A manifesto for internal history of science

The premise of the last three posts is that anachronism is back in fashion. By contrast, there is nothing but mustiness about the labels “internal” or “internalism.” Roughly speaking, internalist historians are interested in ideas and evidence rather than politics and institutions. A single article, let alone a single blog post, can't make internal history fashionable again. But at least it can say what a viable defense of internal history of science might look like. Here goes...

Works not workers. We should try to avoid applying the label “internalist” to particular people and instead apply it to particular books and articles. This is partly for clarity's sake, since it is not uncommon for the same person to write both internalist and non-internalist works. But it is also to remind us that we should aim for variety not hybridity in the history of science (see below).

Non-internalism not externalism. It is often pointed out that “externalism” is a bad label for works that are not internalist. The label conceals important distinctions such as that between explaining scientific theories in social or cultural terms, and simply describing the social and cultural side of science. The term also fails to capture the large number of “hybrid” works that are in some sense a mixture of the internal and the external. We can avoid these thorny matters by saying “non-internalist” where we used to say “externalist.”

Unity not uniformity. Like non-internalism, internalism is a broad church. One author might study the technical details of a nineteenth-century optical theory, with little or no reference to outside events; another might study broad changes in the methods used in geology from 1700 and 1900, making passing reference to social and political developments.

Internalism also has fuzzy borders. Is it internalist to write about Newton's application of the calculus to questions of biblical chronology, or to study Michael Faraday's metaphysics, or the experimental procedures of alchemists?

We should not worry if we can't give definite answers to such questions. We live with historiographical distinctions that are no less fuzzy—try drawing a clean line between “macrohistory” and “microhistory.” And if it really was impossible to distinguish internalism from non-internalism then there would be no sense in opposing internalism, as many people have!

Inquiry not intellection. Internal history of science is the victim of misleading pseudonyms. For example, internalists are sometimes described as giving “philosophical” or “epistemic” explanations of scientific beliefs. This is useful short-hand, but it implies that internalists are more concerned with a priori ideas about science than other historians are, and hence that internalists can never be as “naturalistic” as cultural historians of science.

Certainly some internalists are interested in answering the questions posed by philosophers of science. But not all of them are, and in general they no more rely on present-day epistemology than social historians rely on present-day sociology.

Two other unhelpful labels are “history of ideas” and “intellectual history.” Intellectual historians of science stress the role of religious, philosophical and metaphysical ideas in past science. Internal historians of science may share this interest (it depends how you define them). But internalists are also interested in experiments, instruments, and data-collection. They study scientific inquiry in general, not just intellection.

Present value not past associations. It is often implied (although never stated outright) that the internal/external distinction should be abandoned because it is merely a product of Cold War polarities.

This is a terrible argument. Its premise is false: internal history of science was practised long before the Cold War. And its inference is shaky: to reject internal history on the grounds that it is popular among anti-Marxists would be like rejecting the theory of natural selection because it is popular among social Darwinists. If there's really something wrong with internalism, its critics should not have to resort to guilt-by-association.

Similarly, critics of internalism have to do more than point to the many internalist works that have been guilty of Whiggism or naïve inductivism or whatever. Critics have to show that those sins follow from the very nature of internalism. The reverse is also true: even if all non-internalist works published so far were sloppy and inaccurate, it does not follow that these ills are inherent in the genre.

Continuity not catastrophe. Non-internalists are fond of pointing out that what counts as “internal” to science has changed over time. It is a short step to the conclusion that all internalist history is naïvely committed to present-day ideas about what science is.

The non-internalists have a point. Internalists must recognise that their subject-matter—like that of historians of France or food or banking—has been defined in different ways at different times, and that at any given time there was disagreement about where its boundaries lay.

But the problem is not as bad as it looks. The boundaries have not changed as much as non-internalists sometimes make out. Even if they have changed, the internalist is free to adopt the boundaries that prevailed in the time and place that interest her. Some of the best studies of the changing boundaries of science have been done by scholars who most people would count as internalists, such as Alistair Crombie and Larry Laudan. Finally, consider the histories of France, food and banking: no-one has suggested that these fields are catastrophic failures just because their subject-matter has changed over time.

Quality not category. When we defend internalist works, should we focus on their quality as history? Or should we instead ask whether they count as the history of science as opposed to the history of something else?

I suggest that we start with the former question because it tells us something about the scholarly value of internal history of science, rather than about which academic box it belongs to. Also, the second question tends to stack the deck in favour of internalist works, which are usually about science in a pretty obvious sense.

Whichever of these two questions we answer, we should be sure to distinguish between them. Otherwise we end up with fruitless debates where internalists emphasise that they are writing about the history of science and the non-internalists reply that at least they are writing the history of science.

History not philosophy. Internalist works are sometimes defended on the grounds that they help us to answer questions usually posed by philosophers of science, or because they are useful for science teachers, or simply because they are more interesting to scientists than non-internalist works.

All this may be true, but it does not follow that internalist works are defensible as history. A historiographical defense of internalist works means showing that they can achieve all the normal virtues of historical writing, and avoid all the vices—or at least that they have just as good a chance of doing so as non-internalist works.

Parity not priority. Internalists should give up arguing for the priority of their approach, as history, and instead argue for parity. (This leaves open the possibility that internal history is better as history of science).

Parity is an obvious goal but it is rarely defended in print. Instead, some commentators complain that too much attention is given to one side of the internal/external distinction. Most other commentators urge us to transcend the distinction by writing “hybrid” works that collapse the distinction.

Variety not hybridity. There's nothing wrong with hybrids (I write them myself). What I object to is the idea that that such works are inherently superior, as history, to works that are either strictly internalist or strictly externalist.

