Saving the symmetry principle, II: why distinctions matter

The flurry of tweets that followed my last post made it clear that there are quite a few interpretations of the sentence “people believe things just because they are true.” One question that came up was whether or not the distinction between truth and evidence is any use in understanding that sentence. I think it is. But even if it is not, I want to make the broader point that esoteric-seeming distinctions can make a big difference to the success of our interactions with the general public.

Here's an illustration. If a tree falls in a wood, and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Well, if by “making a sound” you mean “producing sound waves,” then the answer is clearly “yes.” On the other hand, if you mean “causing a human to experience a sound” then the answer is clearly “no.”

The distinction between producing sound waves and causing aural percepts is not one that most people care about. But if our aim is to give a sensible answer to the question posed, we don't have a choice but to make that distinction. If we don't make the distinction, our efforts to answer the question are likely to be wasted. And if we do, we do not need to do much else in order to reach agreement on an answer.

Now imagine we are answering the tree-felling question in a public forum. If we answer “yes,” without making the distinction I mentioned, then we should not be surprised if we are met with howls of protest from those who have tacitly taken “making a sound” to mean “causing a human to experience a sound.”

Of course it would be better if our readers made the distinction themselves, exercised charity and common sense, and assumed that we meant “producing sound waves.” But if we don't make the distinction, when it makes such a big difference to the correctness of our answer, then we can hardly complain if our audience does not do so either.

Conversly, if we are reading a popular text on tree-felling, and the author asserts that trees don't make sounds when they fall in empty forests, then we should not imagine that their claim is obviously, lamentably wrong. To do so would be to ignore the fact that they are half right. And to do that would be to repeat the author's real error, which was not to answer “no” rather than “yes” but to take the question as one rather than two.

Clearly there are many distinctions that are irrelevant to any given question. To answer our question about felled trees, it would not be much use to distinguish between tranverse and longitudinal waves. There are are also an infinite number of weird interpretations of a question, and no matter how careful we are to delimit our answers there is bound to be someone who takes it the wrong way.

(Example: many of the commentators on Vanessa Heggie's recent post seemed to think that she was advocating some sort of radical skepticism about science, which was pretty clearly not the point of the post.)

Philosophers are the specialists in conceptual distinctions, but we historians have a sense of why distinctions matter in general. Whereas philosophers tease apart the meanings of terms, historians are exquisitely sensitive to the peculiarities of different times, places, people, and episodes. The question “Is there a conflict between science and religion?” is meaningless to the historian in the same way that “Is the world one or many?” is meaningless to the philosopher. The answer to both is, “it depends.”

We should also bear in mind that academic study can cloud distinctions that are perfectly clear to non-experts. This does not always reflect well on the experts. Consider the distinction between statements about the world and the world itself. If ordinary people did not make this distinction they would have great difficulty getting through their lives without going mad or getting into terrible accidents.

Such people would automatically believe everything they read or heard, since they would not be able to grasp the idea of a false statement. They would live in a state of perpetual puzzlement as they witnessed objects and events that appeared to have no statements attached to them. In their confusion they might even mistake events for statements, wandering into the path of oncoming traffic in the belief that this wordly action is as harmless as the statement “there is oncoming traffic.”

Yet it is only a bit of an exaggeration to say that entire academic careers have been built around the denial of the distinction between the world and the things we say about it. Much of what is called the 'Science Wars' could have been avoided if both sides had been more careful to distinguish between the two things.

More generally, it has long been fashionable in the humanities to frame new ideas in terms of the erasure of one or other distinction that many people take for granted. There is no shortage of authors who claim to challenge the distinctions between subject and object, fact and fiction, fact and value, fact and theory, theory and practice, art and science, etc. It is a long time since I read a book in science studies that promised to mark out a boundary rather than transgressing one, or to heed a dichotomy rather than interrogating one.

I'm not saying that all this distinction-denying is a bad thing. My point is that academic study blinds us to the ubiquity of the distinctions we deny just as surely as it blinds us to the abstruseness of the distinctions that are commonplace in our chosen field.

What about the distinction between truth and evidence, which I fussed over in my previous post? Is it esoteric like the one between “producing sound waves” and “causing a human to experience a sound”? Or is it more like the distinction between “statements about the world” and “the world itself,” ie. a commonplace that only sophisticated people fail to grasp?

I don't know. But the main message of this post is that it doesn't matter. If the distinction helps us to answer the question at hand then it is worth caring about, no matter how ordinary or esoteric it might be.

The question at hand—to get back to the topic of this series—is whether the symmetry principle is right in stating that people do not believe things just because they are true. The aim of my next post is to give a list of distinctions that make a difference to how we answer this question. Expand post.

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Saving the symmetry principle, I: two fallacies

Vanessa Heggie has posted a clear, visible summary of what she rightly calls a “core principle” for historians of science, namely the “symmetry principle.” So this is a great opportunity for me to explain why I disagree with much that my fellow historians of science have written on this topic. Behind the symmetry principle there is an insight that is true, important and worth keeping. But we need to save this insight from the ideas that are often associated with it, many of which I think we should reject.

The basic insight is that there is a certain inference, which I will call The Fallacy, that is a tempting yet unreliable way of way of explaining the beliefs of past scientists. The point of this post, the first in a series, is to separate The Fallacy from another fallacy that is so unappealing that no-one had even thought of it before historians of science started finding it everywhere.


The Fallacy

Consider Galileo's theory that the uneven shading of the moon is due to the shadows cast by hills and mountains on the moon's surface. Most of us prefer this theory to one of its seventeenth-century rivals, according to which the moon is a perfectly smooth sphere whose visible blotches are due to the uneven density of the crystalline matter of which it is made.

The fallacy is to say that since the theory is true, Galileo must have believed it because of the evidence in its favour, while those who rejected it must have done so out of superstition, prejudice or self-interest. In general:

Theory X is true, therefore everyone who held it did so for good reasons, while everyone who denied it did so for bad reasons.

This is what I will call The Fallacy. As I have stated it, this fallacy applies to two people with conflicting beliefs, but this limitation is one of convenience rather than necessity. The same kind of fallacy could be applied to two beliefs that have opposite truth-values but that do not contradict each-other. Or it could be applied to two beliefs held by the same individual. Or it could be of these cases in one.

For an example of the latter, consider Galileo's theory that comets are exhalations that mount in a straight line from the surface of the earth. The fallacy would be to infer from the truth of Galileo's moon theory that he held it from a combination of accurate observation and sound inference, and from the falsity of his comet theory that he held it out of dogmatism, amour propre, etc.


The Other Fallacy

It may look like I have simply repeated Vanessa's account with a different example (she uses Leibniz v Newton rather than Galileo). But there's a crucial difference. The teaser at the top of Vanessa's post says that “No one believes something simply because it is true”, and the fifth paragraph urges historians to “forego the assumption that [Newton] believed in his law of gravity because it was true.” This suggests that the fallacy that Vanessa has in mind is something like this:

Theory X is true, therefore everyone who held it did so because it was true, while everyone who denied it did so for bad reasons.

Call this the The Other Fallacy. It is the same as The Fallacy except that it replaces “good reasons” with “truth” as an explanation of the true beliefs of past scientists.

Although The Other Fallacy is indeed a fallacy, I think it is a very rare one, even among the most Whiggish of old-fashioned historians. Imagine asking George Sarton (to pick one such historian) why Copernicus believed that the earth goes round the sun. Would Sarton have said “because the earth does indeed go around the sun”, or perhaps “because Copernicus thought 'the earth goes around the sun' was a true statement”?

I doubt it. Instead he would have said something like: “because Copernicus looked at a whole lot of data, did a bunch of calculations, and found that a number of key phenomena—such as the retrograde motions of the planets and the fact that he never observed Mercury and Venus on the opposite side of the earth to the sun—could be explained in very neat manner by supposing that the earth is just another planet.”

To put one of the first two replies in Sarton's mouth is to commit what I have called the constructivist straw man. Another way to commit the same error is to say that Sarton and his ilk denied that “human agency” or “human activity” played any role in the beliefs of scientists.

Both forms of the straw man can be found in this transcript, which Vanessa links to in her post. First comes the suggestion that, some time in the seventies or eighties, historians started to see scientific knowledge has “a human product, something that had to be made and maintained.” In other words, earlier historians had thought that “true knowledge was immaculate, untouched by human hands.” (This is true only on the perverse assumption that calculating, experimenting, and reasoning—the sorts of things that interested Sarton et. al.—do not count as human activities).

Next in the transcript comes the misattribution that lies behind The Other Fallacy. How did these earlier historians explain the beliefs of scientists, if not as the result of human action? Answer: by appeal to the truth of those beliefs. For example, they would “say that Isaac Newton thought that there was an inverse square law of gravity acting instantly at a distance through empty space between the centers of distant bodies because there is [such a law].”

