Lorraine Daston on history as fiction – critical thoughts

Nick Tosh and Lorraine Daston have, separately, made some intriguing remarks about the affinities between fiction and the history of science. Their remarks follow on nicely from my last post. Daston compares historians to readers of mystery novels who know in advance how the story ends. She means this as a criticism. By contrast, Tosh praises authors who freely acknowledge the gap between themselves and their subjects, a stance that Tosh labels ‘postmodern.’ My position is somewhere in between: it is OK for readers to know how the story ends, but this is not a particularly postmodern phenomenon.

Daston made her remarks in a 2012 interview with the Canadian radio station CBC:

Imagine you’re the kind of person who cheats when you read mystery novels, and you read the last page first, to find out who did it. And then when you read the rest of the mystery story, you know that everything is building towards this climax. You read it in a very different way than the person who has to retrace all of the red herrings that have been planted in your way by the author, to throw you off the scent of the real villain. We the historians of science were always the people who read the last page first, and we knew how the story ended.

This statement is plausible on the surface: you read a novel differently if you know the outcome, and historians of science usually know the outcome of the scientific debates they study. But note that Daston has compared two different ways of reading a detective novel, and that she uses this comparison to assess two ways of writing history. Foreknowledge may change the way we read, but does it change the way we write?

The analogy to detective fiction suggests that it does not. Mystery writers do know the outcome of their stories, and despite this they revel in the kind of red herring to which Daston refers. And why not say the same about readers? If the prescient writer can appreciate the red herrings, why not the prescient reader? As per my last post, mystery novels can be gripping even when we know in advance who committed the crime and why.

Daston continues:

Moreover, we were complicit in this with the scientists themselves, who wish to have a story about why we believe what we believe now, and why it is right, because the scientist knew, in a way that the historian did not know so viscerally, that everything—or most things—that we now believe in science will be overturned, if not in a generation then in two generations. This is the progress of science, but it is the pathos as well. Therefore the reassurance of that kind of history of science was: it is inevitable to believe what we believe now, indeed there are no other possible positions one could have...it was that deep reassurance which more than we the historians needed, the scientists needed.

In other words, by writing history with the outcome in mind, historians made those outcomes seem more rational than they really were. This reassured scientists because deep down they knew that most of the outcomes were not particularly rational. My objection is the same as the one I stated above. Historians and their readers can include all the red herrings—all the accidental developments, the roads that led nowhere, and the roads that might have led somewhere but were not taken at the time, and might still be taken—they can include all of this even though they are perfectly aware of what scientists now believe.

What I find especially odd is the idea that knowledge of the status quo is a conservative force, one that stifles dissent and disagreement. In the political realm, those who seek change are usually well advised to study the way things are. This knowledge can be rhetorically as well as strategically valuable. It allows the revolutionary to present his cause as a lonely struggle against massive opposition—not so much opposition that the cause is hopeless, but enough to endow it with romance and urgency. Animal rights activists do not ignore the mistreatment of animals. On the contrary, they spell it out in gory detail. Feminists do not turn a blind eye to laddish behaviour—they hunt it down and string it up. Many skeptics about climate change do not deny that there is a scientific consensus on the topic—instead they try to show that the consensus is rotten.

The grain of truth in Daston’s statements is that historians who overemphasise the present condition of science are usually the ones who exaggerate the naturalness of that condition. My point is that the source of this exaggeration is not knowledge of present-day science but the way this knowledge is used. The principal error is to assume that the theories of present-day science were as defensible in the past as they are today—that there was as much evidence for them in the past as there is today. In history and in mystery novels, it does not matter whether we know how the story ends. The important thing is to not mistake the story for the ending.

Nick Tosh follows in my next post. Expand post.

Malheureusement je ne traduis plus tous les posts que j'écris sur ce blog. Si vous voudriez lire les posts qui ont été traduits, veuillez cliquer ici.

Agrandir ce message.

Histories of science as murder mysteries, or: Steven Weinberg as Henning Mankell

The conclusion of my last post was that scientists who write history are like visitors to one city who live in a different city (as opposed to historians, who study cities while living in the countryside). The point of the analogy was to show that knowledge of present-day science need not get in the way of good history-writing. There is another analogy that gets at the same point from a different direction: scientists who write history are like authors of murder mysteries who reveal the identity of the killer in the first chapter. This may sound like a criticism, but there are successful authors who actually write like this, starting with the Swedish maestro Henning Mankell.

SPOILER ALERT - crucial details of detective novel revealed below, most of them from the first chapter

Consider Mankell's Villospår (1995), also known under the much less chilling title Sidetracked. Four of the murders in the story are narrated from the point of the killer, which means that the reader is always several steps ahead of the detective, the stern but sensitive Kurt Wallander. Within the first 20 pages we know that the killer acts alone, rides a small motorcycle, attacks his victims with knives and axes, is engaged in a vendetta on behalf of his sister, and buries the scalps of each his victims under the window of the hospital ward in which his sister is confined.

Wallander knows none of this. If he knew all of it, he would solve the mystery after the third murder, if not before. This would make the book shorter and much less interesting. It would mean that, as readers, we would not find ourselves in the edifying position of admiring Wallander’s deductions while knowing that his conclusions are wrong. We would not take nearly as much pleasure in the suspenseful meetings between Wallander and the person who (as we but not Wallander knows) committed the grisly murders. Nor would we know that Wallander placed his life in danger by speaking to this person. Most of all, our attention would not be drawn away from the facts of the murders (these facts are boring because Mankell hands them to us on a plate) and towards the process by which Wallander discovers those facts. This process, including the many dead-ends along the way, is the real mystery of the novel.

Mankell’s approach in Sidetracked is not unlike Steven Weinberg’s in To Explain the World.* Weinberg makes no secret of the fact that the earth follows an elliptical path around the sun, that inertial motion is rectilinear rather than circular, that the speed of light is finite, and numerous other present-day orthodoxies that were out of reach of many of the past scientists he discusses.

These disclosures do not ruin Weinberg’s narrative any more than they ruin Mankell’s. On the contrary. They teach us that skilled scientists can be wrong for the right reasons. They lead to dramatic scenes in which scientists come tantalisingly close to a discovery without quite getting there, where they unwittingly endanger their lives or careers by meddling with phenomena they do not understand, and where they become acquainted with a new entity without correctly identifying the entity (for an example of the latter, consider Joseph Priestly’s isolation of oxygen). Most importantly, a plain statement of the facts of nature has the paradoxical effect of drawing our attention away from those facts and towards the circuitous route that leads eventually to their discovery. This route, not the facts themselves, is the real story of the history of science.

Granted, there are relevant disanalogies between histories of science and murder mysteries. One is to do with the contemporaneity of those who know the facts and those who inquire about them. In Sidetracked, as in most murder mysteries, the facts about the crime are known (by the criminal) even before the inquirer (the detective) knows that a crime has been commited. In most histories of science, the facts about nature are not known by anyone until they are discovered by one of the principal inquirers in the narrative.

The second and related disanalogy is that, in a murder mystery, the discovery of the facts is almost always part of the story—the murderer, the means and the motive are correctly identified by someone in the book, usually near the end. By contrast, histories of science need not end with the identification of a true theory or the correct identification of a phenomenon. Often they do, but there is nothing in the rules of the genre that requires this.

These disanalogies do not seriously undermine the point I am trying to make, which is that histories of science can benefit from knowledge that is unavailable to most or all of the scientists they deal with in any given narrative. The first disanalogy is harmless because in both cases—histories of science and murder mysteries—the reader has access to facts that are unavailable to the inquirer. It does not matter whether there is someone else, living at the same time as the inquirer, who knows those facts as well as the reader. The second disanalogy is harmless because there are enough histories of science that do end with a correct solution to a problem to make the comparison to murder mysteries worthwhile.