The usual argument is that only hybrids do justice to the inextricability of social and epistemic factors in past science (or something along those lines). The obvious reply is that there are lots of other inextricable pairs that the historian should try to knit together—like theory and experiment, or mathematics and physics, or science in France and science in Germany—the list is endless. Given that no single work can hybridize everything, why should the science-society dyad be given special attention?

To conclude, if we really want to “transcend” the internal/external distinction, we should stop measuring works according to where they stand with respect to that distinction. There are a variety of legitimate genres ranging from institutional history through trendy hybrids to hard-core internalism, and each of these genres can (and has) produced works of great care and creativity. Expand post.

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Professional theodicy in the history of science: a counter-example

A recurring theme over at Ether Wave Propaganda is what Will Thomas has called “professional theodicy” (see this post for a summary). This phrase refers to a multitude of sins, but mainly to the tendency of recent historians of science to distort the work of their predecessors in a way that amplifies their own insights. I share Will Thomas' impression that this tendency is quite widespread. But I want to draw attention to a striking counter-example, namely the papers by Nick Jardine discussed in my previous two posts. In these papers Jardine couples awareness of past historiography with a down-to-earth suspicion of radical novelty.

Let me begin at the end of Jardine's paper “Etics and Emics,” where he issues a complaint that could have come from a post like this one by Will Thomas:

...historians of science have been all too ready to apply to their own discipline that simplistic model of linear progress whose application to the sciences they call in question—in the beginning was the age of triumphal narratives of progress, then the various sociological turns of the 'seventies and 'eighties, and now the all-conquering new cultural microhistories! (274)

Earlier in the same article Jardine describes what looks like an example of the kind of historiographical amnesia that exercises Will Thomas. Jardine wonders why cultural historians...

...present past institutions almost entirely in terms of past agents' conceptions and perceptions, surprisingly little attention being paid to the nuts-and-bolts aspects of those institutions—their physical layouts, their memberships, their financial arrangements, etc.

He then suggests—and here's the rub—that “there is a tendency to adopt a condescending attitude to the products of 'old-fashioned' studies of institutions, whilst making free use of their fruits” (269). In other words, old-style histories are dismissed with one hand and pilfered with the other.

A related point is that historians' recent stress on the perils of anachronism is of a piece with the bias in favour of ideas instead of actions. As Jardine puts it, “the obsession with actors' categories is a hangover from an historiography of scientific ideas based on texts and doctrines” (261).

One irony of this claim is that it traces a practice that has been much praised in recent years (sensitivity to actors' categories) to a practice that has been much maligned in the same period (over-emphasis on ideas as opposed to actions and materials). A second irony is that, in Jardine's view, one way to advance beyond our “obsession with actors' categories” is to look backwards—that is, to pay attention to the kind of institutional data that was once collected by our “positivistic” forebears (the term “positivistic” is Jardine's).

Empirical data-gathering is not the only “old-fashioned” practice that Jardine hopes to revive. Another is the progress narrative:

...I suggest that historians of science should feel free to return to the long-spurned task of spelling out and explaining the progress of the sciences... Against the objection that such an approach commits anachronism of selection to the extent that it picks out scenes, agendas and doctrines ancestral to those of our sciences, the proper response is surely: so be it! The very existence of history of science as a discipline depends upon such selective anachronism, and there is nothing historically improper in attending to the causal processes that have given rise to our sciences (274) [1].

Jardine has an eye not only for the good habits of past authors but also for the bad habits of more recent ones. Consider his remarks on...

...the dismal 'cultural studies' pick'n'mix style, which jumbles up emic categories with currently fashionable etic theoretical terminology--'habitus' from Bourdieu, 'episteme' from Foucault, 'figuration' from Elias, etc. In so doing, it gets the worst of both the emic and the etic worlds. As isolated anachronisms the words militate against emic interpretation and insight. But there is no payoff: plucked from their theories the etic terms lack the power to analyse or explain anything.

Jardine also recognises that dead positivist historians were not the only ones who imposed an unsuitable theoretical framework on aspects of past science. The newer and trendier frameworks are prone to the same error:

We should not expect analytic and explanatory frameworks designed for the sciences of one period to be applicable to those of others. Why should interest theory, with its own historical roots in the era of political economy, be applicable to earlier sciences? Why should actor-network theory, with its paradigmatic applications to colonial science, be appropriate for analysing early-modern science? (“Uses and Abuses,” 263).

Finally, Jardine reminds us that we are not the first to wring our hands over historiographical issues like anachronism. Ever since scholars began interpreting texts they have been worrying about whether or not they've done justice to the author's point of view. Jardine's example, drawn from a text published in 1697, is a good way to end this series of posts on anachronism in the history of science:

So we must be aware of lending our notions to the Ancients and then judging their discourse on the basis of these notions, as often happens. If we wish their thought to be understood, our opinions should be as if forgotten... We should not compare their sayings with the nature of the things about which they speak, so as to be able to say that their knowledge of them is greater or less than ours, but should as far as possible interpret them from their very words [2].

[1] Jardine's source here is a paper by Tosh, Nick. “Anachronism and Retrospective Explanation: In Defence of a Present-Centred History of Science,” Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A 34, no. 3 (2003): 647–659. I hope to write a post on this interesting paper some time in the New Year.

[2] Daniel Le Clerc, Ars critica (Amsterdam, 1697). Expand post.

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Post-script on Jardine on anachronism

Readers might conclude from what I've just said that Jardine's two papers have little of value to say about anachronism in the history of science. Nothing could be further from the truth. The papers may not solve my demarcation problem, but they contain many insights and much practical advice. I found the following points especially valuable.

