishing themes that historians can fruitfully track across widely separated historical contexts, from themes that cannot be studied in this way?
10. Can historians of science reasonably be criticised for being both repetitive and diverse?
Expand post.
Ceci est mon dernier post sur la vision de Will, mais il est loin d'être le moins important. Mon but ici est d'identifier quelques questions ou problèmes qui surgissent de la vision de Will, en vue de les examiner plus en détail au long de la vie de ce blog. Je termine ce post avec une liste de questions pour des posts à venir.
Quelles ont été les avancées réelles?
Une lacune que WT a lui-même remarquée dans sa propre vision concerne les “modérés” qui ont soutenu des styles d'histoire plus traditionnels ou qui ont émis des réserves sur les tendances nouvelles. Trois exemples que WT a notés sont Geoffrey Cantor, Charles Rosenberg, et Lawrence Holmes. Mais sans examiner des historiens pareils plus en détail on ne peut pas savoir s'ils constituent des voix isolées ou au contraire des membres d'une tradition cohérente.
A mon avis il y a deux traditions qui valent un coup d'oeil. La première est ce que je nommerais “l'école de Kuhn.” Elle comporte des historiens comme Holmes, John Heilbron, Jed Buchwald, et Russell MacCormmach, et son porte-parole principal est la revue qui s'appelle actuellement Etudes Historiques des Sciences Naturelles (Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences). Elle est spécialisée dans des reconstructions denses des découvertes scientifiques renommées, et également dans des études plus larges de l'évolution des diverses disciplines scientifiques.
La deuxième tradition et ce que j'appelle “l'école de Cambridge.” Elle est liée à l'école du même nom dans l'histoire de la pensée politique, laquelle est associée à l'Université de Cambridge en Angleterre et compte Quentin Skinner, John Pocock, et John Dunn comme ses partisans principaux. La partie scientifique de cette école est spécialisée dans des articles quasi-philosophiques sur comment faire l'histoire des sciences, lesquels mettent l'accent sur le problème de la connaissance des cultures étrangères. Cette école est actuellement plus à la mode que celle de Kuhn, et plus préoccupée que la dernière par la méthodologie de l'histoire.
Ces deux traditions font naître une question dont WT ne traite pas vraiment. Supposons que WT ait raison en disant que les historiens et les sociologues ont exagéré les avancées méthodologiques de la discipline depuis (disons) 1970. Cela posé, quelles sont les avancées réelles que les historiens ont faites avant et après 1970? Les écoles de Kuhn et de Cambridge ont toutes deux des opinions sur la nature de ces avancées légitimes. Un des projets de ce blog est d'évaluer ces opinions.
Comment aller d'avancées réelles à des fausses?
Une question liée à la dernière est comment cette exagération s'est déroulée en premier lieu. De quels procédés rhétoriques a-t-on fait usage pour transformer des avancées réelles mais modestes en des avancées sur-éstimées et trompeuses? Cette question est importante parce que si on pouvait identifier ces procédés on pourrait les inverser afin de récuperer les avancées réelles.
Un des procédés dont WT a parlé est moins une façon d'exagérer la valeur de nos propres idées qu'une façon d'exagérer leur nouveauté. Comme WT l'a écrit: “Les historiens des sciences sont devenus des historiens lamentables de leur propre profession afin d'amplifier l'importance des idées récentes.”
Un deuxième procédé est d'écrire l'histoire elle-même (plutôt que l'histoire de sa profession) de telle façon à conférer une importance presque historico-mondiale aux idées récentes. WT a suggéré que ce rôle a été joué par la “théodicée de la modernité” – l'idée que “le progrès scientifique a dépassé le progrès moral, déclenchant un grand nombre de maux actuels et potentiels.”
Je suggère qu'il y a un autre procédé qui a récemment connu un grand succès. Il s'agit de présenter des avancées thématiques comme des avancées méthodologiques. Une avancée thématique consiste à identifier un aspect de la science qui a été négligé jusqu'à présent par les historiens et qui à priori peut être appliqué à n'importe quel cas dans l'histoire des sciences. Il y a une grande liste de thèmes de ce genre: l'architecture, les graphiques, la pédagogie, les instruments, les objets, la géographie, le corps humain, les laboratoires, la metrologie, la conversation, la nourriture...
