What Is The History of Science? Part I

Roger Cooter

(Research Fellow, University of Manchester)

The history of science is no longer an isolated discipline inhabited by scientists flattering themselves by ennobling their past. Nor any longer is it a pasture for grazing philosophers treating scientists (or natural philosophers) and their ideas as if they existed in a vacuum, apart from the rest of society. But it would be a mistake to suppose, simply because historical studies of scientific ideas and events now conform better to the norms of scholarship elsewhere in history, that the discipline has become fully a part of history proper. Despite the success of the efforts made since the 1960s to incorporate historical studies of scientific activity into the rest of history, the history of science as a discipline remains separate (presumably, therefore, for reasons other than the body of material upon which it focuses). Arguably, it is the very success of the efforts made since the 1960s that, paradoxically, has caused the history of science to remain unincorporated. In any event, the present state and outlook of, and regard for, the history of science cannot be defined without referring to its recent past.

For the sake of brevity and convenience, let me confine myself here to one of the interests of my own recent past: the study of those bodies of knowledge that historians previously either dismissed as nonsense or endeavoured to exploit for the purpose of benchmarking the progress of scientific truth. As I argued in 1976 (History of Science), the coming together of scholars on such issues as alchemy, astrology, mesmerism, phrenology and spiritualism was not a sign of growing antiquarianism, but rather a manifestation of current concern over the location and, in some cases, the existence of legitimate boundaries between science, 'pseudoscience', and society. The examination of the controversies over such practices and bodies of knowledge made it apparent that only in hindsight could one sharply distinguish between science and objective facticity, on the one hand, and 'pseudoscience', 'scientism', ideology and social values and interests on the other. Just as the theoretical elaboration and deployment of some of the so-called pseudosciences could be shown to be inseparable from their producers' and deployers' social interests, so the knowledge and selves as 'scientific' could likewise be shown to be social and ideological. The point made was that science and the distinction between it and nonscience was not universal, neutral and eternal as positivist philosophers and historians had implied; what was deemed 'natural' or 'scientific knowledge' and the process by which it was distinguished from 'the social' and 'the cultural' was historically determined, or was the outcome of particular social interests negotiated in particular social contexts.

Quite aside from the fact that studies such as those on rejected scientific knowledge were fundamentally committed to the principal object of history – to explain and account for change – they had a profound implication for a history of science regarded as separate from the rest of history. Because science was shown by its very nature to be social and ideological (in addition to whatever else it is), the history of science could not be rendered other than integral to the total history of social relations and structures.

That this conclusion was not welcomed with open arms by all historians of science is hardly surprising. More interesting, though, is how two decades of hard scholarship have been effectively co-opted through the very act of granting legitimacy to 'social history' of science. Thus labelled and cast (wittingly or unwittingly) merely as the study of science in relation to external social 'factors', the historical studies that had revealed science as integral to the history of society as a whole were opened to marginalisation, whenever and wherever expedient. Moreover, through the same act of acknowledgement, a pardon was given to historical studies of science that were entirely within the history and philosophy of thought. Thus the history of science today is far from uniform in its historiographical outlook. Instead of having become fully a part of history, the discipline often appears hardly less separate than before. Indeed, it seems in some danger of regressing into isolation as a result of failing to understand and/or to heed its own historical counsel.

Maurice Crosland

(Professor of History at the University of Kent)

Much of history has understandably been focused on mankind, with little attention being paid to his natural environment. The history of science is related equally to humanity and the natural world. We might consider the history of science as a study of man's changing understanding of the world of nature. Some people, on seeing the word 'science' assume something modem and very technical, probably associated with a laboratory. But science began with a commonsense interpretation of the world around us, which later became more sophisticated and only in the last century became separated from other studies by specialisation.

