Words of wisdom from the positivist Ernst Mach

Ernst Mach (1838-1916), positivist

Suppose we have always been constructivists, as I suggested in the last post. And suppose we have too many big pictures, not too few, as I argued in the last post but one. What then? What consequences does this have for the way we do the history of science? Here is one consequence: we should pay more attention to dead historians of science. If they were wise enough to be constructivists, perhaps they were wise in other ways. And if we have not discarded their big pictures, perhaps there were some grains of truth in those big pictures. Consider Ernst Mach’s The Science of Mechanics (1883; mine is the 1960 English edition). Mach was nothing if not a positivist. Some would say he was the original (logical) positivist. But there are many passages in his book that defy the present-day caricature of positivists. Here is a collection of the choicer passages of this kind.

1. You cannot understand the science of mechanics without understanding its history:

The gist and kernel of mechanical ideas has in almost every case grown up in the investigation of very simple and special cases of mechanical processes; and the analysis of the history of the discussions concerning these cases must ever remain the method at once the most effective and the most natural for laying this gist and kernel bare. Indeed, it is not too much to say that it is the only way in which a real comprehension of the general upshot of mechanics is to be obtained. (xxii)

2. The study of rejected ideas is an important part of the history of ideas:

We shall recognize [in studying the mechanics of Galileo, Huygens and Newton] that not only a knowledge of the ideas that have been accepted and cultivated by subsequent teachers is necessary for the historical understanding of a science, but also that the rejected and transient thoughts of the inquirers, nay even apparently erroneous notions, may be very important and very instructive. (316)

3. The study of history can show that some taken-for-granted ideas are historically contingent:

Historical investigation not only promotes the understanding of that which now is, but also brings new possibilities before us, by showing that which exists to be in great measure conventional and accidental [Mach's italics]. From the higher point of view at which different paths of thought converge we may look about us with freer vision and discover routes before unknown. (316)

4. Early modern scientists took theological doctrines for granted, and they built these doctrines into their science:

Every unbiased mind must admit that the age in which the chief development of the science of mechanics took place, was an age of predominantly theological cast. Theological questions were excited by everything, and modified everything. No wonder, then, that mechanics is colored thereby. But the thoroughness with which theological thought thus permeated scientific inquiry, will best be seen by an examination of details. (546)

[there follows examples from the published and unpublished writings of Galileo, Fermat, Leibniz, Maupertuis, Euler, and Descartes, before Mach concludes as follows:]

During the entire sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, down to the close of the eighteenth, the prevailing inclination of inquirers was, to find in all physical laws some particular disposition of the Creator. (551)

5. The act of communicating an idea can change the idea in profound ways (or, as we would say nowadays, science is constructed in the process of its communication):

These beginnings [ie. of the science of mechanics] point unmistakably to their origin in the experiences of the manual arts. To the necessity of putting these experiences in communicable form and of disseminating them beyond the confines of class and craft, science owes its origin. The collector of experiences of this kind, who seeks to preserve them in written form, finds before him many different, or at least supposedly different, experiences. His position is one that enables him to review these experiences more frequently, more variously, and more impartially than the individual workingman, who is always limited to a narrow province. The facts and their dependent rules are brought into closer temporal and spatial proximity in his mind and writings, and thus acquire the opportunity of revealing their relationship, their connection, and their gradual transition the one into the other. The desire to simplify and abridge the labor of communication supplies a further impulse in the same direction. Thus, from economical reasons, in such circumstances, great numbers of facts and the rules that spring from them are condensed into a system and comprehended in a single expression. (89-91)

6. Books and chairs and tables are constructions, ie. their existence is not self-evident but an inference from our sensations, and this inference depends on our needs and interests:

Nature is composed of sensations as its elements. Primitive man, however, first picks out certain compounds of these elements—those namely that are relatively permanent and of greater importance to him. The first and oldest words are names of ‘things.’ Even here, there is an abstractive process, and abstraction from the surroundings of the things, and from the continual small changes which these compound sensations undergo, which being practically unimportant are not noticed. No unalterable thing exists. (579)

7. Our ideas change our experiences:

This [never mind what] explains why a person of experience regards a new event with different eyes than the novice. The new experience is illuminated by the mass of old experience. (581)

8. We should study the past so that we do not mistake passing fads for genuine truths:

They that know the entire course of the development of a science, will, as a matter of course, judge more freely and more correctly of the significance of any present scientific movement than they, who, limited in their views to the age in which their own lives have been spent, contemplate merely the momentary trend that the course of intellectual events takes at the present moment. (9)

Conclusion: this last point holds as well for past history of science as it does for past science.