I am not the first to compare histories of science to murder mysteries. Lorraine Daston has also done so, though not in the same way as I have just done. And Nick Tosh has some interesting remarks on the literary merits of historians who, like Weinberg, wear their present-day knowledge on their sleeves. I respond to Daston and Tosh in my next post.



*As I imagine Weinberg’s book, which I have still not read. It matters little whether my hypothetical description of Weinberg’s book is accurate. The features I describe are endemic in the kind of histories of science that are called ‘Whiggish’ or ‘present-centred.’ Expand post.

Malheureusement je ne traduis plus tous les posts que j'écris sur ce blog. Si vous voudriez lire les posts qui ont été traduits, veuillez cliquer ici.

Agrandir ce message.

Are scientists who do history like tourists? Thoughts on Steven Weinberg's analogy

A couple of months ago Will Thomas posted his thoughts on the Shapin-Weinberg episode. You may have read Steven Shapin's unflinching review of Steven Weinberg's new book To Explain the World. The theme of the review, and of the replies and reflections that followed, including my own, was the quality of history written by scientists. One view that Will outlines is that scientists' history serves only to propagate self-serving myths about science. Will's own view is that this is itself a myth, and that historians should treat scientists as tourists whose well-meaning forays into past science are a net gain for the discipline. I like the tourist analogy, but I think it can be modified to better explain that net gain.

The source of the analogy is Weinberg. ‘I work and live in the country of physics,’ he said, ‘but history is the place that I love to visit as a tourist.’ A fine sentiment, but Weinberg is selling himself short. As the name suggests, history of science is about science. It follows that scientists have a relationship with the history of science that non-scientists do not have: they do the thing whose past is being described. True, they do not do exactly the thing that is being described, because that thing has changed over time. But they are doing something similar.

I want to put the stress on the doing. There is a case to be made that scientists have special knowledge of past science by virtue of the fact that they do science in the present. Moreover, this is a kind of knowledge that most historians of science do not have, since most of us are not practising scientists.

The case is easier to make if we suppose, as many historians of science do suppose, that much scientific knowledge is tacit in the sense that it is difficult to write down or has not yet been written down. This supposition has driven historians to replicate past experiments and to collaborate with present-day artisans in order to get behind the veil of words and understand scientific practise. Hasok Chang and Otto Sibum are examples of historians who replicate. Pamela Smith, and her Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University, is an example of collaboration with artisans or ‘expert makers.’

Collaborating with a silversmith is one thing, you might say; working with a physicist on a history of physics is another thing. But what’s the difference? Are we to believe that there is more tacit knowledge in the silversmith’s workshop than there is in the physicist's laboratory? Surely not. At least, most historians of science who are skeptical about the historical abilities of scientists would deny that there is any such difference. I expect Shapin would, for instance.

If scientists do have special knowledge of past science, then the relationship between scientists and historians of science is more complex than one straying into the domain of the other. It is not a case of scientists paying a casual visit to a city that they know nothing about and in which historians have always lived. We need to tweak the analogy. My version is messier than the original but, I hope, more accurate:

The historian is like a person who lives on a farm in Iowa and spends most of his professional life reading about London using whatever material he can find—internet, radio, newspapers, tourist guides, the lot. In this way he has acquired a wealth of information about London and about literature on London, but he has never lived in London or in any other city.

The scientist is like a person who lives in Washington, D.C. London intrigues him because it, too, is a city. So he reads up on London in his spare time. He will never read as much about London as the Iowan, who is a dedicated professional. But he has the advantage that he has lived somewhere that is, like London, a city.

In this analogy, city life corresponds to life in the sciences, and farms to life in the humanities. The US corresponds to the present, and the UK to the past. There is a big gap between the two nations, enough to baffle the tourist, but stretched across the abyss there is a rich web of resemblances. The fact that neither the Iowan nor the Washingtonian actually goes to London corresponds to the fact that neither the historian nor the scientist goes back in time and does past science. They both rely on texts and objects that survive from the past, just as the Washingtonian and the Iowan rely on pieces of London that make their way across the Atlantic.

The lesson is that, when it comes to knowing London, a lifetime of reading in Iowa is no substitute for the lived experience of Washington. Likewise, when it comes to knowing past science, a lifetime of studying the remnants of past science is no substitute for the lived experience of present science.

The revised analogy explains the wariness that some historians display towards scientist-historians. The Washingtonian runs the risk of seeking out everything in London that resembles Washington and ignoring the rest. The Iowan, knowing nothing of cities except what he knows of London, assumes nothing. In addition, the Washingtonian may be enamoured of big cities, in which case he will turn a blind eye to the vices and vanities of London life, and to the tense relationship between London and other parts of the UK. The Iowan will have no such prejudice. The two errors I have just described correspond roughly to the ‘present-centredness’ and ‘triumphalism’ that historians often attribute to scientist-historians.

The analogy has the further merit of showing why we should be wary of these attributions. After all, it is possible for a Washingtonian to study London with an open mind. Only a fool assumes that every city is identical in all respects. We might even say that the Washingtonian is in a better position than the Iowan when it comes to comparing US life to UK life, since he is familiar with both London and Washington whereas the Iowan only knows the former. It is also possible for a Washingtonian to criticise city life. Cities, like sciences, are layered and varied and riven with factions. Washingtonians criticise each-other, so why wouldn't they criticise Londoners? They can empathise with Iowans; why not with East Anglians?

The force of my analogy depends on the scope of tacit knowledge. How much can we learn about London by living there that we cannot learn by reading about London? Analogously, how much can we learn about the practice of physics (or biology, or economics, or whatever) that we cannot learn by reading about it? The force of the analogy also depends on how much science has changed over time, and which parts of past science we study. How similar is eighteenth-century chemistry to today’s chemistry? Are they as alike as Washington and London? Or are they as different as Washington is from Amsterdam, or Nairobi, or Damascus? Washington and Aleppo are both cities, but life in Washington may be little better than life in Iowa as a guide to life in Aleppo.

So my analogy is not a knock-down argument in favour of scientists who dabble in history. It could easily be altered to yield a weaker conclusion. Still, it is an improvement on the image that Weinberg gives us of scientists wandering into an alien land that historians know directly from long experience. Historians do not know past science in the direct way that scientists know present science. And past science is similar to present science. So it is plausible that scientists can help us know past science more directly. Expand post.

Malheureusement je ne traduis plus tous les posts que j'écris sur ce blog. Si vous voudriez lire les posts qui ont été traduits, veuillez cliquer ici.

Agrandir ce message.

Why historians shouldn't write off scientists: on Steven Shapin's review of Steven Weinberg's Explain the World

Say what you like about the science wars, they’ve got legs. A few days after finishing a review of The One Culture, the book that was supposed to end the quarrels between scientists and sociologists/historians of science, I learned that two of the contributors to that volume have been involved in a new skirmish. The opening shot was a new book by the physicist Steven Weinberg, called To Explain The World. The riposte came from the historian of science Steven Shapin, who has reviewed the book under the uncompromising title 'Why Scientists Shouldn't Write History.' Will Thomas, who drew my attention to the review, comments that Shapin’s review is ‘unduly divisive’ and that historians ‘ought to take seriously...the objections and perspectives of scientists.’ I agree, but I would go further. The reason historians should not write scientists off is not just that the scientist's perspective is valid but also that it overlaps with the perspective of some historians. To a large extent, the division that Shapin sees between scientists and historians is better understood as a division between historians.

The methodology that Shapin endorses in his review is a strong form of anti-presentism. He writes: ‘History is properly about trying to understand the world of the past in its own terms.’ Most historians would agree with some reading of that statement. Most would also agree with Shapin that the job of professional historians these days is not that of ‘judging the past by the standards of the present.’ But Shapin goes further, in two ways.

Firstly, he suggests that historians cannot legitimately say that an earlier event was a precursor to a later event. The true historian will ‘thump the table’ while reading Weinberg’s book, ‘insisting that searching for anticipations and foreshadowings is both wrong and illogical—‘ahistorical’ as they’d say.’ Certainly there are historians who would say this. But many others would say that an anticipation is merely a case of a past event resembling, or having an effect upon, a later event, and that anticipations are meat and drink for any historian who aspires to narrate or analyse past events—that is, for any historian worthy of the name.

