Focus: The generalist vision in the history of science: A generalist's vision

ISIS

Volumn 96, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 224-229

  Kohler, Robert E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; HISTORY; HUMAN; MEDICAL PROFESSION; PHILOSOPHY; SCIENCE;

HISTORY; HUMANS; PHILOSOPHY; SCIENCE; SPECIALISM;

EID: 33746734268     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/431533     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. James A. Secord, ed., "The Big Picture," special issue, British Journal for the History of Science, 1993, 26:387-483.
2. The contributor most skeptical of big-picture genres was Ludmilla Jordonova, and she offered an alternative view similar to the one I offer here; see Ludmilla Jordanova, "Gender and the Historiography of Science," ibid., pp. 469-483.
3. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1962);
4. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (French ed., 1972; Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977);
5. and Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1985), p. 31 (see also Ch. 1 - more generally).
6. Books of exemplary lives are an ancient genre not much admired nowadays. But see Michel Vovelle, ed., Enlightenment Portraits, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (French ed., 1992; Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1997).
7. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1994);
8. and Ruth Barton, '"Men of Science': Language, Identity, and Professionalization in the Mid-Victorian Scientific Community," History of Science, 2003, 41:73-119.
9. A pioneering sociological survey, flawed as history but still a useful model, is Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist's Role in Society: A Comparative Study (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971).
10. Shapin, Social History of Truth (cit. n. 5);
11. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (1979; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986);
12. and Robert E. Kohler, "Place and Practice in Field Biology," Hist. Sci., 2002, 40:189-210.
13. On "imaginative infrastructures" see Martin Rudwick, "Encounters with Adam, or at Least the Hyaenas: Nineteenth-Century Visual Representations of the Deep Past," in History, Humanity, and Evolution, ed. James Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 231-252.
14. Topics of recent issues have included science and the city, the "public sphere," imperialism, and environmental history. This seems a timely move, since historians of science are more and more employed in departments of history. On the debit side of the ledger, however, is the fact that the history profession is itself suffering from balkanization. What we need is not decentering but recentering.
15. Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, "De-centering the 'Big Picture': The Origins of Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 1993, 25, 407-432.
16. The call for global history could backfire if by setting the bar of achievement so high it simply discourages more conscientious scholars and tempts the less scrupulous to facile recycling.