Firstly, we can learn a lot about the past from explicit contrasts between it and the present. This is what I take from Jardine's discussion of “false friends” such as the present-day “office” and the early modern “officium”:

Of course, the moral is not that such terms should be banned; on the contrary, reflective and critical employment of them, in which the historian spells out similarities and differences between our usage and earlier usages, may provide valuable access to past life-worlds (“Etics and Emics,” 271).

The second lesson speaks for itself:

The example of the disputed time and place of formation of biology as a discipline illustrates what I take to be a general feature of disciplinary history, namely the mutual dependence of historical study and the elucidation of presuppositions. In most cases we cannot first ascertain the presuppositions of a disciplinary category and then, armed with the list of its presuppositions, check out the historical record to see where and when they were first realized. Rather, it the course of a historical investigation the presuppositions of the disciplinary category and the conditions of emergence of the discipline are progressively clarified (“Uses and Abuses,” 262).

A third lesson is that there are many borderline cases of anachronism, but that this is easily solved in practice:

There are plenty of devices—the use of scare-quotes and of such locutions as “at a stretch,” “so to speak,” “in modern terminology”—that can be used to indicate partial legitimacy of application of categories (“Uses and Abuses,” 263).

Finally, there is no one-size-fits-all rule about what counts as good or bad anachronism. It varies according to what one is studying and which kind of narrative style (eg. analytic or novelistic) one prefers. In general,

historians of science should become less fashion-conscious, less ready to fall for arguments which exclude whole ranges of investigation as anachronistic or scientistic or guilty of some other evil-ism (“Uses and Abuses,” 274-5).

In the next post I consider a general virtue of Jardine's papers that takes us back to Jonathan Rée's suggestion that recent historians of science, along with many other late-twentieth-century intellectuals, suffer from delusions of novelty. Expand post.

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Jardine on benign and vicious anachronism

Nick Jardine

“Is it permissible for an historian to describe past deeds and past works in terms that were not available to the agents themselves?” So asked Nick Jardine at the beginning of a brace of papers published in the early 2000s on the place of anachronism in the history of science. One reason to take a look at these papers is that Jardine, a venerable member of the HPS department at Cambridge, has probably published more words than any other historian of science on the state of the field. Another reason is that Jardine is part of what I have called the Cambridge School in the historiography of science. But the main reason is that in these two papers Jardine tries to solve a problem that came up in the last post: where is the line between good anachronism and bad? This is one way of asking the second of my ten questions: what gains have historians of science made between about 1900 and the present day?

The two papers are “Uses and Abuses of Anachronism in the History of the Sciences,” History of Science 38 (2000): 251–270 and “Etics and Emics (not to Mention Anemics and Emetics) in the History of the Sciences,” History of Science 42 (2004): 261–278.

Both papers give a clear “yes” to the question at the beginning of this post. But they really answer two different questions. I'll start with “Etics and Emics,” the title of which refers to two different ways of doing history, one that privileges the point of view of past actors (“emics”) and one that does not (“etics”). The terms are borrowed from anthropology, where there has been a fierce debate about the relationship between the two approaches. Although most anthropologists agree that there is value in both approaches, they disagree about what the mix should be.

One of Jardine's points in this paper is that the etical approach is valuable in its own right. That approach is indispensable, he argues, if we want to analyse or explain past events or if we want to communicate those events to present-day readers. A subtler point is that etics is indispensible for emics. That is, in order to understand the past from the actor's point of view it is often valuable to draw on theories and concepts that were neither explicitly nor implicitly part of that point of view. For example, “to make sense of past agents' perceptions of and reactions to the Black Death we may resort to historical demography and historical epidemiology so as to reconstruct the horrors they faced” (270).

The second paper, “Uses and Abuses,” asks not about the relationship between etics and emics but about the relationship between two ways of doing emics. If the aim of emics is to understand past actors in their own terms, how do we identify “their terms”? One way to do so—the dominant way, in Jardine's view—is to equate “their terms” with “their categories,” where the latter is understood as explicit organising concepts used by past societies or individuals.

The problem with this, Jardine argues, is that many defining aspects of past societies were never made explicit by the members of those societies. Instead they were implicit in the “material, psychological, social and institutional conditions of the production of deeds and works” (252). To use one of Jardine's examples, it is wrong-headed to think that “biology” became an actor's category as soon as people started using that term to describe their research, and no earlier. Rather, biology emerged when researchers adopted a particular agenda for studying living beings (a mix of physiology and morphology) and when they developed particular institutions (such as laboratories and hands-on teaching).

But what does it mean to say that a category is “implicit” in a society or a field of research? To answer this question Jardine draws on a criterion developed by the philosopher Peter Winch in his The Idea of Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (1958), an influential book that applied Wittgenstein to social theory. Jardine glosses Winch's criterion as follows: “the categories we apply to past deeds and works should not be at odds with the entire range of the significances attached to them in the past societies in question” (255).

***

So far I've said that “Etics and Emics” is about the etic/emic distinction, and that “Uses and Abuses” is about the distinction between emics based on explicit categories and emics based on implicit categories. In fact Jardine talks about both distinctions in both papers. But in “Etics and Emics” he implies that the Winch criterion fails to separate good anachronism from bad (which in Jardine's terms is the same as separating good etics from bad etics). He implies this in “Etics and Emics” by endorsing forms of etical history of science that seem to violate the criteria developed in “Uses and Abuses.”