Secondly, Shapin seems to say that no-one should judge the past by the standards of the present. That is, such judgements are barred not only to professional historians but also to anyone who wishes to write accurate accounts of past science. Shapin’s subtitle captures his view nicely: ‘Plato was ‘silly’. Bacon ‘overrated.’ Galileo ‘behind the times.’ The suggestion is that anyone who makes such claims has made a fundamental methodological mistake, analogous to affirming the consequent or using a telescope to prove a mathematical theorem.

Again, many historians would agree with this. But what’s wrong with saying that a past theory was false or that a past scientist used an unreliable method to reach a theory? Can such statements be verified? Apparently. Do they inevitably lead the author into errors of historical fact? If you think the answer is 'yes,' I'ld like to know your reasons. Arguably, Weinberg’s error is disciplinary, not conceptual. He has used past science in a way that professional historians do not usually use it, and in doing so he has underestimated the preciousness of professional historians.

Shapin’s blanket anti-presentism obscures the real error in Weinberg’s book. Here I must confess that I have not read Weinberg’s book, so I stand to be corrected. Based on Shapin’s description, however, it seems plausible that Weinberg has judged past scientists by first establishing whether their theories were true or false, and then by assuming that the true ones must be the result of sound reasoning and the false ones the result of incompetence.** Plato’s cosmology does not match our own, hence Plato was ‘silly’; Newton’s cosmology is very much like our own, so he must have been a flawless genius. The problem is not the judging, or even the judging-by-today’s-standards. The problem is judging the rationality of an individual by the truth of their theories. This common error is the reason we have the symmetry principle. In his eagerness to run rings around Weinberg, Shapin skates over the distinction between truth and reasonableness and thereby repeats Weinberg’s mistake.

Shapin’s anti-presentism is tied to his defense of the autonomy and expertise of the professional historian. His target is the dogma that ‘writing history is pretty straightforward and that being a 21st-century surgeon gives you a leg up in documenting and interpreting, for example, theories of fever in the 17th century.’ There are really two dogmas here. The first is that history is a doddle. This dogma is false (though whether history is as difficult as surgery is an open question). The other dogma is that knowledge of present-day science can be useful when studying past science. This is a much more plausible dogma, and Shapin is in danger of replacing it with the opposite dogma that scientists have nothing in particular to contribute to the history of their disciplines.

Shapin reaches this conclusion by analogy. ‘Modern installation artists don’t think they can produce adequate scholarly studies of Dutch Golden Age paintings, and it’s hard to find offensive linesmen parading their competence in writing the history of rugby.’ The plausibility of both analogies is due partly to the fact that installation artists, unlike historians, are not heavily involved in reading and writing argumentative prose. The analogies are suspect because scientists are heavily involved in those activities.

More importantly, the analogies rely on the fact that installation art is not painting and that linesmen are not rugby players. But the question is not whether physicists can help with the history of botany, or whether ethics committees—the linesmen of biology—have something to contribute to the history of biology. The question is whether painters can help with the history of painting, rugby-players with the history of rugby-playing, and physicists with the history of physics. And it seems to me that the answer in all cases is that they can, and they do.

The assumption that lies behind Shapin’s analogies is that present-day activities cannot be compared with their closest equivalents in earlier epochs. Now, we can all agree that activities have changed over time, and that the risk of anachronism is real. But how much have events changed, really? How should we weigh the threat of anachronism against the special insights that a practitioner can bring to the study of their practice? And is there really a trade-off between insight and anachronism? After all, it is possible to believe that the earth moves, or that species evolve, or anything else, without automatically attributing that belief to every past scientist.

Shapin’s vision of history is skewed in other ways. On the authority of Thomas Kuhn, he reports that ‘linear and cumulative progress is a problematic notion.’ Very well – but how can Kuhn or Shapin make this claim without making judgements about whether earlier theories were better or worse than later theories, and has not Shapin foresworn all interest in making judgements about past science? Shapin is right that the notion of progress is problematic for historians of science – but is this because we have shown that science does not make progress, or because we have decided not to address the question?

Shapin says that historians would ‘express bemusement at Mr. Weinberg’s insistence that science advances by rejecting teleology, even as he depicts its history as a triumphal progress from dark past to bright present.’ But is it really so absurd to find purpose in human action and not in brute nature? And is Weinberg really so wedded to ‘triumphal progress’ if he thinks that science went backwards in the Middle Ages, as Shapin reports? This historian is not bemused.

I am not saying that Weinberg's book is flawless. As Shapin points out, it ignores most science apart from physics, all science after Newton, and just about everything that seventeenth-century scientists wrote about religion.** Nor am I saying that Weinberg's errors are unrelated to his eagerness to evaluate past scientists and to find anticipations in past science. What I am saying is that anticipations and evaluations do not lead inevitably to bad history, and that at least some professional historians recognise this. More generally, several of Shapin's criticisms of Weinberg reflect the fact that he is a particular type of historian, and not that he is a historian as opposed to a scientist.

This conclusion raises a question that I cannot hope to answer in this post but that is too important to omit. If historians disagree about how to do history, but agree that scientists sometimes write bad history, how should historians go about improving scientists' history? One answer is that historians should set aside their internecine disputes when dealing with scientists: they should only criticise scientists for errors that the vast majority of historians would recognise as errors. The problem is that this seems to tacitly resolve those internecine disputes in favour of the more liberal historians. If Shapin stops criticising Weinberg for evaluating past scientists, will not Weinberg think that it is OK to evaluate past scientists, thereby writing history that I can accept but that Shapin cannot accept?

Still, there is surely some value in identifying points on which historians agree about the historical errors of scientists. These convergences may not be the whole solution, but they are surely part of it. And in the search for historiographical common ground, I think we could do much worse than the symmetry principle that I mentioned earlier in this post and that I have discussed at length on this blog. The vast majority of historians of science would agree, I think, that we should not assume that past scientists who held true theories did so for good reasons, and that those who held false theories did so for bad reasons. Scientists who make these assumptions should be the first targets of anyone who is interested in raising the bar of popular history of science.


** These criticisms of Weinberg's book are based on the data I had at the time of writing, namely a few hints that Shapin dropped about the book in his review. Weinberg has since denied the charges. This denial does not effect the main point of this post, ie. that the division that Shapin sees between scientists and historians is better understood as a division between historians. Expand post.

Malheureusement je ne traduis plus tous les posts que j'écrit sur ce blog. Si vous voudriez lire les posts qui ont été traduits, veuillez cliquer ici.

Agrandir ce message.

How to end the science wars: a review of Harry Collins and Jay Labinger, The One Culture? A Conversation About Science, part II/II

This is the long-delayed second part of a two-part review of Harry Collins and Jay Labinger, The One Culture: A Conversation About Science (2001). In the first part I argued that we—by which I mean, roughly speaking, scientists and sociologists of science—would more easily reach agreement about science if sociologists acknowledged their past relativism and if everyone was charitable in debate. It would also help if we set aside the interesting but irrelevant question of whether the truth of a belief can (partly) explain the belief. In this post I make three other recommendations: revive the internal/external distinction, or something like it; be clear about how our visions of science differ, if we think they do differ; and beware tacit philosophy of science.

Revive the internal/external distinction. Gravity waves are tiny ripples in space-time created by bodies with mass. In 1970, several experts believed that the physicist Joseph Weber had detected gravity waves in his laboratory. By 1980, no experts believed this except Weber. What changed their minds? One plausible answer is that the experts made many sincere and careful attempts to replicate Weber’s results, and these replications failed. Another answer is that there was only one such failure, and that it was carried out by a physicist who happened to have more polemical skill and social prestige than Weber. The former answer says that the experts followed the evidence, and the latter answer that they followed their most powerful colleague. For want of better terms, let’s call the former an ‘internal’ answer and the latter an ‘external’ one.

