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.

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Saving the symmetry principle, IIIb: truth in the history of science

This post continues my effort to understand the symmetry principle by distinguishing different senses of the claim “people do not believe things because they are true.” As you can see, this is not an easy job: this post adds 5 readings to the 6 discussed in my previous post. But nor is it an exercise in hair-splitting or nit-picking. I'm not suggesting that we need to make these distinctions explicit whenever we discuss the symmetry principle, the nature of scientific truth, or the role of evidence in settling scientific debates. But our discussions of all those topics would be improved if we kept these distinctions in mind when we formulate our claims and when we assess the claims of non-historians. (Readers who are pressed for time may want to skip to the end of this post, where I summarise my 11 readings and draw some morals from them.)

7. The truth-value of any given theory is obvious once you decide to consider the evidence. Call this the “self-evidence assumption.” Most historians of science think that this is a dangerous assumption, and that it underlies much popular writing about science. Vanessa alerted me to the relevance of this assumption when she wrote in a tweet that “symmetry is a starting point for undermining the 'if they'd've looked, they'd've believed' assumption.”

I agree that this is a dangerous assumption, and also that it is relevant to the symmetry principle. However I would say that the wrongness off the assumption is the starting point for the symmetry principle, rather than the other way round. This is important: the main reason people give misleadingly asymmetrical accounts of past scientific debates is that they underestimate the quantity, variety and complexity of the evidence that lies behind any well-grounded belief about nature.

This underestimate encourages two other false assumptions. The first is that the evidence available in the past for any given theory was more or less the same as the evidence available today. If you think that the theory of evolution from natural selection follows from a few simple inferences from everyday observations, you are unlikely to appreciate the fact that Darwin had less evidence for that theory than we do today. And if you do not appreciate that, you are unlikely to appreciate the reasonableness of Darwin's nineteenth-century opponents.

The other consequence of the self-evidence assumption is the belief is that, once there is strong evidence for one theory over another, it is impossible to mount a plausible case for the rejected theory. If you think that the evidence for evolution is blatently obvious, you are likely to think that its present-day opponents are stupid, biased, or insincere.

In fact it is possible to make reasonable objections to just about any piece of evidence for evolution available today. I believe that the vast majority of these objections can be answered (otherwise I would not believe in evolution). However I also think that a full answer to those objections would require specialist knowledge of biology and paleontology, not to mention genetics, biogeography, molecular biology, anatomy, and maybe some philosophy of science. This means that it is possible for non-specialists to build fairly plausible cases against evolution by natural selection.

Does the falsity of the self-evidence assumption mean that evidence and argument play little role in scientific disputes? Of course not. If anything, it shows that there is more evidence, on both sides of any debate, that we might first imagine.

8. If a statement is true, it corresponds to reality. Rebekah Higgitt responded to my first post in this series by tweeting that “I do see statements that scientific theories/facts are true because they're true (ie true reflection of reality).” My response was that there is nothing wrong with this, if people mean just that truth consists in some sort of relation between a statement and the world. This is roughly what philosophers call the “correspondence theory of truth.”

I sometimes come across the view in science studies literature that the correspondence theory is a hopelessly naïve theory of truth that was abandoned by all right-thinking people some time between 1950 and 1990. Granted, philosophers continue to argue about whether or not the correspondence theory of truth is a good one, and about which correspondence theory is the best one—witness this article. But the fact that Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy has an up-to-date article defending the theory suggests that it is far from a minority view.

9. The evidence for a theory is a good guide to the truth-value of the theory. According to this view, we should believe theories to the extent that they have good evidence in their favour. This may seem like commonsense—after all, if the evidence does not tell scientists what to believe, what does?

Nevertheless this view is often rejected by both scientists and philosophers of science. For example, IanLove commented as follows in reply to one of Vanessa's posts: “In science saying you believe something means that you consider it best fits the evidence..... As for truth - that is best not used: because, as others have said, all scientific theory and evidence is work in progress.”