The ancient and medieval worlds in which man, the microcosm, was influenced by the macrocosm, the old world of harmony, purpose and design was to be transformed in early modern Europe by new ideas in natural philosophy. The natural world continued, however, to provide a model for human society as, for example, in the organisation of the state. In the seventeenth century the institution of the monarchy was upheld both on the analogy of the position of the sun in the 'universe' (solar system) in the heliocentric theory of Copernicus and by analogy with the heart in the body in the physiology of William Harvey. In the eighteenth century interpretations of nature provided a model for a new approach to law, religion and society. In the nineteenth century Darwin's theory of natural selection was seized upon as justification for two extreme but opposite political viewpoints. There can be no doubt about the power of scientific ideas.

There are many different approaches to the history of science but an encouraging feature over the past decade has been the replacement of much of the old 'internalist' (or science-centred) history of science by a broader contextual approach which relates science to the society of the day. One valuable genre in the history of science is the biographical approach, since the researcher is forced to look at the subject's life and surroundings as well as his work.

A few years ago I chose to study the French scientist, Gay-Lussac, as a prominent example of one of the first generation of professional scientists which emerged in the eventful period immediately after the French revolution, a revolution which had a major influence on the organisation of science and medicine as well as on the social order. Moreover, Gay-Lussac not only became one of France's leading scientists in the early nineteenth century, he also applied science for commercial and industrial purposes and was elected a member of the Chamber of Deputies. The resulting book is therefore a case study of the interaction of science and society in a specific historical context.

A good example of the biographical approach is Richard Westfall's recent study of Isaac Newton. This large book draws on a vast literature and provides an excellent example of the contextual approach to the science of the past. Westfall does not make the old mistake of abstracting the physics from the context of theology, philosophy and alchemy which loomed large in Newton's mental world. A political dimension emerges not so much in Newton's own life as in the uses which are alleged to have been made by Church and State in eighteenth-century Britain of the Newtonian system.

But history of science must be more than the study of individuals. Historians of science have recently been increasingly concerned with institutions. From the seventeenth century onwards men organised themselves into societies, of which the most famous were the Royal Society of London (1660) and the Paris Academy of Sciences (1666). State patronage of science raises interesting questions and there is a striking contrast in the relation between science and government in Britain and France. Searching questions are being asked about the membership of scientific societies, whether on an amateur, part-time basis, as in the British Association, or in a more elitist and professional way, as in the French Academy.

If ladies and gentlemen in nineteenth-century Britain turned to science for recreation, what did they expect to find? Was it a reassuring picture buttressing the existing social order and the established church? And what of the Mechanics Institutes? Here, as elsewhere, there are so many interesting questions to ask and only a handful of specialists engaged in finding answers. Unlike political history, history of science is a comparatively new field. It needs more people with some training in history and an interest in the history of ideas and the applications of science.

History of science can be studied at undergraduate level as part of a history course at several British universities and polytechnics. At the University of Kent it can be studied together with History or English or certain other arts subjects. For postgraduate students there is a fascinating range of problems to study and the field is still fresh enough for researchers to be cultivating virgin soil.

Brian Easlea

(Lecturer in Science Studies at the University of Sussex)

For me, the principal reason for studying history is to try to understand human behaviour from the perspective of attempting to contribute towards the achievement of a less inhumane world. Although other perspectives are certainly possible, I believe that many historians do pursue their research either explicitly or implicitly informed by an overall concern for human well-being. Conversely, I believe that no serious attempt to realise a better future can afford to neglect the contributions historians are able to offer.

What can be the special contributions of historians of science? From the above perspective, the answer is obvious: the scientific revolution, Herbert Butterfield has claimed, outshines everything since the rise of Christianity. Indeed, very broadly speaking, spokesmen for science claim that for over three centuries competent scientific practitioners have pursued an identifiable methodology that has generated knowledge about the natural world as opposed to mere belief; that an important measure of the truth content of scientific claims is (ever-increasing) technological power; that scientific practice underwrites medical, industrial and military innovation and is the principal driving force promoting our civilisation's extraordinary dynamism. No need exists from my general perspective to justify the study of the history of science.