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Barry Barnes and the origin of the constructivist myth

Barry Barnes, Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory (1974)

Science is a human construction. The theories of science, to say nothing of its instruments and institutions, are the outcome of (among other things) a long series of complicated human actions. Many of my fellow historians of science believe this, as do I. But many also believe that we have only recently treated science as a human construction. I believe that this is a myth, and that Barry Barnes’ Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory (1974) is one source of the myth. Last year I gave some evidence for this reading of Barnes. Last week Darrin Durant questioned that evidence. In this post I give more evidence for my reading of Barnes, and hence for my claim that there is something seriously wrong with the self-image of constructivist historians of science.

My claim about Barnes is that he did not properly distinguish between two charges that he levelled against earlier commentators on science, including historians. One of those charges was that of treating true theories as if they were not caused by any human activities. The second charge was that of treating true theories as if they were caused by only some kinds of human activity. I will call the former the no-cause charge and the latter the some-causes-only charge.

The some-causes-only charge is plausible, but the no-cause charge is not. By conflating the two charges, Barnes made the no-cause charge seem plausible. That is, he lent plausibility to the claim that, until some time in the middle of the twentieth century, nearly everyone who thought about scientific theories had failed to see that they were the outcome of human activities.

My claim about Barnes rests on passages from the first chapter of his book, passages that I quote below. These passages show that Barnes did indeed make the no-cause charge. They also show that, although he also made the some-causes-only charge, he did not clearly distinguish between these two charges.

I admit that my reading of these passages ignores some salient distinctions. We might want to distinguish between the idea that a theory can be explained sociologically, and the idea that it can be explained at all; between the idea that the theory is not in need of explanation, and the idea that it does not have an explanation; between the idea that a theory has an explanation, and the idea that it was caused; between the idea that a belief has a straightforward, direct, or unproblematic explanation, or that it can be explained by its truth, and the idea that it has no explanation.

These are important distinctions, but they do not compromise my claim about Barnes, for the simple reason that he did not make those distinctions, at least not in the first chapter of his book. He conflated those distinctions as thoroughly as he conflated the distinction between the no-cause charge and the some-causes-only charge.

Indeed his conflations of the one may help to explain his conflations of the other. For example: if Barnes had distinguished between the claim that theories need causal explanation from sociologists, and the claim that they need causal explanation, he would not have concluded that earlier sociologists had denied the latter claim. He would have simply concluded that they denied the former claim.

All of the italics in the following quotes are my own.

1. Barnes attributes no-cause view to laypeople:

For most people, the beliefs they accept...are rarely reflected upon. Moreover, when reflection does occur, it tends merely depict these beliefs as natural representations of 'how things are' (1)

Indeed, there is an obvious rightness about our own world view. It seems, in some way, to mirror reality so straightforwardly that it must be the consequence of direct apprehension rather than effort and imagination (2)

Common sense theories of the incidence of beliefs involve the actor treating his own as in need of no explanation and the varying beliefs of others as intelligible in terms of pathologies and biasing factors (2)

2. Barnes attributes no-cause view to academics:

Many academic theories about beliefs...are closely related to this common sense approach. Typically, they divide beliefs about nature into ‘true’ and ‘false’ categories, treating the former as unproblematic in the sense that they derive directly from awareness of reality, whereas the latter must be accounted for by biasing and distorting factors (2-3)

...this particular perspective [ie. the academic theories just mentioned], treating truth as unproblematic and falsehood as needing causal explanation... (3)

[Sociologist Talcott Parsons] regards the empirical claims of ideologies as in need of explanation in so far as they deviate from what is valid (3)

[According to these academic theories] [t]he causal explanation of beliefs correlates with distortion or inadequacy, and hence operates as an implicit condemnation. Beliefs which are valued, for whatever reason, are spared a deterministic account (4)

3. Barnes appears to withdraw the no-cause charge and replace it with the some-causes-only charge:

It should be noted at this point that it is only causal elucidation by reference to bias, or interference with normal faculties of reason and cognition, which is held [by laypeople and academics] to be inapplicable to true beliefs. Other kinds of causal account remain possible (4)

[Barnes then discusses one such account, due to the sociologist Robert Merton, and attributes to Merton the belief that] truth, or at least an increase in the truth content of beliefs, does follow from the unhampered operation of reason, from proceeding rationally (4)

4. After appearing to withdraw the no-cause charge, Barnes continues to make it, sometimes in the same breath as the some-causes-only charge. In square brackets I have indicated phrases that suggest one or other of these charges, with question-marks to indicate borderline cases.