I find it hard to understand this blanket quietism about truth. Why would scientists collect all that evidence for their theories if they did not think it would lead them closer to the truth? True, many philosophers of science deny that evidence is a good guide to the truth-value of every kind of belief. But even those philosophers (such as Bas Van Fraassen) usually say that scientist's beliefs about observable phenomena are probably true, and that the evidence is a good guide to the truth-value of that kind of belief.

But suppose for the sake of argument that IanLove is right, and that scientists endorse beliefs that best fit the evidence but never take the further step of saying that those beliefs are true. This would mean that the evidence can never explain why scientists believe theories to be true (since, by hypothesis, they never believe that of theories). But for the same reason, social or institutional factors could never explain why scientists believe theories to be true. So even IanLove's anti-truth stance is no grounds for preferring social or institutional explanations over evidential ones.

10. Historians can explain the past development of things that are defined in present-day terms. I include this one because it came up in a comment on one of Vanessa's earlier posts, the one that prompted Vanessa's post on the symmetry principle. The post was about how we might explain the decline in incidence of TB in the twentieth century—was it drugs and vaccines, or improved nutrition, or perhaps public health measures like clean water and better sanitation?

Vanessa noted that the meaning of “TB” has changed over time, and that this causes problems for any attempt to explain the change in its incidence over time. This provoked the following comment from Wolfbone: “All you have to do is pick the modern, most informed, definition of what TB is and do your research and write your history in the light of that knowledge.” Vanessa subsequently presented this in a tweet as a clear example of bad historical practice, presumably because Wolfbone was proposing that we think about the past in present-day terms.

As I have said elsewhere, I do not see what the problem is with thinking about the past in present-day terms. Sure, you are going to miss a lot if you ignore earlier, different definitions of TB in your history of the topic. But you are also going to miss a lot if you fail to adopt a consistent definition of TB. In particular, you are going to miss the opportunity to explain why rates of TB incidence changed over long periods of time (rather than just giving a sequence of disconnected explanations of how various TB-related conditions changed during the short periods in which each one of those conditions was thought to define TB).

I can see why a historian might choose either one of those approaches, but I do not see why one would want to eject the present-centred one from the canons of good history. As Wolfbone put it, “You can perfectly well write a history of TB and a history of “TB.””

Vanessa's worry seemed to be that the present-centred approach is “progressive” in the sense that “it starts with the assumption that we're obviously right now, and were therefore obviously wrong then.” This statement is imprecise in just the place where precision is needed: the starting assumption is that today's theory is considerably more likely to be true than yesterday's theory, not that today's theory is "obviously right" (if that phrase means "certainly right" or "obviously right once you decide look at the evidence").

And even if the assumption were that we are “obviously right” now, this would not commit us to the belief that we were “obviously wrong” in the past. Perhaps we have uncovered some new evidence recently that means that the truth of our current theory is much more obvious now than it was a decade ago (see 6. above).

11. Today's theories are more likely to be true than yesterday's. Wolfbone suggested that the real reason for Vanessa's hostility to the use of the present-day definition of TB was her assumption that the present-day definition is no better—in the sense of being no more well-supported by the evidence—than previous definitions.

Wolfbone wrote that Vanessa was “apparently motivated by the false belief that today's science facts are just as fragile as yesterday's.” And indeed, Vanessa wrote (for example) that “diagnosis and disease definitions change all the time; today's is as likely to be proved 'wrong' as yesterday's.”

So, does the fact that we have been wrong in the past mean that today's theories are no better than yesterday's? Philosophers of science have long pondered this argument. There is even a name for it: the “pessimistic induction”. The debate is complicated, with plausible arguments on both sides. This means that it would be unwise for historians to base the central tenet of their field—the symmetry principle—on the presumed outcome of the debate.