(Disclaimer: the historian featured in this transcript is my thesis advisor. Clarification: yes, I am disagreeing with my thesis advisor on this point, although I agree with him on much else.)

The problem with The Other Fallacy is that it sets the bar too low. A campaign against it is like an anti-smoking campaign that urges smokers to stop committing murders. Since most smokers are not murderers, the campaign is unlikely to have any effect except perhaps to convince non-smokers that many smokers are, in fact, murderers.

Likewise, urging people to avoid The Other Fallacy is unlikely to solve the real problem, which is The Fallacy. Those who commit the latter are likely to continue doing so, happy in the knowledge that they have not committed The Other Fallacy. And those who avoid The Other Fallacy may end up convincing themselves that everyone else is more wrong-headed than they really are.


Truth and evidence are not the same thing, and it matters

Perhaps historians attack The Other Fallacy, rather than The Fallacy, because the two are hard to tell apart. After all, as noted above, the only difference between them is that between explaining a person's belief by its truth, and explaining that belief by the arguments or evidence that the person found in its favour. And aren't these pretty much the same thing?

No! In the context of a debate, whether in the present or in the past, they are completely different beasts.

This is easy to see from the three quotes I put in the mouth of George Sarton. Imagine if we tried putting those quotes into the mouth of Copernicus rather than Sarton. Does the De Revolutionibus contain statements like: “'the earth moves around the sun' is a true statement, therefore the earth moves around the sun”? Or statements like: “the earth moves around the sun, therefore you should believe that the earth moves round the sun”?

Probably not. Or if it does, they were not the sorts of statement that convinced people that the earth went around the sun. And nor are they the sorts of statement that are used today to convince people that vaccinations work, or that climate change is real, or that God does or does not exist. And this is not something that “modern historians” discovered some time in the seventies and eighties. No sane person has ever denied it.

This should be uncontroversial. Granted, there are controversial issues nearby. There are the questions of the extent to which standards of evidence have varied over time and place, whether there is some super-standard that allows us to assess this alleged multiplicity of standards, whether evidence can reliably inform us about unobservable entities like quarks and quasars, and whether evidence can be decisive in resolving scientific disputes. But we do not need to agree on any of these issues in order to agree that giving evidence for a proposition is different from asserting that the proposition is true.

This large, uncontroversial difference does not stop historians of science running the two together as if they were the same thing, usually when passing judgement on dead historians of science. I've already given one example from a prominent historian. Here's another, from Stephen Shapin's 2010 book Never Pure:

Once upon a time, so the story goes, students of science too believed that truth was its own recommendation, or, if not that, something very like it. If one wanted to know, and one rarely did, why it was that true propositions were credible, one was referred back to their truth, to the evidence for them, or to those methodical procedures the unambiguous following of which testified to the truth of the product.

In this passage Shapin at least recognises that the truth of a claim and the evidence for it are different things. But only just: he also says that they are “very like” each-other. He implies, absurdly, that students of science used to be uninterested in how scientists justified their beliefs. And on the preceeding page he attributes to an unnamed group of “modernist methodologists”—presumably people like Hans Reichenbach, Rudolph Carnap, and Karl Popper—the view that “truth shines by its own light.”

The conflation of truth and justification does an injustice not only to old-fashioned historians like Sarton but also to present-day internalists. The latter may be defined as historians of science whose main interest is the mixture of luck, skill and insight by which past scientists—as individuals or as groups, over months or over centuries—developed arguments for their claims the natural world.

Internalists can be as symmetric as anyone, giving as much attention to the errors of “winners” as they do the insights of the “losers.” They do not give complete accounts of their subject (show me a historian who does!). But they do far more than simply put tautologies in the mouths of past scientists.

To sum up, by conflating truth and evidence we make the latter look as unimportant as the former in the resolution of debates, whether in the present or the past. This is an error as bad as The Fallacy. It is silly to appeal to the presumed truth of a claim in order to persuade people that the claim is true. By contrast, it is silly not to appeal to the presumed evidence for the claim in order to persuade people that the claim is true.

Having identified what I think is the good idea behind the symmetry principle, in my next post I hope to explain why it is a good idea. This can be done, but it is harder to do than my colleagues usually make out.



Postscript 1. If the error that I am attributing to my fellow historians is such a bad one, why had no-one spotted it until now? Actually, at least one person had. Ian Hacking wrote the following in a footnote to his 1999 book The Social Construction of What?:

Evidence, or reasonableness, is quite another matter from truth. [The sociologists of science Barry Barnes and David Bloor] are often taken to hold a symmetry thesis about evidence: you cannot invoke the evidence available to a community for a belief p, in order to explain why people in the community believed p... I find this claim (about evidence, not truth) unsatisfactory (232).

Why did Hacking put this point in a footnote rather than in the main text? Because he only mentioned the symmetry principle on his way to talking about something else, and that thing (the distinction between “nominalism” and “inherent-structurism”) was relevant to truth and not to evidence.

I'm still trying to work out why other commentators on the symmetry principle have not made the point that Hacking made in his footnote, and that I made in the above post. I'ld be delighted to know of any examples of people who have made the point in print.


Postscript 2. Maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe Shapin et. al. want to draw the following contrast. One can say that a scientist believed P because they were convinced, on the basis of the evidence, that it was true. Or one can say that the person believed P because they were convinced, independently of their views of the truth-value of P, that it was in their interests to believe it.

On this reading, “No-one believes things just because they are true” is shorthand for “No-one believes things just because they are convinced, on the basis of the available evidence, that they are true.”

But if this is what is meant, why not just say “No-one believes things just because they have evidence for them”? This would make it clear that evidence is involved. Or what about saying “No-one believes things just because they believe them to be true”? This would at least make it clear that it is not the truth of a person's belief that is under consideration but the person's conviction that it is true.

Both of these clearer expressions would avoid the rhetorical sleight-of-hand that is involved in saying “No-one believes things just because they are true” when what you mean is “No-one believes things just because there is evidence for them.” The former claim is obviously true. The latter claim may be true, but not obviously so. The ambiguity has the effect of making the intended claim (if the intended claim is indeed the latter one) more obvious than it really is.

But all this may be moot, since I doubt that my charitable reading is correct. I suspect that Shapin et. al. really are accusing past historians and philosophers of thinking that the truth of a scientist's belief (and not just the scientist's conviction of its truth) can be a good explanation of that belief.

One reason for my doubt is that, in the passage quoted above, Shapin includes “truth” and “evidence” as separate items in his list of candidate explanations for the beliefs of past scientists. This suggests that he is not implicitly including “evidence” under the rubric of “truth.” If he were, then it would be redundant to include evidence as a separate item.

Another reason to be skeptical is that, as I understand them, even sociologists of science have trouble making sense of the idea that people can believe things without first being convinced of their truth. That is, sociologists would probably not say “Newton believed his inverse square law because, although he withheld judgement about the truth-value of the law, he thought that this belief would protect his reputation as a national hero.” Rather, their explanation would be something like: “Newton believed his inverse square law because he thought the law was true, and an important source of this conviction was (not the evidence but) his desire to protect his reputation.”

At least, that is what I imagine they would say. And if that is right, even sociologists think that people “believe things just because they are convinced of the truth of those things.” So that cannot be the allegedly false view that Shapin et. al. are attributing to past historians and philosophers of science. The view they are attributing must be the one I assumed in the above post, viz. that people believe things just because those things are, in fact, true. Expand post.

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13 things Gopnik got right about Galileo

Since you are reading this, you have probably read Adam Gopnik's recent essay-review about Galileo Galilei in The New Yorker. You might also have seen some reactions from unimpressed historians, one of whom calls the article “extremely pernicious.” I think that some of Gopnik's errors have been exaggerated, and that most of his felicities have gone unnoticed. The moral is that us historians should be as alert to what popular writers get right as we are to what they get wrong. After all, we can hardly criticise Gopnik for imbalance in his treatment of Galileo if we are imbalanced in our treatment of Gopnik.

To avoid over-balancing in Gopnik's favour, I've included some new “cons” next to some of the thirteen “pros” below. Most of the items on this selective list are included because they are pleasant surprises, ie. claims about Galileo that show a healthy level of historical acumen for someone who does not do history for a living. For example, if Gopnik had not made point 12 below, many would have privately groaned at his naive belief that science is insulated from its cultural context.

I'm not suggesting that historians should give a point-by-point assessment of every popular article they comment on; that would paralyse commentary. I've got nothing against the practice of picking out one error from a feature article and tearing it to shreds, as thonyc has done with the Gopnik's comparison between Dee and Galileo. But I do think that we should read popular articles as if we were about to write an analysis like the one I've tried to present in this post. If we look for pleasant surprises, we might find more of them than we expected.

