fall 2016 | hsci 5533 graduate seminar

Why are Historians of Science not talking?

I have not finished all of the readings for this week yet, but I have just finished the introduction to Science and Religion in the Era of William James, which has left my head spinning and not specifically for the subject matter. Before I get into that, though, I would like to applaud the moment where Paul Jerome Croce mentions that he is aware of some of the diversity drawbacks of William James, specifically that he was unaware of his sister's place of subordinate power as well as the cultural institutions repressing other races. That is a moment I have yet to see, an author addressing the pitfalls of the subject outright, though I am assuming this is because they are not mentioned later in the book so he went back to add a note about it in the introduction, however I cannot know that since I have not read the rest of the book. I think it would be really interesting to investigate how authors, recently, have tried to address issues of subjects who come from a place of privilege in relation to their cultural surroundings. Is it even necessary to address those problems? It is a necessary context? Who knows, but would be interesting to ask those questions.

No, what I was most interested in, in the introduction, was the passage about what historians of religion and intellectualism are interested in and how there is little to no overlap between those fields or conversations between them and historians of science. WHY? I don't understand the stark separation of fields in history. I understand that not everyone can cover everything, that would be ridiculous, but why aren't they in conversation? What's the fear involved in sharing? I just find it so strange that there isn't more conversation between fields.

Characteristics of Scientific Biography

Early in the semester we had the opportunity to read biographies of Charles Darwin and Maria Mitchell. In each of these biographies, the authors both suggest the scientists and their science are products of the particular social environments in with the scientists live. Renee Bergland stressed Mitchell’s career “was facilitated by the conditions of her historical moment.” Growing up in Nantucket with a Quaker influence and parents who encouraged her work in astronomy was crucial to Mitchell’s development as a scientist. The unspoken argument here is that Mitchell would have failed to impact astronomy without these influences. Likewise, Janet Browne stressed the importance of the time period, culture, and personal relationships that influenced the scientific development of Charles Darwin. She stated “The theory of natural selection could only have emerged out of the competitive context of Victorian England.” Again the unspoken argument of outside of this context or without Darwin the idea would not have developed. This approach to biography feels a bit deterministic to me. Is this a common approach to all scientific biography? Or, is this a characteristic of biographies written during a particular time period?

Folk Knowledge's Role in Scientific Thinking

    The institutionalization of science is often associated with the diminishing role of lay knowledge in constructing meaningful ways of understanding the world. An easy, although over-simplified example can be found in late nineteenth-century biology and medicine. Once germ theory was accepted by most people, old explanations for disease based on colloquial understandings began to die out; people no longer believed that syphilis was a punishment directly from God for licentious behavior when biologists in laboratories had isolated the spirochete that caused it. 

    Is it as simple as that though? In Appropriating the Weather, author Robert Marc Friedman mentions an episode in the history of meteorology that complicates that narrative. When the developing Bergen school was attempting to prove itself useful commercially by providing increasingly accurate and timely weather forecasts, they found their theoretically based physics approach inadequate with the limited data and technology they had access to. If they could not predict the weather, they would lose their funding.

    While Vilhelm Bjerknes was traveling to "the outermost reefs and to the remote ends of the fjords" to set up the Bergen forecasting service, he ran into a solution;

    "From the farmers, the lighthouse keepers, fishermen, and sailors... he learned a rich folklore of weather prognostics. Interwoven with ancient and superstitious beliefs were useful predictive signs." (p.164)

    By incorporating this knowledge and "seeing" the weather like the people who had been interacting with it in a very real way for decades, maybe even generations, Bjerknes and his school were able to conceive of a new and more useful way of predicting the weather -- "indirect aerology." This time, it was not theoretical, "pure" science that held the key to understanding nature. 

    Are there other historical examples of "folk" knowledge providing (at least in part) the basis for a scientific discipline, theory, or even understanding? Has this been downplayed by historians of science in favor of more purely scientific approaches? What does this, especially if it is not an isolated phenomenon, tell us about the way science is constructed? 

Science advancement through warfare and commerce

In Appropriating the Weather, Friedman makes the argument that developments in meteorology were spurred on by “advent of powered flight and World War I.” (4) Soldiers needed to know if it would be safe to fly and directions of winds so to properly plan attacks with either bombs or gas. This need for information about the air also extended into the commercial sphere, particularly into fields that were dependent the weather. He states, “coordinating commercial and military activities, and especially flight with weather conditions could increase efficiency.” (5) Governments and leaders of industry had a vested interested and as a result great strides were made in developing methods for understanding weather patterns. What other branches of science have been encouraged to develop through the influence of warfare and commerce?