Do historians need to take this risk? That is, does the symmetry principle stand or fall with the pessimistic induction? In one sense the answer is “no.” Imagine that we were absolutely certain that the shading of the moon is due to its surface relief rather than the unenven density of its internal matter. Never mind how we might have become certain, or whether we are actually certain—just pretend that we are. Now, this certainty would be perfectly consistent with the belief that Galileo's evidence for the rockiness of the moon was no better than the Jesuit's evidence for the uneven density of the moon.

But there is another sense in which the symmetry principle does appear to stand or fall with the pessimistic induction. How would we become certain that Galileo was right? Presumably by looking at the best available evidence. But to make this inference, we must suppose that now (May 2013) there is a close connection between the truth-value of a belief and the state of the evidence. But there is nothing special about May 2013, so the same connection must have existed in the 1600s, when Galileo was up against the Jesuits. But this claim is inconsistent with the symmetry principle, which denies that the truth-value of Galileo's belief is any guide to the evidence available to him. So it looks like we can have the symmetry principle, or believe present-day scientific theories, but not both. Maybe Vanessa was right to hitch the symmetry principle to the pessimistic induction.

Although I think that linkage is mistaken, that is not my point here. My point is that we need to break that link in order to save the symmetry principle. Faced with a choice between the symmetry principe and trusting present-day science, many people would ditch the symmetry principle. And that would be a perfectly reasonable choice. Granted, to historians it is absurd to say that all past scientists who held true beliefs did so on the basis of good evidence, whereas those who got it wrong did so on poor evidence. But it is just as absurd, if not more so, to say that today's science is no more likely to be true than yesterday's.


Conclusions

There are lots of legitimate ways in which questions of truth and falsity can enter into historical research. The fact that something is the case can help to explain why people believe it to be the case (#3 in the previous post). The fact that something is the case about nature can also explain why people believe something else to be the case about nature (#4). People can believe things partly because of the evidence (#1), including the factual evidence (#5). And historians can legitimately explain the past development of things (like TB) that are defined in present-day terms (#10 in this post).

In my view, there is little room for debate about these issues (except perhaps #10). They should be distinguished from other, deeper issues that are the subject of ongoing debate among honest and well-informed philosophers. Does truth consist in the correspondence between a statement and reality (#8)? Is the evidence for a theory a good guide to the truth-value of the theory (#9)? Are today's theories more likely to be true than yesterday's (#11)?

Historians should not blithely assume that the answers to these questions are all “yes.” But nor should they assert that the answers are “no” and then build their historiographical principles on this assertion. It is undesirable, and probably unnecessary, for historians to base their methods on claims that are controversial among mainstream philosophers.

There are other forms of historical explanation that do make illegitimate use of truth or evidence. People do not believe things to be true because they believe them to be true (#2). Nor do they respond well to dogmatism (#6). And above all, it is not the case that the truth-value of any given theory is obvious once you decide to consider the evidence (#7).

However, the fact that these kinds of explanation are illegitimate does not threaten the claim with which I began my previous post, viz. that evidence and argument are on a par with social, political or institutional factors when it comes to explaining the beliefs of scientists and laypeople, whether in the past or the present.

The main aim of these two posts was to clarify the symmetry principle. It should now be clear that the principle is not a blanket ban on the invocation of truth, evidence or reality in historical writing. Instead it is a ban on a rather special way of using those concepts: it is a ban on inferences from the truth-value of a past scientist's belief to a decision about whether to explain that belief in terms of evidence and argument or in terms of something else. In other words, it is a ban on what I called “The Fallacy” in my first post in this series. But it is no more than that. In particular, it has very little to do with most of my 11 readings of the claim that “people believe things because they are true.”

In the next post in this series I will describe another way in which historians exaggerate the scope of the symmetry principle. But first, a political interlude. Expand post.

