Training and the generalises vision in the history of science

ISIS

Volumn 96, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 244-251

  Kaiser, David ^a  

^a MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT; ARTICLE; HISTORY; HUMAN; MEDICAL PROFESSION; SCIENCE; SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE;

DISSERTATIONS, ACADEMIC; EDUCATION, GRADUATE; HISTORIOGRAPHY; HUMANS; SCIENCE; SPECIALISM;

EID: 33746747562     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/431536     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Charles Rosenberg, "Isis at Seventy-Five," Isis, 1987, 78:514-517;
2. C. Hakfoort, "The Missing Syntheses in the Historiography of Science," History of Science, 1991, 29:207-216;
3. and James Secord, ed., "The Big Picture," special issue, British Journal for the History of Science, 1993, 26:387-483.
4. Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, rev. ed. (1987; New York: Basic, 2000), Ch. 6.
5. More generally see, e.g., Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), esp. Chs. 13-16;
6. and Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism in the History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998).
7. Alexandre Koyré, Galileo Studies, trans. John Mepham (1939; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1978);
8. Koyré, Newtonian Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. 1965);
9. and Koyré, From the Closed World to the Open Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1957).
10. See also Mario Biagioli, "The Scientific Revolution Is Undead," Configurations, 1988, 6:141-147. The current expectation for early modernists seems to be that their dissertations will be based on primary sources that were unpublished in their day, even if they have since been published.
11. Derek J. de Solla Price, Science since Babylon (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), Ch. 5 (on the exponential growth in numbers of abstracting journals see pp. 96-99);
12. Price, Little Science, Big Science (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963);
13. Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist's Role in Society: A Comparative Study, 2nd ed. (1971; Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1984);
14. Diana Crane, Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1972);
15. Nicholas Mullins, Theories and Theory Groups in Contemporary American Sociology (New York: Harper & Row, 1973);
16. and Tony Becher, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of Disciplines (Bristol: Open Univ. Press, 1989).
17. The data in Figure 1 come from entries in the Dissertation Abstracts database, maintained by ProQuest Information and Learning Company (formerly University Microfilms, Inc. [UMI]) and available at hup://www.oclc.org. Included in Figure 1 are all Ph.D. dissertations accepted in the United States and Canada whose authors included "history of science" as one of the descriptors for the dissertation. Note that the database does not include separate subject descriptors for either "history of technology" or "history of medicine," and hence several of these dissertations are included in Figure 1, although these topics remain a minority of all dissertations included in the "history of science" category (see Table 3, below). In the Doctorate Records File maintained by the National Science Foundation, on the other hand, Ph.D. recipients were required to use only one subject descriptor instead of up to three to describe their dissertations. The number of Ph.D.'s per year counted in "history of science" in the United States within the NSF database remains basically the same as in the UMI set for the period 1974-1982 but ranges between 13 and 25 for the period 1983-1988, between 22 and 41 for 1988-1996, and between 36 and 50 for 1997-2002. The Doctorate Records File may be accessed at http://webcaspar.nsf.gov. I believe that the UMI dataset is more appropriate for present purposes, since it includes all Ph.D. recipients who self-identified as historians of science; these are people most likely to participate in the field's professional meetings, publish in its journals, apply for its jobs, and so on.
18. Data on total Ph.D.'s awarded in the United States come from the NSF's Doctorate Records File. Using only those Ph.D.'s marked "history of science" in the NSF database, rather than the UMI database, the rate of growth for our field still exceeds that for all Ph.D.'s by a factor of 5.6 between 1988 and 1999.
19. Price, Science since Babylon, Ch. 5 (cit. n. 4).
20. On the population explosion in U.S. physics and its effects see David Kaiser, "Cold War Requisitions, Scientific Manpower, and the Production of American Physicists after World War II," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 2002, 55:131-159;
21. and Kaiser, "The Postwar Suburbanization of American Physics," American Quarterly, 2004, 56:851-888.
22. On specialization in American medical education see Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic, 1982), Ch. 3;
23. and Kenneth M. Ludmerer, Learning to Heal: The Development of American Medical Education (New York: Basic, 1985).
24. See John Ziman, Knowing Everything about Nothing: Specialization and Change in Scientific Careers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987).
25. The data in Tables 1-3 ore based on my analysis of the UMI set of "history of science" Ph.D. dissertations accepted by institutions in the United States and Canada. I have assigned dissertations to these various categories on the basis of their titles and abstracts.
26. One third of the dissertations listed as "other" for the 2000 cohort in Table 2 focused on Canada; only 4.3 percent of that year's dissertations focused on Asia, the Middle East, or South America, and none focused on Africa. The Ph.D. cohort of 1990 was the most focused on topics set in the United States during the twentieth century: 46 percent of all of the 1990 history of science dissertations focused on this area, compared to 14 percent of the 1980 cohort and 35 percent of the 2000 cohort.
27. Of course, pedagogical concerns have hardly been unique to the modern period. See, e.g., Owen Gingerich and Robert Westman, "The Wittich Connection: Conflict and Priority in Late Sixteenth-Century Cosmology," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 1988, 78:1-144;
28. Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1995);
29. and Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997).
30. For examples drawn from the modern physical sciences see esp. Kathryn Olesko, Physics as a Calling: Discipline and Practice in the Königsberg Seminar for Physics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991);
31. John Rudolph, Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education (New York: Palgrave, 2002);
32. Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2003);
33. Graeme Gooday, The Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004);
34. David Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2005);
35. and Kaiser, ed., Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).
36. Similar themes are developed in Robert Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1994).
37. See, e.g., Joel Spring, The Sorting Machine Revisited: National Educational Policy since 1945, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1989);
38. Herbert Kliebard, Schooled to Work: Vocationalism and the American Curriculum, 1876-1946 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999);
39. and Richard Arum and Irenee Beattie, eds., The Structure of Schooling: Readings in the Sociology of Education (Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield, 2000).
40. explore these themes further in David Kaiser, "Introduction: Moving Pedagogy from the Periphery to the Center," in Pedagogy and the Practice of Science, ed. Kaiser, pp. 1-8;
41. and in Cyrus Mody and Kaiser, "Scientific Training and the Creation of Scientific Knowledge: Historical, Sociological, and Anthropological Perspectives," in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, rev. ed., ed. Ed Hackett et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, in preparation).