To see this we need to go back to “Etics and Emics,” where Jardine gives some examples of etical history and says whether or not they are acceptable, and why. One acceptable kind of etics is to convict past actors of systematic mis-interpretation of their own deeds or the causes of their own deeds. According to Jardine this kind of anachronism is fine, as long as the historian explains not only the deeds in question but also the actor's mis-interpretation of those deeds. A historian is allowed to say (for example) that X acted out of class interests, as long as he can explain why X was blind to those same class interests. This would be a breach of the Winch condition in the case (which Jardine seems to allow) where class interests were not among the “significances” attached to X's action in his society.

So according to Jardine, Winch's condition is too strict to be applied generally—it rules out permissible kinds of anachronism. A more relaxed condition is needed. Jardine does not explicitly draw out any other condition in “Etics and Emics.” But we can try to guess the condition he has in mind by looking at the examples of etic history that he does and does not approve of in that paper. My conclusion will be that the conditions he seems to have in mind do not rule out the kind of Whiggism that he seems to disapprove of.

My guess is that Jardine's condition is the simple one that historians should not say or imply that things existed in the past if those things did not exist in the past. Call this the “no-fantasy” condition. This condition fits Jardine's disapproval of the unqualified use of present-day terms for past terms with different meanings, eg. the use of the term “office,” in the sense of a salaried job, for the early modern term “office.” The no-fantasy condition is also consistent with Jardine's criticism of general explanatory frameworks that are applied in contexts where the explanans of that framework did not exist—for example, the use of “interest theory” in periods where the category of economic “interests” did not yet exist.

The condition also fits Jardine's remarks about evolutionary accounts of historical events, which he criticises because “the analogies with natural selection on which evolutionary accounts rest are highly dubious” (273). What he means is presumably that phenomena like “survival of the fittest” can't explain historical events because those phenomena do not exist in the domain of human culture.

Finally, the no-fantasy condition explains the fact that Jardine approves of histories that include categories alien to past actors but that do not attribute those categories to the actors. For example, he approves of the use of twentieth-century astronomical techniques to help make sense of Tycho Brahe's claim to have observed the parallax of Mars. I am suggesting that Jardine tolerates this procedure because it does not involve saying that a knowledge of twentieth-century astronomy existed in Tycho's head in the 1580s.

How does this condition apply to Jardine's criticism of Whig histories? In fact Jardine endorses the study of the past progress of the sciences, and even the selective emphasis on projects and doctrines ancestral to our own. But he is opposed to histories of science that

...provided biographical details for great discoverers and credited them with genius and exemplary adherence to scientific method; but [which] rarely paid attention to the ways in which [the discoverers] themselves conceived their 'scientific' activities (272).

My question is whether the no-fantasy condition is strong enough to rule out histories that are Whiggish in this sense. After all, the whole point of examples like the Tycho case is to show that historians can go beyond the actor's “conceptions of their activities” without falling into historical fantasy.

At times Jardine suggests a stronger condition. It is not enough that the etic part of a study is innocent of fantasy; the emic part of the study must also be sufficiently great. As Jardine puts it, “[e]tic history of science without emics is empty, if not anemic, because it fails to engage with the life-worlds of past practitioners of the sciences” (275).

This condition, though stricter than the no-fantasy condition, may still not be strict enough to rule out the Whiggism that Jardine considers vicious. Do we really think that the classic Whiggish works—the books of George Sarton, for example—say nothing at all about the “life-worlds of past practitioners”? It would be more plausible to say that the difference is one of degree rather than of kind: old-fashioned historians captured some of those past life-worlds, but not as much as later historians have.

But plausibility comes at the expense of precision. How much emic history is enough, and how much is too much? Who is to say that we have got the balance right, whereas Sarton et. al. did not? Jardine writes that “[a] history of science properly respectful of the differences of the past must seek out combinations of emics with etics appropriate to its various subjects and aims” (275). Why not extend this pluralist spirit to the subjects and aims of historians like Sarton?

I conclude that these two papers by Jardine do not solve the demarcation problem introduced at the end of my previous post and re-stated at the start of this post. That is, they do not give us a principled way of distinguishing good anachronism from bad. This would be fine if we agreed to exclude all anachronism from the history of science. But it is this precisely this blanket ban on present-day concepts that Jardine rejects in these two papers. Expand post.

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Different kinds of Whig history are wrong (or right) for different kinds of reasons

Which planks of the Whig platform are rotten, and why?

There has been some noise in the blogosphere lately about "Whiggism," a term of abuse often used by historians of science against popular, old-fashioned or journalistic histories of science. Commentators agree that the term is confusingly vague, and that it is important to untangle its different meanings in order to say which forms of Whiggism are harmful and which just appear so. But I've not seen a systematic effort to distinguish the various forms and to say which ones are objectionable and why. This post separates eight strands of Whig history, with this result: not only are there different forms of Whiggism, some objectionable and some not, but those that are objectionable are objectionable for different reasons. It is important to separate the good reasons from the debatable ones, so that we can focus our debates on the latter and not waste time and righteousness on the former.

1. The fixed-evidence fallacy. This fallacy is committed by many works of history that assess the reasonableness of past beliefs according to how closely those beliefs resemble our own.

My problem with this history is not that it assesses past scientists, nor that it assesses past scientists by present-day standards. It is that it is a bad way of assessing past scientists by our standards. It is bad because the evidence for most theories has changed through the past, and the reasonableness of those theories has changed accordingly.

This is a mundane point that does not require any Kuhn-like shifts in norms or standards or research-programs. After reading the weather forecast last night it was reasonable for me to believe that it would not rain today. Now, watching the looming storm clouds, that belief is no longer reasonable. What has changed is not my norms or standards but the state of the evidence.

