The historical way to do science 2 Oct 2010 A review of two history of science books in History Today starts out The story of science is Whig history. We are forever cherry-picking the routes by which we came to our present understanding of the world – and the implication is always the same: our current grasp is final, perfect and unimpeachable. It’s a bad way to do history, but it’s a good way of doing science. That is the problem. No, that’s not the problem. The problem is that we have post hoc stories that systematically misrepresent the history of science. Science is not Whiggish. Nobody knows ahead of time what to do and how to proceed. Scientists don’t take a linear pathway from ignorance to a good theory. But after they have one, they will often tell a story as if they did. Historians don’t need to take them at their word. History Science History
Biology Evopsychopathy 3: The explanatory target 9 Dec 20122 Jan 2013 In the Bad Old Days, biologists, including Darwin, used to speak of “instinct” as an inherited trait of organisms. Darwin has a comment in his Notebooks It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another. — We consider those, when the intellectual faculties [/] cerebral structure most… Read More
Book More FAPPery 27 Apr 2010 Another review of What Darwin got wrong, by Kenan Malik, at The Literary Review. The money quote: Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are no creationists, but ‘outright, card-carrying, signed-up, dyed-in-the-wool, no-holds-barred atheists’. That, however, only makes worse the incoherence of their understanding of Darwinism. There is much that Darwin got wrong, from… Read More
Evolution Trashcan: chaotic remnants 7 Dec 2008 Siris has an interesting piece on the nature of the liberal arts. I loves me some 13th century, I does. Bora objects to Obama’s choices being characterised as “elites” and therefore bad. On the other hand, the term “groupthink” was coined to characterise the elite advisors of the first American… Read More
I just wrote a reply at History Today and tried not to sound too grumpy. Thanks for giving us all the heads up.
The “4000 years” reminded me of a quibble I have with historiography: if it says 4000, is the author spending as many pages on the first 1000 as on the last 1000*? Sometimes I think it’d be nice to write two parallel survey histories of a subject, one that distributes attention evenly over time, and another that devotes progressively more attention to the more recent events. The contrast between the findings of these two histories would be interesting. *adjusted for amount of evidence, of course
Science history is wiggish because it starts as lies-told-to-students. Wiggish history makes more sense than real history, and it fits better into the introduction of a class on some topic. Plus, frequently it is the case that simple foundational ideas grew out of the study of advanced, arcane areas, sometimes of different disciplines. Trying to introduce evolution with a discussion of Malthus, geology, and biological debates of the time would be a pain; introducing set theory in the context of Fourier analysis would be even worse.
Reading the rest of the review, it doesn’t look to me like the reviewer is claiming that the Whig narratives are accurate. Instead, the claim is that the Whig narratives are necessary to make sense of the history. Borrowing some ideas from Hempel, we (meaning historians, even though I’m not a historian) have a mass of observation sentences concerning who did what with which equipment where and when. Hypothesizing something unobservable — the overarching aim for the whole thing — lets us organize these observation sentences into a well-behaved and understandable theory, ie, a Whig narrative. Then Kuhn comes along and points out how those `observation sentences’ are now completely inaccurate, leading Lakatos to suggest accuracy doesn’t actually matter because we really want the well-behaved and understandable theory/narrative. So I guess the solution is for historians to find their van Fraassen or Cartwright? Or, better yet, for the philosopher to go back to grading logic assignments and leave the historians to figure out how to do history.
Well the reviewer says Imagine, then, trying to write a historically accurate story of science itself. You’d have to throw out all the whiggery and in throwing out the whiggery you’d throw out all the knowledge. What you’d end up with is the story of an entirely absurd and incomprehensible activity. It looks to me like he thinks that to even write the history of science you have to be whiggish. I don’t think that a narrative has to be whiggish to be manageable. But a story that excises important and influential side-effects is not a useful piece of history. And I do not think that philosophers can make a case that history can be ignored when doing philosophy of science, any more than we are entitled to invent psychology or sociology when doing philosophy of social science. It wouldn’t hurt historians to read more van Fraassen and Cartwright, no.