Souvent ces avancées thématiques sont réelles. C'est-à-dire que le thème en question est souvent réellement négligé et réellement intéressant. Elles ne commencent à être trompeuses que quand elles sont presentées, explicitement ou pas, comme des changements fondamentaux dans la manière dont on fait de l'histoire des sciences, des changements auxquels on doit s'inscrire sous peine de ne pas faire la vraie histoire.
L'histoire interne des sciences
Une des mauvaise habitudes de l'historien des sciences typique d'aujourd'hui, d'après WT, est sa tendance à minimiser l'aspect intellectuel de la science en faveur de ses aspects sociaux, politicaux, et culturaux. Cette partie des idées de WT est mise en évidence surtout dans sa défense animée d'un appel récent pour “réinstaller la science dans l'histoire des sciences.” Là et ailleurs WT paraît affirmer la valeur de ce que on appelait l'histoire des sciences “interne.”
Après avoir lu la vision de Will il y a trois questions qui me restent sans réponse concernant l'histoire interne.
La première est une question de terminologie. WT n'utilise pas souvent les mots “interne” et “externe.” D'habitude il parle de l'histoire “épistémologique” par opposition à l'histoire “sociologique”, ou de la “philosophie” et de “l'anti-philosophie”, ou de l'histoire “intellectuelle” ou de “l'histoire des idées.” Tout ces termes ont-ils un sens différent, ou sont-ils tout simplement des noms différents pour la même chose? S'ils ont tout le même sens, pourquoi ne pas utiliser les termes anciens “interne” et “externe”? Et s'ils n'ont pas le même sens, et se rapportent tous à des projets différents, quels sont les projets qui méritent notre attention?
Je me doute que cette question de terminologie est liée à une question plus considérable, à savoir: comment peut-on justifier l'histoire des sciences interne après tout ce qu'on appris pendant les dernières décennies à propos de la science? D'après ce que je comprends, WT est pour l'histoire interne pour deux raisons. Premièrement, comme il le constate ici, il est tout simplement évident que les causes intellectuelles font partie d'une explication complète des actes et des croyances des scientifiques du passé. Deuxièmement, comme il le constate ici, les historiens ont le droit d'extraire ces facteurs intellectuels des facteurs non-intellectuels qui font aussi partie d'une explication complète de la science du passé.
Cette défense en elle-même n'est pas mal, mais il en faut plus. Car ce que les historiens ont découvert lors de ces quarante années est justement que les facteurs intellectuels sont beaucoup plus entremêlés avec les facteurs non-intellectuels que ce qu'on croyait avant. La conclusion qui est souvent tirée de cette idée est qu'on n'a pas le droit d'isoler les facteurs intellectuels comme WT le propose. La question demeure: comment réconcilier la validité de l'histoire interne avec le fait qu'on a fait beaucoup de progrès réels en niant sa validité?
La troisième question concerne le contact entre l'histoire et la sociologie que j'ai raconté dans ce post. WT a suggéré que les sociologues ont forgé une alliance avec les historiens dans les années soixante-dix et quatres-vingt en éxagérant les différences entre les historiens “internes” et les historiens “externes.”
Mais ont-ils vraiment exagéré cette différence? Pour répondre à cette question il faut examiner en détail les données que les sociologues ont exposées sur le sujet, ainsi que les données qu'ils ont ignorées. Sans ces détails je ne suis pas convaincu par cette partie de l'explication que WT donne de l'état actuel de l'histoire des sciences.
Le constructivisme social contre le culte de l'invisibilité
WT ne supporte pas les débats sur des questions telles que “le savoir est-il relatif?”, “la science est-elle une construction sociale?”, etc. Ces questions ont été posées pendant les soit-disants “guerres de science” dans les années quante-vingt-dix, et d'après WT “presque tout le monde est d'accord que les guerres de science étaient absurdes.”