The idea of truth as a normal, straightforward [no-cause] product of human experience...[has] been of considerable importance in academic work (5)

Another consequence of these ideas is that the existence and distribution of scientific beliefs is readily explained; essentially, they are believed because they are true [no-cause]; people will tend to accept them wherever human cognition and reason are unconstrained [some-causes-only] (6)

What matters [in much history of science] is that Newton's beliefs, or those of some other hero, are 'right' and not in need of causal explanations [no-cause], whereas other beliefs linked with the same evidence are 'wrong', even though Newton's beliefs are not accepted as final today. Science is conceived as a uniquely rational process [some-causes-only] leading to present truth; that which can be set on a teleologically conceived sequence leading to the present is assumed to be naturally reasonable and not in need of causal explanation [no-cause] (7)

[For example] Suppose a philosopher gives an account of how true and reasonable beliefs arise by citing (say) sensory inputs, memory, induction, and deduction [some-causes-only] (7)

Here, then, is what has been a very common way of understanding beliefs. We have one world, with a wide range of conflicting beliefs about it; this is intelligible in terms of one set of true [no-cause], or uniquely reasonable, beliefs, and a wide range of causes [no-cause?] of error and distortion (7)

[In sociology] [it] is no longer possible to treat 'truth' [no-cause], or 'naturally reasonable inductions' [some-causes-only?], as unproblematic baselines for explanations, and all other beliefs about nature as distortions in need of causal explanation [no-cause] (11).

[Sociologists of science] have tended to talk of scientific knowledge as 'consonant with experience' or 'in accord with the facts' [no-cause?], as though this completely accounted for its acceptance within science, established its validity and excused it from causal explanation [no-cause] (12).

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Historians of science have too many big pictures, not too few

This is not a good metaphor for the historiography of science.

There has long been talk in the history of science about our alleged failure to write big picture histories. This talk goes back to at least 1993, when the British Journal for the History of Science published a special issue that was supposed to address the problem. The latest round of rumination on the topic is in July’s number of Isis, which featured several essays on the theme of the “longue durée.” The worry is that, for the last forty years or so, historians of science have been spending too much time writing exquisitely rendered accounts of particular people or episodes, and too little time stitching these episodes together to make some sort of coherent narrative. There is something to be said for this view, but there is much to be said for the opposite view, which is that we have too many big pictures, not too few. The challenge is not to stitch together our case studies to make new big pictures, but to merge the big pictures we already have.

The fact is that there are more big pictures on the table than we are led to believe. In my last post but one I identified seven different theories about the second scientific revolution (SSR), an event that allegedly took place around 1800 and that transformed the theories and methods and institutions of science (see the end of this post for references).

Surely seven theories is enough. It is enough from the point of view of time-management—we have our work cut out simply trying to understand and synthesise these theories, and we had better do that work before we try to add an eighth theory to the list. It is also enough from an epistemic point of view—if seven distinguished historians have applied themselves to task of building a theory of the second scientific revolution, surely they have constructed something that is worth keeping. Better to build on what they have done rather than start again from scratch.

There is all the more reason to do so given the dearth of interaction between the authors of the seven theories. Michel Foucault’s theory was almost diametrically opposed to that of Gaston Bachelard, but the reader of Foucault’s book The Order of Things (1966) will search in vain for an attempt to deal with this conflict or even a recognition that the conflict exists. Thomas Kuhn did not mention Foucault, Bachelard, or Hélène Metzger in the article where he developed his own theory. John Heilbron has explained how his own theory differs from Kuhn’s but not how it relates to other theories. Pickstone mentioned Foucault and Metzger but not Heilbron or Kuhn. The work of cataloguing the big pictures on the SSR, let alone the work of reconciling the items in the inventory, has scarcely begun.

All of this would be moot if the big pictures that I have been discussing had been crushed under the weight of critical empirical research. In that case we would be better off building again from new materials rather than foraging in the rubble of discarded theories. But I do not think that such a demolition has taken place. The Order of Things had its critics, but it survived them well enough to become, nearly three decades after its publication, the basis for Pickstone’s theory of the SSR. Kuhn’s theory also has its problems, but two of his sharpest critics (Heilbron and Floris Cohen) have retained the main idea of the theory, namely that early modern science is best understood as a convergence of mathematical disciplines and experimental ones. Two other active historians of science, Steven Shapin and Peter Dear, have built this idea into some of their own work.

