Like it or not, a big picture of the history of science is something which we cannot avoid. Big pictures are, of course, thoroughly out of fashion at the moment; those committed to specialist research find them simplistic and insufficiently complex and nuanced, while postmodernists regard them as simply impossible. But however specialist we may be in our research, however scornful of the immaturity of grand narratives, it is not so easy to escape from dependence – acknowledged or not – (...) on a big picture. When we define our research as part of the history of science, we implicitly invoke a big picture of that history to give identity and meaning to our specialism. When we teach the history of science, even if we do not present a big picture explicitly, our students already have a big picture of that history which they bring to our classes and into which they fit whatever we say, no matter how many complications and refinements and contradictions we put before them – unless we offer them an alternative big picture. (shrink)

The paper begins with a detailed reconstruction of the development of Ian Hacking’s theory of scientific ‘styles of reasoning’, paying particular attention to Alistair Crombie’s influence, and suggesting that Hacking’s theory deserves to come under the title ‘historical epistemology’. Subsequently, the paper seeks to establish three critical theses. First, Hacking’s reliance on Crombie leads him to adopt an outdated historiographical position; second, Hacking is unsuccessful in his attempt to distance historical epistemology from epistemic relativism; and third, Hacking has not offered (...) convincing criteria for individuating styles of reasoning. Keywords: Styles of reasoning; Historical epistemology; Ian Hacking; Alistair Crombie; Relativism; Sociology of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

The ArgumentBehind the dispute over the relative priority of theory and experiment lie conflicting philosophical images of the nature of scientific inquiry. One crucial image arose in the 1920s, when the logical positivists agitated for a “unity of science” that would ground all meaningful scientific activity on an observational foundation. Their goals and rhetoric dovetailed with the larger movements of architectural, literary, and philosophical modernism. Historians of science followed the positivists by tracking experimental science as the basis for scientific progress. (...) After World War II, historians and philosophers of science created an antipositivist movement, inverting the positivist idea that observation had epistemic priority. But this counter-movement retained the modernist aspiration to unity, now chaining observation to theory. Once again historians of science, following their philosophical colleagues, illustrated the new modernism with historical instances of observation dominated by theory.Either reductionist scheme, by privileging one activity over the other, dictates an overly constrictive periodization. We need a wider class of periodization models that will allow instrumentation, experimentation, and theory a partial autonomy without granting any one the sole legitimate narrative standpoint. Such a heterogeneous representation of historical traditions may, surprisingly, make better sense of the perceived coherence of activity across theoretical transitions than the monolithic modernist representation of science it displaces. (shrink)

In surveying the field of history and philosophy of science , it may be more useful just now to pose some key questions than it would be to lay out the sundry competing attempts to unify H and P. The ten problems this essay presents are grounded in a range of work of enormous interest—historical and philosophical work that has made use of productive categories of analysis: context, historicism, purity, and microhistory, to name but a few. What kind of account (...) are we after—historically and philosophically—when we attempt to address science not as a vacuous generality but in its specific, local formation? (shrink)

Concentrating on genetics, this paper examines the strength of the links between our biological science -- our biology -- and the particular history which brought that science into being. Would quite different histories have produced roughly the same science? Or, on the contrary, would different histories have produced other, quite different biologies? One emphasis throughout is on the kinds of evidence that might be brought to bear from the actual past in order to assess claims about what might have been. (...) Another emphasis is on the implications for debates on realism and antirealism about genes. (shrink)

There is a crisis of readership for work in our field, as in many other academic disciplines. One of its causes is a pathological form of the professionalism that we so greatly value. “Hyperprofessionalism” is a disease whose symptoms include self‐referentiality, self‐absorption, and a narrowing of intellectual focus. This essay describes some features and consequences of hyperprofessionalism in the history of science and offers a modest suggestion for a possible cure.

Counterfactual reasoning is broadly implicated in causal claims made by historians. However, this point is more generally recognized and accepted by economic historians than historians of science. A good site for examining alternative appeals to counterfactuals is to consider "what if" the Scientific Revolution had not occurred in seventeenth-century Europe. Two alternative interpretations are analyzed: that the revolution would eventually have happened somewhere else or that the revolution would not have happened at all. Broadly speaking, these two interpretations correspond to (...) the respective attitudes of philosophers and historians to the development of science. However, a case is presented for synthesizing the two interpretations into a normative historiography of science that would allow past and present concerns to interrogate each other. This exercise in counterfactual reasoning can be imagined in the spirit of a time traveler who aims to persuade, rather than simply understand, the natives he or she encounters. (shrink)

The launch of a revolutionary new scientific theory represents a rare occasion on which the apparently cumulative development of science might be influenced by particular events. Yet in the case of the Darwinian revolution it is often claimed that the theory of evolution by natural selection would have emerged more or less inevitably, given the scientific and cultural circumstances prevailing in mid-Victorian Britain. This essay challenges that claim by arguing that if Darwin had not been there to write his Origin (...) of Species the subsequent development of biology would have occurred along a line that steadily diverged from the sequence of events we actually experienced. There would certainly have been an evolutionary movement in the late nineteenth century, but there would have been no selection theory to disturb the progressionist assumptions of the time. A totally non-Darwinian evolutionism might not have generated the challenges that led to the emergence of modern genetics in the early twentieth century, resulting in a very different understanding of the relationship between development, heredity, and environment. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Among the many groups of scholars whose work now illuminates science, technology and medicine (STM), historians, it seems to me, have a key responsibility not just to elucidate change but to establish and explain variety. One of the big pictures we need is a model of the varieties of STM over time; one which does not presume the timeless existence of disciplines, or the distinctions between science, technology and medicine; a model which is both synchronic and diachronic, and both cognitive (...) and social. To that end, this brief paper presents a historical typology of STM from about 1700 to the present by focusing on four ‘ideal’ socio-cognitive types – four knowledge structures which correspond to four sets of social relations. To some extent these are period specific, but they do not have to be – hence, one may hope, the flexibility and usefulness of the model. (shrink)

This essay offers some preliminary and general considerations of big picture historiography of science, attempting an introductory specification of the topic by means of narratological analysis. It takes no strong, substantive position eitherpro or contrabig pictures themselves, preferring an approach which is more diagnostic and heuristic in nature. After considering what may be meant by a term such as ‘big picture’ and its cognates, it interrogates the kind of desire which could lie behind the wish expressed by the conference title (...) ‘Getting the Big Picture’: namely, that a big picture may be worth getting. It proceeds by way of a limited enquiry into what seems to be felt as a relative absence of big picture works in contemporary historiography, criticizing one very general historicocultural thesis which accounts for such an absence, advancing instead evolving features of the professional history of science community over the last thirty years as reasons for this relative absence. Concludingly, it turns the issues raised thus far on their head, in some measure at least. In trying for a more precise specification of the contemporary historiographical formation, we will discover eventually a situation not so much of relative absence of big pictures, rather one where there exists both frame and title for the picture, together with some distinguished painters' names; but where the canvas is only minimally marked, a partial and shadowy sketch, stylistically disjoined. Although this sounds paradoxical, a concrete paradox is not intended. The existence of frame and title enclosing mainly empty canvas indicates only the limitations of the pictorial metaphor for describing complex and developing sets of historiographical practice. What is instanced concludingly is less a theoretical paradox than an intelligible sequence and form of development which issues in a potential problem of practice. (shrink)