Objectivity, relativism, and the individual: A role for a post-Kuhnian history of science

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A

Volumn 29, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 327-344

  Caneva, Kenneth L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT GREENSBORO   (United States)

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EID: 0001899480     PISSN: 00393681     EISSN: 18792510     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/S0039-3681(98)00012-0     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Somewhat different -and appreciably shorter-versions of this paper were delivered at Duke University on 30 September 1994 and at the New Orleans History of Science Society meeting on 14 October 1994, the latter in a session on 'Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science' prompted by the work of Paul Hoyningen-Huene cited in note 11.
2. Kenneth L. Caneva, Robert Mayer and the Conservation of Energy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
3. Nancy Nersessian cited David Gooding's work on Faraday as shedding light on the question of 'how the difficulties and skill required to produce a stable phenomenon drop out in the attempt to communicate a novel phenomenon. This "packaging" of skills into a narrative demonstrates that, as with social features, cognitive features of experimental practice get edited out as the accounts become further removed from the situation. Ultimately, a phenomenon appears as a fact and not as a product of an active process of construction' ('The Cognitive Sciences and the History of Science', Conference on Critical Problems and Research Frontiers in History of Science and History of Technology, 30 October-3 November 1991 (Madison, Wisconsin: History of Science Society, 1991, pp. 92-115, on p. 99). Thomas Nickles offered scientists' reconstruction of scientific knowledge - 'locating the essential problems, distilling out essential contributions to those problems, and reformulating all of this in the clearest, contemporary terms' - as a model for sociologists' nuanced reconstructions of the generation of scientific knowledge (as represented by community consensus) which promised to yield a coherent account of (among other things) the 'processes by which scientific claims are decontextualized or globalized' and to answer the question of how 'working scientists transform "historical" accounts of research into "logical" accounts' ('The Reconstruction of Scientific Knowledge', Philosophy and Social Action 13 (1987), pp. 91-104, on pp. 92, 98, and 102). My questions are clearly in the spirit of Nickles' program. See also Joseph Rouse, 'The Narrative Reconstruction of Science', Inquiry 33 (1990), pp. 179-196. In their analysis of the (local) 'situatedness of knowledge', Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin stated but left unanswered the related questions 'How is it, if knowledge is indeed local, that certain forms of it appear global in domain of application? Is the global ... character of, for example, much scientific and mathematical knowledge an illusion?' ('The Place of Knowledge: A Methodological Survey', Science in Context 4 (1991), pp. 3-21, on pp. 4 and 15). Their distinction between local and global does not, to be sure, correspond precisely to the one here between the personal and contextual on the one hand and the depersonalized and decontextualized on the other.
4. Nancy Nersessian cited David Gooding's work on Faraday as shedding light on the question of 'how the difficulties and skill required to produce a stable phenomenon drop out in the attempt to communicate a novel phenomenon. This "packaging" of skills into a narrative demonstrates that, as with social features, cognitive features of experimental practice get edited out as the accounts become further removed from the situation. Ultimately, a phenomenon appears as a fact and not as a product of an active process of construction' ('The Cognitive Sciences and the History of Science', Conference on Critical Problems and Research Frontiers in History of Science and History of Technology, 30 October-3 November 1991 (Madison, Wisconsin: History of Science Society, 1991, pp. 92-115, on p. 99). Thomas Nickles offered scientists' reconstruction of scientific knowledge - 'locating the essential problems, distilling out essential contributions to those problems, and reformulating all of this in the clearest, contemporary terms' - as a model for sociologists' nuanced reconstructions of the generation of scientific knowledge (as represented by community consensus) which promised to yield a coherent account of (among other things) the 'processes by which scientific claims are decontextualized or globalized' and to answer the question of how 'working scientists transform "historical" accounts of research into "logical" accounts' ('The Reconstruction of Scientific Knowledge', Philosophy and Social Action 13 (1987), pp. 91-104, on pp. 92, 98, and 102). My questions are clearly in the spirit of Nickles' program. See also Joseph Rouse, 'The Narrative Reconstruction of Science', Inquiry 33 (1990), pp. 179-196. In their analysis of the (local) 'situatedness of knowledge', Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin stated but left unanswered the related questions 'How is it, if knowledge is indeed local, that certain forms of it appear global in domain of application? Is the global ... character of, for example, much scientific and mathematical knowledge an illusion?' ('The Place of Knowledge: A Methodological Survey', Science in Context 4 (1991), pp. 3-21, on pp. 4 and 15). Their distinction between local and global does not, to be sure, correspond precisely to the one here between the personal and contextual on the one hand and the depersonalized and decontextualized on the other.
