Constructivist History Of Science Research Paper

1. Local Cultures

In their exemplary study of the early modern culture of experiment, Shapin and Schaffer lay out some of the central concerns of the constructivist history of science (Shapin and Schaffer 1985). Focusing on the dispute between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes concerning the validity of Boyle’s famous air-pump experiments, they use Hobbes’s critique of Boyle’s experiments to lay bare the interests underlying them and the strategies that Boyle and his allies adopted to convince others of the experiments’ reliability. They demonstrate how even such an apparently universal cornerstone of the scientific method as experiment has its origins in particular local and contingent circumstances. Making science local and examining the interests that underlie the articulation and resolution of scientific debates have been preoccupations of constructivist history. Other pioneering studies include accounts of the ways that disillusionment with rational philosophy and mechanistic notions of causality in postwar Weimar Germany informed interpretations of quantum theory (Forman 1971), and of the role social interests played in debates concerning the anatomical structure of the brain in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh (Shapin 1979). Such studies emphasize the way in which such interests are constitutive rather than contingent features of even the most apparently abstract and technical forms of knowledge.

One important outcome of constructivist history is the recognition that even the issue of what kind of activity might count as science is often the product of locally articulated debates and controversies. Not only did Boyle and Hobbes disagree as to what might reliably be inferred from the outcome of air-pump experiments, but they also disagreed as to whether or not doing such experiments should be counted as a reliable way of generating scientific knowledge at all. Similarly, the scientific and the medical establishment who opposed the introduction of continental ideas concerning evolution and transmutation into early Victorian England did so both because they did not recognize the practices or the practitioners involved as being properly scientific and because they disagreed with the theories themselves (Desmond 1989). As the labels ‘science’ and ‘scientific’ gained in cultural value, so too did different groups of knowledge producers disagree more vociferously as to what kinds of people and what kinds of activity should be accorded those labels (Gieryn 1999). Constructivist historians have identified the business of policing the constantly changing boundaries of science as a crucial part of science’s history. Through institutions, regimes of training, control of resources, and access to networks of patronage, natural philosophers and scientists have struggled to circumscribe and discipline their own and others’ knowledge producing activities.

This localist historical perspective leads to recognition of the extent to which the production and validation of scientific knowledge are contingent upon more or less informal networks of trust. In order for particular groups or individuals to be considered reliable spokespersons for nature, they have to be trustworthy. They have to be the kinds of people who can be relied upon to tell the truth. This opens up the possibility of producing a cultural history of truth and objectivity. The marks of being trustworthy vary according to time and place. In early modern England for example, trustworthiness was considered the hallmark of the gentleman (Shapin 1994). As a result, many of the informal (and more formal) rules of early modern gentlemanly behavior became enshrined as codes of conduct for the nascent scientific community as well. Some historians have argued that the increased scientific reliance on precision measurement and self-registering instrumentation since the beginning of the nineteenth century may be regarded as efforts to circumvent the need for trusting individuals with knowledge production (Schaffer 1988). Others have pinpointed the increasing quantification of science as a means of overcoming the problem of trust in the production and particularly in the transfer of knowledge (Porter 1995).

2. The Material Culture Of Experiment

The constructivist history of science pays attention not only to experiment as a form of inquiry, but also to the process of experiment. Experimentation is taken to be a matter of human agents actively engaged in constructing the natural world around them (Gooding et al. 1989). From this perspective, the material culture of experiment becomes a crucial focus of attention. Historians have worked to recover the kinds of material resources required for successful experimentation. They have traced the emergence of the laboratory as a specialized space within which experiments take place. They have emphasized the ways in which successful manipulation of nature requires the experimenter to manipulate material and social resources successfully as well (Latour 1988). Michael Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic induction, for example, involved as much his marshalling of the Royal Institution’s considerable resources as it was the outcome of his artful manipulations in the laboratory (Morus 1998). Constructivist historians have identified as well the important ways in which individual scientific reputations hinge upon recognition of the property relationship between experiment and experimenter. Priority disputes in science are frequent and virulent precisely because of the ways in which experiments embody the skills and reputations of their makers (Iliffe 1992).

Seeing experiment as a skilled activity, constructivist historians have focused much attention on understanding the historical origins of the kinds of skills required in order to carry out experiments. They have investigated how particular skills have been transferred into the laboratory from other settings, such as workshops or factories. Historical experiments have been replicated in an effort to better understand the tacit, unarticulated skills required for their successful performance. Such studies have shown how iconic experiments such as James Prescott Joule’s famous paddle-wheel experiments establishing the mechanical equivalent of heat during the 1840s, were contingent upon the technical know-how that Joule and his workers derived from their experiences in the family brewery (Sibum 1995). Increasingly also, historians have looked at the politics of skill in the laboratory and elsewhere, investigating the division and distribution of hierarchies of skilled activity within science at different times and places. Much attention has been devoted to the historical transmission of material resources and skilled personnel that accompanies the standardization of experimental practices. Work in this vein has shown how experiments move from being instances of highly skilled, difficult to replicate, and delicate procedures performed in highly circumscribed settings to being robust, standardized, and readily reproducible embodiments of group knowledge (Galison 1987).