My list covers three topics, in this order: Galileo and the Church, Galileo's science, and Galileo's context. My main source on Galileo is one of the subjects of Gopnik's review, an excellent 2010 biography by John Heilbron—the same John Heilbron who starred as Thomas Kuhn's student in my previous post.


Galileo and the Church

One. Gopnik writes that Galileo's conflict with the Catholic Church was “traceable to his hubris.” This should please those who say, with Thomas Mayer, that “the fault [for the condemnation of Galileo] lies with Galileo, not the pope or the Inquisition” (quoted in this news article.)

(Mayer is the author of two works that Gopnik covers in his review; his take on Gopnik's article can be found in the comments of this post. I hope to read Mayer's books in full at some point, but for now I am relying on the snippets from their introductions that are available on Google Books).

In fact, the theme of Galileo's insolence in was strong enough in Gopnik's article to antagonise a blogger at the Cato Institute, who read Gopnik as saying that “Galileo could have avoided a lot of trouble if he'd been just a little less stubborn and impolitic.”

Two. “The Catholic Church in Italy then was very much like the Communist Party in China now: an institution in which few of the rulers took their own ideology seriously but still held a monopoly on moral and legal authority. … Like the Party in China now, the Church then was pluralistic in practice about everything except an affront to its core powers. … You could calculate, consider, and even hypothesize with Copernicus. You just couldn’t believe in him.”

Gopnik is right that the Church could tolerate a large amount of Copernican science, especially when it was useful for things like making calendars. This is a key point that is often missed by those who take a black-and-white view of Galileo's conflict with the Church.

On the other hand, I'm not sure where Gopnik got the idea that the rulers of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time did not take religion seriously. Even Galileo was a man of faith, at least according to Heilbron, who thinks that he “believed as surely as Bellarmine [the Pope's chief theologian until his death in 1621] and the majority of Catholic exegetes of their time that every statement in scripture is in some sense true.”

But Gopnik is right that the Church was especially sensitive to doctrinal violations that posed a threat to its power:

“In Rome they pardon atheists, sodomites, libertines, and other sorts of rascals, but they never pardon those who bad mouth the Pope or his court, or who seem to question papal power” (needless to say, I got this quote from Heilbron's biography, who attributes it to Gabriel Naudé, the librarian of Urban VIII's nephew).

Three. “Galileo even seems to have had six interviews with the sympathetic new Pope, Urban VIII—a member of the sophisticated Barberini family—in which he was more or less promised freedom of expression in exchange for keeping quiet about his Copernicanism.”

This is not the sort of concession you would expect from someone who wants to show that there was no room for compromise between Galileo and the Church.

Gopnik could have added that Urban VIII was not only willing to publish Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (the book that triggered Galileo's 1633 trial) but that he considered it useful for the church. By showing that he knew all of the arguments in favour of the Copernican hypothesis, Galileo would show that he—along with all good Roman Catholics—had rejected that hypothesis out of piety and epistemic humility and not out of ignorance.

I bring this up not to suggest that Gopnik should have mentioned it in his article, but because it must be one of the craftiest rhetorical manoeuvres in the history of Church-science relations.

Four. “Though Galileo, vain as ever, thought he could finesse the point, Copernicanism was at the heart of what he wanted to express.”

This sentence is a pretty good summary of Galileo's motivations for publishing his Dialogue. It captures the depth of Galileo's Copernican commitment, and the foolishness of his belief that he could dodge censure with verbal trickery.

Five. “Galileo’s trial was a bureaucratic muddle, with crossing lines of responsibility, and it left fruitfully unsettled the question of whether Copernican ideas had been declared heretical or if Galileo had simply been condemned as an individual for continuing to promote them after he had promised not to.”

“Bureaucratic muddle” echoes Mayer's point, reported in this 2010 article, that the irregularities of Galileo's trial were due to ineptitude rather than malice on the part of Church bureaucrats. The rest of the quoted sentence shows that Gopnik grasps Mayer's point, reported in the same article, that Galileo's punishment in 1633 was at least partly due to his violation of a precept issued against him in 1616.

On the minus side, Gopnik omits another of Mayer's points, which is that Galileo was as clumsy as his judges, ie. he made things worse not just through “vanity” or “hubris” but also through sheer legal incompetence.

Six. Other scientists have followed Galileo in “ducking and avoiding the consequences of what they discovered”; in general, “science demands heroic minds, but not heroic morals.”

These claims, from the final paragraph of Gopnik's article, arguably make Galileo into even less a hero than he really was. Between his Sunspot Letters of 1613 and his trial in 1633, and especially before the precept issued against him in 1616, Galileo often did the opposite of “ducking and avoiding” the consequences of his Copernican views.


Galileo's science

Seven. Gopnik notes that Galileo's astronomical observations were due to his powers of his interpretation rather than his knowledge of the telescope, and that he did not invent that instrument: “since there were Dutch gadgets in many hands [by the time Galileo made the key observations], and many eyes, he understood what he was seeing as no man of his time had before.”

Eight. Despite being a “founder of modern science,” Galileo wrote things that we consider false today, notably that the orbits of the planets around the sun are circular and that the tides are due to the sloshing caused by the acceleration and deceleration of different parts of the earth. As Gopnik puts it, he “had his crotchets.” Moreover, Gopnik suggests that he went wrong about the tides precisely because of the skepticism that makes him seem modern (shades of Paul Feyerabend?).

A minor quibble is that Gopnik does not mention the best illustration of this theme, Galileo's 1623 book on comets, the Assayer. Heilbron shows that this work, which contains some of Galileo's most famous remarks about scientific method, was riddled with scientific errors and written out of groundless spite.

A bigger complaint is that Gopnik does not mention that Galileo overstated the case for Copernicanism. Many of his arguments showed only that the earth's motion was consistent with sense experience, he completely ignored a compromise model put forward by the great astronomer Tycho Brahe, and his favourite argument for the motion of the earth was based on his dodgy theory of the tides. Many of Galileo's contemporaries, including some of his close friends, were aware of these problems. Heilbron puts it like this: “although [reason and experience] established essential and growing support for Copernican theory [by 1616], it gave no unimpeachable proof.”

Nine. The Dialogue did not express a straightforward view about scientific method: “Though Galileo/Salviati wants to convince Simplicio and Sagredo of the importance of looking for yourself, he also wants to convince them of the importance of not looking for yourself.”

On the minus side, Gopnik may be too generous when he implies that this two-faced attitude is “philosophically sophisticated.” Perhaps Galileo championed observation when it suited his case, and favoured a priori reflection when sense experience worked against him.

Ten. “The temperament [of Galileo] is not all-seeing and curious; it is, instead, irritable and impatient with the usual stories.”

This is not a bad paraphrase of Heilbron's point that “perhaps the best single-word descriptor of Galileo is 'critic.'” On the other hand, the reference to "usual stories" is misleading, since Galileo was often a conservative critic. This from pages 1 and 2 of Heilbron's biography:

Galileo was a humanist of the old school. He much preferred Ariosto, the darling poet of the sixteenth century, to Tasso, who would be a favorite of the seventeenth... He stayed with the geometry of the Greeks rather than employ the algebras of his contemporaries... He was not an innovator by temperament. And, we are told, he liked to wear clothes that were fifty years out of date.

Another limit on Galileo's critical spirit was that he had trouble applying it to himself. Few people were convinced by Galileo's theory of the tides when he showed it off in Rome in 1615-16. Galileo must have been aware of the weaknesses of the theory, but once he got hold of it he could not let go.

Gopnik's comparison between Galileo's temperament and that of his near-contemporary, John Dee, has been ripped apart by thonyc. I'm not going to try to put the pieces back together. But it does seem that the fault, if there is any, lies less with Gopnik that it does with his source. Gopnik could not have guessed that the biography he reviewed left out most of Dee's contributions to modern science, as thonyc seems to say it did.


Galileo's context

Eleven. The Dialogue was as much a literary achievement as a technical one. Indeed, “it uses every device of Renaissance humanism: irony, drama, comedy, sarcasm, pointed conflict, and a special kind of fantastic poetry.”

Twelve. Galileo's “primary education” was in such things as music, drawing, poetry and rhetoric; and this cultural context had an effect on his natural philosophy. It gave him a “competitive, empirical drive” and “intellectual practices of doubting authority and trying out experiments.”

A tick for paying attention to context, but possibly a cross for doing so selectively. Gopnik does not mention Heilbron's thesis that Galileo's early literary tastes foretold his black-and-white approach to debates, his heroic self-image, and (remarkably) the absence of the crucial notion of “force” in his mechanics. A determined critic might say that Gopnik has fastened on the cultural elements that make Galileo an ideal modern scientist, and ignored the rest.