5. Nancy Nersessian cited David Gooding's work on Faraday as shedding light on the question of 'how the difficulties and skill required to produce a stable phenomenon drop out in the attempt to communicate a novel phenomenon. This "packaging" of skills into a narrative demonstrates that, as with social features, cognitive features of experimental practice get edited out as the accounts become further removed from the situation. Ultimately, a phenomenon appears as a fact and not as a product of an active process of construction' ('The Cognitive Sciences and the History of Science', Conference on Critical Problems and Research Frontiers in History of Science and History of Technology, 30 October-3 November 1991 (Madison, Wisconsin: History of Science Society, 1991, pp. 92-115, on p. 99). Thomas Nickles offered scientists' reconstruction of scientific knowledge - 'locating the essential problems, distilling out essential contributions to those problems, and reformulating all of this in the clearest, contemporary terms' - as a model for sociologists' nuanced reconstructions of the generation of scientific knowledge (as represented by community consensus) which promised to yield a coherent account of (among other things) the 'processes by which scientific claims are decontextualized or globalized' and to answer the question of how 'working scientists transform "historical" accounts of research into "logical" accounts' ('The Reconstruction of Scientific Knowledge', Philosophy and Social Action 13 (1987), pp. 91-104, on pp. 92, 98, and 102). My questions are clearly in the spirit of Nickles' program. See also Joseph Rouse, 'The Narrative Reconstruction of Science', Inquiry 33 (1990), pp. 179-196. In their analysis of the (local) 'situatedness of knowledge', Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin stated but left unanswered the related questions 'How is it, if knowledge is indeed local, that certain forms of it appear global in domain of application? Is the global ... character of, for example, much scientific and mathematical knowledge an illusion?' ('The Place of Knowledge: A Methodological Survey', Science in Context 4 (1991), pp. 3-21, on pp. 4 and 15). Their distinction between local and global does not, to be sure, correspond precisely to the one here between the personal and contextual on the one hand and the depersonalized and decontextualized on the other.
6. Nancy Nersessian cited David Gooding's work on Faraday as shedding light on the question of 'how the difficulties and skill required to produce a stable phenomenon drop out in the attempt to communicate a novel phenomenon. This "packaging" of skills into a narrative demonstrates that, as with social features, cognitive features of experimental practice get edited out as the accounts become further removed from the situation. Ultimately, a phenomenon appears as a fact and not as a product of an active process of construction' ('The Cognitive Sciences and the History of Science', Conference on Critical Problems and Research Frontiers in History of Science and History of Technology, 30 October-3 November 1991 (Madison, Wisconsin: History of Science Society, 1991, pp. 92-115, on p. 99). Thomas Nickles offered scientists' reconstruction of scientific knowledge - 'locating the essential problems, distilling out essential contributions to those problems, and reformulating all of this in the clearest, contemporary terms' - as a model for sociologists' nuanced reconstructions of the generation of scientific knowledge (as represented by community consensus) which promised to yield a coherent account of (among other things) the 'processes by which scientific claims are decontextualized or globalized' and to answer the question of how 'working scientists transform "historical" accounts of research into "logical" accounts' ('The Reconstruction of Scientific Knowledge', Philosophy and Social Action 13 (1987), pp. 91-104, on pp. 92, 98, and 102). My questions are clearly in the spirit of Nickles' program. See also Joseph Rouse, 'The Narrative Reconstruction of Science', Inquiry 33 (1990), pp. 179-196. In their analysis of the (local) 'situatedness of knowledge', Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin stated but left unanswered the related questions 'How is it, if knowledge is indeed local, that certain forms of it appear global in domain of application? Is the global ... character of, for example, much scientific and mathematical knowledge an illusion?' ('The Place of Knowledge: A Methodological Survey', Science in Context 4 (1991), pp. 3-21, on pp. 4 and 15). Their distinction between local and global does not, to be sure, correspond precisely to the one here between the personal and contextual on the one hand and the depersonalized and decontextualized on the other.
7. Thomas S. Kuhn, 'Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery', Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), pp. 321-356, on p. 323.
8. As sounded for example in the title of Robert M. Young, 'Science is Social Relations', Radical Science Journal 5 (1977), pp. 65-129.
9. Although the term objectivity plays a central role in this essay, I choose to avoid defining it precisely and explicitly, believing that traditional notions of what it means to be objective - 'existing independent of mind: relating to an object as it is in itself or as distinguished from consciousness or the subject', 'publicly or intersubjectiveIy observable or verifiable esp. by scientific methods: independent of what is personal or private in our apprehension and feelings: of such nature that rational minds agree in holding it real or true or valid', and 'expressing or involving the use of facts without distortion by personal feelings or prejudices' - are all epistemologically so problematic as to be useless in precise practice regardless of their rough appeal (Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged (Springfield: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1961), p. 1556). Objectivity strikes me as more a term of rhetorical obfuscation than defensible philosophical analysis. Although I will suggest a way of reinterpreting it in a more realistic and justifiable fashion, in the end I think the term is best retired as inextricably encumbered with tendentiously unrealistic associations.
10. David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London, Hensley, & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 67, with reference to Bloor, 'Popper's Mystification of Objective Knowledge', Social Studies 4 (1974), pp. 65-76, itself an essay review of Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Unfortunately, Bloor's replacement of Popper's 'third world' by a 'social group' as the locus of scientific knowledge seems to me to entail its own mystification with regard to who actually is doing the understanding.
11. David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London, Hensley, & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 67, with reference to Bloor, 'Popper's Mystification of Objective Knowledge', Social Studies 4 (1974), pp. 65-76, itself an essay review of Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Unfortunately, Bloor's replacement of Popper's 'third world' by a 'social group' as the locus of scientific knowledge seems to me to entail its own mystification with regard to who actually is doing the understanding.
12. David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London, Hensley, & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 67, with reference to Bloor, 'Popper's Mystification of Objective Knowledge', Social Studies 4 (1974), pp. 65-76, itself an essay review of Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Unfortunately, Bloor's replacement of Popper's 'third world' by a 'social group' as the locus of scientific knowledge seems to me to entail its own mystification with regard to who actually is doing the understanding.