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Saving the symmetry principle, IIIa: truth in the history of science

This post continues my series on the symmetry principle, with apologies to anyone who has been holding their breath since my last post five weeks ago. That was a piece of conceptual ground-clearing in which I argued that esoteric-seeming distinctions can make a big difference to the answers we give to important questions. In this post and the next I want to illustrate the point by distinguishing between different senses of the claim—which historians sometimes equate with the symmetry principle—that “people don't believe things just because they are true.”

This may seem like an academic exercise, but the stakes are high. One is the professional competence of historians of science: if the symmetry principle is a central tenet of our field, and we are unable to give a clear account of it, we look bad.

A second question is how historians of science engage with the public. I sometimes get the impression that, in the eyes of historians and sociologists of science, anyone who uses the words “truth,” “evidence,” or “reality” when discussing past or present science must be doing something wrong. If we do not make an effort to be more discriminating, we should not be surprised if the public is confused by our work or suspicious of it.

A final issue is how scientific debates have been, or should be, carried out. This is the issue that motivated the Guardian post by Vanessa Heggie that prompted this series. As I read that post, Vanessa used the symmetry principle to draw attention to the social, personal, political and institutional factors behind beliefs that scientists had in the past and that we now consider true. She seemed to be saying that we should focus on those factors instead of, or at least in preference to, factors such as the evidence that scientists advanced for their beliefs or the facts that they had in their favour. The present-day analogue, Vanessa suggested, is that when we debate issues like climate change and religion we should consider how our social or political situation might have shaped our personal convictions on those topics. I expect that many present-day historians of science would agree with these sentiments.

I disagree. I do think that social or political explanations for beliefs are important. But I think they are on a par with, rather than preferable too, more traditional explanations such as evidence or argument. More importantly, I think that the symmetry principle is irrelevant to that question. All the symmetry principle says is that we should give the same sort of explanation for true beliefs as we do for false ones. It is perfectly consistent with this principle to (for example) explain Galileo's belief that the moon was mountainous by appeal to the evidence he had in his favour—as long as we explain the beliefs of his rivals in the same way. The lesson for present-day debates, one might think, is not that we should pay attention to our own biases but that we should pay attention to the evidence or arguments advanced by people we disagree with.

But isn't evidence more or less the same thing as truth? And isn't it bad practice for a historian or a sociologist of science to let questions of truth and falsity interfere with their naturalistic explanations of past beliefs? The only way to respond to such concerns—and to clarify the symmetry principle and to engage properly with the public—is to distinguish carefully between different ways in which “questions of truth and falsity” can enter into our explanations of scientists' beliefs. So here goes...

1. People believe things because they believe they have evidence in favour of those things. As I asserted in my first post in this series, it is silly to deny that evidence can play a major role in scientific debates. The evidence might not be very good, of course. And there are not many beliefs, if any, that are fully explained by the evidence possessed by the believer. But there is nothing wrong-headed about saying (for example) that Darwin believed in evolution partly because of his observations of the distribution of finches on the Galapagos islands. Likewise, there is nothing wrong-headed about trying to shake someone's confidence in an omniscient, benevolent God by observing the amount of needless suffering in the world.

Anyone who denies this is likely to be accused, in my view justly, of being “tainted with relativism” or of “misunderstand[ing] how science works at a rather fundamental level” (as per the comment by DavidColquhoun in reply to the Vanessa's post).

2. People believe things to be true because they believe them to be true. In contrast to 1., this is a terrible explanation of what people believe. It is just wrong-headed to say, for example, that someone believes in God because they believe in God. It is like saying that the death of Maggie Thatcher was caused by the death of Maggie Thatcher. That's just not how explanations work. Nor is this how arguments work—people don't go around saying “God exists, therefore God exists.”

3. The fact that something is the case can explain why people believe it to be the case. It is quite common to lump this explanation together with the obviously defective 2. This is a mistake, because 3. is much more plausible than 2.