Apparently self-evident features of experimentation, such as precision measurement, are similarly shown by constructivist historians to have a history. Far from being a routine and unproblematic aspect of scientific activity, measurement can be taken to be an expression of particular cultural values (Wise 1995). The rise of metrology, for example, was an expression of science’s increasing embeddedness in and contribution to a rapidly bureaucratizing and industrializing Western culture. Measurement could be regarded not only as a means of disciplining nature, rendering it more amenable to standardized routines of inquiry, but also as a means of disciplining the scientific workforce. Nineteenth-century scientific managers such as George Biddell Airy, the English Astronomer Royal, regarded their laboratories and observatories as industrial workplaces and used regimes of routinized measurement and calculation to impose an industrial discipline on their workforces (Smith 1991). In late nineteenth century laboratories at Cambridge or Glasgow, natural philosophers such as James Clerk Maxwell or Lord Kelvin saw the imposition of regimes of precision measurement in teaching and research as an expression of their affinity with industrializing society (Schaffer 1992). Increasingly, constructivist historians have investigated how adherence to cultural values like precision came to be taken as a hallmark of what it meant to be properly scientific. More recently, some historians have returned to matters of theory, using the analytical tools developed to understand experiment to look at theory as a form of cultural practice as well. From this perspective, processes of theory construction and dissemination are seen in terms of the pedagogical training and practical skills required to participate in highly specialized theoretical cultures (Galison and Warwick 1998).

3. Science As Performance

One notable outcome of constructivist historical work has been to make the identity of the scientific practitioner itself problematic. Being a scientist is not a self-evident activity: the word itself is of comparatively recent, early nineteenth century origin. Scientific practitioners in the past occupied a number of different cultural niches. Crucially, constructivist historians have shown how natural philosophers at different times and places have been engaged actively in carving out social spaces for themselves and their work. Galileo’s position at the Medici court in Renaissance Florence, for example, was not ready made. Galileo had to work hard to promote the idea of a philosopher or mathematician courtier that he could then fulfill (Biagioli 1993). He had to fashion himself into the kind of person who could easily inhabit that cultural niche and then to orient his work so that it would fit into the milieu of Italian Renaissance court life. The same could be said of Humphry Davy and his efforts to forge a place for the fashionable natural philosopher in Georgian London (Golinski 1992). Constructivist approaches share with the ‘new history’ an emphasis on the important role of individual agents’ artful engagement in constructing both themselves and their worlds.

Recent constructivist work has paid particular attention to the body of the scientific practitioner (Lawrence and Shapin 1998). This is an outgrowth of the constructivist insistence on viewing scientific practices and the knowledge they produce as being in crucial ways embodied. Scientific practitioners at different times and places have needed to be particular kinds of human beings with specific bodily attributes. The ways in which those attributes were held to be best produced—whether by birth, self-discipline, or rigorous training—have been a focus of increasing historical attention. Historians have examined, for example, the emergence of particular regimes of mental training in Victorian Cambridge and the ways in which candidates for mathematical honors were encouraged to train their bodies into being fit receptacles for their minds (Warwick, in Lawrence and Shapin 1998). The bodily interaction of practitioners with their experimental apparatus and the spatial organization of their laboratories have come to be recognized as playing an important role in the production of knowledge. The organization of such spaces and the kinds of material interactions between practitioners, and between them and their instruments, that have been taken to produce reliable knowledge are now seen as contingent and open to historical investigation.

Not only the identity and activities of the practitioner producing knowledge, but also the role of the audience for such productions are now recognized as constitutive. Audiences for scientific knowledge do not simply act as passive receivers of settled and unproblematic matters of fact. They have an important and active role to play in the articulation and resolution of controversies. During the early modern period and well into the nineteenth century, experiments were often performed before an audience. This was not simply a matter of demonstration. Members of the audience—prestigious and often named individually—played an important role in validating the knowledge produced. Their reputations could be used to underwrite the matters of fact they had witnessed. Audiences have participated in and responded to the processes of knowledge production through a variety of media, from direct witnessing to the virtual witnessing of reading a scientific paper at first hand, to the reception of second or third-hand reports in museums, newspapers, reviews, or popular handbooks. In the hands of states, public instrumental uses of science and technology have become devices for legitimating political power (Ezrahi 1990). Public scientific performances are an important part therefore of the dynamic process of knowledge-production and validation.