13. For one of Friedrich Nietzsche's typically tendentious and deeply insightful aperçus, see Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 1966), p. 11 (§3): 'Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life. '
14. In her attempt to define a defensible concept of objectivity between the extremes represented by what she called 'empirical' and 'wholist' accounts of science, Helen Longino would shift attention from individual scientists to the scientific community regarded as an ensemble of critics: 'Scientific knowledge ... is produced not by collecting the products of individuals into one whole, but through a process of critical emendation and modification of those products by the rest of the scientific community' ('Scientific Objectivity and the Logics of Science', Inquiry 26 (1983), pp. 85-106, on p. 95). To be sure. Yet her recognition that 'the possibility of criticism does not totally eliminate subjective preference, either from an individual's or from a community's practice of science' leaves the individual in play, just as her recognition that ' [w]hen ... background assumptions are shared by all members of a community they acquire an invisibility which renders them unavailable for criticism' so relativizes the concept of objectivity - to generally shared beliefs - as to make one wonder what warrants retention of such a contentious term (ibid., pp. 97 and 99) . I find much of value in Longino's elaboration of the social character of scientific knowledge and practice in Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) and in 'Essential Tensions - Phase Two: Feminist, Philosophical, and Social Studies of Science', in Social Dimensions of Science, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1992), pp. 198-216. Nevertheless, although I can agree that 'what gets to count as scientific knowledge is produced through social interaction', I cannot accept the slogan that 'scientific inquiry is a social rather than an individual activity' - against which I offer the case of Robert Mayer and the claim that '[i]t is not the individual's observation and reasoning that matter in scientific inquiry, but the community's' involves - it seems to me - a fundamental category mistake: communities are not the kinds of entities that observe and reason; individuals are ('Essential Tensions', pp. 205, 201, and 207, respectively).
15. In her attempt to define a defensible concept of objectivity between the extremes represented by what she called 'empirical' and 'wholist' accounts of science, Helen Longino would shift attention from individual scientists to the scientific community regarded as an ensemble of critics: 'Scientific knowledge ... is produced not by collecting the products of individuals into one whole, but through a process of critical emendation and modification of those products by the rest of the scientific community' ('Scientific Objectivity and the Logics of Science', Inquiry 26 (1983), pp. 85-106, on p. 95). To be sure. Yet her recognition that 'the possibility of criticism does not totally eliminate subjective preference, either from an individual's or from a community's practice of science' leaves the individual in play, just as her recognition that ' [w]hen ... background assumptions are shared by all members of a community they acquire an invisibility which renders them unavailable for criticism' so relativizes the concept of objectivity - to generally shared beliefs - as to make one wonder what warrants retention of such a contentious term (ibid., pp. 97 and 99) . I find much of value in Longino's elaboration of the social character of scientific knowledge and practice in Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) and in 'Essential Tensions - Phase Two: Feminist, Philosophical, and Social Studies of Science', in Social Dimensions of Science, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1992), pp. 198-216. Nevertheless, although I can agree that 'what gets to count as scientific knowledge is produced through social interaction', I cannot accept the slogan that 'scientific inquiry is a social rather than an individual activity' - against which I offer the case of Robert Mayer and the claim that '[i]t is not the individual's observation and reasoning that matter in scientific inquiry, but the community's' involves - it seems to me - a fundamental category mistake: communities are not the kinds of entities that observe and reason; individuals are ('Essential Tensions', pp. 205, 201, and 207, respectively).
16. In her attempt to define a defensible concept of objectivity between the extremes represented by what she called 'empirical' and 'wholist' accounts of science, Helen Longino would shift attention from individual scientists to the scientific community regarded as an ensemble of critics: 'Scientific knowledge ... is produced not by collecting the products of individuals into one whole, but through a process of critical emendation and modification of those products by the rest of the scientific community' ('Scientific Objectivity and the Logics of Science', Inquiry 26 (1983), pp. 85-106, on p. 95). To be sure. Yet her recognition that 'the possibility of criticism does not totally eliminate subjective preference, either from an individual's or from a community's practice of science' leaves the individual in play, just as her recognition that ' [w]hen ... background assumptions are shared by all members of a community they acquire an invisibility which renders them unavailable for criticism' so relativizes the concept of objectivity - to generally shared beliefs - as to make one wonder what warrants retention of such a contentious term (ibid., pp. 97 and 99) . I find much of value in Longino's elaboration of the social character of scientific knowledge and practice in Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) and in 'Essential Tensions - Phase Two: Feminist, Philosophical, and Social Studies of Science', in Social Dimensions of Science, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1992), pp. 198-216. Nevertheless, although I can agree that 'what gets to count as scientific knowledge is produced through social interaction', I cannot accept the slogan that 'scientific inquiry is a social rather than an individual activity' - against which I offer the case of Robert Mayer and the claim that '[i]t is not the individual's observation and reasoning that matter in scientific inquiry, but the community's' involves - it seems to me - a fundamental category mistake: communities are not the kinds of entities that observe and reason; individuals are ('Essential Tensions', pp. 205, 201, and 207, respectively).
17. In her attempt to define a defensible concept of objectivity between the extremes represented by what she called 'empirical' and 'wholist' accounts of science, Helen Longino would shift attention from individual scientists to the scientific community regarded as an ensemble of critics: 'Scientific knowledge ... is produced not by collecting the products of individuals into one whole, but through a process of critical emendation and modification of those products by the rest of the scientific community' ('Scientific Objectivity and the Logics of Science', Inquiry 26 (1983), pp. 85-106, on p. 95). To be sure. Yet her recognition that 'the possibility of criticism does not totally eliminate subjective preference, either from an individual's or from a community's practice of science' leaves the individual in play, just as her recognition that ' [w]hen ... background assumptions are shared by all members of a community they acquire an invisibility which renders them unavailable for criticism' so relativizes the concept of objectivity - to generally shared beliefs - as to make one wonder what warrants retention of such a contentious term (ibid., pp. 97 and 99) . I find much of value in Longino's elaboration of the social character of scientific knowledge and practice in Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) and in 'Essential Tensions - Phase Two: Feminist, Philosophical, and Social Studies of Science', in Social Dimensions of Science, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1992), pp. 198-216. Nevertheless, although I can agree that 'what gets to count as scientific knowledge is produced through social interaction', I cannot accept the slogan that 'scientific inquiry is a social rather than an individual activity' - against which I offer the case of Robert Mayer and the claim that '[i]t is not the individual's observation and reasoning that matter in scientific inquiry, but the community's' involves - it seems to me - a fundamental category mistake: communities are not the kinds of entities that observe and reason; individuals are ('Essential Tensions', pp. 205, 201, and 207, respectively).