Shapin’s name may seem incongruous here. Is he not the co-author of Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985), and is that book not the classic example of a case study in the history of science, a miniature portrait rather than a big picture? And has Shapin not written that the resistance to “synthetic” histories of science is “one of the crowning achievements of our field”?

Yes, but Shapin has also written a book called The Scientific Revolution (1996), which despite a few rhetorical flourishes (such as the first sentence) does not differ a great deal from traditional histories of early modern science. Shapin has also written papers that purport to cover “a broad sweep of history” and that contain sentences such as: “These characteristics of public and private science are, of course [!], fully general.”

Shapin is not the only historian of science who moves happily between miniatures and murals. Simon Schaffer was the other author of Leviathan and the Air Pump, but he is also the author of articles on such sweeping topics as “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century” and “Scientific Discoveries and the End of Natural Philosophy.” Martin Rudwick wrote The Great Devonian Controversy (1988), a microscopic study of a controversy in Victorian geology, but he also wrote ambitious synthetic histories such as The Meaning of Fossils (1972) and Bursting the Limits of Time (2005). There are plenty of splitters in the history of science, but some of them are also lumpers. There are also some who specialise in lumping—anyone who browses the oeuvre of Lorraine Daston, for example, will be puzzled by the claim that recent historians of science have a problem with big pictures. John Heilbron is certainly puzzled:

[some assert that] during the last few decades historians have concentrated more and more on less and less and so produce fewer long-haul accounts; consequently, their work is less inviting and informative to policy makers than it used to be. An analysis of the Isis Current Bibliographies over the last thirty years does not support this characterization of trends in the history of science.

To conclude, here is a big picture about the historiography of science, one that many historians of science appear to endorse. We used to write many big pictures. We stopped doing so because we discovered that the big pictures did not fit the facts, and that the very idea of big-picture history of science is wrong-headed. We have started to write big pictures again, but we still think that the old ones were wrong, and hence that the best way to build new ones is to piece together our new case studies.

Here is a different big picture, one that I prefer. We never showed that the old big pictures were false. We set them aside for a range of reasons that had little to do with the evidence for them or against them. Some of these reasons were good (case studies allowed us to give a more rounded picture of science) and some of the reasons were dubious (the big pictures celebrated science, ergo they were false). Some claimed that big pictures were wrong-headed, but some of these people wrote big pictures anyway. Some of the new big pictures conflicted with some of the old ones, but usually because the new ones were inspired by other old big pictures (we replaced Butterfield with Bachelard, Koyré with Merton, and so on). True, the new big pictures were organised around “ways of knowing” rather than disciplines, but no-one ever explained why the former were preferable to the latter as a unit of analysis, and in any case the former histories were not as new as they looked (Pickstone was indebted to old histories of ways of knowing, such as Alistair Crombie’s, and to old histories of disciplines, such as Metzger’s history of crystallography).

Because we believed that the old big pictures were wrong-headed, we did not bother to compare the new ones with the old. And because we believed that very few new big pictures were being written, we did not bother to compare the new ones between themselves. The upshot is that we now have an excess of big pictures and a deficit of serious reflection about how they are related to each-other. What we need, more urgently than new case studies or even new big pictures, is an understanding of the big pictures we already have.



Seven theories of the second scientific revolution:

Metzger, Hélène. La genèse de la science des cristaux. Paris: Albert Blanchard, 1969.

Bachelard, Gaston. La Formation de l’esprit scientifique: contribution à une psychanalyse de la connaissance. Vrin, 1934.

Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1966.

Kuhn, Thomas. "Mathematical Versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7, no. 1 (1976): 1–31.

Heilbron, John. Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: a Study of Early Modern Physics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

Frängsmyr, Tore, J. L Heilbron, and Robin E Rider, eds. The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Pickstone, John V. "Ways of Knowing: Towards a Historical Sociology of Science, Technology and Medicine." The British Journal for the History of Science 26, no. 4 (1993): 433–58.



Other references, in the order they are cited in this post:

Shapin, Steven. Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as If It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, p. 8.

Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. The first sentence is: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.”

Shapin, Steven. "'The Mind Is Its Own Place': Science and Solitude in Seventeenth-Century England." Science in Context 4, no. 1 (1991): 191–218.

Schaffer, Simon. "Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century." History of Science 21, no. 1 (1983): 1–43.

Schaffer, Simon. "Scientific Discoveries and the End of Natural Philosophy." Social Studies of Science 16, no. 3 (1986): 387–420.

Heilbron, J. L. "Are Historians Fit to Rule?" Isis 107, no. 2 (1 June 2016): 350–52. Expand post.

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