I don’t know which answer is the right one in the case of Weber, but we should be mindful of the difference between the two answers, because otherwise the science wars will never end. The reason is that scientists tend to play up internal explanations of true beliefs, whereas sociologists emphasise the external ones. If we do not distinguish between these two kinds of explanation, we will not even be able to characterise this disagreement. Worse, we may end up exaggerating the extent of the disagreement.

Most of the contributors to The One Culture do not make any distinction along the lines of the internal/external one. More often they distinguish between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ factors, which they too often see as synonymous with ‘scientific’ and ‘social’ ones. For example, Michael Lynch takes ‘social factors’ to refer to ‘a range of personal, circumstantial, and institutional considerations,’ and ‘natural factors’ to mean ‘objective reality, nature itself, or properties of the physical world’ (271).

What is missing in Lynch’s distinction is the idea that scientists’ beliefs might result from a third kind of cause, namely experiments undertaken by scientists and the deductions made by them—the meat and drink of internal historians of science. No progress can be made if one party (sociologists) does not recognise, even conceptually, the preferred explanations of the other party (scientists).

When sociologists do recognise the scientists’ preferred explanations, they tend to absorb them into the category of ‘society’ or ‘culture.’ This has the effect of obscuring points of agreement between scientists and sociologists, since scientists do not think ‘experiments and deductions’ when they see the words ‘society’ and ‘culture.’ This is not due to any deep misunderstanding on the part of the scientists. It is just not how the words ‘society’ and ‘culture’ are usually used when talking about science.

The point may be illustrated by a dispute between Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, on the one hand, and the physicist H. David Mermin on the other. Collins and Pinch wrote an account of early experimental tests of the theory of relativity in which they argued that those tests were inconclusive. They maintained that it was not these tests, but rather the ‘culture of life in the physics community’, that persuaded physicists to believe the theory. I leave the rest to Mermin:

What this means depends, of course, on what ‘culture’ is taken to include. If, as I now understand Collins and Pinch’s intent, ‘the culture of life in the physics community’ refers to the cumulative impact of all theoretical and experimental work bearing on relativity since 1905, then [their thesis] is correct. But their readers...are likely to conclude that the momentum was generated by nothing more than many years of growing more and more comfortable with the [two inconclusive tests].

Be clear about other disagreements. In my previous post I said that the most visible disagreement in The One Culture (about whether the truth of a belief can explain the belief) is not a real disagreement. And in this post I have argued that the real disagreement (between internal and external explanations of true beliefs) is scarcely visible in the book. So, are there any disagreements in the book that are both real and visible? Collins thinks there are, but I’m not convinced.

In a chapter near the end of the book, Collins says that sociologists prefer the ‘rough diamonds’ of science to the ‘crown jewels’ of science. He summarises his point by saying that sociology ‘reduces the quasilogical authority of science’, but really he draws several contrasts that need to be treated separately. None of them pick out a clear disagreement between scientists and sociologists.

Process v product. One of these contrasts is that, whereas Collins studies the early, uncertain stages of scientific debates, scientists such as Weinberg (who seems to be the foil that Collins has in mind in this chapter) emphasise the polished theories that emerge from this process. This is a difference in research interests, not a disagreement.

Skills v knowledge. Collins says that he stresses the ‘assiduousness, experience, skill and virtuosity’ of scientists, and the fact that they are ‘the kind of people whom it makes sense to trust’ because they have ‘the right kind of expertise.’ By contrast, scientists play up their ‘privileged access to reality’ and their ‘extensive store of knowledge about the way the world works.’ Whether this is a disagreement depends, as ever, on how the terms are defined. The disagreement vanishes if scientists say that it is precisely their ‘experience’ and ‘skill’ that gives them ‘privileged access to reality.’ Collins himself suggests that ‘the right kind of expertise’ might consist in making ‘experimentally or observationally based claims’ rather than ‘book-based claims.’ This claim is remarkable for its conventionality. It looks like all that quasi-sociological talk of ‘trust’ and ‘skill’ and ‘expertise’ is really just another way of saying that we should believe what scientists say about nature because they study it directly instead of relying on bookish authorities. In short, Nullis in verbia.

Simple v complicated justifications. Collins says that ‘scientific procedures do not speak for themselves but have to be judged and interpreted’, and that ‘experiments and theories [are] less decisive in bringing scientific controversies to a close than uninvolved scientists and others generally think they are.’ His idea seems to be that the intellectual side of scientific debates are more complicated than scientists make out—he is saying that it is not just a matter of doing one or two experiments and drawing the obvious conclusion. The problem is that none of the scientists in the volume deny this, not even Weinberg. In fact, one of them (Mermin) turns the tables and accuses Collins of giving an insufficiently complex account of the early evidence for the theory of relativity.

Social v scientific education. Collins says that the sociology of science ‘turns the public understanding of science into a matter of social education rather than scientific education.’ What he means is that non-scientists lack the time and expertise to carry out a thorough assessment of the evidence on either side of scientific debates over such things as global warming and genetically modified foods. We rely on the testimony of the experts, which means that we need to decide who are the experts on the debate in question. This is not a trivial problem, especially when the experts appear to disagree. Collins implies that scientists have trouble understanding these points. He should have another look at the following passage from the scientists Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal:

When confronted with experts, any individual or small group of individuals is in a difficult situation. There is no way to find the time and the means to check even a small fraction of the experts’ assertions. And yet, in many practical situations we have to decide whether or not to trust their claims. How should we proceed? This is a truly interesting and difficult question … [and one where] many sociological considerations become relevant (46).

Beware of tacit philosophy of science. Michael Lynch writes that the science wars are ‘a metaphysical battle fought by conscripts who have limited training in the martial arts of philosophy’ (53). Lynch says that the debate would be improved if the participants recognised that they were arguing over questions that have challenged philosophers for centuries, if not millenia. Some of the questions are metaphysical: do causes and categories really exist in nature, or are they just tools that help us to understand nature? Other questions are epistemological: what is the best way to justify scientific theories, and are our justifications strong enough to give us confidence in the existence and nature of unobservable entities like quarks and DNA?

Lynch is right that these are fraught topics, and that anyone who wants to discuss them seriously should have a least a passing acquaintance with the relevant writings of trained philosophers. However, to judge from The One Culture, Lynch is mistaken if he thinks that scientists and sociologists still see these issues as a major front in the science wars. None of those issues appear in the list of ‘open questions’ that the editors provide at the end of the book (299-300). And, as I mentioned in my previous post, the only avowed relativists in the book are methodological ones.

This reticence is both encouraging and vexing. It is encouraging because it suggests that, pace Lynch, scientists and sociologists are arguing over topics that they have some special competence in, rather than ineptly reproducing the debates of professional philosophers.

The reticence is vexing because it may conceal more disagreements than it resolves. Collins, with his stress on 'skill' and 'expertise', often sounds like an instrumentalist, ie. someone who thinks that scientific theories are great instruments for predicting and controlling nature but who is loath to take the next step and say that the successful ones are probably true. Steven Shapin, for all his asides about the impotence of philosophy, defends a thesis that is nothing if not philosophical, namely that there is no single method that characterises all forms of science. Several contributors imply that the sociology of science has shown that science does not achieve 'certainty', a claim that is both normative and epistemological. If we make such claims then we should be clear that we are making them and that they are, at least in part, philosophical claims. This would not solve the problem of how non-philosophers can reach agreement on philosophical questions. But it would at least clarify where the disagreements lie.

***

The stated aims of The One Culture were to get scientists and sociologists talking to each-other again, and to get clear about their points of agreement and disagreement. The upshot of this review is that the book achieves the former goal but has mixed success with the latter. To sum up my criticisms:

- the editors ignore the main source of agreement between the two parties, namely the fact that sociologists have retreated from their full-blooded relativism of the 1970s and 1980s.