Here's an illustration. It is silly to say (as per 2.) that Galileo appealed to the rockiness of the moon in order to justify his belief that the moon was rocky. But it is not silly to say (as per 3.) that the rockiness of the moon caused his belief that the moon was rocky. After all, the moon is rocky; and the rockiness of the moon was (partly) responsible for the shapes that Galileo saw in his telescope, which were turn (partly) responsible for his belief that the moon was rocky. (I owe this point, though not the illustration, to this article [paywall] by the philosopher Nick Tosh; see especially pp. 691-92).

In fact, it is hard to see how scientists could consistently say true things about the natural world if their beliefs were not partly caused by the natural world. If there were no causal link between nature and scientist's beliefs about it, it would be a remarkable coincidence if the latter accurately described the former. (Again I owe this point to Nick Tosh, who discusses it on pp. 187-88 in this paper. I expect that this intuition, or something like it, underlay TonyLloyd's remark that “the trouble with this symmetry approach is that it does not just exclude truth but any relation of theory to the world.”)

Nevertheless, in my experience this sort of explanation is rarely used by even the most “Whiggish” historians of science. This may be because a state of affairs can explain the false things, and not just the true things, that people believe about it. For example, one of Galileo's opponents was a Jesuit professor who thought that the blotches on the moon were due to density variations inside the moon (rather than to its surface relief). This belief, no less than Galileo's, was partly caused by the shapes the Jesuit professor saw in a telescope, which in turn were partly caused by the rockiness of the moon.

4. The fact that something is the case (about nature) can explain why people believe something else is the case. Here is an example of what I have in mind. William Gilbert was an English natural philosopher who believed that electrostatic repulsion, unlike electrostatic attraction, was not a real effect. A historian has explained this by noting that Gilbert used chaff and paper rather than metal objects as detectors of electricity. If he had used gold leaf instead, the argument goes, he would probably have observed the gold leaf to leap energetically from charged objects, rather than simply falling off them as chaff and paper tends to do.

This explanation uses a present-day scientific commonplace (that metals are unusually good electrical conductors) to account for a different but related belief that Gilbert held (there is no such thing as electrostatic repulsion). To me this explanation is unobjectionable. In fact, without it we do not have a full historical explanation of the historical fact that Gilbert did not believe that repulsion was a real electrical effect.

5. People believe things because of factual evidence. This one is easily confused with 3, especially when it is expressed as “people believe things because of the facts.” That phrase could mean a) that people believe X because X is the case, or b) that people believe X because they have access to facts that count as evidence for X.

The distinction matters. a) is plausible, but rarely used by historians (as per 3. above). By contrast, b) is often used by historians and laypeople, and with good reason—it is just a special case of 1., a special case in which the evidence comes in the form of “facts.”

Now, people in science studies tend to be as suspicious of “facts” as they are of “truth,” as indicated by their tendency to surround both words with scare-quotes. Here as elsewhere, ambiguity has done much mischief. There are at least four senses of “fact” in common usage:

I. Any true statement. Here “fact” is to be contrasted with “opinion.”

II. A particular kind of statement, namely one that is about raw data or empirical observations. Here the contrast is with an abstract or theoretical statement, as when we tell someone to “get their facts right.” (Note that this phrase only makes sense if there is such a thing as a “false fact”).

III. A sub-set of the statements in II., namely those that are true rather than false, as when we use “it's a fact” to mean “it's true.” (When “fact” is used in this sense, there is no such thing as a “false fact.”)

IV. A “matter of fact,” ie. a state of affairs in the world rather than a statement about the world.

Sometimes popular authors exploit this four-fold ambiguity for rhetorical advantage. For example, in his book Why Evolution is True, the biologist Jerry Coyne often writes “evolution is a fact” when he means to make the (perfectly reasonable) claim that “the theory of evolution is almost certainly true.” Here he is using “fact” in the first sense listed above. But by using that word he invites readers to think that the statement “animals evolve by natural selection” is a datum rather than a theory inferred from the data.