4. Science At Work

Constructivist historical analysis looks as well at the many ways in which nature has been used historically as a model for social organization. The constitution of the natural economy has frequently been used as a powerful argument in favor of particular ways of ordering society. Natural theology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example, was widely used as an argument in favor of existing social hierarchies. Evolutionary theories were similarly cited to support new, meritocratic visions of society. The proper social economy was often held to mirror the natural order. Constructivist historians have shown how models of nature and society in the past were frequently mutually sustaining. They were produced together. Discussions in mid-nineteenth century thermodynamics surrounding issues of work and waste in natural economies were coextensive with arguments concerning the proper organization of work and the minimization of waste in political economy (Smith and Wise 1989). Proponents of new forms of industrial organization, for example, looked to nature for their models. At the same time, scientists looked to factory organization as a model for the best means of ordering the search for truth.

In turn, different models for the organization of scientific work often expressed different understandings not only of how nature was ordered but also of the proper politics of knowledge production. Nineteenth century scientific gentlemen, for example, regarded scientific work as a highly disciplined, hierarchical, and increasingly specialized activity. In principle, it was open to all. In practice, however, it could only be conducted properly either by, or under the supervision of, properly trained and vocationally committed ‘gentlemen of science’ (Rudwick 1985). Other social groups had different notions of the politics of knowledge. The gentlemen’s vision excluded women and artisans, for example, from anything other than a supportive role in making knowledge. Working-class men, on the other hand, could construct their own very different accounts of how knowledge making ought to be organized (Secord 1994).

Through constructivist historical analysis, many of the traditional analytical categories employed by historians and sociologists of science have become recognized as being themselves in need of careful historical contextualization. Pronouncements by historical actors concerning matters such as the scientific method, experimentation, objectivity, or even more novel analytical categories such as skill, are not to be taken at face value. Such pronouncements usually carry considerable weight. The issue of what kind of activity might properly be considered as carrying out an experiment, for example, is not straightforward. At different times, experimentation has been regarded as both a public and a private process. It has been characterized as both a fundamentally communal and an essentially individual activity. What it means to be a skilled worker, again, has changed a great deal since the early modern period. Skill, like method, or even science itself, is a historical construction. By looking at science as a pre-eminently cultural activity, constructivist histories of science have made it possible to raise a whole host of new questions concerning the ways in which human beings, in the past, have tried to make sense of the world around them. Rather than seeing science as a static, monolithic edifice, constructivist history recognizes it as a constantly changing process of production, reproduction, and consumption, its boundaries continually shifting and its meaning always open to renegotiation.

Bibliography:

1. Biagioli M 1993 Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
2. Desmond A 1989 The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
3. Ezrahi Y 1990 The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
4. Forman P 1971 Weimar culture, causality, and quantum theory, 1918–1927: Adaptation by German physicists and mathematicians to a hostile intellectual environment. Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3: 1–115
5. Galison P 1987 How Experiments End. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
6. Galison P, Warwick A (eds.) 1998 Cultures of Theory. Special Issue: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. Pergamon, Oxford, UK
7. Gieryn T 1999 Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
8. Golinski J 1992 Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment Britain, 1760–1820. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
9. Gooding D, Pinch T, Schaffer S (eds.) 1989 The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
10. Iliffe R 1992 In the warehouse: Privacy, property and priority in the early Royal Society. History of Science 30: 30–68
11. Latour B 1988 The Pasteurization of France. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
12. Lawrence C, Shapin S (eds.) 1998 Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
13. Morus I R 1998 Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition and Experiment in Early Nineteenth-century London. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
14. Porter T 1995 Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
15. Rudwick M 1985 The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
16. Schaffer S 1988 Astronomers mark time: Discipline and the personal equation. Science in Context 2: 115–45
17. Schaffer S 1992 Late Victorian metrology and its instrumentation: A manufactory of ohms. In: Bud R, Cozzens S (eds.) Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions and Science. SPIE Optical Engineering Press, Bellingham, WA Secord A 1994 Science in the pub: Artisan botanists in early nineteenth century Lancashire. History of Science 32: 269–315
18. Shapin S 1979 The politics of observation: Cerebral anatomy and social interests in the Edinburgh phrenology disputes. In: Wallis R (ed.) On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge. University of Keele Press, Keele, UK
19. Shapin S 1994 A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-century England. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
20. Shapin S, Schaffer S 1985 Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
21. Sibum H O 1995 Reworking the mechanical value of heat: Instruments of precision and gestures of accuracy in early Victorian England. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26: 73–106
22. Smith C, Wise N 1989 Energy & Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
23. Smith R A 1991 National observatory transformed: Greenwich in the nineteenth century. Journal of the History of Astronomy 22: 5–20
24. Wise N (ed.) 1995 The Values of Precision. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