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>From the Chonicle of Higher Education, and directly related to earlier
discussions on HES regarding historiography in the history of economics.
-- RBE
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Historians of Science Must Again Master Scientific Substance
By neglecting internal history and disregarding content, scholars are turning
their backs on a large audience of scientists and students By ALAN E.
SHAPIRO
As a historian of science who spends much of his time immersed in
manuscripts and other primary sources -- that is, doing history -- I
have become troubled by the way in which my discipline has become nearly
obsessed with the nature of history and science and is no longer
addressing the actual content of the science it purports to study.
Scholars are taking this content as a given, a fact, without mastering
it or examining it closely.
For example, the contemporary historian of science is likely to assume,
quite properly, that Newton's Principia, which announced the theory of
universal gravitation, was an exceedingly influential work. But although
that historian will study the social forces behind the book's
importance, the work's cultural uses, and the like, he or she probably
will not seriously examine the contents of the book. In this way, we are
losing an essential part of history and, I fear, we will soon lose an
essential part of our professional identity. Someone from cultural
studies or the English department can teach this sort of history of
science just as well as a historian of science.
Among its practitioners, the history of science is now approached from
three principal perspectives: the sociology of scientific knowledge,
formerly called the sociology of science, which focuses on the social
structure and processes of the scientific community; cultural studies of
science, which focus on the cultural significance and development of
science within its particular, local context; and "internal" history of
science, which studies the intellectual and empirical content of science
within its historical context.
The first two approaches are coming to dominate the discipline, while
internal history is practiced less -- and read even less than it is
practiced. This trend partly reflects changing tastes and interests, but
there is more to it than that: Mastering the substance of science is
difficult and requires hard work. Nonetheless, that is what I believe
historians of science are supposed to do.
Not only are historians of science producing fewer writings of interest
to scientists, but much of the work of the sociologists and cultural
historians is antagonistic to science, as they attempt to deconstruct
it, eliminate its "privileged" status, and deny the reality of nature.
Among scientists, this has, quite naturally, led to a loss of confidence
in the history of science -- another casualty of the "science wars."
One of the essential distinctions between historians of science and
other historians has been our level of technical expertise. Not only did
we have to master difficult sciences in their modern versions, but we
also had to master them in archaic forms. This expertise allowed us to
declare ourselves a separate discipline from the rest of the field of
history. I do not wish to paint a picture of some golden age of internal
history in the past, but it is true that, not so long ago, everyone in
the field had some mastery of the substantive developments in science.
This expertise is vanishing quickly, and it is becoming increasingly
difficult to find young scholars who can teach a traditional survey
course in the history of science, which must include scientific content.
If we cannot fulfill this need, our discipline is in serious trouble.
By neglecting internal history and disregarding scientific content,
historians of science are turning their backs on a large audience of
interested scientists and science students. The science of the past is
too intrinsically interesting and important to be ignored, and if
historians of science do not investigate it, scientists will. This would
not be all bad. A number of eminent historians of science started out as
scientists, and they frequently have offered insights into science
missed by non-practitioners. However, many of us can remember when much
of the history of science was written by scientists.
Science history then suffered from several serious problems: too much
attention to determining who was the first to make a particular
scientific discovery; a focus on what was "right" or "true"
scientifically, with a concomitant rejection of science that turned out
to be "wrong," in spite of its historical significance; and a failure to
place science in its historical context. A generation of scholars
emerged in the 1950s that had become sensitive to the problems of
writing history with the aim of showing how science developed into its
present, presumably "true" state. The new generation studied past
science in its own language and attempted to describe the science within
the context of its time, not ours.
Losing sight of scientific content also has numerous historiographical
consequences. It ignores much of what actually happened in the past and
thereby distorts or misrepresents it. For example, Steven Shapin, a
professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego,
intended his The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press,
1996) for undergraduates and a general audience. As the first overall
account of the scientific revolution written from the perspective of one
of the newer historical approaches -- in this case, constructivism --
his work illustrates a number of my points. Constructivists hold that
science is a collective activity in which scientists construct a
knowledge of nature rather than uncover it directly from nature.
Science, in the constructivists' view, thus is similar to other social
activities, such as religion or law.
Shapin's book is an interesting essay on various aspects of the
scientific revolution. But its opening chapter, ironically titled "What
Was Known?," in fact contains very little on scientific knowledge
besides some descriptions of various experimental sciences and natural
philosophy. It omits most of what past scholars have generally taken to
be the central features of 17th-century science -- for example,
theoretical astronomy from Kepler to Newton, and Harvey and the study of
anatomy and physiology. By avoiding hard conceptual issues, such as how
scientists of the day explained the motion of objects on a moving earth,
the book presents the choice between a modern Copernican and an older
Aristotelian view of the cosmos as essentially being a question of
cultural values and struggles, not one of deep scientific issues.