- the editors misidentify methodological relativism as a major source of disagreement. Even Harry Collins admits that the truth can help to explain a belief, and anyway the interesting question is not whether truths can explain true beliefs but whether social factors routinely play a decisive role in the formation of true beliefs.

- The One Culture barely addresses the latter question (about social factors), which is not surprising given that most contributors do not acknowledge the distinction between social and intellectual factors.

- Collins identifies another persistent disagreement, concerning 'crown jewels' and 'rough diamonds,' but this distinction is overdrawn, as we see when we unpack the gemmological metaphor.

- some contributors hint at more substantial disagreements over such things as instrumentalism and the unity of science, but these are philosophical questions that scientists and sociologists cannot resolve on their own.

The good news is that the question about the decisiveness of social factors is a question for scientists and sociologists, and there is no reason why they should not be able to answer it together—as long as they can agree to distinguish social factors from intellectual ones. Expand post.

Malheureusement je ne traduis plus tous les posts que j'écrit sur ce blog. Si vous voudriez lire les posts qui ont été traduits, veuillez cliquer ici.

Agrandir ce message.

How to end the science wars: a review of Harry Collins and Jay Labinger, The One Culture? A Conversation About Science, part I/II

The science wars were a series of skirmishes that took place between scientists and sociologists (loosely speaking) in the 1990s. Sociologists of science were accused of using bad arguments and shoddy scholarship to undermine science; scientists were accused of misunderstanding the sociologists, idealising science, and conspiring to shut down legitimate debate. In 1997 some of the protagonists met at a ‘Science Peace Workshop’ in the hope of finding common ground and clarifying the issues at stake. The result was The One Culture? A Conversation About Science (2001), edited by the sociologist Harry Collins and the chemist Jay Labinger. It has been said, not without justice, that the book spelled the end of the science wars. But the book has its flaws, including several irritants and two serious omissions. This post and the next one are a guide to the 'science peace process.' These remarks are cobbled together from insights I found in the book and from my own reflections on such things as the symmetry principle and the internal/external distinction.

Be charitable in debate. Of the 35 chapters in The One Culture, the one I found most enlightening was by N. David Mermin, a theoretical physicist who took on a whole squadron of sociologists in reviews and letters published in the magazine Physics Today in the mid-1990s. His targets were The Golem (1993), by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, and Scientific Knowledge: a Sociological Analysis (1996), by Barry Barnes, David Bloor and John Henry. In his contribution to The One Culture, Mermin describes the slow process by which he came to understand what his interlocutors were trying to say, and he concludes with three lessons that are as simple as they are indispensable:

Focus on the substance of what is being said and not on alleged motives for saying it.

Do not expect people from remote disciplines to speak clearly in or understand the nuances of your own disciplinary language.

Do not assume that it is as easy as it may appear to penetrate the disciplinary language of others (97-8).

Mermin says that sociologists, not just scientists, fell foul of these rules. This is worth stressing, since the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Conclusion’ of the book mention the scientists’ habit of dismissing sociologists as science-haters but do not mention the sociologists’ habit of dismissing scientists as science-worshippers (see esp. 5-6, 297). Mermin was a victim of this habit, to judge from his account of his exchanges with sociologists:

...the response was not to what I was saying, but to why I might have been saying it. Both times I was taken to be responding to a perceived violation of something I held to be sacred [ie. science], and my actual criticism--they were paying insufficient attention to the broad coherence of an extensive body of knowledge--was read as a charge that they were personally biased (against relativity, for astrology). In both cases the imagined charge was both denied and dismissed as irrelevant, and the substance of my criticism was not addressed (94).

Acknowledge past relativism. Now for one of the serious omissions. Arguably, the main reason for the progress of the ‘peace talks’ between scientists and sociologists is that the latter no longer make radical claims about the limits of scientific knowledge. None of the contributors to The One Culture seem to agree with Barry Barnes and David Bloor that ‘there is no sense attached to the idea that some standards or beliefs are really rational as distinct from merely locally accepted as such.’* Nor do they deploy the arguments that were routinely invoked to support such claims before the year 2000, such as the Quine-Duhem thesis and the underdetermination of theory by the evidence. Some contributors mention these arguments, but only to attribute them to other writers (eg. 31-3, 196). If the science wars are over, this is largely because the more radical sociologists have beaten a hasty retreat.

Remarkably, this retreat is scarcely mentioned in The One Culture. There is a glimmer of recognition in a footnote by Harry Collins in which he says that he changed his mind about relativism some time around 1980, abandoning ordinary relativism in favour of the methodological version (of which more below). This is an isolated case, however, and it does not sit well with the claim, repeated throughout the book, that the sociology of science has never had any consequences for our evaluation of scientific knowledge, and that those who charge sociologists with ‘undermining’ science are being precious or malicious or both. In the 1970s, Barnes and Collins both implied that there is no objective reason—and could never be an objective reason—for preferring the theories of present-day Western scientists over any other theories.** If that does not count as undermining science, what does?

Be methodological relativists about reasons not truth. The full-blooded relativism of the 1970s has been replaced by the dictum that historians and sociologists should not refer to the truth or falsity of the beliefs they try to explain. This dictum is known as ‘methodological relativism’ or ‘the symmetry principle’, and The One Culture takes it very seriously indeed. The editors say, rightly, that it is the most common source of disagreement between the book's contributors (297). It is also the topic with the most entries in the book’s index, outrunning ‘relativism’, ‘Thomas Kuhn’, and even ‘science studies.’ Some contributors argue that methodological relativism is a precondition for a mature sociology of science, others that it makes for aimless and ill-formed history, and others that it leads back to the epistemological relativism that it was supposed to replace.

I believe that this entire debate is red herring. The problem is that The One Culture frames methodological relativism as the thesis that the truth of a belief has no place in a sociological explanation of that belief. The scientists dispute this thesis, pointing out that many beliefs (eg. ‘it is raining today’) are caused, in part, by their truth (eg. the fact that it is raining today). The sociologists seem to concede that the truth of a belief can (partly) explain the belief, but they deny that this kind of cause is a proper subject for a sociologist.

There is a genuine disagreement here, but it has little to do with the science wars, since it is possible to explain a theory in a manner that is triumphalist and rationalistic in the extreme without ever referring to its truth. All you need to do is idealise the experiments and arguments that the scientists gave for the theory, ignore the interests and prejudices of those scientists, and play up the interests and prejudices of their rivals. If the only novelty of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) was that it made no reference to the truth of theories, it would be scarcely distinguishable from the explanations that historians, scientists, and sociologists have traditionally given of scientists’ beliefs.

In my view, what was really new about SSK, and what raised the ire of scientists, was that it tried to reverse the usual pattern of explanation. It drew attention to the arguments in favour of false theories and to the interests and prejudices that lay behind true theories. In other words, it explained true beliefs in terms of bad reasons and false beliefs in terms of good reasons. Its methodological relativism was directed at reasons, not at truth.

The contributors to The One Culture are unable to see this because they do not distinguish clearly between reason and truth. Even the scientists are guilty of this conflation. Consider Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal. They use the ‘it is raining’ example to show that the truth of a belief can explain that belief. But later they accuse sociologists of eliminating evidence, not truth, from their explanations: ‘Could one conceivably explain scientists’ beliefs about the Earth’s climate without making any reference to the currently available evidence concerning the Earth's climate?’ (245, original emphasis).

Insofar as Bricmont and Sokal do distinguish between truth and evidence, they seem to assume that they are very strongly correlated. They assume, that is, that every true theory has always had better evidence in its favour than its false rivals. The One Culture would have been more fruitful if the authors had confronted this assumption head-on instead of wrangling over the question of whether the truth of a belief can be part of the explanation of the belief.