Thirteen. Galileo framed his discoveries so as to appeal to patrons: “A Tuscan opportunist to the bone, Galileo rushed off letters to the Medici duke in Florence, hinting that, in exchange for a job, he would name the new stars [ie. the moons of Jupiter] after the Medici.” Similarly, the telescope was not just a technical device for Galileo, but an “emblem and icon,” part of his “image.”

These are key themes in Mario Biagioli's 1994 book Galileo, Courtier. True, Gopnik probably got this information second-hand, from Heilbron's biography. But it does not follow, as Darin Hayton has suggested, that he “ignores considerable recent work on Galileo.”


*******


Gopnik's main errors, in approximate order of seriousness, are to ignore Galileo's overstatement of the Copernican case, to ignore the conservatism and dogmatism that went with his critical spirit, to underestimate the sincerity of his religious faith, to neglect Heilbron's novel and striking thesis about the relevance of Galileo's early literary tastes to his later career, and to omit Mayer's point that Galileo made elementary legal mistakes during his trial.

These errors should be seen alongside the many pleasant surprises listed above, of which the most gratifying are, in my opinion, the recognition that Galileo was vain and stubborn, that the Church supported much Copernican science in Galileo's time, that the Pope himself agreed to the publication of an anti-realist version of the Dialogue, and that Galileo's critical spirit was partly responsible for his rejection of Kepler's ellipses and his acceptance of a mechanical tidal theory, two moves that we now regard as major blunders.

In my view, and keeping in mind that this is a popular article by a non-specialist author, the pros outweigh the cons by a clear margin. If an unprejudiced non-historian reads Gopnik's article with care, there is a good chance that he or she will come away with a more nuanced and accurate view of the Galileo affair than they started with.

In my next post I intend to look at some more general issues that the “Gopnik affair” raises about history-of-science communication. Expand post.

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Kuhn's Big Picture I: from the Harvard Case Study to the Berkeley Survey

This post is a follow-up to my account of Kuhn's internalism. There will be at least two more posts in this series on Kuhn's historiographical legacy.

What did Thomas Kuhn take from his experience as a teacher of history of science? And what has he taught historians of science? The standard answer to the first question revolves around the "Harvard case method." Answers to the second question usually refer to the sociology of science, integrated HPS, and the rejection of cumulative narratives. What these answers overlook is our debt to Kuhn's influential big picture of modern physical science, which emerged not from case studies he developed at Harvard but a survey course he taught at Berkeley.


The Harvard case method and Structure

Here is the standard account in a bit more detail. In 1947 Kuhn was called up to lecture on the history of science as part of a new General Education curriculum for undergraduates at Harvard University. The course made use of the Harvard case method, a pedagogical technique that had been introduced in the Harvard medical and business schools over the previous half-century. The moving spirit of the course, Harvard president James B. Conant, was also the general editor of the series Harvard Case Studies in the History of Experimental Science, for which Kuhn wrote his first book, The Copernican Revolution (1957).

The case method had meant different things to different pedagogues, but at its heart was the idea that it is better to teach by practice than by precept. It is better to teach law, for example, by exposing students to a large number of concrete legal cases, than by filling them with abstract principles. General principles are not only unhelpful in practice, the argument went, but impossible to articulate in a way that captures all the richness and specificity of the particulars that those principles are supposed to summarise.

Many readers will recognise this as a key idea in Kuhn's most famous book, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). According to Kuhn, researchers in the natural sciences are like students at Harvard law school. They learn by doing exercises, not by memorising laws; and what they learn cannot be fully captured by the general principles stated in modern-day textbooks or in their early modern equivalents. In Kuhn's terms, scientists learn by "exemplars," which are in turn one of the main ingredients of a "paradigm” [1].

When historians ask my second question—what have we learnt from Kuhn?—they tend to anchor their answers in Structure and in the famously slippery idea of a paradigm. By emphasising the tacit quality of paradigms, it is said, Kuhn taught us to study practices rather than theories. By showing just how different one paradigm is from the next, he taught us to reject progressive narratives about past science and to understand past thinkers on their own terms. By suggesting that one paradigm is as good as any other, others say, he paved the way for the sociology of science.


The Berkeley survey and the two traditions

That's the standard story, and there's a lot of truth in it. But there is also a different story that is rarely told and that does better justice to Kuhn's gifts as a historian. It is also a story we should take seriously if we are interested in the large-scale chronology of past science.

The first part of the story is best told by Kuhn himself. Here's an extract from an interview he gave in 1995, where he described the teaching he did after moving from Harvard to Berkeley in 1956.

Two of the courses [at Berkeley] were survey courses. I'd never given a survey course in history of science, I'd never had a survey course before in history of science. So that every lecture I gave was a research project and it was very good for me. After a while I couldn't get much [more] out of the survey course, but... I learned some of the problems of trying to organize the development of science. [For example] the standard division of history of science—ancient-medieval as one, and then modern science starting in the seventeenth century—it just doesn't work.

There is a group of sciences which starts in antiquity and comes to a first major culmination in the sixteenth-seventeenth century, and that's mechanics, parts of optics, and astronomy. And then there are a whole lot of fields that scarcely exist in antiquity and have not yet got much identity, and they are the experimental fields.

So I used to go through Newton in the fall, and then drop back in the spring to the beginning of the seventeenth century and pick up Bacon and Boyle and the experimental movements. That's a hell of a lot better way to organize a one-year survey than the standard way--and what it really is, is the origin of the article of mine on Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science [2].

The article, published in 1976, distinguishes between the "mathematical" or "classical" sciences and the "experimental" or "Baconian" ones. According to Kuhn, the former emerged in antiquity and underwent a revolution in the 17th century, which is also when the experimental sciences emerged. Kuhn thought that the two traditions met briefly in Newton's optical research, but that they did not really converge until the Baconian sciences became mathematical in the decades around 1800 [3].

To Kuhn this was a powerful new way of thinking about past science in the longue durée. It clarified what was revolutionary about science in the 17th century, what has ground-breaking about Newton, and what was novel about science around 1800. At the same time it extended what historians know as the "Merton thesis," according to which modern science first flourished in Protestant nations. Kuhn noted apparent exceptions to this rule, such as the French thinker Blaise Pascal, and accommodated them by arguing that Pascal and other Continental Catholics tended to advance the mathematical but not the experimental tradition.

The passage just quoted shows that these ideas emerged from a pedagogical context quite different from that of the General Education course at Harvard. Perhaps his Berkeley survey course was also responsible for the general problem that Kuhn identified at the start of the article. Teachers of history of science are in a bind, he said. They can teach the institutional and ideological factors behind the development of science as a whole; or they can focus on the technical details of a particular discipline and ignore the external factors. Kuhn saw himself as uniting these two approaches by describing the full range of factors behind what he called "the changing divisions of the sciences."


What Heilbron learnt from Kuhn

One historian who took these ideas up—the two-traditions narrative and the study of "changing divisions of the sciences"—was one of Kuhn's students at Berkeley, John Heilbron. Heilbron paid tribute to Kuhn in a 1993 chapter that ended as follows:

Kuhn's scheme [ie. the two-tradition narrative] is characteristic of his mode of analysis and indicative of his strength as a teacher. His clarity of thought, resourcefulness of argument, and enthusiasm for ideas inspired his students to fill in the blanks... The involvement of self while retaining respect for the historical actor, the technique of scrutinizing texts not for what sounds familiar but for what seems bizarre, and the reliance on a clear and simple schema as a first approximation to a historical reconstruction were lessons of great value... Eager to know how [his students'] research results would fit his general ideas, he gave us to understand that we were engaged in an intellectual adventure of great moment. Some of us think we still are [4].

Some of the lessons Heilbron mentions here—and especially the one about reading texts for "what seems bizarre"—have been widely championed by historians of science. But that is not the case for the lesson that Heilbron puts the most weight on, ie. using "clear and simple schema" to get an initial grip on a large chunk of the past.

Kuhn's own schema enters Heilbron's oeuvre as an interest in the period when the mathematical and experimental traditions are supposed to have merged. As Heilbron puts it in the article just cited, "[Kuhn's] aperçus have the merit of raising the question of how physics came to be quantified during the years 1780 to 1820."

Three of Heilbron's books are meditations on this theme. The most recent of these, Weighing Imponderables and other Quantitative Science Around 1800 (1992), has a title that speaks for itself. The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (1990), which Heilbron co-edited, is an attempt at a unified account of the late-18th-century quantification of physics, meteorology, chemistry, botany and other branches of science.