I mean "evidence" to include abstract arguments as well as empirical data. I also include evidence for criteria for judging theories, not just evidence for theories. Why, for example, is it bad history to heavily criticise Thomas Hobbes for his lack of confidence in contrived experiments as a way of choosing between theories? Part of the answer, I would say, is because Hobbes had much less evidence for the effectiveness of contrived experiments than we do today.


2. Dogmatic side-taking. This is when the historian lets his judgement of one aspect of a scientist colour his judgement of all other aspects of the same scientist. If the initial judgement is a positive one, the historian refuses to hear anything bad about the scientist; and if the initial judgement is a negative one, he refuses to hear anything good about the scientist.

This is part of what people mean when they criticise "saints v demons" history or "black hat v white hat" history. It is alleged, for example, that the reason some people refuse to accept that Newton did alchemy is that those people have already decided Newton was a flawless scientist on the basis of such praise-worthy things as his theory of gravitation.

Dogmatic side-taking is clearly a bad habit: that a person did a number of great things does not mean that everything they did was great. Like the fixed-evidence fallacy, dogmatic side-taking is harmful because it breeds falsehoods about the past.


3. Manichean history. This is when the historian only assesses past scientists as very good or very bad. All other shades of praise or blame are ignored. This is presumably also part of what people mean by "saints v demons" history, but it is distinct from dogmatic side-taking. One can take sides without restricting oneself to extreme judgements. And one can make extreme judgements without being dogmatic -- after all, there are always cases that in actual fact do lie near the extremes.

I put Manichean history in the same camp as the two previous errors, and call it a cognitive error that can lead to falsehoods. But the following forms of Whiggism are not so obviously objectionable, or at least are objectionable for different sorts of reasons.


4. Linear narratives. Whiggism is often associated with "narratives of progress," and one alleged problem with the latter is that they ignore the mistakes, dead-ends and difficulties that arose on the way to the present state of things. This criticism seems reasonable because although it is plausible that (say) predictive power in biology has increased over time, it is not plausible that this always happened in the most efficient way possible.

On the other hand, it would be wrong for historians to always put the accent on mistakes, dead-ends and difficulties. Some projects go more or less to plan; some problems are more quickly solved than expected; not everything is an accidental by-product of unavoidable errors.

To put it another way, there is no a priori problem with linear narratives. If we criticise them we need to present historical evidence that things did not happen in a linear manner. This puts linear narrative in a different category to the historiographical sins so far discussed. The fixed-evidence fallacy is always an error; linear narratives are not always so. The former is a piece of bad reasoning; the latter is an unsafe assumption that might nevertheless be true in a given case.


5. Normative judgements. Another alleged problem with "narratives of progress" is that a) progress implies judgement and b) judgement is ahistorical. I agree with a), but I have reservations about b).

I grant that it is ahistorical simply to express a moral judgement such as "slavery is bad" or an epistemic judgement such as "predictive power in a theory is good." But there is nothing ahistorical about asking whether slavery has declined in Europe over the last two centuries or whether predictive power has increased in biology in the same period. These questions are as empirical or "naturalistic" as any others you will find in historical writing. Normative judgements may be derived from them, such as that "recent trends in predictive power in biology are a good thing." But in themselves they are as descriptive as you'll get.

What about works that blend description and judgement—say, a book that gives a naturalistic description of the last few centuries of increasing predictive power in biology, but does so with a celebratory tone? What's wrong with that?

One problem might be that the celebratory tone comes with a prejudiced view of the subject matter. The worry is that the historian who celebrates the predictive power of biological theories is bound to exaggerate the predictive advance that occurred, perhaps ignoring instances of failed predictions or downplaying theories that were accepted for reasons other than their predictive power.

But I don't think this is the real problem with moral or epistemic judgement in history-writing. Historians should not be barred from studying topics that engage their ideals or values—otherwise history could never serve to change those ideals or values. Instead historians should be encouraged to be as objective as possible when dealing with such topics, objective in the sense of looking for data that conflicts with their pre-conceived views, and of generally paying attention to the evidence whatever it says.

The real problem, insofar as it is a problem, is that making normative claims in a work of history is a kind of disciplinary category-mistake. It's like beginning a scientific article with a limerick. There's nothing wrong with limericks, and placing one at the beginning of an article need not affect the quality of the article as science. It's simply out of place.

So far we have seen Whiggisms that involve straight-forward fallacies, unsafe assumptions, and disciplinary confusions. The remaining three kinds of Whiggism are different again. In my view, they are the hard cases: there is much room for debate about whether or not they are really errors.


6. Comparisons to present-day beliefs. Suppose I study the resemblances between our own beliefs and past beliefs, but don't draw any inferences about the rationality or otherwise of the holders of past beliefs. I might conduct a survey of 18th century workers in optics, say, and for each worker record the extent to which their beliefs about optics resemble our own.

Would this be bad history? Certainly not in the same way that the fixed-evidence fallacy is bad history. It does not lead to untruth. There is nothing false about the claim that, say, Newton's explanation of coloured rings has something important in common with the present-day notion of "wave interference" whereas the explanation provided by the Frenchman Dortous de Mairan (an explanation based on refraction rather than interference) does not have that thing in common with the present-day notion. Admittedly this claim could lead to falsehoods if we're not careful, but there are few historical claims for which that warning does not apply.


7. Present-day criteria. A similar and much-maligned exercise is to apply criteria to past theories that are different from the criteria deployed by the people who held those theories.

Sometimes this practice would fail for lack of anything to talk about. Given that Hobbes didn't perform many experiments, there is not much to say about what sort of experimental evidence he gave for his beliefs.