Not only is the latter question irrelevant to the science wars—it is also more easily resolved than one might infer from the intensity with which it is debated in The One Culture. Harry Collins is the pioneer of methodological relativism and one of its staunchest supporters. Yet even he concedes that the ban on truth only applies to some kinds of history and not to others (192). It seems that Collins has no in-principle objection to the idea that (for example) the moons of Jupiter are part of the explanation of Galileo’s belief in the moons of Jupiter. If this is what methodological relativism amounts to, it is hard to see what all the fuss is about.



*Barnes, Barry, and David Bloor, ‘Relativism, Rationalism, and the Sociology of Knowledge’, in Rationality and Relativism, ed. Martin Hollis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 21–47, on 27.

**Barnes, Barry, Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 154; Collins, Harry, and Graham Cox, ‘Recovering Relativity: Did Prophecy Fail?’, Social Studies of Science, 6 (1976), 423–44. Expand post.

Malheureusement je ne traduis plus tous les posts que j'écrit sur ce blog. Si vous voudriez lire les posts qui ont été traduits, veuillez cliquer ici.

Agrandir ce message.

Barry Barnes' Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory, 40 years on

2012 was the fiftieth anniversary of Thomas Kuhns’ influential and controversial book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2014 is the anniversary of a book that was nearly as influential and nearly as controversial as Kuhn's, at least among historians and sociologists of science. Barry Barnes’ Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory was the first full-length exposition of what soon became known as the Strong Programme in the sociology of knowledge. The programme was ‘strong’ in the sense that it used sociology to explain established scientific theories, as opposed to explaining scientific institutions or explaining discredited beliefs. When I read the book last week I found it surprisingly radical and surprisingly prescient. I also found what I think are the roots of a gross error that persists to this day.

What struck me as radical about Barnes was his fully-fledged relativism. Nowadays historians and sociologists have adopted something called ‘methodological relativism’ (see here for a critical exposition). They concede that some beliefs are objectively more rational or more true than others, but they deny that this fact should play any role in the explanations we give of the beliefs of past scientists.

Proponents of this view have started to read it back into the original texts of the Strong Programme. They tend to shake their heads in dismay when anyone suggests the relativism of the Strong Programme was anything more than methodical. For example, here is Jan Golinski’s head-shake:

Since the symmetry principle is primarily motivated by a desire to set aside issues of epistemology it is unfortunate that it has regularly been attacked as a species of philosophical relativism. One can of course assert relativistic claims in a metaphysical or ontological way, saying, for example, that there is no such thing as ‘truth’, or that all beliefs about nature are equally valid, or that there is no ‘reality’ to the material world. But such statements encounter severe difficulties if defended as absolute claims....More pertinently, the constructivist outlook does not depend upon them. [1]

Barnes certainly meant his relativism to be methodologically useful. But he meant much more than that:

In arguing that all belief systems must be treated symmetrically for the purposes of sociological explanation, many traditional ways of justifying belief as knowledge were [in this book] incidentally undermined. It transpired that one perspective can only be shown to be preferable to another in expedient terms...Thus, the epistemological message could be said to be skeptical, or relativistic...It is relativistic because it suggests that belief systems cannot be objectively ranked in terms of their proximity to reality or their rationality (p. 154).

The prescience in Barnes’ book lies in his account of the debate between internalists and externalists. Barnes drew a then-standard distinction between internalist historians, who focus on the ‘intellectual’ or ‘technical’ aspects of science, and externalist historians, who study the ‘socio-economic’ background to science (the terms in quotes are Barnes’). Nowadays we are inclined to reject this distinction on two grounds. Firstly, the boundary between the internal and the external has changed over time. Secondly, there are as many social phenomena inside scientific communities as there are in the societies that surround them.

These are views that have not been read back into the work of Barnes and Bloor, at least not as far as I am aware. Indeed, it is common to distinguish between the Strong Programme, which focused on social factors that originate outside scientific communities, such as class interests and political movements, and later sociologists who focused on the internal politics of scientific disciplines. Golinski himself makes a distinction along these lines [2].

In this instance, I think, there is a case for reading our own ideas into Barnes’ book. He certainly argues for a role for sociology in accounting for the internal development of disciplines and research traditions. In fact he devotes an entire chapter to this argument, entitled ‘The culture of the natural sciences.’ Barnes also gives a subtle account of the ways that scientists—as well as present-day commentators on science—disagree about what counts as ‘internal’ to science and what does not. Again, he devotes (nearly) a whole chapter to this point, entitled ‘‘Internal’ and ‘external’ factors in the history of science.’

What about the gross error that persists to this day? In the first chapter of his book, Barnes repeatedly implies that there is a widespread tendency among commentators on science—including historians of science—to suppose that true beliefs cannot be explained causally. Here are a few examples of this attribution:

Many academic theories about beliefs, whether philosophical, psychological or sociological [have the following form]. 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 (pp. 2-3).

...this particular perspective, treating truth as unproblematic and falsehood as needing causal explanation... (p. 3)

Science is conceived [by many] as a uniquely rational process 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. (p. 7)

These statements are grossly erroneous because it is doubtful whether any historian or philosopher (I cannot speak for sociologists) has maintained that true beliefs do not have causal explanations. Larry Laudan spoke for the philosophers in a 1984 critique of a book by David Bloor, another pioneer of the Strong Programme:

Bloor’s analysis of the philosophical tradition will not stand up to scrutiny. For as long as we know anything about the history of philosophy, epistemologists have been concerned how to discover the true and the rational. The suggestion that most philosophers have believed that true beliefs just happen, that rational behaviour is uncaused, that only ‘aberrant’ belief is part of nature’s causal nexus, is hard to take seriously.

Laudan goes on:

It is true that many philosophers have suggested that true or rational beliefs are not to be attributed to sociological causes. But unless we are to imagine that sociology has a monopoly on causes, the denial that true or false beliefs have social causes is manifestly not equivalent to the assertion that true and rational beliefs are uncaused! [3]

I believe that the same can be said about historians of science. If we take even the most cursory look at eighteenth- or nineteenth-century histories of science, we find many references to human actions that gave rise to this or that theory. We do find a lack of causal explanations that are social in nature, but we do not find a lack of causal explanations. (I have given some evidence for this view here).

Despite the absurdity of the claim that historians and philosophers have long believed that true beliefs are uncaused, and despite Laudan’s protests, the claim has persisted. Nowadays the claim is usually expressed as the idea that ‘science is a human activity.’ The implication is that many people used to believe that science is not a human activity. Indeed, Golinski seems to say that the inclusion of human activity in accounts of past science was a vital transformation—perhaps the vital transformation—in the historiography of science. He writes:

By a ‘constructivist’ outlook, I mean that which regards scientific knowledge primarily as a human product, made with locally situated cultural and material resources, rather than as simply the revelation of a pre-given order of nature. This view of science has attained widespread currency in recent years... (p. xvii)

Barnes’ relativism may have fallen from favour, but his peculiar portrait of old-fashioned historians and philosophers of science is still with us.


[1] Making Natural Knowledge, p. 8. I am not sure what to make of Golinski's shudder-quotes around the words ‘truth’ and ‘reality.’ If there are such things as truth and reality, as Golinski seems to be saying in this passage, why put those words in quotes?

[2] Ibid., p. 24.

[3] ‘The Pseudo-Science of Science,’ Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11 (1981): 173-198, p. 178.

Expand post.

Malheureusement je ne traduis plus tous les posts que j'écrit sur ce blog. Si vous voudriez lire les posts qui ont été traduits, veuillez cliquer ici.

Agrandir ce message.

How to save the symmetry principle in six simple steps

I began posting on the symmetry principle in March 2013, in response to a post by Vanessa Heggie on the H Word. After eight posts and nearly eighteen months, it is time to bring this desultory marathon to an end. In the interests of brevity and coherence, here is a six-step guide to saving the symmetry principle. Each step corresponds to one or two posts in the series.