My third example is the earliest, Heilbron's magisterial study of early modern physics, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries (1979). The book kicks off with a one-paragraph summary of Kuhn's two-traditions narrative. It starts "breaking new ground," in the author's words, with a chapter on, of all things, the quantification of physics from around 1760. And when Heilbron finally gets to the topic promised in the title, ie. electricity, the main thrust of his narrative is the conceptualisation, measurement, and mathematisation of basic electrical quantities (especially charge, capacity and tension).

These echos of Kuhn's 1976 paper are made all the more striking by the fact that Heilbron's Electricity creates problems for Kuhn's most famous book. In Structure, Kuhn used Benjamin Franklin's explanation of the Leyden Jar as a leading case of a paradigm-creating exemplar—a striking application of a theory that turns a confused and disparate field into subject of unified, systematic research, otherwise known as "normal science."

By contrast, Heilbron's book shows that Europe's leading electricians were already unified around a theory (that of the Frenchman Jean-Antoine Nollet) before Franklin came along, and that electrical science had already been placed on a systematic footing by Nollet's teacher, Charles Dufay. Moreover, Franklin's account of the Leyden Jar made a splash mainly in France, and mainly because of the interest whipped up by Nollet's enemies, who tended to ape Franklin's arguments and ignore Nollet's well-considered responses. (See here for a primer on the Dufay-Nollet-Franklin sequence).

Nor was the Leyden jar one of those "shy anomalies" (Heilbron's phrase) that fell outside the narrow vision that is supposed to beset the members of a Kuhnian paradigm. On the contrary: as Heilbron shows, the Leyden jar was met on all sides with "frank admissions" of the inadequacy of accepted theory. Nollet himself admitted the anomalousness of the Leyden jar in the very paper in which he announced the discovery of the instrument.

True, Heilbron's work creates problems not just for Structure but also for Kuhn's two-tradition narrative. The problems with the latter are that Kuhn omits such things as astrology, geography, and fortification from his account of the classical tradition; that these branches of mixed mathematics did not "turn into physics" in the way that (say) geometrical optics did; that natural philosophy, and not just the mathematical tradition, suffered major transformations in the 17th century; and that the "quantifying spirit" effected all branches of science in the 18th century, not just physics. Nevertheless, Heilbron makes it clear, in the chapter quoted above, that the two traditions are a "convenient fiction" that he hopes to "extend" in his own work.

The descriptive lesson of this post is that the historical fruits of the Berkeley survey have survived at least as well as the philosophical fruits of the Harvard case method. The normative lesson is that historians of science should place as much value on large-scale historical sketches—Heilbron's “clear and simple schema”—as they do on the sensitive reading of past texts or on the avoidance of progressive narratives.

***

In my next post I hope to show that Heilbron was not the only one to get historiographical mileage out of Kuhn's two-traditions narrative.


References

[1] This account of Kuhn's debt to the Harvard case method is a summary of chapters 2 and 6 of Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2012), a book that I recommend even if its emphases are different from my own.

[2] Kuhn, “An Interview with Thomas Kuhn,” in The Road Since Structure, eds. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 294-295.

[3] Kuhn, “Mathematical Versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7 no.1 (1976), 1-31.

[4] Heilbron, “A Mathematician's Mutiny, With Morals,” in World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science, ed. Paul Horwich (Pittsburch: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), 81-127. Expand post.

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The constructivist straw man

What does “constructivism” mean these days for historians of science? As near as I can tell, it is simply the idea that each scientific claim has a complex causal history that involves people. But there is nothing new about this idea, as we see once we drop straw-mannish views about old-fashioned internalist historians of science. The real novelty is not constructivism but social constructivism, or something like it. Nor is this the only way that old-fashioned historians are short-changed by the way "constructivism" is sometimes portrayed nowadays. Fortunately, there are some simple steps we can take to solve these problems. Let me explain.

But before I explain, let me disclaim. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with what is called “constructivism” or “social constructivism,” or that there is nothing new about those approaches. My views on the internal/external distinction are, I think, fair on both sides. My target is not the historical work of constructivists but the way that work is sometimes portrayed. And I am less interested in knocking down constructivists than I am in giving some credit to their predecessors.


Current definitions of constructivism

Now I'll explain. Here are two recent definitions of constructivism from historians of science.

By a 'constructivist' outlook, I mean that which regards scientific knowledge primarily as a human product, made with locally situated cultural and material resources, rather than as simply the revelation of a pre-given order of nature" (Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science, xvii).

Most historians are constructivists. Most constructivists take for granted that both the givenness of the experience and phenomena presented in experiental narratives and the aboutness of the language that describes them can be explained as the product of human agency--writing and theorising as well as manipulating (and designing the manipulation of) material objects and agents (David Gooding, in Radder ed., The Philosophy of Scientific Experimentation, 261).

Here is another statement which looks like an implied definition of constructivism:

[F]or [Simon] Schaffer, myself, and others, it is one of the signal virtues of science studies to have localised the production of knowledge, and to have shown that agency is involved in the production and dissemination of that knowledge" (Peter Galison, in The Disunity of Science, 29).

If you think I've cherry-picked these examples, consider how often how words implying human agency—like “work,” “production” and “making”—appear in close vicinity to the word “constructivism.” Or consider a statement that introduced many historians to constructivism back in the roaring '80s:

Knowledge, as much as the state, is the product of human actions (Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, 344).

What these quotes have in common is the idea that the main products of science need to be explained by reference to human activity. They have other themes too, like the local nature of science or the importance of the dissemination of scientific ideas. But the main one they share is that the products of science can be (at least partly) explained by human action.


Current definitions of non-constructivism

If this is constructivism, what does it mean to not be a constructivist? The first quote above suggests an answer, since it contrasts constructivists with those who regard science “as simply the revelation of a pre-given order of nature.”

This answer is not unique to the author of this quote. Sometimes the answer is put poetically, as when old-fashioned writers are said to have thought that “the truth shines by its own light.” Another common formulation is that, in the eyes of old historians of science, “scientific knowledge spreads because it is true.” I'm not making these up.

The suggestion seems to be that, for a non-constructivist, scientists are people who sit around, not performing any actions, waiting for nature to be revealed to them. Eventually, through some combination of luck, patience and providence, they acquire true beliefs.


There are no non-constructivists

I do not know of any historians of scientists who are non-constructivists in this sense, and nor do I expect to ever meet any.

Let me begin with William Whewell. He is a good case to consider because he wrote a long time ago, he wrote in English, and he is one of the historians of science least likely to be called a constructivist.

Consider an excerpt from William Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences. The first edition of this book, to which my page numbers refer, was published in 1837. The section I happen to have in hard-copy is called “Promulgation of the electro-chemical theory by Davy” (v.3, 154-162). The main scientific product here is Humphrey Davy's theory that “chemical and electrical attractions were produced by the same cause, acting in the one case on particles, in the other on masses.”

By my count Whewell describes 18 separate human actions in this section, an average of two per page. These actions include such things as:

--Alessandro Volta's execution of an experiment in 1800, in which he placed the two ends of a Voltaic pile in water and observed streams of gas rising from each wire, gasses that were identified as oxygen and hydrogen
--Davy's acquisition of a pile of great power in 1801
--Davy's conjecture that in all cases of chemical decomposition using the pile, the chemical products might be related to each other as electrically positive and negative
--William H. Wollaston's demonstration that the action of the Voltaic pile was always accompanied by oxidation or other chemical changes, and his inference that the pile could not be explained solely in terms of the contact between different metals
--Davy's equivocations about exactly what he meant by his electro-chemical theory.

Nowhere in this section does Whewell say that Davy believed his theory just because it was true. In fact, throughout the section Whewell stresses that (in his words) “[Davy's] view was far from obvious.” At the beginning of the section Whewell even reminds us how perplexing and difficult it is to arrive at a new theory:

In the newly-acquired provinces of man's intellectual empire, the din and confusion of conquests, pass gradually only into quiet and security. We have seen, in the history of all capital discoveries, how hardly they have made their way, even among the most intelligent and candid philosophers of the antecedent schools: we must, therefore, not expect that the metamorphosis of the theoretical views of chemistry which is now going on, will be effected without some trouble and delay.

Examples could be endlessly multiplied of historians of science who describe a great deal of human activity but who have never been called “constructivists.” I'll just give one other example of constructivism in an unexpected place. It's probably my favourite example, so I quote at length:

When the taps of the beak break the shell of the egg and the chick breaks from its prison, the child might imagine that this rigid and immobile mass ... has suddenly taken life and produced the bird that runs and squeaks. But where the childish imagination sees a sudden creation, the naturalist recognises the final phase of a long development ...

The vulgar see the birth of physical theories as the child sees the hatching of the chick ... He thinks that it was enough for Newton to watch an apple fall in a field, for the effects of the fall of heavy bodies, the movements of the earth, the moon, the planets and their satellites, the trajectories of comets, the flux and reflux of the sea, to suddenly be summarised and ordered in this single proposition: any two bodies attract eachother in proportion to the product of their masses and the inverse square of the distance between them (Pierre Duhem, La théorie physique: son objet, sa structure, 337-338, original pagination, my translation).