Questions emerge immediately. How is scientific activity to be defined and identified? What have been the principal conceptions of Nature advanced by natural philosophers? How are they to be evaluated, how have they changed and why? Have practitioners of science successfully promulgated manifestly 'false' conceptions of Nature and with what implications? What kinds of people and from what social classes have tended to become scientists? How and why has it happened that a large fraction of the world's scientists work today on the development of weapons systems, and what might be done to promote socially constructive applications of science? There is no shortage of questions.

From this perspective, my own research programme explores possible ramifications of the 'maleness' of science. The subject is not an insignificant one. For example, in her book The Gestalts of War the military historian Sue Mansfield has claimed that the scientific mentality 'has carried from its beginnings in the seventeenth century the burden of an essential hostility to the body, the feminine, and the natural environment,' that the scientific mentality has not only produced atomic and thermonuclear weapons but informs current nuclear strategic thought, and that 'though the re-enslavement of women and the destruction of nature are not conscious goals of our nuclear stance, the language of our bodies, our posture, and our acts is a critical clue to our unexamined motives'.

From the perspective of contributing towards a less inhumane world, historical and psychological claims such as Mansfield's need detailed exploration and evaluation. They imply that Western culture has maintained a man-mind-science/woman body-Nature dualism and that within this dualistic tradition modern science is underwriting an unconscious drive towards the destruction of Nature and the re-enslavement of women. Stated this baldly, the implications seem somewhat improbable, if not absurd. However, given the absurd military situation produced by scientifically advanced nations in which even a 'limited' nuclear war could bring about 'unthinkable' destruction, it is prudent not to dismiss Mansfield's claims out of hand.

Again, an abundance of questions springs to mind. Is misogyny characteristic of Western civilisation? How is misogyny to be defined and identified? Is it true, as H.C.E. Midelfort stated in History Today (February 1981), that the witch-craze of early modern Europe 'displayed a burst of misogyny without parallel in Western history.’ If so, is it coincidental that modern science originated in a period of intense misogyny or can causal connections be identified? How have the development of science and changing misogynistic attitudes and practice reciprocally interacted? Is Western society still misogynistic? Dorothy Dinnerstein, Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University, writes that 'the hate, fear, loathing, contempt, and greed that men express toward women so pervade the human atmosphere that we breathe them as casually as the city child breathes smog'. If this is true, is twentieth-century science deeply misogynistic? Is military science even more so? Does an unconscious desire exist for the destruction of 'female' Nature and the re-enslavement of women?

These kinds of questions crudely serve to outline a complex historical research programme. There already exists, for example, the work of H.C.E. Midelfort on the history of the witchcraze, Carolyn Merchant's work on the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, the work of feminist historians on Darwin's revolution and modern biology, my own preliminary work on the sexual metaphors used by nuclear scientists and weapons physicists, and the work of philosophers such as Evelyn Fox Keller and Sandra Harding on the social construction of gender and science. Underlying this work is the larger question of the possibility of a major transformation in weltanschauung and practice, such as that described in Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point. Sandra Harding has explicitly asked: How does the 'super-masculinization of desirable belief... limit the ability of the kind of science we have to contribute to truly human progress'? One of the tasks of historians of science, I suggest, is to help explore this kind of question and to attempt to answer it.

David Gooding

(Lecturer at the University of Bath)

History of science deals with an influential and very specialised form of culture: the production, study, and use of natural phenomena. Historians of science are interested in the activities of scientific practitioners, in the instruments and techniques they devised to investigate nature, the ways they represented and communicated their results to others, the institutional arrangements made to promote science, and in the development of their ideas and arguments, as recorded in manuscripts and papers. There has been a growing recognition that scientists drew verbal, visual and symbolic representations from images, practices, and technologies of the world in which they lived. This has renewed our interest in artefacts and procedures as sources which complement the interpretation of the written word. Historians are studying how these practitioners drew upon their milieux and how they were in turn affected by them. They are finding that, whether scientists were inventing a new interpretation or defending an established one, they drew on a far wider range of resources than the familiar material and financial ones.