This kind of sleight-of-hand is annoying, whether deliberate or not. But it is no more annoying than the practice, fairly common in science studies, of saying “facts are socially constructed” or “facts change over time” or “facts can always be disputed” without saying which sense of “fact” is intended.

To get back to the point: “X believed Y because of the factual evidence” is a perfectly acceptable explanation if “factual” is intended in sense II above. This is because the distinction between “fact” and “theory” (or something similar) dates back at least to Aristotle, and because people routinely appeal to data or observations or phenomena to support their theories or conjectures or explanations.

Of course we should not forget that it usually requires quite a bit of work to go from raw sense data (like “there is a yellow patch in the top-left of my visual field”) to a fact in sense II (like “a third of Americans are obese”). And it takes more work again to go from a set of facts to a theory based on them. But these truisms do not mean that it is an error to say that people believe things because of the factual evidence.

6. People believe us when we are dogmatic about our beliefs. Perhaps the thing that historians of science mean to reject, by way of the symmetry principle, is the practice of believing one's own position so strongly as to disregard all counter-arguments. They are against the dogmatist who reasons like this: I am right; therefore all arguments against my position must be misleading arguments; therefore I can safely ignore everything my critics say.

(If I read her correctly, Vanessa was describing this kind of dogmatism when she tweeted that there was “a clear link between 'it's true, therefore there's evidence, therefore belief.'”)

There is obviously something wrong with this dogmatic line of reasoning: if it were sound, it would give us grounds for never changing our minds in the light of new evidence. It is not obvious exactly what is wrong with the argument—so much so, in fact, that philosophers have given it a name: the "Kripke-Harman dogmatism paradox." All the more reason, then, to think that people are vulnerable to that way of thinking, whether they realise it or not.

But note that the avoidance of dogmatism does not require us to turn away from questions of evidence and towards questions of social, political, or institutional bias. The solution to dogmatism, one might think, is not to set the evidence aside but to give a fairer appraisal of a greater range of evidence. The historiographical equivalent is to give as much attention to the evidence advanced by the “losers” (ie. past scientists whose theories we consider false) as we do to the “winners.”

***

It should be clear by now that the plausibility of the claim “people believe things because they are true” depends crucially on how you interpret that claim. In the next post I'll distinguish another five interpretations, beginning with one of the most important ones, namely “the truth-value of any given theory is obvious once you decide to consider the evidence.” Expand post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Post-script on Jardine on anachronism

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

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

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

The second lesson speaks for itself:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Jardine on benign and vicious anachronism

Nick Jardine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


****

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

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

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

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

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Jonathan Rée on the vanity of historicism

Jonathan Rée

I should have known that it would be a tall order to get married and maintain a bilingual blog over the same summer. But I'm pleased to say that after a few months of inactivity posting will now resume on this blog. I regret to add that it will no longer be bilingual. The reasons for this are the obvious one that translation is time-consuming, and the less-obvious one that the bilingualism so far practiced on this blog has already done its job of improving my French. At least a bit.

***

I have some things to say on the much-discussed topic of Whiggism, but as a warm-up here are some remarks on an intriguing paper from two decades ago: Jonathan Rée, "The Vanity of Historicism," New Literary History, 1991, 22(4), 961-983 (paywall).

The paper is intriguing for three reasons. Firstly, it presents an outsider's perspective of the history of science--Rée was a professor in philosophy when he wrote the article, and is now better known as a freelance writer and historian. Secondly, Rée endorses a thesis that is part of Will's picture, namely that recent historians of science tend to suffer delusions of novelty. Thirdly, Rée gives a general and plausible explanation of why those delusions exist. I'll say what Rée's views are and then say what I think of them, in general and with respect to the discipline of the history of science.