Constructivists like to compare scientific theories to black boxes in need of opening, and to ships in bottles. Duhem makes the same point by comparing a theory to a newly-hatched egg. Yet I doubt that Duhem has ever been included in a list of constructivists.

Another more general point is that so-called non-constructivists are often criticised for espousing one or other scientific method. But a method is a human activity, pretty much by definition.

For example, in the book just cited Duhem describes four successive operations that physicists carry out on the way to a physical theory: finding simple physical properties and attaching mathematical symbols to them; combining these symbols to give a small number of hypotheses; using algebra to create a theory that is consistent with these hypotheses; then deriving predictions from these hypotheses and testing them against experiment. What are these operations if not human actions, and what is the result if not the product of work, effort and agency?


Interlude: replies to some possible objections

It might be objected that writers like Whewell and Duhem are not proper constructivists because they focus on the long-term development of scientific ideas. They don't go into detail about the mundane, day-to-day actions of someone like Davy or Newton.

To which the reply is two-fold. Firstly, there are historians of science who do go into that sort of detail, but who are rarely called constructivists. My staple examples are Jed Buchwald's Creation of Scientific Effects and Larry Holmes' Lavoisier and the Chemistry of Life. There are plenty of other examples.

Secondly, why are microhistories superior to macrohistories, when it comes to showing the work or agency that goes into any given scientific product? After the passage about the chick and the egg, Duhem gives a history of Newton's law of gravitation that goes all the way back to Aristotle. We tend to dismiss such narratives as Whiggish. If we were consistent, we would praise them for showing the vast amount of work, effort and agency that was required to produce something as simple-seeming as Newton's law. (By the same token, we would criticise microhistories for seeing scientific theories as the child sees the newly-hatched chick.)

Some might object that Whewell and Duhem are only constructivists in a perverse, legalistic sense. After all, neither of them do what self-identified constructivists do today. They don't describe how scientific beliefs emerge out of the ambitions and interests of scientists, and out of the laboratories, cultures and training regimes in which scientists are embedded.

But this is just my point. The difference between Whewell and, say, Steven Shapin, is not that one includes human agency in his histories while the other does not. The real difference is that Whewell focuses on one kind of human agency whereas Shapin focuses on a different kind. Whewell writes about people speculating, hypothesising, carrying out experiments, and gradually refining their concepts. Shapin writes about ambitions, interests, training regimes, etc.


Two related grievances

My conclusion so far is that there is nothing new about including human agency in histories of science. Contrary to a familiar line, old-fashioned historians did not believe that “truth shines with its own light.”

Traditional historians have two other reasons to feel somewhat short-changed by the self-portrayal of self-identified constructivists. One is that the latter sometimes depict old-fashioned historians and philosophers as living in fear of human agency. Here is an example from a book that is so well-known that the paragraph is worth quoting in full:

There is nothing so given as a matter of fact. In common speech, as in the philosophy of science, the solidity and permanence of matters of fact reside in the absence of human agency in their coming to be. Human agents make theories and interpretations, and human agents therefore may unmake them. But matters of fact are regarded as the very 'mirror of nature.' Like Stendhal's ideal novel, matters of fact are held to be the passive result of holding a mirror up to reality. What men make, men may unmake; but what nature makes no man may dispute. To identify the role of human agency in the making of an item of knowledge is to identify the possibility of it being otherwise. To shift the agency onto natural reality is to stipulate the grounds for universal and irrevocable assent (Leviathan and the Air Pump, 23).

This passage seems to say that, according to received wisdom, the best way to make people believe something is to convince them that no humans had any role in the formation of that belief.

Neither Whewell nor Duhem, nor any other historian I know, considered it inappropriate for scientists to carry out experiments, make calculations, or derive predictions. Perhaps such historians were hostile to other kinds of human agency in science, like endorsing a theory just because your job depends on it, or like omitting counter-examples from a published paper. Probably they also thought that instruments do certain jobs better than humans can. But that's a long way from having a generalised suspicion of all human agency.

Sometimes self-identified constructivists do discuss the human actions that interested Whewell and Duhem, such as carrying out experiments and making inferences. The odd thing—and here is the second way that old-fashioned historians are short-changed—is that nowadays these sorts of actions are sometimes presented as if no-one had written about them before.

Consider, for example, Jan Golinski's discussion of a lecture Davy gave on the Voltaic pile in 1806, before the Royal Society of London. Golinski points out that the first part of Davy's lecture was devoted to a defense of the Voltaic pile. For the rest of his findings to be credible, Davy needed to defend the pile against critics who thought that it decomposed pure water into acids and alkilis as well as into hydrogen and oxygen. (My text is Golinski's Science as Public Culture, 209-211).

Golinksi then describes how Davy mounted his defense. He presented past interpretations of the pile as varied and confused. He then described some refinements of technique, such as using a large battery, pure platinum electrodes, repeatedly distilled water, and so on. Then Davy showed how, by repeated trials using these new materials, he could get rid of the acid completely and greatly reduce the amount of alkili. He then showed that this alkili could have come from impurities in the water he used, since a lengthy process of evaporation revealed that the water contained saline matter even though it had been distilled. Other experiments, which Golinski summarises, showed that the acids and alkilis could have come from the wax or resin cups used by other experimenters, or from dissolved nitrogen in the water.

All of this is meat and drink to an old-fashioned historian of science. Golinski may have been the first to spend time describing these particular experiments and arguments, but he is by no means the first to notice that Davy's papers contain arguments based on experiments. Yet this is not what you would think from reading Golinski's conclusion, which seems to imply that his analysis of Davy's paper is the fruit of the constructivist programme:

The instrumental power of the pile was not purely natural; it had to be constructed by Davy through resourceful experiment and effective argumentation.

Constructivists as marketers of bottled water

So far this post may remind some readers of what the intellectual historian John Zammito has called “post-modern equivocation,” and which Will Thomas has discussed here. The phenomenon is also known as the “post-modern bait-and-switch”.

The “bait” is a radical, attention-grabbing claim such as that natural objects or phenomena (quarks, the moons of Jupiter, the law of gravity) come into existence because scientists have some social need for them. Call this claim A. The “switch” is when the claim is changed without notice into a more mundane claim, such as the claim that sometimes the belief in natural objects or phenomena comes into existence because scientists have some social need for that belief. Call this claim B.

The phenomenon that I am calling the constructivist straw-man is like the bait-and-switch insofar as the former relies on an equivocation. The equivocation is between saying (claim A*) that there is some human agency in science, and (claim B*) that there are particular kinds of human agency in science such as social interests, disciplinary dynamics, office politics, etc.

But the constructivist straw-man is different from post-modern equivocation in two ways. One is that the claims involved in the equivocation are different. True, B looks quite similar to B*. But A does not appear in the constructivist straw-man, and A* does not appear in the bait-and-switch.

The second and more important difference concerns the rhetorical effect of these two argumentative moves. The effect of post-modern equivocation is to give apparently plausible arguments for a radical position when in fact the arguments only support a more mundane position. By contrast, the effect of the constructivist straw-man is, like all straw man arguments, to claim a victory over an opponent by misrepresenting their position. The effect of this straw man in particular is to suggest that the study of the social aspects of science is necessary to doing good history of science.

Some commercial examples might help to show the distinction I have in mind. An example of a bait-and-switch might be Subway advertising a sandwich as a “Subway footlong” but selling you an 11-inch sandwich after the advert has enticed you to walk 10 minutes to their store.

The constructivist straw-man is more like an advertisement for bottled water. Such adverts point out that the human body is 80% water, that this liquid is vital to your health, and that if you don't drink any within three days you'll die. While saying this, the advert presents images of the company's bottled water. What the advert omits is that you can get perfectly good water, with all the same life-sustaining properties, by going to your kitchen and turning on the tap. The overall effect is to create the impression that purchasing a bottle of the company's water is necessary for your future well-being.

In a similar way, people sympathetic to the constructivist programme draw attention to its historiographical virtues—after all, it gives us a way of talking about human agency, and how could we write history without talking about human agency? They then give examples of studies that deal with the social aspects of human agency—the ambitions of scientists, disciplinary dynamics, etc. They omit examples of books and articles that have the same historiographical virtues but that focus on the internal aspects of science. The overall effect is to suggest that social history of science is more wholesome than old-fashioned approaches to the history of science.

To be fair on self-identified constructivists, they differ from bottled-water marketers because they are not asking for our money, because there are independent reasons to pay attention to their "product," and because they probably do not intend to have the rhetorical effect I have just described. But that is the effect all the same, and it is unfair on old-fashioned internalists and their present-day descendants.