As somebody who owns Simon Ings’ The Eye: A Natural History, bought on the basis of very positive reviews, I can’t say that I am very impressed with his ability to write history of science.
I seem to have been spat at by “an aging freak who fell in love with the history of science and now lives mostly in the 16th century”. But I expect I’ll live.
If you think that was being spat at, you haven’t spent much time on the internet. But that [late edit: using Thony’s self-description as an attack] is a pretty poor response.
I was brought up to believe that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but being myself sarcastic by nature I of course disagree. However I would have thought that a professional novelist and science writer who apparently tosses off books between producing progeny and travelling to exotic destination would be more capable of delivering interesting insults than the faint squib that dribbled out of your keyboard. Remaining at your subterranean level, I seem to have been sneered at by an irate author and still seem to be alive.
I was aware of walking a fine line but I hoped I had not strayed onto the wrong side, if so I unreservedly apologise .
I hope my sketchy review wasn’t partly responsible for Thony C’s disappointing purchase. I enjoyed Ings’s book, if for no other reason than the account of French anatomist Jean Mery’s observation that a cat’s eyes shine much more brightly if you hold the cat underwater. We need more experimenters like that! [I am so not a cat person.]
Contrary to the opinion my comment might evoke I’m not disappointed by Ings’ book. The history of science section only makes up a small part of his rather entertaining book. However that section although correct in its basics contains enough unnecessary sloppy statements to allow me to have a negative opinion of the authors abilities as a historian of science.
@snarkyxanf – Trying to introduce Darwin’s ideas without Malthus etc makes no sense, although you can introduce modern evolutionary theory without them, and without Darwin for that matter. Science picks, or ends up with, its forebears, heroes snd narratives for all sorts of reasons, only some of which bear any relation to the best understanding of ‘what actually happened’. The kind of historical information that gets dropped into science teaching is not, in my book, history of science.
I agree, the sort of historical information that gets dropped into science and math instruction is not history of science, more like the mythology of science. I do think that the mythology of science ends up having an outsized effect on the history of science, because it provides an attractive, widely known narrative about the past. The sorts of ideas citizens have about the past of their countries (and their enemies countries) might not be very good history either, but they do have a way of coloring history books. I think my discipline, mathematics, might be especially guilty of this: things are constantly reformulated to provide clean exposition, and come with historical names attached. Some subjects end up being taught in near reverse chronological order.
“Hey, I can give a thumbs-up to my own comments! Awesome!” Oh no I find writing anything like trying to push a overwieght camel through the gate of a Needles Eye after a few industrial strength lagers (excuse my lapse into biblical rhetoric). I would be tempted to push the other button on my own words.
And from thence they went to Beer: that is the well whereof the Lord spake unto Moses, gather the people together and I will give them water. King James Bible Numbers 21:16
John wrote: “Science is not Whiggish,” but whether this sentence is true or not depends on how you construe “Science” because the P.R. image of science and its traditional pedagogy are indeed Whiggish even if some individual scientists are aware that the triumphant historical narratives enshrined in the textbooks and dramatized in the movies are highly meretricious. Of course, just as the methodological rules promoted in Chapter One usually don’t reappear in the body of the text, the self-understanding of science doesn’t capture much of the reality of this enormous social institution, the ideology is part of the enterprise.
I would agree that Science TEACHING tends to be much more Whiggish than Science History (in general, at least nowadays). And of course I guess very few people would maintain in our presente understanding that Science (or, for that matter, anything) is somehow intrinsecally Whiggish. However, I can see that a point of common misconception about the issue is the fact that there is no such a thing as an ALTERNATIVE SCIENCE (as there might be, for instance, in philosophy, arts, religion, etc.). Not getting down to the details of kuhnian issues of normal versus extraordinary (critical) science, or particular situations (in which, for example, political or other issues might have intervened in a more dramatic form in the going of Science), I guess we could say that in general the scientific community at any point embraces a general and sort of CUMULATIVE collection of beliefs/knowledge about the natural world. My point is precisely that the ill understanding of this issue (the cumulative nature of scientific knowledge) gives rise to the accusation of Whiggism IN Science and, by reflex, in Science History. A good question to pose is “given all the information available to scientists at some particular point in history, would it have been possible to come up with an entirely different science than the one that actually evolved from that point on”? Although I guess most would defend Science as a human and social process, I think this could hardly be done – hence the “feeling” that Science has in itself something that smells (badly and) Whiggish.