Rée diagnoses three problems with intellectuals who have taken what he calls "historical turns." These intellectuals include postmodernists, deconstructivists, and Foucauldians, as well as plain old historians of science. Here are the problems:

[F]irst, they have substituted relativism for skepticism; next, they have mistaken historicism for historicity; and finally, they have vastly exaggerated the scale of what they were trying (rightly, no doubt) to turn against (976-7).

These claims require some explanation. By relativism Rée means the view that values--whether moral, intellectual or aesthetic--cannot be justified absolutely but only relative to a given historical situation. Rée makes short shrift of relativism, noting that it is self-defeating and that--despite the good intentions of its advocates--it is not a "true friend of the marginalized and the oppressed" (965).

These are stock arguments against relativism, but the distinction between "historicism" and "historicity" is Rée's own invention. Historicity is an appreciation for the strangeness and particularity of the past, for "the sheer singularity of places and times" (961). Rée urges us to "respect the historicity of things, the fact that they take place without benefit of an enveloping historical plot" (976).

By contrast, historicism is the insistence on a plot, or at least a particular kind of plot. For Rée, the prototypical historicist is the historican of philosophy who believes that all past philosophers were addressing the same set of "perennial questions," and that his job is to assess their answers. Such a historian ignores or misreads all statements that do not seem like answers to a pre-fabricated schedule of questions. As a result such historians "offer you the comforting assurance that nothing you encounter in history will be really unfamiliar or alien to you."

The third and related problem on Rée's list is the delusion of novelty I mentioned in the introduction to this post. The relativists "believe in the originality of their theme, its audacity, its scurrilousness, and even its radicalism." Rée thinks that in fact it has been around for centuries, in the work of Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Simone de Beauvoir, and 1940s existentialists, as well as in the "languorous, snobbish cosmopolitanism which likes to smile at the intuitive enthusiasms of simple folk." Rée concludes that relativism "is more like a recurrent ideal of high cuture than its belated comeuppance" (965).

The history of science is a special case of this amnesia. "The new historians of science have supposed that everyone before Kuhn believed in a single scientific method, which was somehow supposed to control the whole of the history of science" (977). This judgement of "the new historians of science" is similar to claims made over at Ether Wave Propaganda, such as that "historians of science have themselves become appallingly poor historians of their own profession so as to amplify the significance of recent insights" (see the end of this post for a summary of this line of thought on EWP). But whereas EWP writes about the history of science, Rée levels the accusation against everyone who has taken the "historical turn," including political and literary theorists.

How does Rée explain such widespread hubris among late-twentieth-century intellectuals? By appeal to their early-twentieth-century counterparts, the modernists. The relativists think they are subverting the entire history of Western thought (the argument runs) but really they are simply reacting to the excesses of modernism circa. 1910-40. That period witnessed the rise of professionalized disciplines, the members of whom...

...saw themselves as the inheritors of a set of comforting pieties about God and human dignity which, in the stark and unillusioned world in which they now found themselves, could be seen to be empty, anthropocentric, self-indulgent, and prescientific: in short, no longer possible. They developed a kind of higher sentimentality about their own stern refusal to be sentimental. They were, that is to say, modernists, and they sought to construct hardedged, antitraditional, professional research communities which would put an end to the timewasting of the past to produce solid, context-free, cumulative, scientific knowledge. This is what the historical turns have been turning against.

There is much I disagree with in this set of claims. It is very strange to accuse relativists of engaging in historicism, as Rée defines the latter term. Consider two of the people he calls relativist, Quentin Skinner and Thomas Kuhn. Both of these men were opposed to that brand of historicism that treats all past texts as so many answers to present-day questions. Indeed, this is one of the reasons they get called relativists.

Rée seems to recognise this at the end of the article, when he quotes Skinner as arguing for "a non-anachronistic reconstruction of the alien mentalities of the past" (978). So is Rée on Skinner's side after all? Apparently not, because Rée then goes on to accuse Skinner and his ilk of being too sensitive to the strangeness of the past; Rée then urges historians to embrace anachronism. The upshot is that Rée gives a set of cogent arguments for opposite conclusions, without much attempt to reconcile those conclusions.