18. In her attempt to define a defensible concept of objectivity between the extremes represented by what she called 'empirical' and 'wholist' accounts of science, Helen Longino would shift attention from individual scientists to the scientific community regarded as an ensemble of critics: 'Scientific knowledge ... is produced not by collecting the products of individuals into one whole, but through a process of critical emendation and modification of those products by the rest of the scientific community' ('Scientific Objectivity and the Logics of Science', Inquiry 26 (1983), pp. 85-106, on p. 95). To be sure. Yet her recognition that 'the possibility of criticism does not totally eliminate subjective preference, either from an individual's or from a community's practice of science' leaves the individual in play, just as her recognition that ' [w]hen ... background assumptions are shared by all members of a community they acquire an invisibility which renders them unavailable for criticism' so relativizes the concept of objectivity - to generally shared beliefs - as to make one wonder what warrants retention of such a contentious term (ibid., pp. 97 and 99) . I find much of value in Longino's elaboration of the social character of scientific knowledge and practice in Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) and in 'Essential Tensions - Phase Two: Feminist, Philosophical, and Social Studies of Science', in Social Dimensions of Science, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1992), pp. 198-216. Nevertheless, although I can agree that 'what gets to count as scientific knowledge is produced through social interaction', I cannot accept the slogan that 'scientific inquiry is a social rather than an individual activity' -against which I offer the case of Robert Mayer and the claim that '[i]t is not the individual's observation and reasoning that matter in scientific inquiry, but the community's' involves - it seems to me - a fundamental category mistake: communities are not the kinds of entities that observe and reason; individuals are ('Essential Tensions', pp. 205, 201, and 207, respectively).
19. The drift of this essay would seem to correspond at least in part to the spirit of Andy Pickering's 'mangle of practice' - 'The traditional oppositions between objectivity, relativity, and historicity are false ones, the distinctions mangled by the mangle' - though I confess to not fully understanding the appropriateness of his metaphor ('Objectivity and the Mangle of Practice', Annals of Scholarship 8 (1991), pp. 409-425, on p. 419). For Pickering, the objectivity of scientific knowledge derives from the fact that its production 'is disciplined by its subject matter, the material world' (p. 409). Likewise it is that concrete practice to which the putative knowledge is relative: 'If objective knowledge is knowledge produced in adherence to enduring standards, then scientific knowledge is not objective on my account. Neither is it socially relative, if such relativity is articulated in terms of preexisting goals or interests. Instead, ... one has to acknowledge a constitutive role for contingency in the particular closures that emerge from the mangle; all of those cases of "it just happened" matter in understanding why the facts, instruments and interpretations generated in Morpurgo's program took the precise form that they did. Which means that if one wants to speak of the relativity of scientific knowledge, one has to speak of its relativity to chance rather than to enduring features of "the social". Better, it seems to me, to speak, as here, of the full blown historicity of science, in recognition of the genuinely historical character of the extension of scientific culture'.
20. Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science, trans. Alexander T. Levine (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 34-35.
21. I have not known how to avoid all seemingly essentialist locutions that treat 'science' as a reified agent without resorting to tiresome circumlocutions and unwieldy circumscriptions. Nevertheless, I do not believe that this paper makes any claims about 'science' that cannot be so reinterpreted.
22. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 170.
23. In his own way, Dudley Shapere has effectively relativized the concepts of objectivity and rationality by having them depend on certain historically vetted disciplinary presuppositions via a 'contingently-realized process of refining and altering standards' ('Objectivity, Rationality, and Scientific Change', PSA 1984 2 (1985), pp. 637-663, on p. 653).
24. Embedded in this issue are aspects of the traditional distinction between context of discovery and context of justification: the former tends to privilege the individual and his or her claims, the latter others' response to them.
25. Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1969), p. 44 and passim; cf. p. 55: 'It is very, very difficult to be cognitively entre nous in modern society, especially in the area of religion. This simple sociological fact, and not some magical inexorability of a "scientific" world outlook, is at the basis of the religious plausibility crisis.' (These references correspond to pp. 36 and 44 of the Anchor Books paperback edition of 1970.)
26. Frederick L. Holmes made a similar point in his elegant defense of a history of science directed toward understanding the nature of creative thinking via detailed study of individual scientists: 'There is a particular, non-symmetrical relationship between a text and its context, which places the text in the centre and the context around it. Foreground and background are equally essential to a complete picture, but they are not interchangeable' ('The Fine Structure of Scientific Creativity', History of Science 19 (1981), pp. 60-70, on p. 69). It is only by understanding the cognitive side of science 'that we can know what it is that the various contexts surround' (p. 60).