Le résultat de ce point de vue est qu'aujourd'hui les historiens des sciences n'ont rien à gagner en reprenant ces debats. D'après WT on ne va pas devenir des historiens plus efficaces en se convainquant, par example, que la science après tout n'est pas une construction sociale. L'origine des pratiques actuelles n'est pas le constructivisme social mais le culte de l'invisibilité, c'est-à-dire le projet de dévoiler les choses qui ont été cachées, et les maux qui ont été causés, par certains préjugés intellectuels à propos de la science. Alors au lieu de recommencer les guerres de science, WT nous conseille plutôt de trouver les origines du culte de l'invisibilité, peut-être en esquissant l'histoire du terme “idéologie” dans les sciences sociales.
Je ne suis pas sur qu'on n'ait rien à gagner en revenant sur quelques aspects du débat sur la construction sociale de la science. Je me doute que la plupart des “préjugés intellectuels” auxquels les historiens des science s'opposent actuellement ne sont que les croyances auxquelles les constructivistes s'opposent. Les constructivistes ont tendance à dire, par exemple, que la science est “très sensible à son contexte sociale”, que “n'importe quel résultat expérimental peut être nier”, ou que “l'efficacité de la science découle principalement des relations de confiance et d'autorité entre un grand nombre des scientifiques.” Beaucoup de recherche actuelle dans la discipline peut être considérée soit comme une affirmation de telles idées soit comme leur conséquence.
Les conséquences sont peut-être plus importantes que les affirmations directes. L'une des conséquences est peut-être la méfiance vague de l'autoportrait des scientifiques, une méfiance qui semble être très répandue dans la discipline. Une deuxième conséquence est peut-être la multiplication des thèmes que j'ai remarqués ci-dessus. Le constructivisme social soutient la recherche de thèmes noveaux dans la mesure où il élimine les thèmes traditionels (les données, les preuves, etc.) comme explications d'actes et des croyances de scientifiques.
J'avoue que je suis d'accord avec le constat de WT que la tache principale de l'historien des sciences n'est pas de participer aux débats sur la nature générale des sciences. Mais il est évident que les idées d'un historien sur la nature générale de la science puissent (je ne dis pas “doivent”) avoir un effet sur la qualité de ce qu'il fait en tant qu'historien. Par exemple, les ouvrages d'un historien vont souffrir s'il croit que tous les articles qui ont jamais été publiés par les scientifiques sont de parfaits mensonges.
En bref, il est possible que les constructivistes sociaux utilisent parfois de mauvais arguments pour soutenir des idées fausses sur la nature générale de la science, et que ces idées aient parfois un effet défavorable sur l'histoire qu'on écrit. Cela posé, les historiens des sciences peuvent tirer profit de bons arguments qui aident à remplacer ces idées fausses avec des idées plus vraisemblables – ou du moins ceux qui montrent la variété des idées défendables sur la nature générale des sciences.
L'unité ou les idées sans contexte?
Parfois WT est en faveur des historiens qui trouvent des ressemblences entre la science de différentes époques. Ailleurs il s'exprime contre les historiens qui insistent sur des rassemblences qui n'existent pas réellement. En principe ces deux jugements ne sont pas contradictoires. Mais parfois j'ai du mal à apercevoir la différence entre les ouvrages qui sont ainsi loués et critiqués.
Par exemple, dans un livre sur l'histoire de l'erreur scientifique, Jed Buchwald et Allan Franklin ont suggéré que les erreurs de l'astronome Ptolemée peuvent être utilement comparées aux erreurs de Newton, malgré le grand écart entre le Grec du deuxième siècle et l'Anglais du dix-septième. WT est pour de telles comparaisons parce qu'elles “nous permettent de fournir des explications historiques sur comment les scientifiques du passé sont parvenus à être d'accord sur des questions intellectuelles.”