Historians of science also want to show how scientists made use of the literary, technical, financial, and institutional resources of their culture while maintaining the power to influence and change it. This work suggests that influential discoveries and ideas are not given in nature or by genius. Nor are they extracted and distilled from nature, for application to technical or social ends. Natural knowledge is invented and constructed by making information from nature intelligible, interesting and useful. It can then be influential. So we no longer see science as having been insulated from the wider social and cultural environment. We now see laboratories and research institutes as places where scientists bring nature into the crucible of western culture. What they get out has often reflected that culture as much as it reflected nature. This suggests that scientists' success – their ability to explain and control aspects of nature – depends as much upon their mastery of culture as upon their study of nature.

Historians are now moving away from the familiar trilogy of sources: ideas embodied in texts, applications embodied in technologies, and consequences such as industrialisation or secularisation. Like other students of science, historians are paying particular attention to what scientists did as well as what they said and wrote. If science is not pre-eminently theoretical or literary, we can look beyond texts for the concrete and practical sources of evidence about the day-to-day activity in which scientists have constructed new views of the world. An exciting example of this is the attention now given to experimentation. Some historians now present this as a process of making and remaking our experience of the world as the basis for more general views about nature, ourselves, and our societies.

We all believe that what distinguishes science from other pursuits is the fact that scientists test their theories by making experiments whose results are often decisive. Our beliefs are reinforced by the way we learned to think about experiments. Most of us came to know experiment second or third-hand, through classroom demonstrations or through media coverage of spectacular 'crucial' tests of major theories. Both make it seem that experiment makes the natural world speak directly to the intellect. But empirical studies of experimental practices suggest that this is a caricature. This mini 'Copernican Revolution' has led many historians to look beyond the didactic and demonstrative uses of experiment, to see how experiments were made and used and how their results came to be accepted or discredited. When scientific practice is not idealised as the handmaiden of theory (as it was, for example, by Sir Karl Popper) or as the handmaiden of politics (as it was more recently, for example, by Sir Keith Joseph) a multiplicity of experimental strategies comes to light. Most of these were used to make results intelligible, easy to communicate and to experience. We find that, though their techniques and arguments vary, scientists have always been concerned to make their results self-evident and real. They do not want their results dismissed as artefacts that owe their existence to the ingenuity of a few practitioners. Much of their time and ingenuity is devoted to solving practical problems of presentation and communication. Such problems have aesthetic, cognitive, social, institutional and political dimensions as well as the more abstruse intellectual and technical dimensions. Here case studies suggest that in the exploratory, innovative stages of research, interactions between scientists (as persons) are often more important than their interactions with nature (as observers).

This means that the history of science cannot be written on its own. Historians no longer take the cognitive or moral priority of science for granted, or the existence of nature as an objective source of information. If scientists' learning about nature is not as distinct from other, more familiar forms of learning, invention and expression as we used to think, then we may be close to writing a history of science which explains why science has been so successful as a way of learning about nature and so powerful an influence upon the way we live and think. Many historians of science now have training in both history and a natural science and can combine interpretative and empirical modes of investigating history. Their explanations should be more accessible to scientists and humanists, than earlier histories that placed science above and apart from the rest of culture.

Rupert Hall

(Professor Emeritus, London University)

The essential of being an historian, like the essential of being a poet or a musician, is to follow one's craft rather than to try to explain it to non-practitioners. For this reason among others it is, I think, appropriate to conceive of history operationally: as being the telling of a tale or the analytical dissection of recorded data, or something lying between these extremes. It is both qualitative and quantitative. The history that attracts the majority of readers is the history of tales; the best-known, perhaps the best, historical writers have been superb tale-tellers, from G.M. Trevelyan and Sir Arthur Bryant to Sir John Plumb and Antonia Fraser. Tale-telling of the highest order requires no less formidable a bulk of knowledge, no less ardour in research (even if it eschews computers!) than does the analytical history which, on the whole, academics prefer. There is this difference, however, that analytical history uses procedures that are, in principle, universal; a tale is necessarily unique. Does anyone doubt that irrespective of historical weight the story of Garibaldi is more exciting than that of Cavour? Who would not rather write the life of Samuel Pepys than that of Edward Cardwell?

