A Companion to the History of Science

Bernard Lightman, Bernard Lightman

• Editorial: Wiley-Blackwell
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118620755
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia de la ciencia

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the History of Science is a single volume companion that discusses the history of science as it is done today, providing a survey of the debates and issues that dominate current scholarly discussion, with contributions from leading international scholars.

• Provides a single-volume overview of current scholarship in the history of science edited by one of the leading figures in the field
• Features forty essays by leading international scholars providing an overview of the key debates and developments in the history of science
• Reflects the shift towards deeper historical contextualization within the field
• Helps communicate and integrate perspectives from the history of science with other areas of historical inquiry
• Includes discussion of non-Western themes which are integrated throughout the chapters
• Divided into four sections based on key analytic categories that reflect new approaches in the field

Chapter One
Historiography of the History of Science

Lynn K. Nyhart

Over the past 35 years or so, the subject matter, people, places, and processes associated with history of science have grown vastly. Exaggerating only slightly for effect, an older predominant history of science might be captured by the image of a tree of scientific ideas rooted in the base of Western culture (perhaps extending downward earlier to ancient Egypt and Babylonia); the task of the historian of science was to trace the tree's growth and branching. Today a more fitting image would be of the history of science as a densely tangled bank of people and material things teeming with social, cultural, economic, and religious life, that covers the globe. The historian's task now is to tease out how certain forms of knowledge and practice within this mass of activity came to be understood as “science;” what has sustained science socially, culturally, and materially; and who has benefitted and who has suffered in its formation. What happened in the past did not change: what we expect professional historians of science to know and care about has.

The four parts of this volume—Roles, Places and Spaces, Communication, and Tools of Science—reflect broad analytical categories central to today's history of science. They cut across historical periods, geographical locations, and sciences to provide a common vocabulary that helps tie our far-flung history together. Rather than reproduce these categories in the present essay, I sketch out some of the historiographic trends that made it possible—even commonsensical—to use them to thematize contemporary history of science scholarship written in English.

I focus first on the social constructionist turn of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and its consequences for how we think about the nature of scientific knowledge and who is involved in its making. I then turn to the subsequent (re-)formulation of approaches to answering two fundamental questions in our field. One focuses on making scientific knowledge, asking “How is scientific knowledge constructed in a given context?” Historians' answers to this question since the early 1990s have become increasingly attentive to scientific practice, its settings and material culture. A second question focuses on moving scientific knowledge. As James Secord (2004, 655) put it, “How and why does [scientific] knowledge circulate? How does it cease to be the exclusive property of a single individual or group and become part of the taken-for-granted understanding of much wider groups of people?” Scholars working on this question have highlighted the tropes of communication and circulation, and indeed often question the very distinction between making and moving.

Recent history of science has been profoundly shaped by its historians' interactions with scholars from other disciplines across and between the social sciences and humanities. In these exchanges, historians of science have both given and received, but they have often shied away from direct theoretical statements in favor of a more empiricist style that integrates analytical insights into narrative structures. Within the broad themes of this essay, I highlight works that articulate or exemplify analytical approaches and conceptual tools that might be applicable to different places and periods. While these often originate from individual authors, I have been particularly struck by the importance of thematic journal issues and that most maligned of genres, the multi-authored edited volume. Thematic volumes are notoriously hard to get published, yet they can raise the visibility of an approach or topic well above the level of the individual article or even book, and give a sense for the significant conversations in which our community participates. The liveliness of these conversations is evidenced by the large number of collective works cited in the present essay—and also, of course, by this volume, which as a whole attests to the community-based nature of the history we make.

Constructing Scientific Knowledge, Socially

Since the late 1970s, historians of science have gradually come to accept a predominantly social constructionist account that views the development of scientific knowledge as depending heavily on particulars of local circumstances, people, epistemes, and politics, and that doesn't necessarily drive ever closer toward a single truth. Although historians of science had long been interested in recovering earlier knowledge systems and the means by which they were transformed over time (e.g. Kuhn 2012), social constructionism offered new tools for doing so. The sociologists of the “Edinburgh School” and the “Bath School” developed many of these tools in the 1970s and early 1980s; despite differences in approach, they broadly articulated what was known as the “Strong Programme” of the social construction of scientific knowledge. (For retrospective analyses of the early situation, see Golinski 2005; Shapin and Schaffer 2011; Kim 2014; Soler et al. 2014).