“[In] general the scientific community at any point embraces a general and sort of CUMULATIVE collection of beliefs/knowledge about the natural world” Yes, but the majority of what scientists do is done where that cumulative collection of beliefs does not exist—i.e. do new research. Therefore science-in-books consists of a consensus, cumulative collection of beliefs, but science-as-experience consists almost entirely of (fights over) alternatives. What might be the biggest difference between philosophy and science is the relative preference for coherent systems and consensus facts. Science can make meaningful progress for some time in the absence of a coherent theory, by accumulating facts.
You are right. I was referring mostly to Science as it is supposed to exist as (to use a kuhnian term) paradigm, i. e., Science as a teachable subject, or as you quite rightly almost put it, textbook Science. I agree completely with you that this is in blatant contrast with part of the “Science-in-the-making”, especially in the areas outside plain application of paradigmatic Science (guess theoretists are even more agressive in that than experimentalists, actually). Still, why don’t alternative theories evolve parallel but rather tend do become “extinct” (if the metaphor applies) and we end up with only one line of scientific development (which finally gives rise to the Whiggish feeling)? Is it just sociological, or is there something in the nature of Science itself that explains that?
I think there is something in the nature of science, yes. A theory that can’t agree with observation is just failed (or kept as a useful approximation, e.g. Newtonian mechanics), but two theories that make the same predictions over an extensive set of situations don’t really feel that different. The competing models of quantum mechanics, for example, are mathematically equivalent, so the differences are rather de-fanged. So I think the difference has to do with human instincts about what reality is, instincts that apply to the physical world, but not, say, art or religion.
Would you be comfortable with me renaming what you called “instincts” to some sort of aesthetic appraisal of “reality” (or “outside world”)? It surely would sound better to me. However, in this case, it wouldn’t make Science much different from art or religion, say. It bothers, doesn’t it? The feeling that there is something in the nature of Science (besides the sociology) has to do with the sense of reality we have, I am afraid. Were it not for it we wouldn’t speak of a ‘discovery’, but only of ‘inventions’. So is it the perception that Science cumulatively and progressively uncovers facts about the reality of the natural world that gives us the feeling that there is an ultimate goal (which, to recall the start of all this, gives people the (ill interpreted) feeling that Science has in itself some sort of ‘Whigginess’ ? Also, I am not sure Quantum Mechanics different INTERPRETATIONS are a good example here. Can we really speak of different, competing MODELS of Quantum Mechanics (in the same way people spoke of the competing wave and corpuscular models for optical phenomena in the beginning of the XIXth century)? On that case although many of the optical phenomena could be well explained by both competing models of the nature of light, the mathematics and the procedures (conceptualization, principles, etc.) to arrive at the results were quite different. I am not an expert, but I suspect this is not the case in the different interpretations of Quantum Mechanics. So in this sense they would be (as far as current knowledge goes) more metaphysical than scientific, in a way. Of course this all points towards semantics. What exactly is a MODEL, or a THEORY, we could ask. I am sure there are good answers available out there.
Just realised, one of the books reviewed by Ings is by my old History of Science professor. I should probably buy it.
Being a simple soul Ive got utterly lost mid -way through this. All I would say is that I hope to see more articles on Whewells Ghost building on the approach very clearly demonstrated in ‘Martyr of Science’ i.e. a straightforward analysis of the subject examined in context. That is something I can understand, as it looks distinctly like a historical argument.
‘Pretty sure the Bible doesn’t even mention beer, let alone lagers.’ Its a cultural adaption. My ancestors were rather fond of penning lines like. “I would like to hold a great ale feast for the baby jesus” I am a Glasgow/Irish boy, although I have a fondness for only one of the two named escapes from reality.