1. Get the fallacy right. What kind of inference does the symmetry principle forbid? Here is one kind of false inference: the earth really does move, so the motion of the earth is a sufficient explanation of Copernicus' belief that it moves. Very few historians have ever made this inference, so there is little point in fulminating against it. The real worry is inferences like this: the earth really does move, so the evidence for the earth's motion is a sufficient explanation of why Copernicus believed it to move. The difference is between explaining a belief by its truth and explaining a belief by the believer's arguments and evidence.

2. Take distinctions seriously. To get the fallacy right we need to distinguish between the truth of a belief and the evidence in favour of a belief. This may seem like an esoteric distinction, but we have no choice but to make the distinction if we want to understand the symmetry principle. The distinction is especially important if we want to communicate the symmetry principle to non-historians. If we do not make the distinction ourselves, we cannot expect non-historians to do so, and if they do not do so then we should not be surprised if they reject the symmetry principle. Another reason to make the distinction is that evidence gets a bad name if it is constantly confused with truth, since evidence usually explains more than truth.

3. Make room for truth. Truth nevertheless does explain something. The motion of the earth may not be a sufficient explanation of Copernicus' belief, but it is surely part of the explanation. There are other ways in which truth can legitimately enter into writing about past science. For example, it is philosophically respectable to say that theories are true insofar as they correspond to reality. And it is undeniable that factual evidence has played a role in the beliefs of past scientists. A blanket ban on truth does more harm than good in the history of science.

4. Be a minimalist about symmetry. Every historian of science knows that she should treat true beliefs in the same way as false ones. But what does this mean in practice? Does it mean that both sides of all past debates in science were equally reasonable? Or that historians should aim for completeness, always reporting the good reasons on the losing side and the bad reasons on the winning side? Or does it mean that we should ignore good reasons altogether and focus on social factors rather than cognitive ones? Or that, as a matter of fact, the social factors dominate in most cases? Properly understood, the symmetry principle does not imply any of these things. It simply forbids us from inferring the goodness of a believer's reasons from the truth-value of their belief.

5. Face up to the skeptical challenge. The reason this inference is forbidden is that people can be right for the wrong reasons and wrong for the right reasons. But what if we apply that principle to today's science? Maybe our best theories are wrong, despite the good reasons in their favour. Historians tend to welcome this thought as an antidote to dogmatism. In fact it is a serious threat to the symmetry principle, because few people will accept a principle that implies that today's theories are no better than Aristotle's. We need to work harder to reconcile symmetry and scientific realism. For example, we can observe that the argument from realism to asymmetry only works for consensual beliefs and not for those under dispute.

6. Aim for understanding not self-delusion. Suppose that symmetry is indeed consistent with realism. Shouldn't we nevertheless suspend our realism when we do history, just to make sure that it does not distort our results? Shouldn't we forget that the earth moves when we study Ptolemaic astronomy? No, we should not. If our knowledge of our former skews our view of the latter, then we have failed to grasp some fundamental points about past science. We should try to grasp these points rather than playing evasive mind games.


If we take these steps then we have a good chance of rescuing the symmetry principle from the false or irrelevant principles that are sometimes associated with it. These steps focus on what the symmetry principle is not, rather than what it is. But we need both to grasp the symmetry principle. So here is one more rendition of the minimalist, truth-friendly, and realist-friendly, version of the principle that I have defended in this series: the truth of a belief does not imply that the believer had good reasons for holding that belief, and the falsity of a belief does not imply that the believer had bad reasons for holding that belief. In short, historians should not reason from truth-value to goodness-of-reason. Expand post.

Malheureusement je ne traduis plus tous les posts que j'écrit sur ce blog. Si vous voudriez lire les posts qui ont été traduits, veuillez cliquer ici.

Agrandir ce message.

Saving the symmetry principle VI: symmetry without short-cuts

Last month I tried to show that historians can honour the symmetry principle without becoming skeptics about current scientific theories. We do not need to "forget" that the earth moves in order to see that there was once good reason to believe that it is stationary. But even if we do not need to forget this, perhaps we should try to forget it anyway just to be on the safe side? The aim of this short post is to explain why this kind of methodological relativism is not a good idea. Put simply, if we need to resort to this psychological trick in order to do good history then we have not understood the symmetry principle.

My point is easily stated in the abstract. According to the symmetry principle, it is a fallacy to infer the quality of a person's reasons for holding a belief from the truth-value of their belief. In other words, the whole point of the principle is that truth-value--as judged by present-day science--tells us nothing about quality-of-reason. So if you are worried that your knowledge of present-day science will lead you astray in historical research, you have missed the point of the symmetry principle. Present-day science should not lead the historian astray because present-day science should not lead the historian anywhere.

An analogy might help to get the point across. When small children are around we place the chocolate bars on a high shelf so that the children cannot reach them. The reason for this--or one of the reasons--is that small children do not grasp the fact that chocolate bars are bad for their health. If the chocolate was easy to access, children would eat it all at once and get sick. When adults are around, we place the chocolate bars wherever we like, because adults understand the link between overeating and illness. They can see chocolate, and even handle chocolate, without eating too much of it.

The historian who cannot do good history in the knowledge of present-day science is like the child who cannot stay healthy within reach of chocolate. Present-day science can be dangerous in the hands of the historian, just as chocolate can be dangerous in the hands of a child. But these things are only dangerous if they are badly handled. To keep these things out of our reach is to concede that we cannot handle them properly. Once we know how to handle them properly, we should be able to store them in accessible parts of our kitchens (in the case of chocolate) or our minds (in the case of present-day science).

But, you might object, it's not just children who need to store the chocolate on the top shelf or behind the muesli. Fully-grown adults can also give in to temptation, and surely they cannot be faulted if they use physical or psychological tricks to make up for the weakness of their will. After all, the important thing is to avoid getting sick, not to develop an iron will. We make use of this pragmatic principle every time we download software to block distracting websites or close the window to shut out the summery music being played outside our office. Why shouldn't historians of sciences help themselves to similar ruses?

The answer is that historians who mishandle present-day science do not show a weakness of the will but a fundamental misunderstanding of the thing they are trying to understand, namely past science. The reason we should not infer quality-of-reason from truth-value is that there is such a thing as being right for the wrong reasons and wrong for the right reasons. These things are possible because the state of the evidence for a theory can change over time, because scientists can make lucky guesses on flimsy evidence, and for other equally significant reasons. If we are worried about violating the symmetry principle we should try to grasp these reasons rather than taking un-illuminating short-cuts such as forgetting or rejecting the theories of current science. Expand post.

Malheureusement je ne traduis plus tous les posts que j'écrit sur ce blog. Si vous voudriez lire les posts qui ont été traduits, veuillez cliquer ici.

Agrandir ce message.

Should the history of science have relevance? Notes on the BSHS conference session

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the annual conference of the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS). Aside from the overall bubbliness and smooth organisation of the conference, the highlights for me were the opening session on recycling in early modern chymistry, Richard Serjeantson's talk on seventeenth-century student notebooks, and the spinach-and-mozarella pastry that was served up for lunch on day one. I was also impressed by the well-attended closing session with the curious title "Should the history of science have relevance?" Rebekah Higgitt, one of the four panellists in this session, said that someone should blog about it. Hence this post, which reconstructs the discussion with the help of other people's tweets and my hasty notes. Feel free to use the comments section of this post to complete or clarify what I have written. At the end of the post I offer three comments of my own: facts matter, there's a place for the deficit model in the humanities, and we should take reflexivity seriously.

But first, why blog about this session? Out of all the stimulating talks at the conference, why single this one out for special attention? The obvious answer is that the session was about engaging with the public, so it makes sense to engage the public in this session, or at least make it available to the public. Another reason is that public engagement is a topic that concerns every historian of science, in a way a seventeenth-century notebook does not. But the main reason is that this kind of session, more so than the standard academic talk, is only as good as the number of people who know about it. The aim of these events is to get people talking about some of the challenges facing the profession. The more people talk about them, the better.