But sometimes there can be a lot to talk about. What kind of empirical data (in our sense of that phrase) did Paracelsus provide for his "theory of correspondences" between the microcosm (man) and the macrocosm (the world outside man)? This question is anachronistic insofar as Paracelsus' notion of empirical data was probably quite different from our own. But answering it would not necessitate any unsound inferences or any false claims.

Is such a question guilty of a disciplinary category-mistake, like putting a limerick at the beginning of a scientific article? Does it make claims that, though true or otherwise valuable, are not historical claims?

It is not obvious that the question fails to be a historical one, at least not to me. For one thing, it need not be a normative question. To ask what empirical data Paracelsus had is not to say that empirical data is something valuable to have. Certainly it suggests that empirical data is something that it is valuable to ask questions about—but all historical questions are normative in that innocuous sense.

Moreover, the answers one came up with to such a question could tell us something about the past, since Paracelsus' books do contain statements that we might interpret as "empirical data" (again, in our sense of that phrase). At the very least, we can all agree that answering such a question would require reading Paracelsus' manuscripts—and if the evidence for a claim includes past texts, surely the claim must in some sense be about those past texts.

Perhaps the objection to such questions is that the answers to them are bound to be anachronistic. That is, the answers are bound to say things that Paracelsus could never have thought, in terms that were not available to him.

The problem with this objection is that it is too strong, applying to many claims that almost all historians would consider properly historical. If the principle is that historians should not write things that no-one in the past could have thought, then we would have to abandon (for example) any claim that refers to two or more people who did not know each-other. Equally, no historian would be allowed to say that person X was ignorant of some fact Y, even if Y had important consequences for X.

The same problem arises with the eighth and last kind of Whiggism I'm going to consider here, which is closely related to numbers six and seven.


8. Present-directed narratives. This is history that takes something from the present—a person, institution, idea, or whatever—and writes the history of that thing as the sequence of past events that resembled it or that made a causal contribution to it.

As for the use of present-day criteria, a common objection to this kind of history is that it says things about the past that past actors were not aware of. Copernicus could not have known that the world system in his De Revolutionibus (1543) would resemble, or make a causal contribution to, the world system that appeared well after his death in Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (1632).

Of course we should avoid being misled by superficial resemblances between the past and present, or by causal contributions that are only apparent. But this does not mean that no such resemblances or contributions exist, just that we should be careful when we look for them and describe them.

Another objection to present-directed history is that it says much more about the present than about the past. For the whole point of such history is to explain or understand something in the present. To which the reply is two-fold. Firstly, historians like to say that a good way to understand the present is through the past. They cannot consistently say this and make the objection just stated.
Secondly, the objection is always short-lived: wait a few years after the publication of a present-centred work, and the thing that the work explains or understands will be a thing of the past, and so the work will be past-centred rather than present-centred.


****

The main lesson of this list is that some forms of history are unfairly tarred with the Whiggish brush. The most important of these is I think the last, the one I've called present-directed narrative. One can write present-directed narrative without dogmatic side-taking, linear narratives, Manichean judgements, or the fixed-evidence fallacy.

A second lesson, and a less well-known one, is that not all objectionable forms of whiggism are objectionable for the same reasons. The above list includes examples of unsound reasoning that are obviously harmful, such as the fixed-evidence fallacy; it also includes a posteriori claims that may turn out to be false, such as the assumption that science changes in a linear manner. Then there are claims that, though true or otherwise valuable, are not historical claims, notably normative judgements. Finally there are narratives that say things that none of their subjects could have been aware of, but which nevertheless do not commit any of the other sins just listed.

My list of eight Whiggisms is incomplete. Some of the items could be sub-divided—for example, I expect that people have more than one idea in mind when they accuse someone of writing a "linear" narrative. Entirely new items could be added to the list, such as the various kinds of anachronism (conceptual, selective, institutional, etc.) that historians have written about in recent times. And there are some labels that do not appear on the list but are often associated with Whiggism, such as "teleology" and "positivism.” But this list is at least a start.

The list also raises a pressing question: is there a principled way of distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable forms of anachronism? If there is, it might help to solve the problem I raised in number seven above—that is, the problem that it is easy to reply to any charge of anachronism just by pointing out that at least some anachronism is necessary in history-writing. In the next post I consider one attempt that a recent historian has made to solve this demarcation problem. Expand post.

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Holmes, Porter and Hacking on the Experimental Turn

Frederic L. Holmes (1932-2003)

In my previous post I discussed Jonathan Rée's view that many late-twentieth century intellectuals over-reacted to the excesses of their modernist predecessors. In this post I suggest that something similar may have happened with respect to experiment in the history of science. It is said that past historians studied the ideas of science rather than its materials, its software rather than its hardware. But these claims are overblown, and partly because their authors take a small number of recent idealists as representative of the discipline. I want to flesh out these assertions by looking at a book by the philosopher Ian Hacking and at papers by the historians Frederic Holmes and Roy Porter.

I'll start with Holmes, since he says with authority just about everything I want to say. My source is his “Do We Understand Historically How Experimental Knowledge Is Acquired?” History of Science, vol. 30 (1992), 119-136.

Holmes' speciality was experiment, a topic that is central to the “material culture” of science as historians now understand that label. Holmes begins with a roll-call of authors who have proclaimed the novelty of recent studies of experimental practice. Here is a selection of claims, their authors, and the dates on which they were made:

“Despite the slogan that science advances through experiments, virtually the entire literature of the history of science concerns theory” (Peter Galison, 1987)

“Experiment is a respected but neglected activity ... the process of experimentation is taken to be either unproblematic or uninteresting” (David Gooding, Trevor Pinch and Simon Schaffer, 1989)

“...little attention has been directed at how experiments are actually done, and how they come to be regarded as meaningful” (Jan Golinski, 1990)

Holmes then gives a list of counter-examples to these generalisations. For example, Henry Guerlac declared in 1959 that it was “fallacious to make an arbitrary distinction between ideas and experience, between thought and action, and to treat ideas as if they had a totally independent life of their own, divorced from material reality.”