27. The story is told briefly in Caneva, 'Conceptual and Generational Change in German Physics: The Case of Electricity, 1800-1846' (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1974), p. 344, and fully in John Worrall, 'Fresnel, Poisson, and the White Spot: The Role of Successful Predictions in the Acceptance of Scientific Theories', in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 135-157. Cf. Kuhn, following E.T. Whittaker: 'French resistance [to the wave theory of light] collapsed suddenly and relatively completely when Fresnel was able to demonstrate the existence of a white spot at the center of the shadow of a circular disk. That was an effect that not even he had anticipated but that Poisson, initially one of his opponents, had shown to be a necessary if absurd consequence of Fresnel's theory' (op. cit., note 13, p. 155).
28. The story is told briefly in Caneva, 'Conceptual and Generational Change in German Physics: The Case of Electricity, 1800-1846' (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1974), p. 344, and fully in John Worrall, 'Fresnel, Poisson, and the White Spot: The Role of Successful Predictions in the Acceptance of Scientific Theories', in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 135-157. Cf. Kuhn, following E.T. Whittaker: 'French resistance [to the wave theory of light] collapsed suddenly and relatively completely when Fresnel was able to demonstrate the existence of a white spot at the center of the shadow of a circular disk. That was an effect that not even he had anticipated but that Poisson, initially one of his opponents, had shown to be a necessary if absurd consequence of Fresnel's theory' (op. cit., note 13, p. 155).
29. The story is told briefly in Caneva, 'Conceptual and Generational Change in German Physics: The Case of Electricity, 1800-1846' (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1974), p. 344, and fully in John Worrall, 'Fresnel, Poisson, and the White Spot: The Role of Successful Predictions in the Acceptance of Scientific Theories', in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 135-157. Cf. Kuhn, following E.T. Whittaker: 'French resistance [to the wave theory of light] collapsed suddenly and relatively completely when Fresnel was able to demonstrate the existence of a white spot at the center of the shadow of a circular disk. That was an effect that not even he had anticipated but that Poisson, initially one of his opponents, had shown to be a necessary if absurd consequence of Fresnel's theory' (op. cit., note 13, p. 155).
30. 19. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859), pp. 186-187.
31. Malcolm Jay Kottler, 'Alfred Russel Wallace, the Origin of Man, and Spiritualism', Isis 65 (1974), pp. 145-192.
32. Nancy Nersessian, 'Opening the Black Box: Cognitive Science and the History of Science', Osiris, 2nd ser., 10 (1995), pp. 194-211, on p. 202, citing Peter Burke, 'Strengths and Weaknesses in the History of Mentalités', History of European Ideas 7 (1986), pp. 439-451, on p. 440.
33. Nancy Nersessian, 'Opening the Black Box: Cognitive Science and the History of Science', Osiris, 2nd ser., 10 (1995), pp. 194-211, on p. 202, citing Peter Burke, 'Strengths and Weaknesses in the History of Mentalités', History of European Ideas 7 (1986), pp. 439-451, on p. 440.
34. At the same meeting at which I read a shorter version of this paper containing these words, Thomas Söderqvist urged in another session that 'the last two decades' concern for the social and political context of science has not been to the advantage of personalities. The traditional dismissal of the personal in the writings of philosophers of science, has been followed by a sociological dismissal of the individual' ('Biography in History of Science: Between Hermeneutics of Suspicion and Hermeneutics of Edification', paper read at the New Orleans History of Science Society meeting on 15 October 1994, revised and expanded as 'Scientific Biography as a Hermeneutics of Edification', International History of Science Newsletter No. 3 (April 1995), pp. 4-6.
35. Charles E. Rosenberg, 'Woods or Trees? Ideas and Actors in the History of Science', Isis 79 (1988), pp. 565-570, on pp. 566-567.
36. Ibid., p. 565.
37. Ibid., p. 567.
38. Ibid., p. 568.
39. I fancy to have done just that in my book on Mayer. As I noted there, '[p]aradoxically, the more one understands Mayer, the more one sees how an appreciation of his idiosyncratic uniqueness advances in step with an appreciation of the manifold interconnections between him and his context' (Caneva, op. cit., note 2, p. xxiii).
40. Robert M. Young, 'Darwin and the Genre of Biography', in One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, ed. George Levine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 203-224, on p. 213.
41. Ibid., pp. 205-206.
42. Young, 'Biography: The Basic Discipline for Human Science', Free Associations: Psychoanalysis, Groups, Politics, Culture No. 11 (1988), pp. 108-130, on pp. 122 and 124.
43. Ibid., pp. 111 and 112. Young added: 'One of the things I like most about biography is that it celebrates so many of the approaches jettisoned by smarty-pants in the 1970s, for example, the history of ideas, narrative, will, character and the validity of the subject's subjectivity. In biography at its best these are combined with structural and epochal causation and the historicity of the construction of the subject and subjectivity' (p. 115).