Noble intentions are one thing; turning up on time is quite another. I have to confess that I missed the first half-hour of this session, so I did not hear the short presentations that each panellist gave before the general discussion began. However thanks to twitter (and in particular to Rebekah Higgitt, Dominic Berry, and Angela Cassidy) I can relay four key messages from the first part of the session:

How much, who, how, and at what cost? No-one was seriously arguing that historians of science should never aim for relevance. Rather, the question was how often they should aim for relevance in their research and research proposals, who should aim for relevance, how this aim might be achieved, and whether relevance can be reconciled with the other pressures of academic life such as the need to produce sound scholarship.

Usefulness not relevance. Usefulness is a better term than relevance to describe our aims when we engage with people outside academia. Why is it better? The answer, I gather, is that "relevance" implies topicality, ie. it suggests that our case studies should bear a superficial resemblance to events that are currently in the news. One risk of this approach is that by focusing on the big stories of the day we will ignore the more important but less visible stories (as one participant put it, we should always ask "relevant to what?"). Another risk is that we will ignore lessons that flow from the strangeness of the past rather than from the resemblance between the past and the present. Finally, it is not enough to juxtapose past episodes with analogous present-day events; to make a real difference we need to draw concrete lessons from past episodes. In short, we can be useful without being topical and topical without being useful.

We have failed. Historians of science as a community have failed to get the attention of some important audiences. We have done good work, but we could do much better. In particular, we could do more to interact with social scientists and other historians as well as with scientists.

Less deficit-model and more engagement. Our failures may be due in part to our condescending view of our audiences. We are guilty of the "deficit-model" that we so often attribute to scientists and naïve science communicators. What is the deficit model? This is where I need help from someone who was actually present, because there are different versions of the deficit model that have different implications for our attempts at outreach. The implication might be that we have no special expertise in the history of science; or it might be that we do have special expertise, but that it takes the form of special skills or methods rather than factual knowledge; or it might be that we do have special expertise but that we should try to learn from non-historians rather than teaching them.


This brings us to the half-hour mark, which is when I discreetly entered the room. What follows is my attempt to arrange the free-flowing conversation that I witnessed into a series of discreet chunks. I've arranged the chunks roughly in the order in which they were discussed.

Gender. The gender balance in the profession is much better than it was fifty years ago. (At this point one of the panellists joked that he was pleased to be the "token male" on the panel). Still, the balance is not perfect, and some sub-fields in the history of science are still dominated by men (the speaker did not name the sub-fields).

Ethnic minorities. The situation is quite different for ethnic minorities, who are still badly under-represented in the history of science as in other areas of the humanities. One possible link between under-representation and usefulness is that minority groups decline study in the humanities because they feel that humanities degrees are relatively useless given their high price-tag. Hence one way to solve our under-representation problem is to show that humanities degrees are more useful than they may appear at first sight.

Independent scholars. Speaking of marginalised groups, spare a thought for people who are historians by avocation but not by vocation. Much high-quality research in our field is done by people who are not employed as academics in universities. These people are sometimes slighted, and this is unwise given the scarcity of tenure-track jobs and the increasing number of people who move freely between academic and non-academic jobs in the course of their careers.

Attitudes to outreach. In some university departments there is still an alarming lack of recognition of the value of activities such as policy work, museum work, and blogging. Academics should not only respect these activities but also make room for them. Outreach should not be something that academics do on top of the normal load of teaching, research and administrative work. It should either be integrated with these core activities or seen as a (partial) substitute for them.

Junior scholars. Senior scholars sometimes have a tendency to delegate public engagement to PhDs and early career colleagues. There is a danger of creating an unhealthy division of labour whereby young scholars do the hard work of outreach while their supervisors get on with their own research. [Disclaimer: I have not observed this tendency in my own academic circle, though I can't speak for other circles.] Nor should the outreach activities of senior scholars be separate from those of junior scholars. Instead we should strive for "intergenerational collaboration."

Translation. This buzzword refers to the process of converting academic research into something that the general public can understand and appreciate. Translation is all very well, but can we expect academics to be experts in translation--twitter and museum exhibits and all that jazz--as well as being experts in the traditional tools of scholarship? Wouldn't it be nice if we could delegate the former tasks to a dedicated team of translators? The answer from the panel was that it depends on the end product of the translation. Not every academic has the know-how to set up a museum exhibit, but every academic should be able to summarise their latest research in a readable blog post.

Capacity building. In policy circles there is much talk about building the scientific capacity of developing nations. One of the panellists recalled a recent conference at which various criticisms were levelled at the concept of capacity building, but where the African participants seemed quite keen on the idea. This concerns historians because many university administrators in developing nations see the history of science as an ally in their efforts to raise the profile of science in their communities. Hence the demand for historians of medicine in these universities, a demand that may extend to historians of science and technology in the future.

Methods but not facts or disciplines. Our gift to the public should not be facts about past science but a set of methods for studying past science, or perhaps a perspective from which to view past science. But we should not be too precious about defining our discipline, since we are inherently interdisciplinary, with contributions from philosophers and sociologists and scientists as well as pure-blood historians.

Usefulness need not be public. There are many ways of being useful, and not all of them are public-facing in the manner of blogs, museum exhibits and newspaper articles. For example, we can make ourselves useful by talking to policy-makers and scientists on a one-to-one basis.

Ethics not impact. The British government measures the usefulness of British academics in terms of the "impact" of their research. Lots of British academics object to this criterion and to the way it is currently measured. But our dissatisfaction with the impact agenda should not become an excuse for retreating into the ivory tower and drawing the blinds. On the contrary, we should think deeply about why we do research in the humanities and what we can contribute to society at large. We may shrink from the impact agenda, but we cannot shirk the ethics of research.

***

In the interests of continuing the discussion, here are three comments inspired by the conversation that I have just summarised:

Facts matter. I was surprised that some participants insisted on the importance of conveying methods or perspectives to the public rather than conveying facts. Haven't we been diligent, not to say militant, in correcting the factual errors made by scientists who write about past science? And aren't our perspectives (such as our emphasis on political context) based on our hard-won knowledge of the facts of key episodes (there are too many episodes to name)? Finally, aren't we obliged to refer to facts about particular fields or disciplines (such as climate science or evolutionary psychology) if we want our messages to be specific and concrete rather than vague and evangelistic?

There's a place for the deficit model in the humanities. I realise that there are problems with the deficit model, but we should not be too diffident when it comes to instructing non-historians about past science. As a rule, those of us who have studied past science in detail are in a better position to speak about it than those who have studied it superficially or not at all. The same is true for scientists, but there is an important difference between the sciences and the humanities, namely that scientists use their expertise to make useful gadgets. This means that if scientists always engaged with the public and never instructed them, their expertise would not go to waste. The same cannot be said for historians. If we do not use our expertise to teach people about the past, our expertise is not much use at all.

We should take reflexivity seriously. There were a couple of references to "reflexivity" in the tweets about the BSHS session on relevance. Here's my definition of this protean term: to be reflexive is to insist on consistency between our own condition as historians and the conditions we observe in past science. For example, it would be non-reflexive to say that there is a historical method but no scientific method. Yet this is what historians of science, as a group, seem to be saying: we no longer believe in the scientific method, yet we like to claim that we have a distinctive and powerful method for studying past science. If we take reflexivity seriously, we should either abandon one of these claims or explain why there is room for method in history but not in physics or chemistry. Two other examples come to mind. If we complain about the public misunderstanding of history, as many of us do, we should admit that there is such a thing as the public misunderstanding of science. And if we defend scholarship on the grounds that it is useful in the long run, we should tolerate scientists who use the same argument in favour of basic research.


That's all for now. As I mentioned in the introduction, feel free to use the comments of this post (or your own blog, if you have one) to improve on my summary of this relevant and useful BSHS session. Expand post.

Malheureusement je ne traduis plus tous les posts que j'écrit sur ce blog. Si vous voudriez lire les posts qui ont été traduits, veuillez cliquer ici.

Agrandir ce message.