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).

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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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