Jusqu'à ici, tout va bien. Mais dans un autre exemple, Lorraine Daston et Peter Galison ont essayé de comparer les styles de représentation des scientifiques qui sont presque aussi écartés les uns des autres que Newton l'est de Ptolemée. Loin de louer ce projet, WT suggère qu'il ne peut qu'aboutir à une “interprétation partielle des documents historiques.” WT explique que “pour bien comprendre un acte de représentation, on doit tenir compte des idées et des pratiques associées à cet acte, ce qui oblige l'historien à chercher derrière l'acte lui-même les détails des problèmes socio-intellectuels que la représentation a été créée pour résoudre.” Ce que je ne comprends pas est comment cette critique peut être valable contre Daston et Galison mais pas valable contre Buchwald et Franklin.
La répétition et le perspectisme
Un dernier problème, ou du moins un problème apparent, concerne deux autre critiques que WT addresse aux historiens d'aujourd'hui. Une de ces critiques est que l'histoire des sciences est trop répétitive, étant toujours en train de réutiliser un petit nombre d'idées. L'autre critique est que l'histoire qu'on écrit est trop variée, entretenant un grand nombre de styles, d'intérêts, et de perspectives qui rendent difficile la formation d'une idée cohérente de telle ou telle époque dans la science du passé. La question est évidente: comment l'histoire des sciences peut-elle être em même temps répétitive et variée?
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Dix questions
Voici un résumé des dix questions qui ont surgi de ma vue d'ensemble de la vision de Will, des questions dont j'ai parlées dans ce post.
1. Quelle est la nature et l'évolution des traditions “modérées” comme par exemple l'école de Kuhn et celle de Cambridge?
2. Quelles sont les opinions de ces traditions sur les avancées réelles que les historiens des sciences ont faites tout au long du vingtième siècle? Ces opinions sont-elles deféndables? Et quels sont les qualités et les défauts des ouvrages “pre-historiques” sur l'histoire des sciences, c'est-à-dire des livres écrits avant environ 1960?
3. Quelles sont les avancées thématiques que les historiens des sciences ont exagérées en les présentant comme des avancées méthodologiques?
4. Avons-nous besoin d'une remplacement pour les termes “interne” et “externe” par rapport à l'histoire des sciences? Si la réponse est “oui”, pourquoi?
5. Comment pouvons-nous réconcilier la validité de l'histoire des sciences “interne” avec le progrès qu'on a fait en insistant sur sa manque de validité?
6. Les sociologues comme Barnes et Shapin ont-ils vraiment exagéré l'écart et le conflit entre les historians “internes” et les historiens “externes” de la science?
7. Quel est l'avantage à comprendre le passé récent de l'histoire des sciences en termes d'un “culte d'invisibilité” au lieu du “constructivisme social”?
8. En particulier, y a-t-il des préjugés repandus parmi les historiens des sciences qu'on peut améliorer en mieux faisant la philosophie des sciences?
9. Existe-il une façon cohérente de distinguer les thèmes que les historiens peuvent étudier utilement à travers des contextes radicalement séparés, des thèmes qu'on ne peut pas étudier ainsi?
10. Peut-on reprocher aux historiens des sciences d'être au même temps trop répétitifs et trop diverses? Si la réponse est “oui”, comment peut-on le faire sans se contredire?
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Michael, sorry it's taken me so long to put together a response to this last post -- the last part of the summer has been very busy for me. First off, I'm glad that these criticisms seem to be mainly "around the edges," concerning incompleteness and inconsistency, rather than the core assumptions of my picture.
ReplyDeletePointing to the "Kuhnian" school is, I think, an important thing to do. There are very long traditions discussing the relations between scientific ideas and broader cultural issues, scientific institutions, the less formalized aspects of scientific thought (Polanyi's "tacit dimension", Holton's "themata" etc.). I look forward to your take on the Cambridge School's influence. There is lots of empirical work to be done in sorting out where the "real gains" came from, and when they appeared.
I also think your emphasis on thematic versus methodological gains is on target. The confusion seems to arise from the need to put new themes at the heart of epistemology (you can't have scientific knowledge if you don't control the spaces in which it's conducted...). As you say, the implication becomes that not attending to new themes becomes conflated with doing "bad history".