Practical solutions

What can be done? It would probably be unfair to ask “constructivists” to stop using that label: like the label “internalist,” people are familiar with it and know roughly what sort of books and articles it refers to.

But it is not too much to ask self-identified constructivists to call themselves “social constructivists” rather than just plain “constructivists.” The former label is still a bit misleading, since the constructivism of someone like Whewell was “social” in the sense that he saw science as a collective enterprise (just look at the list of “persons cited” at the end of his History of the Inductive Sciences). It is also misleading insofar as self-identified constructivists are usually interested in more than just the social interests of scientists. But it's a good start.

Another corrective would be to avoid defining “social constructivism” as the doctrine that science is the result of “work,” “effort,” or “human agency,” or that science is a “human activity” or a “human accomplishment,” or that science is “made by humans.” All of these terms are straw-mannish unless the user clarifies that it is social work and social effort and social activity that is novel about their approach.

But maybe the best antidote to the constructivist straw-man would be for other historians—those who would not usually call themselves “constructivists,” and especially those who tend to write internalist histories of science—to start calling themselves constructivists. This may be met with blank looks and confusion, at least initially. To clarify matters it may help to add something like “I'm a constructivist, just not a social constructivist.” Or even better: “I'm a constructivist, just like William Whewell.” Expand post.

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Correctives to #overlyhonestmethods

What lessons can we learn from the current flood of methodological confessions from scientists on Twitter? Most commentaries so far—and there have been a few from historians as well as scientists—assume that the #overlyhonestmethods meme shows that the methods of scientists are not what they are cracked up to be. I agree that the tweets are revealing, but I also think we need to be careful when deciding what they reveal. Here's why.

Reconstruction is not rhetoric

Some people have worried that the tweets will harm public trust in science, since they show that scientific articles misrepresent the research that goes into them. The assumption is that if an article does not describe accurately every step of the author's research, in the order in which they occurred, then there is something fishy going on.

It should be obvious that this assumption is wide of the mark. True, some omissions can be seriously misleading, like the one exemplified in this comic. But many omissions make little difference to what a reasonable and well-informed reader will take from an article. Who cares if “experiment was failing, because my partner was using a bulletbelt?” (@farmperfect) There's nothing fraudulent about omitting an experiment that failed for known reasons—especially when everyone has too much to read already and publishers charge exorbitant rates for journal space.

Moreover, the rhetorical losses of leaving things out are just as great as the rhetorical gains. The more details are published about an experiment, the easier it is to replicate. The more a scientist writes about hypotheses they entertained then soundly refuted, the more convincing she will be. A detailed narrative, vividly portraying the long hours spent at the workbench, might persuade readers that the author is at one with his apparatus. And as Robert Boyle knew, circumstantial details at least generate the appearance of honesty, if not the reality.

In sum, it is well known that scientific articles are carefully crafted reconstructions rather than full descriptions of research carried out. But this may have more to do with the practical pressures than with rhetorical sleight-of-hand.

Update: Jim Grozier makes similar points about the function of scientific papers in the second half of this post.


Error and contingency are not opposed to method

It is said that the tweets challenge our views about scientific method. One reason this is said is that some of the tweets describe failed experiments, fruitless hypotheses, and accidental discoveries. “There was no plan,” wrote @russelgarwood, “we just tried stuff we thought would be interesting until something interesting happened.” And @dr_leigh “did experiment2 because we don't know what the fuck to make of experiment 1.”

There is one view of scientific method that is challenged by confessions like these. It is the view that scientists do research in the same way they bake cakes: by mechanically following a small set of well-defined steps that lead reliably to a desired result.

Francis Bacon's account was a bit like this, but post-Bacon I don't know of any philosophers who have seriously endorsed such a paternilistic view of science. The most ambitious accounts of scientific method give a kind of rough outline of how all research should proceed, leaving the scientist to fill in the gaps as best she can.

For example, most readers will know that Karl Popper advised scientists to dream up a bold conjecture, derive a prediction from the conjecture, then try a new conjecture if the prediction was wrong. This leaves plenty of room for error: one of Popper's mottos was that scientists are people who learn from their mistakes. It also leaves plenty of room for contingency: Popper compared conjectures to the biological mutations that appear more or less at random in evolving organisms.

Consider also a book that has been seen as a kind of prophesy of #overlyhonestmethods, Peter Galison's How Experiments End. It is true that this book portrays the messy, local, and conventional aspects of scientific practice. But this does not stop the author from offering his own account of scientific method. In a way that resembles Bacon, Galison argues that experimenters proceed by “a process of exclusion,” trying to rule out all except one of their explanations of their data. And in a way that recalls another old-fashioned methodologist, William Whewell, he argues that the key to the experimenter's confidence in a result is that it is robust under a variety of conditions [1].

The upshot is that scientific method is compatible with “stuff-ups and serendipity,” as one person described the subjet-matter of the tweets on #overlyhonestmethods.


We can be surprised by good methods as well as bad

I have to admit that many of the tweets look like cases of genuinely bad scientific practice. For example: “For the sake of parsimony we excluded everything that contradicts our hypotheses and only present what supports us.” If all scientists did this all the time then we would have good reason to shut down their departments.

Suppose for a moment that tweets like this one are unembellished accounts of actual events (rather than irony or hyperbole). And suppose also that their authors are a representative sample of all practising scientists. Does this mean that we have finally lifted the lid on actual scientific practice?

No, because for every one of these examples of surprisingly inept method there is another example of surprisingly adept method. Sometimes experiments are left “for the precise time that it took for us to get a cup of tea.” But many other times they are left for a period of time that is carefully measured by some instrument that—though not perfect—is vastly superior to what was used for the same sort of experiment 100 years ago.

Similarly, sometimes experimenters use bluetack to hold their apparatus together; but on other occasions the apparatus is a device of bewildering complexity made up of a zoo of exotic materials. Sometimes experimental results are not replicated; other times the same result holds true in so many circumstances that we've lost count.

This point is so obvious that it is worth asking why we tend to forget it. One reason might be that there is a straw-mannish view that scientists are infinitely competent. This view is vulnerable to examples of less-than-competent practice because those examples can never be counter-balanced. They could only be balanced by examples of more-than-infinitely-competent practice—and good luck finding those.

I say “straw-mannish” because the view that scientists are infinitely competent is often (mostly?) put forward by people who want to show that science is not what it's cracked up to be. Admirers of science are usually not so rash as to say that scientists are infallible or that they have super-human powers. Usually they make the more modest claim that scientists are unusually competent—and sometimes remarkably competent—in their domains of expertise.


Scientists are not the only ones

Hank from AmericanScience has quoted the sociologist of science Michael Lynch on the “tension between rhetoric and reality” that results from air-brushed scientific reports:

Science is perhaps unique as an occupation for the way in which its shop work is made extensively accountable in written reports, and examined for its rational, logical and systematically achieved 'methods' as formulated in those accounts.

I agree that scientists are unusual, perhaps unique, in the extent to which their written reports are meant to be rational and logical. However it does not follow that the mismatch between rhetoric and reality is greater in science than in other fields, such as history or literary criticism. True, the rhetoric is less rationalistic in those fields than in science; but perhaps there is a corresponding lack of rigour in the actual practice of those non-scientific fields.

This point is frequently ignored in science studies. X will publish a study showing that there is a surprising amount of prejudice/convention/office politics in natural science. Y will infer from the study that the gap between scientific knowledge and everyday knowledge is smaller than we thought. The inference is faulty because we might find, if we looked, that we underestimated the amount of prejudice/convention/office politics in everyday knowledge as well as in scientific knowledge.

As a historian I can vouch for the fact that historical articles are air-brushed versions of actual historical practice. Most of what we read in books and archives does not show up in our published articles. The information that does make it is usually rearranged for the sake of intelligibility. And many of our decisions are arbitrary, from the decision to use a particular archive to the decision to publish one quote from a text rather than three. It is no surprise that there is now a hashtag for #overlyhonesthistorians.

It might be objected that at least historians are more open about these foibles than scientists are. This is questionable. It is rare to read a published historical article in which the author describes all the twists and turns in his or her research. The confessions on #overlyhonesthistorians are as absent from published historical articles as the confessions on #overlyhonestmethods are from published scientiic articles.

Nor are people in science studies any less likely than scientists to wax on about the value of their chosen methods. Steve Fuller makes the point nicely:

Thus, while most STS scholars officially oppose the very idea of a universal theory of science, they are nevertheless inclined to promote a universal method for studying science, be it Bloor's four tenets of the Strong Programme, Harry Collin's eleven propositions on experiment, and Latour's seven rules of method [2].