Histories that omit the conceptual framework of the various sciences
fail to provide readers with much of the texture and the very nature of
17th-century science. Scientific theories can seem strange and even
mysterious, they can be difficult and abstruse, but they can be
ingenious and extraordinarily powerful explanatory tools. This was so in
the 17th century, just as it is now. Our historical accounts must
clearly present these features of science. Advocates of the sociology of
scientific knowledge have insisted for more than a decade that we cannot
understand the history of science without understanding its social
structure; it is equally true that we cannot understand the history of
science without knowing the science.
Perhaps the most serious omission from much contemporary history of
science is that of a focus on scientific theories and concepts. One of
the more salutary contributions of the new historical approaches has
been the emphasis on experiment as a method for producing knowledge of
nature; this has stimulated fruitful historical research and debate. It
counterbalanced an excessive emphasis on theory that had dominated the
field from the 1950s through the '70s. It also brought scientific
"practice" -- that is, the process of doing science -- into the story.
Perhaps the constructivists' most important achievement was to show how,
during the scientific revolution, the experimental approach as a
procedure for generating knowledge was itself generated.
Unfortunately, this historiographical insight rapidly produced the
excessive view that science is only experiment, practice, and the
generation of facts. Theory, though, is as integral a part of science as
experiment. Theory integrates experiments and concepts, provides a
coherent interpretation of known facts, and serves as a guide to the
discovery and interpretation of new phenomena. One of the principal
reasons for the neglect of theory among constructivists is that it is
very difficult to show -- as their assumptions demand -- that scientific
theories are culturally defined. Typically, all a historian can show is
that a theory parallels or reflects aspects of the broader culture, and
this is generally not very convincing.
In the introduction to The Scientific Revolution, Shapin tells us that
he wants to present a history of scientific practice. He asserts that
historians like himself "now wish to understand the concrete human
practices by which ideas or concepts are made. What did people do when
they made or confirmed an observation, proved a theorem, performed an
experiment? An account of the Scientific Revolution as a history of
free-floating concepts is a very different animal from a history of
concept-making practices."
The process by which ideas are "made" is, for Shapin, a social process
of doing something, and he has trouble admitting into the realm of
practice scientific theories and concepts, which transcend the
scientist's local culture and the act of creation or "doing." As a
logically ordered series of statements about the natural world, theories
may be examined for new consequences, reformulated, questioned, tested
through experiments, and taught. Yet Shapin has consigned theory and
such concepts as inertia, hydrostatic pressure, and circulation of blood
to the realm that he rejects -- "free-floating concepts." In doing so,
he is casting much real science out of his new concept of the history of
science. Scientific theories and concepts need not be treated as
"free-floating." Internal history has provided plenty of fine accounts
of the development and meaning of scientific ideas.
For instance, using Newton's surviving manuscripts and notebooks,
historians have traced the emergence of various concepts and theories
from his experiments, calculations, readings, and interactions with his
contemporaries. They have also studied the changes that these theories
and concepts have undergone when other scientists used them in different
cultures or philosophical frameworks, or applied them to other
scientific problems.
The problem with the constructivist approach is its reductionist
assumption that science is purely social. In The Disunity of Science:
Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford University Press, 1996),
edited by Peter Galison and David J. Stump, the philosopher of science
Arthur Fine trenchantly observed: "Behind this reductionism ... is the
tendency to take the social in science as absolutely all of science.
There is a sense in which this may well be true, just as there is a
sense in which it is true that people are nothing but material objects.
That sense might tempt one to think that the mental and the social and
the political are reducible to the motions and interactions of material
objects. That would be a mistake. It is no less a mistake to move from
the sense in which science is nothing but the activities of human beings
to think that all the realms of science can be reduced to the social."
A fundamental assumption of much recent work in the history of science
is that science is a social activity created by its local culture.
Consequently, many scholars argue, science cannot have any meaning
beyond that culture; it is a local, rather than a global, endeavor. But
science, of course, really is both local and global. Cultural and
constructivist historians need not abandon their conviction that science
contains important socio-cultural elements, but they must recognize that
it also includes a coherent body of practices and knowledge that
transcends the local.
To remain a serious discipline for both historians and scientists, the
history of science must include the intellectual content of science.
Uniting this more-traditional approach with the newer socio-cultural
ones would give us a fuller, more balanced, and truly exciting history
of science. It also should have the salutary effect of moderating some
of the tensions that have given rise to the "science wars."
Alan E. Shapiro is director of the Program in History of Science and
Technology at the University of Minnesota.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright (c) 1998 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com Date: 02/20/98 Section: Opinion Page: B4
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