Questioning the papering-over of the internal-external divide is a bold undertaking, given that believing in an internal-external divide has become a sign of profound naiveté. But I suspect you are right to do so. The issue was properly opened up by historians of early-modern natural philosophy, who correctly emphasized the links between natural, moral, and political philosophy. In later times, there is no doubt that there are many points of cross-over, particularly in the human sciences, but, at the same time, I don't think there's much doubt that there is some sort of divide being crossed.
On terminology, I think it is the case that philosophy is often conflated with intellectual history, simply because the latter was thrown to the margins of science studies alongside the former, but I do think there is a proper separation. Intellectual history is a nice term, because it handles cases of "cross-over" fairly seamlessly, while still making clear that one is talking about arguments and not things like tacit ideologies inhabiting practices. Histories of ideas are like intellectual history, but are perhaps more abstract. An "idea" might represent a common argumentative move in intellectual history, but it could also be something more tacit inhabiting practices.
I think "internal" history is legitimate, but this is a point that needs to be fought for. There is a tradition that seems to say if your history seems to be a straightforward internal history, then you must be naively missing the interesting, external bit. But I think this confuses perceptions of what is "interesting" with what is "legitimate", and that most historians would, if pressed, admit the legitimacy of internalist histories, just so long as it was clear that this didn't mean that science is always and everywhere internal -- as though that were a battle that needs to be fought constantly and continuously.
to be continued....
....continued
ReplyDeleteI still think we can ignore SSK and related programs without losing too much. It's helpful, insofar as it elucidates the sources of current historiographical imperatives (I've just submitted a paper doing just this). However, after reading a bit of SSK, I'm not sure it ever said anything definitive about the nature of science, so much as it was concerned with developing what it says "on the tin" -- a sociological body of knowledge. It was heavily implied that this would transform the face of the history of science, and many historians were certainly inspired by it to redirect their efforts into certain channels. But, if everyone agrees that sociology doesn't prescribe how to write history, and is, in fact, just a criticism of particular sins of portraiture, then, now that we are long-since past those sins, the question of how to write history constructively remains to be addressed, and we need no longer bother with the particular debates surrounding social constructionism. (Although I do find the pre-1983 debates, before historians became heavily involved, instructive.)
On the remaining points:
I think the Buchwald-Franklin vs. Daston-Galison thing comes down to the particulars of what is being argued. In the case of B-F, what they are saying is that it is possible to use abstracted ideas about kinds of arguments to compare temporally and spatially separated arguments, if they are comparable. I think my point about D-G is that argumentative forms were being compared and contrasted, despite the fact that the arguments were made in the service of different audiences, goals, and so forth. So cross-comparability is possible, but its validity is open to question, it cannot be assumed based on first appearances.
Finally, on the last point, I think what is remarkable about the history of science (and much other history) is that the arguments are repetitive in spite of the diversity of perspectives brought to bear. Histories can deal with the portrayal of science in literature or with laboratory procedure, they can deal with Cold War politics or with medical facilities in the British Empire, and the argumentative form will nevertheless be predictable, dealing in invisibility, tacit ideologies, and the other elements I've tried to sketch out.
The "Rashomon posture" point is somewhat different, dealing with the failure to reconcile different studies of similar subjects. Thus, we can study Darwin's arguments, his public persona, his private life, his material practices, and so on, but if one study treating only one of these aspects doesn't mesh with another study, authors don't really feel compelled to reconcile the portraits. I don't have any particular studies of Darwin in mind here -- I'm just using it as a generic example.
Thanks again for taking these issues so seriously! I particularly liked your representation of candor as central to my thinking -- I've already incorporated the idea of candid engagement into a paper that will appear soon.
Thanks very much for your point-by-point responses to this post. And apologies for the lateness of this reply -- it's been a busy summer for me too.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like we agree on thematic versus methodological gains; on the legitimacy of internal history, at least in some of its forms; and about the existence and interest of traditions such as the Kuhnian School and Cambridge School.