Other historians practised what Guerlac preached. I. Bernard Cohen published a book in 1956 called Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry Into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin's Work in Electricity as an Examble Thereof. Soon afterwards, Guerlac himself wrote a book called Lavoisier--the Crucial Year: The Background and Origin of his First Experiments on Combustion in 1772. The authors of both books made a point of focusing on experiments as much as, or more than, theoretical speculation.

The next generation, partly inspired by Guerlac and Cohen, went one step further by studying the drafts and lab notes of past scientists rather than their published articles. Others studied long-term changes in scientific domains, with an emphasis on instruments and institutions. Holmes discusses the following books, all published before the three quotes at the beginning of this post:

L. Pearce Williams, Michael Faraday (1966)
Mirko Grmek, Raisonnement expérimental et recherches toxicologiques chez Claude Bernard (1973)
Holmes, Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry (1974)
Gerald Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology (1978)
John Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries (1979) [1]
Robert Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists (1980) [1]
John Lesch, Science and Medicine in France (1984)
A number of articles picked more or less at random from the journal Isis between 1957 and 1966.

Holmes could have gone on. He could have discussed books by Mauric Daumas on the cabinets de physique of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or those by William Middleton on the histories of the thermometer and barometer. Nor should we forget the Harvard Case Studies in Experimental Science, which whatever their flaws certainly contain descriptions of experiments. There is also Stillman Drake's work on Galileo's experimental apparatus, Alistair Crombie's Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100-1700, and Holmes' own Lavoisier and the Chemistry of Life: an Exploration of Scientific Creativity—all of which predate the three quotes at the start of this post. Many more examples can be found under “Scientific Instruments and Special Techniques” in the Isis Critical Bibliographies from 1955 onwards.

But that's not all. If Heilbron's Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries counts as a study of experiment rather than theory, then so do a large proportion of the histories of science written before 1900. Take the first book-length history of electricity, Joseph's Priestley's History and Present State of Electricity, the first edition of which appeared in 1767. The contents page of the third edition can be viewed here, and anyone who glances at it will note that for each figure in his history Priestley promises to describe their “experiments and discoveries.” And indeed, in the body of the book he describes both.

As a work of history, Heilbron's book is greatly superior to Priestley's. But the difference between them is certainly not that Priestley focuses on theory whereas Heilbron focuses on experiment. Granted, Heilbron goes into more detail than Priestley for each major eighteenth-century electrical experiment; but Heilbron also goes into more detail than Priestley for each major theory of that period.

Heilbron himself has written that the “experimental turn” is overrated. Here is the first paragraph of his review of two books from 1989, The Uses of Experiment and The Development of the Laboratory [2].

During the last few years, a few historians and sociologists of science have made the discovery that experiment and measurement are important and problematic parts of the scientific enterprise. The dazzle of this illumination carried conviction of its novelty; and the editors of The uses of experiment open their preface with the astonishing claim that “experiment is a respected but neglected activity.” A few lines later they specify not experiment, but “the process of experimentation" as the neglected subject, only to return immediately to their gambit: “the neglect of experiment is symptomatic of a prejudice against practical activity in favour of speech acts.” Being editors, however, they are condemned to commit speech acts. These include calling attention to rhetorical devices by which scientists put forward arguments based on experiments and emphasising the logical and epistemological difficulties of confirmation and corroboration of results of experiments and instrumental tests. These themes are important; they receive incisive treatment; but they do not have the freshness advertised.

***

Holmes suggests in passing two explanations for the false advertising that Heilbron describes. One is that the self-proclaimed innovators are studying new aspects of experiment rather than newly studying experiment itself. This becomes apparent in the second part of Holmes' article where he contrasts his own approach to experiment with the “newer” approach as represented by that of Leviathan and the Air Pump, a book that many subsequent historians of experiment have taken as a guide. Holmes draws the contrast with respect to Robert Boyle, the man whose air pump features in the title of the book in question:

Shapin and Schaffer portray an assertive Boyle, mobilizing literary resources to secure assent for matters of fact he has produced through a material technology [ie. the air pump]. I portray a playful, exploratory Boyle, performing experiments that seek answers to questions he poses, often tentative and uncertain... (133)

In other words, the new historians of experiment focus on how experimental knowledge is disseminated rather than how it is acquired. Holmes is interested in the latter, as per the title of the paper under discussion.

Holmes seems to say that the former approach is genuinely new, and he rightly admires Schaffer and Shapin's book. But he denies that it represents an increased emphasis on experiment. At most it is an increased emphasis on a particular aspect of experiment, an emphasis that complements traditional accounts but in no way replaces them. The new approach has its own dangers, he says, such as focusing on a small sample of a scientist's experiments and thereby tearing them from “a rich tapestry of intermingled experimentation and reasoning” (126).

Another of Holmes' suggestions is that often it seems to be philosophers rather than historians who are accused of neglecting experiment. At the same time, Holmes would not have written the article if he did not think that historians were among the targets of the accusation. Two possibilities arise, although Holmes does not discuss them in this particular article. One is that philosophers really have neglected experiment, but that the so-called innovators have unjustly tarred past historians with the idealistic brush. Another possibility is that the new historians of experiment are writing a kind of meta-history of experiment: one which considers experiment at a more abstract level than historians usually do, and therefore has new things to say about experiment even though it differs little from traditional accounts at the level of basic description.