Scientific Management and Identity

In his chapter about scientific management, Taylor seeks to mechanize and commodify labor. He comes up with formulas to determine how hard he can work employees without damaging the business. By using formulas to reduce each employee to abilities and types, he figures out where people fit in his machine of production. In this system, employees are no longer believed able to pick the best work for themselves but are instead told what they need to do. However, once the employee's work is stripped down to mechanical efficiency, it loses its artistic nature. What does this do to the power and identity of the employee? And how are they able to find satisfaction and fulfillment in their work? 

The future of humanities scholarship

One of our assignments for this class is to participate in creating blog posts. This is a relatively new approach to the communication of scholarship. In another class, I happened to have quoted a blog post in a paper only to have the professor tell me in no uncertain terms that I should never use a blog post as a reference as it is not a refereed source. The blog I quoted had substantial feedback from those who would be considered experts in the field. These two apparently opposite approaches made me question the what the future of acceptable scholarly resources. Using a blog certainly gets ideas out into the community more quickly, but then one has to wonder how trustworthy those sources can be. So the question for me is, what does the future of acceptable humanities scholarship look like? The sciences have been “forced” into a more open access approach (mostly through government financing pressure). Communications are happening through arxiv.org and open access journals much more rapidly than the peer reviewed process. Will a similar change happen with the humanities? If so, what will it look like?

Grappling with a Mechanical World

For weeks I have found myself pushing back against the idea of a mechanical universe and this study of the parts of something rather than the whole, especially after the two documentaries last week, I found myself struggling with how anyone could approach science in this manner. I'm still not entirely sure, though I did not find holism to be much better honestly, a mechanized universe bothers me as well. However, after reading about Vilhelm Bjerknes and his own struggle with his ideas about a mechanized universe and the fluidity of the environment around him, I understand how there could be a struggle to grasp at the universe and how the world works. I think I am beginning to understand why these two very different approaches emerged. Sorry for the long ramblings, but I have been struggling to understand why people approach things the way they do and I feel like this book helped to open my mind up to different approaches to the universe and how people can change their approach over time, either from external or internal pressures.

As far as my questions are concerned, they mainly center around meteorology as a field. Why was this field so late in emerging? It seems like weather and climate would be really important things to study, so why did science enter it so late? Why is there a need to separate it from physics? There is a ton of physics in it, so why make it a separate field? Is this a field that is studied a lot, because I had a hard time finding much source material on the history of meteorology, which is so relevant to today and seems like an interesting field of study. If there isn't a lot of historiography, why not? Why leave this field out?

Visualizations and Narratives in Science and the History of Science - Response to Moser and Landau

“With the aid of the reflecting shield of literary theory, scientists may free themselves from these bonds, first, by realizing that they tell stories and, second, by recognizing that they may put them to good purpose. Stories may be strong of jaw, but like Huxley’s dragon, they can be serviceable creatures.”  — Misia Landau, “Narratives of Human Evolution,” pp. 2-3

    With the claustrophobic pressures of hyperspecialization, it seems increasingly difficult for one person to both engage in the creation of scientific knowledge and be a raconteur for science. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this rule (Jane Goodall, David Attenborough, Carl Sagan), but these seem only to prove the rule. The changing nature of science has incentivized the production of literarily sanitized journal articles over book-length works (where there might be more room for the researcher to engage in reflection and other narrative forms). Under these circumstances, science may tell stories, but the scientists themselves don’t seem to have time to tell them. This responsibility, then, would seem to fall to science journalists and historians of science. We’re the ones holding the flame up to science’s face, or the flashlight up from under its chin, when the narrative calls for a horror story. In this instance, the creation of histories of science becomes something akin to a non-fiction novel, a la Truman Capote. Should we collaborate more with the characters in our stories, to get the first-hand details we need? Or should we exorcise them from the storytelling endeavor altogether, lest they should attempt to taint our dispassionate undertakings by the bias of their proximity? Being the storyteller is a burden. For what purpose are we telling these stories? The aggrandizement or chastisement of science? Our own spiritual enrichment, in the humanist mode? To inform the public? All three would be nice, but then our job is storytellers is made much more difficult, if we are to have three (or more) distinct invoked audiences with three, sometimes contradictory, sets of desires and rhetorical expectations.

“. . . Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928). The aim of this book is to classify literary forms, and Russian fairy tales in particular, in the same manner that biologists classify living forms such as plants and animals: “according to their component parts and the relationship of these components to each other and to the whole.” p.3

    So the literary theorists were learning from science to try to systematize their classification schema. Now it seems, if historians of science are the wardens of the narrative of science, we have a reciprocal obligation to learn from those who know how stories work. Should we be studying literature and rhetoric and composition, in addition to our studies in sociology, philosophy, history, anthropology, and all the myriad STEM disciplines? In the age of intersectionality and transdisciplinary studies in the humanities, we’re getting stretched pretty thin.

 

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“Furthermore, Latour’s contribution argues for the centrality of pictures to the crafting of knowledge, using several important case-studies of the development of pictorial languages. Here and in an earlier paper, Latour argues that images effectively escape our attention because they are so practical, so modest, so pervasive — so close to the hands and the eyes. He emphasizes the way in which groups of people argue with one another using illustrations and argues that the importance of images is the unique advantage they give in the rhetorical or polemical situation — ‘you doubt what I say? I’ll show you.’”

— Stephanie Moser, “Visual Representation in Archaeology: Depicting the Missing-Link in Human Origins,” in Picturing Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science (Brian S. Baigrie, Ed.), pp. 186-7

    The idea that “if you doubt what I say, I’ll just show you,” hinges upon our cultural conception of the image as an exact representation of reality. This is akin to saying that only verbal symbols possess rhetorical qualities, that imagery is not subject to rhetorical manipulation. This follows from the idea that pictorial languages are direct translations of the reality they depict, whereas verbal language is mediated through and constructed by the human mind, and thus possesses idiosyncrasies that imagery is immune to. This has got me thinking of Peter Galison’s Image and Logic, Daniela Bleichmar’s Visible Empire, and Daniel Margocsy’s Commercial Visions. Scientists’ selection of imagery, construction of diagrams and graphs, and aesthetic choices imbue their pictorial representations with rhetorical influences. If historians of science are going to deploy these images to forward arguments, then do we need to attain fluency in these rhetorics of aesthetics and representation? So we have to add this to our list of fluencies inferred from Landau’s recommendations: fluency in literary analysis, rhetoric, anthropology, history, sociology, philosophy, STEM (chemistry, math, physics, astronomy, various engineering disciplines, biology, ecology, earth and atmospheric sciences, computer science (and all of their various sub-disciplines)) . . . and, we have to learn foreign languages to study these phenomena in their various geospatial and sociocultural contexts. How?

Narratives about communication

This week's articles evokes some of the issues I have touched on in my previous posts.  Moser touts the efficacy of visual arguments, while Huxley [and Landau?] believes that language is the 'foundation of all human knowledge' (Landau 30).  It takes little effort to refute that narrow view: any engineer who designs physical machinery must imagine it without words, as a solid object shaped so that it mechanically acts on other solid objects.  Words are not the secret underpinning of what he does, and they are entirely insufficient to the task.  The same is true for many sculptors and painters.  Their knowledge does not exist as spoken or written language, and words can only serve as reductive icons of what they create and express.  That aside, her article poses interesting questions about how the narrative format has affected the course of scientific theorizing in a way similar to, but different from straightforward analogizing.  As far as Moser's work discusses the subtle and not-so-subtle arguments implied in the details in artistic renderings of scientific concepts, I wonder what was communicated to the artist and what was not.  How did this intermediate figure impact the product of science?  How did the scientist's instructions to the artist indulge his untested prejudices?  Was the artist/scientist interaction one that promoted license?  If so, why?  This also flows into the Project Nim documentary.  Does the documentary function as history?  Does it function as science?  What is lost by accepting what the actors have to say to some questions and not others?  What is lost by not hearing the questioner?  What is conveyed, without attribution, by the narrative constructed by the director?

Picturing Prehistory

In her article about visually representing the missing link, Stephanie Moser describes how archaeologists always make important decisions about how they depict early humans. Showing them with weapons and tools, hunting, in family groups, or as a victim of a big cat was an influential way of arguing whether these animals were human or not. These images shaped the way people understood early human life. However, archaeologists were well aware that the depictions were artificial. They were arguments rather than a simple replication, since it was impossible to replicate. But is that good? Is a bad, poor, or inaccurate representation better than none? Is it more damaging to scientific discourse, or do images promote debate? And how does this translate to the wider public? Is it better for them to have imperfect or outdated pictures (which often get represented in popular media as well) than no visuals?