======================= HES POSTING ================== >From the Chonicle of Higher Education, and directly related to earlier discussions on HES regarding historiography in the history of economics. -- RBE ----------------------------------------------- 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 ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]