44. Ibid., pp. 113-114.
45. Young, 'The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Man's Place in Nature', in Changing Perspectives in the History of Science: Essays in Honour of Joseph Needham, ed. Mikuláš Teich and Robert Young (London: Heinemann, 1973), pp. 344-438, on pp. 345 and 384. Young urged a shift of attention 'towards the complex and subtle mediations between social and economic factors and the explicit content of scientific findings and theories. It is suggested that the strategy for developing a radical historiography in the current period should have two moments. First, the devotion of serious attention to the dialectic between base and superstructure. Second, the development of a theory of mediations which moves towards a concept of totality in which man, nature and society are seen in fully relational terms. Rather than abandoning the study of the history of ideas, it is important that both ideas and their institutionalizations continue to be given serious attention. But this must be done without losing sight of their historical place in social and economic life, and their ideological rôle in maintaining existing social and economic relations by rationalizing them' (pp. 346-347). In a quite different spirit, Söderqvist argued for a kind of 'existential biography' that would serve other ends than (for example) the generation of case studies aimed at explicating the historical and contextual nature of science: The basic argument of this chapter is that the aim of science biography is not primarily to be a genre that adds yet another means for disclosing the contextual and socially constructed nature of science. Its primary aim is to be a genre which conveys an understanding of what it means to live a life in which scientific work and rational thinking are part of an existential project and involve existential choices. The aim of existential biography is to help scientists and non-scientists alike to strengthen their abilities to live fuller and more authentic intellectual lives. Instead of adding to the hermeneutics of suspicion that governs so much of today's history and sociology of science, science biography should rather contribute to a 'second naivité', a 'hermeneutics of belief, based on trust and a willingness to listen in order to understand ... An existential approach to biography points to a dimension of uniqueness and individual choice. To stress the notion of the existential project and the notion of empowerment that goes with it is not to deny the importance of the social and political contexts of our actions. But those who stress the notion of social context neglect the other side of the modernist coin, that is, that we are able to break through these contexts. To give attention to our abilities to break contexts is to give the freely acting, ethically responsible, individual scientist the privileged role in science biography. ('Existential Projects and Existential Choice in Science: Science Biography as an Edifying Genre', in Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography, ed. Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 45-84, on pp. 75-76.) See also his essay review of Holmes' two-volume biographical study of Hans Krebs, 'The Architecture of a Biographical Pathway', Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 25 (1994), pp. 165-175. Although my study of Robert Mayer was not a biography in the conventional sense, it provides, I think, a nice example of such an 'existential project': Mayer's determination to pursue his initially inchoate ideas concerning 'force' derived much of its strength from his conviction that a proper theory of force as an immaterial but substantial entity sui generis would disprove the vulgar - and godless - materialism he believed characterized contemporary science.
46. Young, 'The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Man's Place in Nature', in Changing Perspectives in the History of Science: Essays in Honour of Joseph Needham, ed. Mikuláš Teich and Robert Young (London: Heinemann, 1973), pp. 344-438, on pp. 345 and 384. Young urged a shift of attention 'towards the complex and subtle mediations between social and economic factors and the explicit content of scientific findings and theories. It is suggested that the strategy for developing a radical historiography in the current period should have two moments. First, the devotion of serious attention to the dialectic between base and superstructure. Second, the development of a theory of mediations which moves towards a concept of totality in which man, nature and society are seen in fully relational terms. Rather than abandoning the study of the history of ideas, it is important that both ideas and their institutionalizations continue to be given serious attention. But this must be done without losing sight of their historical place in social and economic life, and their ideological rôle in maintaining existing social and economic relations by rationalizing them' (pp. 346-347). In a quite different spirit, Söderqvist argued for a kind of 'existential biography' that would serve other ends than (for example) the generation of case studies aimed at explicating the historical and contextual nature of science: The basic argument of this chapter is that the aim of science biography is not primarily to be a genre that adds yet another means for disclosing the contextual and socially constructed nature of science. Its primary aim is to be a genre which conveys an understanding of what it means to live a life in which scientific work and rational thinking are part of an existential project and involve existential choices. The aim of existential biography is to help scientists and non-scientists alike to strengthen their abilities to live fuller and more authentic intellectual lives. Instead of adding to the hermeneutics of suspicion that governs so much of today's history and sociology of science, science biography should rather contribute to a 'second naivité', a 'hermeneutics of belief, based on trust and a willingness to listen in order to understand ... An existential approach to biography points to a dimension of uniqueness and individual choice. To stress the notion of the existential project and the notion of empowerment that goes with it is not to deny the importance of the social and political contexts of our actions. But those who stress the notion of social context neglect the other side of the modernist coin, that is, that we are able to break through these contexts. To give attention to our abilities to break contexts is to give the freely acting, ethically responsible, individual scientist the privileged role in science biography. ('Existential Projects and Existential Choice in Science: Science Biography as an Edifying Genre', in Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography, ed. Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 45-84, on pp. 75-76.) See also his essay review of Holmes' two-volume biographical study of Hans Krebs, 'The Architecture of a Biographical Pathway', Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 25 (1994), pp. 165-175. Although my study of Robert Mayer was not a biography in the conventional sense, it provides, I think, a nice example of such an 'existential project': Mayer's determination to pursue his initially inchoate ideas concerning 'force' derived much of its strength from his conviction that a proper theory of force as an immaterial but substantial entity sui generis would disprove the vulgar - and godless - materialism he believed characterized contemporary science.