By contrast, analysis of the role of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge in the history of modern physics is not, methodologically, very different from analysis of that of the Star Chamber in the governance of Tudor England. An historical study of MPs can be easily paralleled by another of FRSs. Again, analysis of the work of a poet or novelist may find analogy as to method in the study of a mathematician, indeed, some literary scholars have made notable contributions to the history of science, like Majorie Nicolson. Where an economic historian examines figures for the export of commodities, the historian of science can examine statistics relating to expenditure on scientific education and research.

Analytical studies of the development of the natural sciences in their manifold aspects – organisational, textual, educational, prosopographical, social and economic – have flourished enormously during the last forty years. Nearly all the historians of science in the world are academics or para-academics – not least in the USSR and Japan – and most of them are engaged upon properly analytic academic researches. Teaching of historical methodology is almost de rigueur, and not a few believe that historical writing should follow some formal methodological model, for example that of Thomas S. Kuhn or Mary Douglas. And since analytical history can only work with certain kinds of questions – though these may be linear in type as well as cross-sectional – just as quantitative history (sensu strictu) can only work with things that can be counted, these are the questions that most historians of science today are concerned with.

They are not, therefore, tale-tellers. Pioneers of the history of science indeed strove to tell 'The story of Astronomy' (as it might be) and in trying to paint in simple colours too large a canvas they were often guilty of superficiality and, what some hold to be worse, 'Whiggishness'. Their stories had happy endings. They found that progress in human knowledge had occurred, was occurring, and was likely to occur in the future; that later ideas of the natural world were almost invariably more rational and better supported by evidence than earlier ones. When Karl Sudhoff (and many others) examined the history of anatomical illustration, for example, they discovered it to be non-existent in antiquity, crude and imaginative in the Middle Ages, first achieving pictorial realism with the artists and engravers of the Renaissance, and advancing to further scientific, ultimately photographic, realism in recent times. Again, historians of cosmology found a progression from crude speculations to the sophisticated anthropocentric universe of antiquity and the Middle Ages, followed by the notion of an infinite and isostatic cosmos brought into close correspondence with an ever more exact astronomy, which was in turn modified during the late eighteenth century by the concept of cosmic evolution. No one could fail to see that the theories of each stage – though none was final – were buttressed by more numerous and more precise observations than had been the case before, and that the later understanding invoked and depended upon a far more rich and detailed range of integration with other branches of science than was previously possible.

Thus, until well into the present century, the main story-line of the history of science, by no means uniquely, was that of intellectual progress. Of course, there are also many excellent special tales in the history of science like that of the 'crime' and trial of Galileo, so well told (in English) by Giorgio de Santillana (1955). But even these have tended to lose interest in the general discredit of the idea of progress. This has had far more effect upon the nature of the subject, history of science, than has the character of science itself. The forbidding appearance of some work on the history of science has, of course, had its effect and it is no accident that the most widely discussed book in this field in recent years was by Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers (1959), a book which though analytical in spirit has many attractive tale-telling qualities.

Historians of science pride themselves, rightly, on their post-war creation of an academic profession (a 'discipline', indeed, since it is taught to students) and less justifiably on writing only for members of their own profession (thus, hopefully, gaining 'peer-approval'). On the other hand, it would be a dubious proposition that either scientists or general historians are now more interested in the history of science than they were half a century ago, nor has it yet been satisfactorily demonstrated that there is any inevitable antithesis here: that an historian of science must appeal either to scientists or to general historians. The perfection and extension of analysis has done great things for the history of science, but a return to narrative history is long overdue.