Here are some more detailed replies to some of your points:
1. One of my aims in my original post was to present the internal/external issue as an intellectual dilemma rather than a clash between two different groups of historians. The dilemma is this. Lots of fine history has been written recently that purports to be blind to the i/e distinction -- indeed, the authors often claim that their history is good *because* it is blind to the i/e distinction. Yet some of us still think that internal history is legitimate history, indeed indispensible. How can we reconcile these two views?
I expect reconciliation can happen along the lines you mentioned. Firstly, the rejection of internal history is more a matter of taste than of principle (of what is "interesting" rather than what is "legitimate", as you put it). And secondly, those who slight internalism slide between a (reasonable) rejection of internal history as the *only* form of history of science, and an (unreasonable) rejection of internal history as *one legitimate* form of history of science.
2. In my post there were two concerns behind my remarks about terminology in the i/e debate. One is that internal history is conflated with philosophy (with the implication that internalist historians are committed to an a priori philosophy of science and therefore fail to be "naturalistic"). The other is that internal history is conflated with history of ideas (with the implication that internalist historians only deal with abstract ideas and not with instruments or concrete actions). I think both of those implications contribute to the bad image of internal history, and that both of them are false. I hope to elaborate on this point in a follow-up post.
...continued.
ReplyDelete3. On SSK I tend to disgree with this claim: "I'm not sure it ever said anything definitive about the nature of science." To take two examples, Harry Collins' "Changing Order" and Bruno Latour's "Science in Action" seem to me to make some strong and specific claims about the nature of science. (Although, as you noted in an early post, when pressed these authors tended to replace their attention-grabbing claims with weaker claims: http://histsci.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/postmodern-equivocation.html).
A different question, which you also raise in your comment, is the extent to which current historians of science are "directed" or "inspired" by the picture of science painted by SSK. In the above post I suggested that many historians may still be directed by the tenets of SSK even if they are not aware of it. My suspicion is that many widespread preferences among current historians -- including the preference for non-internal history -- can be traced more or less directly to arguments found in Kuhn or Collins or Latour or related authors. As a result I suspect that historians would write about science differently if they read authors (including many very good recent philosophers of science) who have something critical to say about the authors just listed.
My evidence for these suspicions is sketchy and anecdotal. I'm also influenced, probably unduly, by something Philip Kitcher wrote. In a 1998 essay "A Plea For Science Studies" he listed four influential arguments about the nature of science, including SSK staples such as "the theory-ladenness of observation" and "the underdetermination of theory by evidence." He concluded: "Anyone who has tried to talk to people who have recently been trained in Science Studies will know that the conclusions of the four arguments I have criticized are treated as axiomatic. There is just no questioning them." If such arguments really are part of the professional lore of historians of science, then they need to be scrutinised.
These remain disagreements "around the edges", as you put it. If we disagree on whether revisiting old SSK debates is *necessary* for improving present-day history of science, we agree that it is not *sufficient.* Things like building navigable archives, writing about traditions of practice, and compiling informative footnotes are important, overlooked, and have little to do with SSK.
4. Thanks for your reply regarding Buchwald-Franklin and Daston-Galison. My follow-up questions would be:
A. Didn't Newton and Ptolemy (the B-F examples) have different "audiences, goals, and so forth"?
B. In general, how can we decide whether two historical people or periods are sufficiently similar in their "audiences, goals and so forth" that those people or periods can be usefully compared and contrasted?
"It's up to the judgement of the historian on a case-by-case basis" would be an acceptable answer to the second question, I think. But this places greater weight on giving a detailed answer to the first, case-specific question. I'm not asking for a detailed answer to that second question in this comment-thread. I'm just noting that there is no easy way of showing that B-F are doing legitimate history and D-G doing illegitimate history: it requires arguments from history, not just from historiography.
5. I'm appeased by your remarks on the Rashomon posture, perspectivism and repetition.
Finally, I look forward to reading the two papers you mentioned on SSK and on scholarly candour. Plus I'm glad you agree that there is more work to do on defending internal history and coming to grips with "moderate" traditions such as the Cambridge and Kuhnian schools -- look out for posts on these topics on this blog.
Very nice posst
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