47. Young, 'The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Man's Place in Nature', in Changing Perspectives in the History of Science: Essays in Honour of Joseph Needham, ed. Mikuláš Teich and Robert Young (London: Heinemann, 1973), pp. 344-438, on pp. 345 and 384. Young urged a shift of attention 'towards the complex and subtle mediations between social and economic factors and the explicit content of scientific findings and theories. It is suggested that the strategy for developing a radical historiography in the current period should have two moments. First, the devotion of serious attention to the dialectic between base and superstructure. Second, the development of a theory of mediations which moves towards a concept of totality in which man, nature and society are seen in fully relational terms. Rather than abandoning the study of the history of ideas, it is important that both ideas and their institutionalizations continue to be given serious attention. But this must be done without losing sight of their historical place in social and economic life, and their ideological rôle in maintaining existing social and economic relations by rationalizing them' (pp. 346-347). In a quite different spirit, Söderqvist argued for a kind of 'existential biography' that would serve other ends than (for example) the generation of case studies aimed at explicating the historical and contextual nature of science: The basic argument of this chapter is that the aim of science biography is not primarily to be a genre that adds yet another means for disclosing the contextual and socially constructed nature of science. Its primary aim is to be a genre which conveys an understanding of what it means to live a life in which scientific work and rational thinking are part of an existential project and involve existential choices. The aim of existential biography is to help scientists and non-scientists alike to strengthen their abilities to live fuller and more authentic intellectual lives. Instead of adding to the hermeneutics of suspicion that governs so much of today's history and sociology of science, science biography should rather contribute to a 'second naivité', a 'hermeneutics of belief, based on trust and a willingness to listen in order to understand ... An existential approach to biography points to a dimension of uniqueness and individual choice. To stress the notion of the existential project and the notion of empowerment that goes with it is not to deny the importance of the social and political contexts of our actions. But those who stress the notion of social context neglect the other side of the modernist coin, that is, that we are able to break through these contexts. To give attention to our abilities to break contexts is to give the freely acting, ethically responsible, individual scientist the privileged role in science biography. ('Existential Projects and Existential Choice in Science: Science Biography as an Edifying Genre', in Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography, ed. Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 45-84, on pp. 75-76.) See also his essay review of Holmes' two-volume biographical study of Hans Krebs, 'The Architecture of a Biographical Pathway', Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 25 (1994), pp. 165-175. Although my study of Robert Mayer was not a biography in the conventional sense, it provides, I think, a nice example of such an 'existential project': Mayer's determination to pursue his initially inchoate ideas concerning 'force' derived much of its strength from his conviction that a proper theory of force as an immaterial but substantial entity sui generis would disprove the vulgar - and godless - materialism he believed characterized contemporary science.
48. Understanding meaning as connectedness, and objectivity as unconnectedness, throws light on one of the most profound aspects of the transformation of typical Renaissance worldviews, in which every detail of microcosm and macrocosm acquired meaning via a network of associations, into the pared-down and threateningly meaningless world appropriate to the new science we associate with the Scientific Revolution. See William B. Ashworth, Jr, 'Natural History and the Emblematic World View', in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 303-332.
49. Kuhn, 'Possible Worlds in History of Science', in Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences, ed. Sture Allén (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1989), pp. 9-32.
50. L. Pearce Williams made an impassioned plea for the importance of scientific biography in 'The Life of Science and Scientific Lives', Physis, n.s., 28 (1991), pp. 199-213. Although in general sympathy with Williams' plea, my experience with Robert Mayer leads me to conclude that Williams both over-estimated the extent to which 'relevance is rather precisely defined' for the biographer (p. 204) and underestimated the extent to which, by comparison, defining one's problem in terms of subject matter -his example was nineteenth-century electromagnetism - unduly limits the historian's field of relevant issues (p. 212). Nor do I think an argument for the centrality of biography need be associated with a bias toward the 'giants of science' (p. 209; cf. pp. 204 and 213). A similarly spirited plea that does not share these drawbacks is Thomas L. Hankins, 'In Defense of Biography: The Use of Biography in the History of Science', History of Science 17 (1979), pp. 1-16.
51. L. Pearce Williams made an impassioned plea for the importance of scientific biography in 'The Life of Science and Scientific Lives', Physis, n.s., 28 (1991), pp. 199-213. Although in general sympathy with Williams' plea, my experience with Robert Mayer leads me to conclude that Williams both over-estimated the extent to which 'relevance is rather precisely defined' for the biographer (p. 204) and underestimated the extent to which, by comparison, defining one's problem in terms of subject matter - his example was nineteenth-century electromagnetism - unduly limits the historian's field of relevant issues (p. 212). Nor do I think an argument for the centrality of biography need be associated with a bias toward the 'giants of science' (p. 209; cf. pp. 204 and 213). A similarly spirited plea that does not share these drawbacks is Thomas L. Hankins, 'In Defense of Biography: The Use of Biography in the History of Science', History of Science 17 (1979), pp. 1-16.
52. Kuhn, op. cit., note 13, pp. 188-189.
53. Francis Bacon, Instauratio Magna (1620), Pars secunda operis, quæ dicitur Novum Organum; Liber secundus aphorismorum de interpretatione naturæ, XX: 'Attamen quia citius emergit veritas ex errore quam ex confusione ...'; quoted in another translation in Kuhn, op. cit., note 13, p. 18.
54. Francis Bacon, Instauratio Magna (1620), Pars secunda operis, quæ dicitur Novum Organum; Liber secundus aphorismorum de interpretatione naturæ, XX: 'Attamen quia citius emergit veritas ex errore quam ex confusione ...'; quoted in another translation in Kuhn, op. cit., note 13, p. 18.
55. Cf. Young's comment on the process of historical understanding, quoted at note 31. As Robert C. Solomon has well argued, contextual ad hominem analyses (which, like Nietzsche's understanding of genealogy, seek to understand by historicizing) should not be seen as a substitute for logical or empirical analyses, but as a realistic complement based on the conviction that who makes a claim does affect one's assessment of it ('Nietzsche ad hominem: Perspectivism, Personality and Ressentiment', in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgins (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 180-222).
56. Cf. my essay,'" Why Are You a Vegetarian?" On the Historicity of Becoming vs. the Rationality of Being and Other Practical Matters', Mad River: a Journal of Essays No. 2 (Spring 1991), pp. 5-10. (Note that 'MHller' on line 13 of p. 10 is a misprint for 'Müller'.)
57. Kuhn's imprimatur allows one to take Hoyningen-Huene's representation as authoritative; see Kuhn's 'Foreword' to Hoyningen-Huene, op. cit., note 11, pp. xi-xiii.
