Past and Present Knowledges in the Practice of the History of Science

This essay, mostly drafted in 1990–91, owes much to the methodological pluralism of my past and present Manchester colleagues. I thank them all, but especially David Edgerton, Jon Harwood and Steve Sturdy for comment on the text, Joan Mottram for assistance and Jeff Hughes for additional references. For comments and information I am also grateful to David Bloor, Jon Hodge and Roy Porter.

For example, Woolgar S. , “Interests and explanation in the social study of science”, Social studies of science, xi (1981), 365–94; and his exchange with Barnes B. , ibid., 481–94 and 505–14.

Collingwood R. G. , An autobiography (1939; Oxford, 1970), chap. 10.

Crick M. , Exploration in language and meaning: Toward a semantic anthropology (London, 1976); Taylor C. , Social theory as practice: B. N. Ganguli Memorial Lectures (Delhi, 1983).

McKenzie D. Barnes B. , “Scientific judgement: The biometry–Mendelism controversy”, in Barnes B. Shapin S. (eds), Natural order: Historical studies of scientific culture (London and Beverly Hills, 1979).

As Jonathan Hodge explained to me in the early 1970s, using present experience to explain the past need not make the past dull, it may be an incentive to explore the liveliness of the present. He was, of course, discussing the ‘actualism’ of Charles Lyell in geology. See Hodge M. J. S. , “Darwin and the laws of the animate part of the terrestrial system (1835–7): On the Lyellian origins of his zoonomical explanatory programme”, Studies in the history of biology, vi (1982), 1–106, esp. pp. 6–13.

See Shortland M. Warwick A. (eds), Teaching the history of science (Oxford, 1989), especially the article by Steven Pumfrey.

This kind of realism is defended by Rouse Joseph , Knowledge and power: Towards a political philosophy of science (Ithaca and London, 1987); it underlies much of the work of the Edinburgh School — See, for example Barnes's exchange with Woolgar, ref. 2 above. Also see Nickles Thomas , “Good science as bad history: From the order of knowing to the order of being”, in McMullin Ernan (ed.), The social dimensions of science (Notre Dame, 1992), 85–129. In my opinion, some such limited (scientific) realism underlies most of the studies in the social history of scientific knowledge accomplished over the last quarter century. I here exclude the constructivist heuristic of Harry Collins, the reflexive school, radical ethnomethodology, and the hylozooical monism of Bruno Latour and his co-actants, which are briefly discussed towards the end of this essay.

Rouse , op. cit. (ref. 8), esp. p. 164.

See, for example, Hesse Mary , “Changing concepts and stable order”, Social studies of science, iv (1986), 714–26, and “Socialising epistemology”, in McMullin E. (ed.), Construction and constraint: The shaping of scientific rationality (Notre Dame, 1988), 97–122.

Barnes B. , “Problems of intelligibility and paradigm instances”, in Brown J. R. (ed.), Scientific rationality: The sociological turn (Dordrecht, 1984), 113–25.

Galison P. , How experiments end (Chicago, 1987), 10; Bloor D. , review of Galison's How experiments end, Social studies of science, xxi (1991), 186–9. Galison's mistake reveals a common tendency to attribute to all sociology of scientific knowledge the metaphysical idiosyncracies of the Bath school and its descendants.

Hesse , “Socialising epistemology” (ref. 10), 113–14.

Rudwick M. , The great Devonian controversy (Chicago, 1985), chap. 16.

Farley J. Geison G. , “Science, politics and spontaneous generation in nineteenth-century France: The Pasteur–Pouchet debate”, Bulletin of the history of medicine, xlviii (1974), 161–98.

Latour Bruno , The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1988). For critiques see Schaffer Simon , “The eighteenth brumaire of Bruno Latour”, Studies in the history and philosophy of science, xxii (1991), 174–92; Sturdy Steve , “The germs of a new enlightenment”, ibid. , 163–73; Amsterdamska Olga , “Surely you are joking, Monsieur Latour”, Science, technology and human values, xv (1990), 495–504.

Coulter H. L. , Divided legacy (Washington, D.C., 1977).

Smith F. B. , The retreat of tuberculosis 1850–1950 (London, 1988).

See Hodge , op. cit. (ref. 6).

See Cunningham Andrew , “William Harvey: The discovery of the circulation of the blood”, in Porter Roy (ed.), Man masters nature (London, 1987), 65–76.

See Platt A. , “Aristotle on the heart”, in Singer C. (ed.), Studies in the history and method of science (2 vols, Oxford, 1921), ii, 520–32, and Huxley T. H. , “On certain errrors respecting the heart attributed to Aristotle”, Nature, xxi (1880), 1–5. I owe these references to Wilson L. G. , see his article on Aristotle in the Dictionary of scientific biography, i, 266–7.

On some of the difficulties of replication, and for a wonderful evocation of the changing “natural history” of physics labs, see Stansfield R. G. , “Could we repeat it?”, in Roche J. (ed.), Physicists look back: Studies in the history of physics (Bristol, 1990), 88–110.