The same can be said of Rée's discussion of relativism. On the one hand he says that relativism is a long-standing feature of intellectual life that has nothing subversive about it; on the other hand he argues that relativism may be "foundationalist, transcendental, and even totalitarian" (966). So is Rée rejecting relativism or not? Perhaps he would say that the question is too crude. Very well, but if there is a more nuanced question that he is answering I'm not sure what that question is.

***

Despite such oddities, Rée is surely right that those involved in the "historical turns" in the late 20th-century often claimed to be doing something very novel. If such claims were systematically overblown then we need to explain why they were so, and Rée offers an interesting explanation. The question I want to finish with is: does the explanation apply to the discipline of the history of science? I think it does, but not in the way Rée suggests.

It is not hard to find people who flourished in the period 1910-1940 (Rée's dates for modernism), who were keen on building a professional research community in the history of science, and who act as a foil to present-day historians of science. The outstanding example is the Belgian chemist George Sarton (1884-1956) who founded the field's flagship in 1912 and worked in many other ways to build the field. He also had ties to Paul Otlet, another Belgian now known as the father of the information age for his promotion of "rational bibliography"--an archetypal modernist project.

But Sarton did not see past history of science as Rée says a modernists saw their predecessors. That is, Sarton did not see past historians of science as "empty, anthropocentric, self-indulgent, and prescientific." How could they have been prescientific when almost all of them were scientists? Certainly Sarton thought that his field was fragmented, under-resourced, and in need of unification. But he did not think it was excessively sentimental.

Moreover, historians nowadays are not delusional when they assimilate writers like Sarton with all historians of science before him. Sarton is not just a modernist anomaly--in many respects it is reasonable to group him with his predecessors and contrast that group with present-day history of science. Take a look at the last ten winners of the book prize for the History of Science Society, a society that Sarton co-founded. Most of them are the sorts of books that could not have been written prior to about 1970.

Another "but" is that it is easy to identify pioneers of the field in the period 1910-1940 who had a rather non-modernist view of science, if modernism means thinking of knowledge as an empirical, cumulative affair. Neo-Kantians such as Hélène Metzger and Alexander Koyré thought of science as a mental, epochal affair in which whole systems of thought rose up then fell away. The American philosopher Edwin Burtt not only lamented the de-humanised world that he inherited from seventeenth-century science, but tried to work out an alternative. These and other writers forged a discipline around the idea of the Scientific Revolution, ie. the idea of a dramatic change in ways of understanding the natural world that occured between about 1550 and 1700.

If Rée's account is applied to the history of science, it should be applied to the historians who rejected the neo-Kantians. Burtt, Metzger, Koyré and their followers were genuinely novel in their treatment of the history of science as a sequence of coherent world systems. There were precursors, as there always are. But Burtt et. al. were as novel with respect to their predecessors as recent winners of the HSS book prize are with respect to their predecessors.

The backlash against these authors consisted in rejecting their idealism, ie. their emphasis on abstract ideas as opposed to what we now call "scientific practice" or "material culture." This backlash goes wrong when it takes the neo-Kantians as representative of all past history of science. One can say of this backlash, as Rée says of relativism, that "the orthodoxies against which [it is] in revolt have a quite short and particular history."

To sum up, Rée's idea of an over-reaction to modernist excesses may help to explain some forms of relativism, but it does not apply to the history of science. It fails to apply because the really new historians of science in the early 20th century were not the ones with modernist sympathies (like Sarton) but the ones who scrutinised those sympathies (like Burtt). There have been over-reactions to short-lived past excesses in the field of the history of science. But the over-reaction has not been to the excesses of modernism, but to those of Burtt, Koyré and their followers.

The next post will provide some badly-needed evidence for my claims in this post. Expand post.

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