John Hendry

(GSRC Fellow at the London Business School)

People like classifications. Even if the phrase means nothing to them, I find on the whole that the people I meet feel comforted to know that I am an historian of science – or an historian of philosophy, or of technology, or of industry. If, on the other hand, I admit to being more than one of these, however partially or inadequately, they become suspicious and uncomfortable. They cannot place me, so they cannot trust me. In much the same way my fellow historians of science, as they class themselves, are happy to accept me as, let us say, an historian of twentieth-century physics, but ill at ease should I appear to stray into such distant disciplines as the history of astronomy, or that of not quite so modern physics. And at the other end of the spectrum there are people who are quite content to class me as an historian with no further qualification – providing of course that I do not admit to indulging in philosophy, policy studies, or, worst of all, fiction. Sometimes, I have no doubt, my statements of activities are mistaken for claims of expertise. Sometimes, I suspect, there is an element of resentment that I should be able to earn a living indulging and enjoying myself as much as I do. In general, though, these reactions probably reflect no more than a natural and universal desire to classify and categorise our environment, the very same desire, indeed, that underlies that science of which I am, or try to be, an historian.

This observation may seem commonplace, but it does have a particular relevance for the history of science today. For it is a curious and somewhat ironic circumstance that the desire for classification that is central to the subject matter, and thus to the growth, of the history of science, is also central to its isolation and current decline. The pioneers of the discipline were all people with unusually broad interests and learning who sought to develop what was once a sadly neglected subject. In the process of establishing and defending their new field, however, they unwittingly isolated it both from science and from history. A subject that originally grew out of a rebellion against specialism thus became a speciality in its own right, has remained one ever since, and has now begun to suffer the consequences. In most history faculties the historian of science is no more welcome than is the historian of art or philosophy. But nor is he welcome either in the faculties of science, where experiment and calculation, not literature, reign.

For the historian of science today this situation is an irritation, to say the least, but it is also a challenge. For somehow the history of science has to be brought back into the mainstreams of its parent disciplines, and this has to be done without sacrificing in the process everything that it has gained over the years. It is easy enough to communicate with social historians by restricting one's attention to the history of scientific institutions, or with scientists by restricting oneself to the narrowly internalist pre-history of current scientific theories. It is much harder to convince scientists of the value of historical perspective, context and analysis, or historians of the relevance of scientific theories and experiments. We must, however, try. The aims of history, as of any other study, are largely personal. My own view, for what its worth, is that history is a literary genre, subject to strict rules of evidence and cross-examination, the purpose of which is extremely practical. Much of my history of science and philosophy is aimed explicitly at scientists, and much of my history of technology and industry at policy makers. But the history of science must also be directed at the wider historical community. And it must be so not only for its own sake but, far more importantly, for the sake of that community.

History is the study of man. And there is surely nothing that has been more central to man's development in the modern era than has science. It has been central both to man's psychology and to his society, and central in both its ideas and its consequences. The world we live in has been moulded by the ideas of evolution and relativity, psychoanalysis, even non-local quantum mechanics, every bit as much as it has by those of political or economic thought. The impact of science-based technologies, from electric power to genetic engineering, from plastics to nuclear weapons, and from antibiotics to aircraft, has surely been even greater than that of wars and revolutions.

Given this situation, it seems obvious that if history is to be taken seriously at all, then the history of science must play an important part in it. But there appears to be no sign of this happening. The historians of science complain, quite rightly, that they and their subject are left out in the cold. The mainstream historians retort, quite rightly, that this is not entirely their fault. What they need are textbooks. What they have is nothing between the distortions of popular science writers and the inaccessible scholarship of the historians of science. Both sides blame the other and neither does anything about it.

One day, if historians of science can get off their high horses and write books that can be read, and if mainstream historians can get off their high horses, accept that science really is an important part of their domain, and make an effort to understand it, the history of science may become genuinely part of history. If not, it may just become part of history in the other, less vital sense, and it is history itself that will be the loser.