I am not arguing for the suicidal view that the humanities is a methodological slag-heap, or that science studies has said nothing new or interesting about how scientific research is done. My point is just that when it comes to tensions between rhetoric and reality, the humanities are no better—or worse—than the sciences.

Most of us in the humanities would add that, despite this tension, our methods and training make us unusually competent in our domain of expertise, whether we are classicists or philosophers or anyone else. We should be equally charitable towards scientists when we read the tweets on #overlyhonestmethods.


[1] How Experiments End, esp. pp. 246 and 277. The Whewellian idea I have in mind is that of a “consilience of inductions,” his idea being that we should believe a theory when it can be derived from multiple independent chains of inference.

[2] Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History For Our Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 343. Expand post.

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Other Men Laboured

Whatever this vision, it is not a child's. It is what a child's vision can become. (Geoffrey Hill: The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy).

In the opening pages of his fine recent book The Sounding of the Whale, D. Graham Burnett spends rather a long time describing what it lacks: 'there is not a single cetacean of any sort in these pages. You knew that, of course, since even the smallest dolphin needs much more room than the largest trim size of the most voluminous scholarly tome. And though they breathe air, cetaceans basically like being in the water, while books are mostly written on paper, a substance that fares poorly when submerged.' The lugubrious comedy here is doing a certain sort of scholarly work: it is reminding us about materiality, the difference between the traces which books can contain and the living creatures which they can't. And it is drawing a quite standard boundary around the practice of academic history; Burnett is not gesturing romantically to rhetorical evocations of a whale. Books and whales are different.

But of course they are. And the historian is at some remove from the world; so that at the end of (this one's) day's labour he would go outside and wonder 'what life looked like to those who had spent the day in full career with the actual world, as opposed to bookish resignation from its affairs'; a state which raised in Burnett feelings 'approaching hysterical glee'. Part of the work these boundaries perform is to caper around some of the questions raised recently around non-human agency, particularly by Bruno Latour and his followers. Burnett's response to this is deflationary, and reasonably amusing: 'What were the whales saying? I have no idea. Do I give too much agency to (human) words? Maybe. It is ever thus with bookish folk. If it is whales you want, you have to go to sea.'

Burnett did go to sea. He writes evocatively of his experience, even while insisting that most of the work which went into composition 'involved sitting perfectly still in a chair, sometimes reading and sometimes writing. Sometimes I would lie down.' It is of course such austere discipline – and his immersion in the more lyric literature about Whales - which allows him to represent his more immediate experiences with vivid candour, to describe 'that silent and moonless night in a small kayak, paddling about in terrified awe as, somewhere impossibly near, one of those giants – a fin, presumably, sucked up sudden, room-sized breaths and expelled them in deep and plosive gusts'; when he felt 'something of the basic, unmitigated, almost suicidal fear that one does well to recall while waxing eloquent about the beauties of untrammelled nature.' Good history is not written from books or archives alone. Living can get into it.

And there was a personal story behind it, too, some 'succor' which led to this choice of career and resigned engagement: 'it is true that my mother told me whale stories as a small boy, and yes, she and my father took me out on campus at Indiana University in the mid-1970s to meet an earnest, bearded grad student who gave me a copy of the 1975 Audubon issue on whales. These things, I presume, stuck. I have a sister who was for several years my scuba-diving partner […] and much of my sense of the sea was shaped in her company.' Here the playfulness (that sighing, parenthetical 'yes') is again trying to undercut a standard, faintly romantic story: a tale of how childhood experience forms the adult experience. You may bristle very slightly at the complacent entitlement of this, the idea that none of it needs to be spelled out – one recalls that Burnett lives in Brooklyn, and is an editor for the rather achingly impressive Cabinet magazine – but it is of a piece with the general approach of his preface and introduction. History books are not personal romances. There's still something awesome about those whales.

It should go without saying that this posturing and personal positioning is one of the very least interesting things about The Sounding of the Whale, which is about as good a book as our field has recently produced. But it interests me here because of how it touches on questions of how historians construct their personas and allow their personal identification with their subjects of study to inflect their work.

At the most basic level, many of us do respond to certain interests which were formed in relatively early life: a childhood or adolescent preoccupation with, say, battlefield tanks or the behaviours of great dictators like Hitler or Stalin which remains as an interest and got the whole strange project of writing history going. Historians and philosophers of science are often, in a slightly different sense, trying to deal with discomfort with their initial professional training in the specialist sciences: sometimes this is a mourning for the sense of wide-ranging vocations which have been lost and which were in some sense available in the past. (Hasok Chang for one has been quite explicit about this as a motivation for some of his work). The prevalence of 'boyishness' as a motivating factor among historians of technology is so great that it led David Edgerton, in introducing his great book The Shock of the Old to write that 'most books about technology are for boys of all ages. This is a book for adults of both genders.' Put those childish things aside.

Sometimes the formative interest is relational. Mine is, to a pretty significant extent. I work on the history of lowly inventors and improvers, many of whom improvised simple and minor improvements and tools. Not many people have thought this group worth studying in their own right – and I can't say whether I would or not if my grandfather, Peter Paskins, hadn't been a tool-maker during the Second World War (he made razors for skin grafts). (He also made toys for his grandchildren). I'm aware of working out something about the legacy of bookish men in relation to their handy ancestors; a kind of personal provocation which is, I suspect, far from rare in families which have only had the opportunity to become bookish within the last couple of generations.

That I feel this is important is my business, and doesn't justify the significance of my research. At the same time, the fact that historical passions may start in forms of relational knowledge is far from contemptible, and worth talking about – if only as a way to clarify some of our prejudices. If you ask me what it means to have that motivation, then my entirely sincere and extremely annoying response is to quote John's Gospel, 4.23: 'I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours'. The point of going to scripture at this point is my own way of trying to demarcate those feelings, and the imagined community which they project, from the actual practice of my history.

That academic history needs to be above such concerns is part of its self-image and professional vocation. When historians want to claim to speak with authority, they do so partly on the basis that scholarship is able to resist the romances which our personal inclinations might want to offer as a vision of the past. This is one reason that much academic historical writing takes the forms it does. It is also why so much of it is so extremely boring. But there is no question that this is the most major part of how the work proceeds, historians' equivalent to Kuhnian normal science. And as with other forms of knowledge, the prejudices of the past are easier to detect than those of our own period, so that we're more than aware of the fantasies of collective political action which shaped a work like E. P. Thompson's The Making of the Working Class but far less certain about the determinants of the more cultural works which have, generally speaking, succeeded Thompson's form of social history.

At a certain point in his great essay “Science as a Vocation”, Max Weber argues that if you can't dedicate the whole of your life to a single textual emendation, you have no business being an historian. (At UCL, we've been hoping to match the signs in the natural scientists' laboratories which say 'what gets me up in the morning is trying to save the world' with our own: 'what gets me up in the morning is the possibility that somebody told a lie in 1762, and there is reliable textual evidence in support of this claim.')

Paul Ricoeur summarised these issues in a paper published in Annales long ago by saying that though we may think of history and memory as closely aligned, they are in many senses actually opposite. History provides the checks which memory seeks to betray; history acts as a kind of reality principle; whereas memory is looking helplessly for relation, recognition, presence. In reading a history book, Ricoeur says, we can never have the moment of saying 'it is you!' (Although, of course, by gesturing at such absences, histories can recall the longing for such immediacies, as Burnett does in the passages about direct encounters with whales which I quoted above). There are no tool-makers in my thesis, only words and pictures and the occasional painting of grass.

And yet, and yet...though we must be scholarly, and impartial, and above our own romances, historians retain a certain fascination for the workings of identification – with subjects and with people - and how it informs our concerns. This is one reason why historians who are concerned with historiography often return to the work of Jules Michelet, the great romantic of France who imagined himself inhaling and re-embodying the dust of the past. Michelet's necromantic pretensions are fun and enticing, and writing about him (perhaps) provides a way of expressing certain longings of our own not readily available in the present state of our art.

Among recent historians who have dealt with Michelet's legacy – and reflected more broadly on what it means to identify with the subjects of the past – the one who has moved me most is the Warwick social historian Carolyn Steedman, particularly in her recent books (which I think of as a trilogy) Dust, Master and Servant, and Labours Lost. Psychoanalytically knowledgeable and theoretically omniverous, though sceptical, Steedman writes about what it means to want certain forms of identification, even when the historical evidence will not allow for them. I tried to dramatise my response to the major subject of Master and Servant at a recent performance: if you're interested, there is a link to it here.

You may object that all of this is relatively remote from the concerns of history of science. But I hope it prompts some reflection on the subjects we choose, and how we articulate their absence in our work. If it's whales you want, you have to go to sea. Yet other men (and women) have laboured; and we are entered into their labours. Expand post.

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