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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