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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