The new sociologists of scientific knowledge participated in a broader postmodern rejection of our unmediated access to reality, often associated with other critiques of science's truth value. Michel Foucault (especially 1970, 1973) challenged historians to understand how the structures of knowledge, discourse, and institutions instantiated forms of power (the entire bundle called “epistemes”) that were virtually invisible to those living inside their regimes. Since he offered no clues as to how one episteme turned into another, and little in the way of specific empirical evidence for his provocative claims, Foucault's work remained largely (if importantly) inspirational. From a different direction, feminist scientists would soon expand the purview of social constructionist criticism of science (Bleier 1984; Fausto-Sterling 1992). Uneasy with both the implications of radical social constructionism and the “all-seeing” stance represented in standard claims to objectivity, however, Sandra Harding (1986) and Donna Haraway (1988) developed, respectively, the crucial ideas of standpoint epistemology and “situated knowledges.” Haraway (1988, 590) in particular advocated the “partial perspective,” which lent the authority of agency to individuals previously without standing and demanded communal effort to arrive at shared reliable knowledge.

Such perspectives collectively challenged the received view of history of science in two fundamental ways. First, they demonstrated that scientific knowledge was constructed by human beings, not discovered in nature. Second, this process was not the work of individual minds but was ineluctably social. The implications for history were profound.

If knowledge of nature is made, not arrived at, then we should not expect that science will progress toward a pre-existing universal truth. One important implication is that the truth value of a claim in the past cannot be assessed by what we now believe to be true—an account of the success or failure of a scientific claim must be neutral with respect to that outcome. Evaluations of success must depend on other grounds—social, political, rhetorical—and both successes and failures must be treated similarly. In the 1980s cutting-edge historians of science adopted these principles of “neutrality” and “symmetry” (Bloor 1976), taking up the challenge of treating the outcomes of scientific controversies as determined not by the truth winning, but by social interactions.

The paradigmatic example of this sociological-historical approach is Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985). They interpreted the contest between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes as not just over the existence and nature of the vacuum and its experimental proof, but over what sort of knowledge would be counted as scientific (or, more properly, “natural philosophical”), and what adjudged not. The very division between “science” and “non-science” was at stake, and the winner not only won the specific controversy but also the right to claim what kind of knowledge would be constituted as authoritative (experimental knowledge), who would be considered a natural philosopher in the future (Robert Boyle), and who would not (Thomas Hobbes).

Developing the commitment to neutrality with respect to the outcome of a controversy led Martin Rudwick to take a different tack. His Great Devonian Controversy (1985) experimented with a radically anti-teleological narrative of controversy, persuasion, and power that steadfastly resisted letting the reader know how this geological story came out until its end. It thereby called attention to the conventions of histories that anticipate the outcome, challenging readers to problematize the very structure of historical narrative and to recognize the contingency of the development of science.

Both books also forcefully showed the extent to which the construction of scientific knowledge was social, in the sense of involving many people (see also Smith 1998 on the collective “discovery” of the conservation of energy). The diversity of kinds of people included in this social reckoning has only expanded over time. If Michael Ruse was innovatively broad, in his 1979 Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw, for including over a dozen British male natural philosophers as the relevant community that helped to make the revolution in Darwin's name, its scope seems narrow today, when we see that revolution as preceding Darwin in many of its features (Desmond 1992; Secord 2000) and extending far into nineteenth-century British and European culture (e.g. Beer 1983; Glick and Engels 2008)—and indeed cultures worldwide (Pusey 1983; Elshakry 2013).

The key second claim of social constructionism, then, was that the development of science involved many people, doing many different kinds of things. As microsociological laboratory studies demonstrated the centrality of postdocs, graduate students, and technicians to making knowledge (Latour and Woolgar 1979), historians wondered, Who were the “invisible technicians” of the past (Shapin 1989; Hentsche...