58. Hoyningen-Huene, op. cit., note 11, pp. 150-154, 188, 225, 229, 231, 235, 240-250. In noting that '[t]he transfer of terms like "gestalt switch" from individuals to groups is ... clearly metaphorical, and in this case the metaphor proves damaging', Kuhn recognized - without elaboration - that 'treating groups or communities as though they were individuals-writ-large misrepresents the process of conceptual change' ('Speaker's Reply', in Allén, op. cit., note 35, pp. 49-51, on 50). A later essay clarified his intended meaning: 'It is groups and group-practices that constitute worlds ... And the practice-in-the-world of some of those groups is science. The primary unit through which the sciences develop is thus, as previously stressed, the group, and groups do not have minds' ('The Road Since Structure', PSA 1990 2 (1991), pp. 3-13, on p. 11).
59. Hoyningen-Huene, op. cit., note 11, pp. 150-154, 188, 225, 229, 231, 235, 240-250. In noting that '[t]he transfer of terms like "gestalt switch" from individuals to groups is ... clearly metaphorical, and in this case the metaphor proves damaging', Kuhn recognized - without elaboration - that 'treating groups or communities as though they were individuals-writ-large misrepresents the process of conceptual change' ('Speaker's Reply', in Allén, op. cit., note 35, pp. 49-51, on 50). A later essay clarified his intended meaning: 'It is groups and group-practices that constitute worlds ... And the practice-in-the-world of some of those groups is science. The primary unit through which the sciences develop is thus, as previously stressed, the group, and groups do not have minds' ('The Road Since Structure', PSA 1990 2 (1991), pp. 3-13, on p. 11).
60. Hoyningen-Huene, op. cit., note 11, pp. 150-154, 188, 225, 229, 231, 235, 240-250. In noting that '[t]he transfer of terms like "gestalt switch" from individuals to groups is ... clearly metaphorical, and in this case the metaphor proves damaging', Kuhn recognized - without elaboration - that 'treating groups or communities as though they were individuals-writ-large misrepresents the process of conceptual change' ('Speaker's Reply', in Allén, op. cit., note 35, pp. 49-51, on 50). A later essay clarified his intended meaning: 'It is groups and group-practices that constitute worlds ... And the practice-in-the-world of some of those groups is science. The primary unit through which the sciences develop is thus, as previously stressed, the group, and groups do not have minds' ('The Road Since Structure', PSA 1990 2 (1991), pp. 3-13, on p. 11).
61. The failure to perceive the importance of idiosyncratic personal stories - and hence to examine those stories in sufficient depth and detail - vitiated Kuhn's insightful but not well grounded attempt to discover the general factors that led 'twelve men ... within a short period of time ... [to grasp] for themselves essential parts of the concept of energy and its conservation' (Kuhn, op. cit., note 4, p. 321).
62. In response to critics, Kuhn noted the need for 'a systematic attempt to separate the concepts appropriate to the description of groups from those appropriate to the description of individuals', as exemplified by the need 'to distinguish between the lexicon as a shared property constitutive of community, on the one hand, and the lexicon as something carried by each individual member of the community, on the other' (op. cit., note 42, 'Speaker's Reply', p. 51). Yet this possible opening in the direction of the individual was not pursued, and Kuhn's primary focus remained on the group, not the individual scientist. Indeed, in an essay reporting the progress of his thinking as of 1990, Kuhn reiterated his conviction that 'the unit [in terms of which scientific change must be understood] is a community of intercommunicating specialists, a unit whose members share a lexicon that... maintains their isolation from practitioners of other specialties' (op. cit., note 42, 'Road', p. 8).
63. In response to critics, Kuhn noted the need for 'a systematic attempt to separate the concepts appropriate to the description of groups from those appropriate to the description of individuals', as exemplified by the need 'to distinguish between the lexicon as a shared property constitutive of community, on the one hand, and the lexicon as something carried by each individual member of the community, on the other' (op. cit., note 42, 'Speaker's Reply', p. 51). Yet this possible opening in the direction of the individual was not pursued, and Kuhn's primary focus remained on the group, not the individual scientist. Indeed, in an essay reporting the progress of his thinking as of 1990, Kuhn reiterated his conviction that 'the unit [in terms of which scientific change must be understood] is a community of intercommunicating specialists, a unit whose members share a lexicon that... maintains their isolation from practitioners of other specialties' (op. cit., note 42, 'Road', p. 8).
64. Using as examples creatively critical women scientists who situated themselves with respect to both disciplinary and feminist communities, Nancy Tuana emphasized that 'a scientist is simultaneously a member of a number of different epistemic communities and subcommunities. Fuller understanding of the development of knowledge then requires an appreciation of the interactive effects of all relevant communities' ('The Values of Science: Empiricism from a Feminist Perspective', Synthese 104 (1995), pp. 441-461, on p. 456). She criticized 'traditional individualistic accounts of the knowing subject' -in particular, the 'S-knows-that-p model' - not because they are individualistic, but because that model of knowledge 'aims ideally at removing all individual traces of the knowing subject' in favor of an abstract and universalized knower (pp. 456 and 452, respectively).
65. Kuhn, op. cit., note 13, pp. 79-80. If 'awareness of crisis distinguishes Lavoisier's work on oxygen from Priestley's' (pp. 88-89), then maybe there was no community-wide crisis.
66. Kuhn, 'Afterwords', in World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science, ed. Paul Horwich (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 311-341, on p. 328.
67. Ibid., p. 329.