***

There are grains of truth in all of these suggestions. But another explanation, and perhaps a more far-reaching one, is that much of the talk about a neglect of experiment is directed at a small but influential group of recent historians and philosophers of science. This group can indeed be said to have neglected experiment (although they should also be credited with showing just how much experiment depends on theory). The claim that experiment is a new topic—whether that claim is made in 1983 or 2013—is often an error based on an unwarranted extrapolation from this group of recent idealists to all historians and philosophers of science who preceded them.

A glance at two pieces, one by a historian and one by a philosopher, can help to substantiate this thesis.

The first is an influential chapter by Roy Porter, a wonderful and much-mourned historian of medicine, Britain, and the eighteenth century. His “The Scientific Revolution: A Spoke in the Wheel?” appeared in 1986 in Porter and Teich, eds., Revolution in History (CUP). The title of the chapter says that it is about the idea of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century, but it is also about how that idea shaped the discipline of the history of science between about 1940 and 1970. The Scientific Revolution, Porter writes, was

...initially the brain-child and shibboleth of a specific cluster of scholars emerging during the 1940s, including the Russian émigré Alexandre Koyré, [the Cambridge historian Herbert] Butterfield, whose outline history popularized Koyré's work, Rupert Hall, who was Butterfield's pupil, and, a little later, Marie Boas [Hall]. Their scrupulous scholarship and prolific works of synthesis animated an emerging discipline, and laid down a coherent framework for future research (295).

For these historians, science was essentially thought – profound, bold, logical, abstract...Thus idealism has been pervasive, and its implications run even to the interpretation of detailed episodes [such as Alexander Koyré's claim that Galileo didn't perform many of the experiments he described] (296).

The first passage answers the “who” question clearly enough, and the second gives an idea of what sort of “idealism” they had in common. It is precisely the kind of idealism that could justly be accused of neglecting experiment, as the example of Koyré suggests. Granted, Porter's article does not make any bold claims for a turn towards experiment; and he explicitly acknowledges that the idealism of Koyré and his English counterparts was a recent and local phenomenon. But by focusing on those idealists and saying little about their predecessors he sets them up as the chief foil to revisionist accounts of the Scientific Revolution, and by extension to revisionist histories of science in general.

Compare Porter's targets with those in an influential book in philosophy, Ian Hacking's Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Science (CUP, 1983). A fair summary of the book is that “representing” is a problematic activity that philosophers have written too much about, and that “intervening” is a promising activity that they have written too little about.

Hacking makes some bold claims at the beginning of his discussion of “intervening”:

History of the natural sciences is almost always written as a history of theory. Philosophy of science has so much become philosophy of theory that the very existence of pre-theoretical observations or experiments has been denied. I hope the following chapters might initiate a Back-to-Bacon movement, in which we attend more seriously to experimental science. Experimentation has a life of its own.

This is one of the most cited passages—by historians and sociologists as well as by philosophers—in the “new” literature on experimentation. For example, the first two sentences are quoted near the beginning of Leviathan and the Air Pump to show that “even philosophers are beginning to admit the anti-practice and pro-theory prejudices of their discipline” (17). Having read a fair chunk of the recent literature on experimentation, I am confident that a citation analysis would reveal many more examples.

However on reading Hacking's ideas about “intervening” it becomes clear that his main targets are not philosophers of science per se but Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Imré Lakatos. He criticises Popper for thinking that observations are usually made to confirm or refute pre-conceived hypothesis (155); he criticises Kuhn for preferring a theoretician over an experimenter in a book that Kuhn was editing (151-152); he criticises Feyerabend for saying that all observation is theory-laden (173); and he criticises Lakatos for implying that there is no such thing as a crucial experiment (254-261).

Hacking's chief conclusion—that there is such a thing as “pre-theoretical observations or experiments”—is novel with respect to this sequence of recent idealists. But with respect to many earlier philosophers of science, from Robert Boyle to John Stuart Mill, it is a statement of the obvious. Encouraged by Hacking's polemical passages, like the one quoted above, historians and sociologists of science have supposed that his chief conclusion is a piece of earthquake-like novelty that will totally reform the way we do the history and sociology of science. There are some new ideas in Hacking's book, but fewer than is often supposed (and insofar as they are new they are controversial, such as the idea that active experiment furnishes powerful arguments for scientific realism that passive observation does not) [3].

The broader lesson of this post is that historians should be clear about who they are accusing of what. The three quotes at the beginning of this post make claims about a large number of past historians of science. But the books and articles in which those quotes appear do not attempt anything like a systematic survey of the books and articles that they indict. The closest approximations that I have seen of such a survey are by those who reject the indictment, like Holmes, Heilbron, and Brian Baigrie [4]. Among those who make the indictment, the one who supplies the most evidence seems to be a philosopher (Hacking, in Representing and Intervening) rather than any historian. If politeness is the reason for this reticence, it is laudable but misguided: better to be openly critical than to confuse the issue with unsupported insinuations.


[1] To be fair, these two books are sometimes acknowledged as precursors of the experimental turn (eg. Leviathan and the Air Pump, 15).

[2] Medical History, vol. 34, no. 3 (1990), 335 (paywall).

[3] This last point generalises. I am not claiming that there is nothing new about the experimental turn, just that the novelty has been exaggerated and poorly defined and that claims to novelty have not been backed up with much historiographical evidence.

[4] Baigrie, “Scientific Practice: The View From the Tabletop,” in Jed Buchwald, ed., Theories and Stories of Doing Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), chap. 5. Expand post.

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