Sociology, Science Indexing, and Science Indicators in the ’60s and ’70s April 25, 2012
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Allen Newell, Arnold Thackray, Derek de Solla Price, Eugene Garfield, Gerald Holton, Harriet Zuckerman, Joshua Lederberg, Robert K. Merton, William Adair, Yehuda Elkana
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Simultaneously reading a recent Guardian article on the issue of open-access scientific publication, and Robert K. Merton’s “The Sociology of Science: An Episodic Memoir” (in The Sociology of Science in Europe, 1977, pp. 3-141) spurred me to wonder whether science studies could aid scientists to transition to a new model of scientific publication that is up-to-date with technology, but that also retains the intellectual and institutional virtues of present models. My answer to this question is: probably not.
The thought occurred to me because of Merton’s consideration of whether or not his 1940s-era understanding of how and why scientific credit is assigned the way it is could have led to the establishment of something like the Science Citation Index (SCI) prior to its actual appearance in 1963. Merton speculated on why it didn’t, but he also marked a growing contact in the 1960s and ’70s between the historians and sociologists of science, publication indexing, and the rising tide of “science indicators”. He reckoned this contact would grow as both the sociology of science and science metrics matured. Unfortunately, the 1970s actually seems to have been its high-water mark.
Merton, the DSB, and the Failed Digital Humanities of the 1960s April 15, 2012
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Alphonse de Candolle, Arnold Thackray, Charles Gillispie, Derek de Solla Price, Donald Beaver, Francis Galton, Harriet Zuckerman, Robert K. Merton, Robert Young, Roy MacLeod, Steven Shapin, Thomas Kuhn
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Following up on a reference in Gieryn 1982, I’ve been reading over Robert K. Merton’s long essay, “The Sociology of Science: An Episodic Memoir,” in The Sociology of Science in Europe (1977), pp. 3-141. I’ll post more on it soon in the context of other recent posts on this blog. For the moment, I’ll just say that the essay is thin on “norms”, “counter-norms”, “ambivalence”, etc. It is mainly about the intellectual influences on the sociology of science that developed in the 1960s and ’70s. It is also about the methods, ambitions, and projects of what Merton still regarded as a nascent discipline. It turns out these projects are well worth a tangential post, or two.
In this post, I want to focus on Merton’s account of his involvement with the planning of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (DSB), and the computerized “data bank” that didn’t accompany it.
The Post-Marxist Social History of Science of Morris Berman, Pt. 1 April 12, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Book Club, Ideology of Science.Tags: Arnold Thackray, F. R. Leavis, Humphry Davy, J. D. Bernal, Jeremy Bentham, Max Weber, Michael Faraday, Morris Berman, William Thomas Brande
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The main source for my last post, Morris Berman’s Social Change and Scientific Organization: The Royal Institution, 1799-1844 (1978), is a very good example of a post-Marxist social history of science. The historiographical tradition of the social history of science will benefit from some reflection, because it has been eclipsed for a quarter century, though some of its basic strategies remain phenomenally influential. The key component, now largely missing, is the sustained analysis of how the direction of scientific research programs align with their social and economic milieu (though, of course, sources of patronage remain a subject of interest).
Unsurprisingly, Marxism is a key methodological source for the social history of science. Traditionally, Marxist history of science maintained a narrow conceptual gap between general scientific inquiry and research related to technological development and industrial production. Marxist analysts — the crystallographer and intellectual J. D. Bernal (1901-1971) being a prime example — usually emphasized the historical connection between scientific research and capitalist and militaristic interests. Generally, they would not deny the importance of research pursued for intellectual interest, but they would view a self-imposed isolation of this research to be a bourgeois conceit. Eager to point out that fundamental advances and practical problems often feed off each other, Marxists urged that scientists should take an active, conscious interest in social and political problems.
In his analysis of the history of the RI, Berman retains the Marxist emphasis in class interest, using a prosopographical analysis of the RI’s proprietors to convincingly chart a shift from an early dominance by the agenda of landed interests to a post-1815 dominance by a reform-minded class of business, legal, and medical professionals. (more…)
The Bounds of Natural Philosophy: Temporal and Practical Frontiers, Pt. 1 March 28, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Natural Philosophy/Anthropo-cosmology.Tags: Arnold Thackray, Crosbie Smith, Geoffrey Cantor, Jack Morrell, Jed Buchwald, Norton Wise, Paul Lucier, Simon Schaffer
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Lord Kelvin: still natural philosophical after all these years
If we accept the working idea that 18th-century natural philosophy could be characterized by philosophers’ willingness to incorporate ideas about the physical nature of the world into a general scheme accounting for various natural “economies” or “cosmologies” that flowed into questions encompassing the characteristics of life, body, mind, epistemology, ethics, society, theology, and politics; then we need to define how far this universalizing philosophical practice extended, both temporally and within particular cultures, and what sorts of things have happened at the boundaries.
This was an active question through the 1980s. One common answer was professionalization and specialization (not to be conflated!—notably see Paul Lucier’s “The Professional and the Scientist in Nineteenth-Century America” in the latest Isis; the piece opens with an unusually lively historiographical discussion). In 1983, Simon Schaffer saw boundary creation as a consequence of the political dangers attributable to public natural philosophical demonstrations. Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray were also very clear on this point in Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1981), discussing how the BA was established in the 1830s, both to promote scientific work, and to constrain the bounds of (and thus objections to) scientific investigation and thought.
It was likewise in this same early-to-mid 19th-century British context that William Whewell (1794-1866) coined the term “scientist” in response to an injunction by Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834) that men of science should not pretend to the more general and eminent title of philosopher. (See also Schaffer (1991) on Whewell as a critic of knowledge claims.) In 1986, Schaffer had been very explicit in denoting the establishment of new philosophies and institutions of science as signaling the “end of natural philosophy”, which also entailed the rewriting of histories of older discoveries to accommodate the new understanding of “science”, singular.
Of course, natural philosophy did not “end”. To begin with, “scientists” were by no means prevented from discussing issues outside of their defined jurisdictions, nor, conversely, was delimited expertise devoid of broader implications. In fact, the term “scientist” did not even catch on until much later. However, it is clear that the situation did change, and some effort was put into figuring out how the intellectual and moral terrain of science was reconfigured. (more…)
Primer: The British Association December 17, 2008
Posted by Will Thomas in EWP Primer.Tags: Arnold Thackray, Charles Babbage, David Brewster, Jack Morrell, Samuel Coleridge, William Vernon Harcourt, William Whewell
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In 1830, Britain was on the cusp of one of its most famous eras of scientific activity. The year before Charles Darwin unassumingly set out aboard the Beagle, the first volume of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology came off the printing press to wide and immediate acclaim. The experimentation of Michael Faraday and James Joule in the 1830s would help spark the development of modern electromagnetic theory and thermodynamics in the ensuing decades. The Cambridge Mathematical Tripos was already beginning to churn out rigorously prepared physical theorists.
Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
However, the future, as always, was unclear, and there were a number of people who were gloomy about the state of affairs in British science. One was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Charles Babbage, who was frustrated in his search for funding for a calculating engine he had designed (and for which he would be most remembered thanks to the folk history of computing). In 1830 he gave vent to his gloom and frustration through a book entitled Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of its Causes, which was picked up by the Edinburgh experimentalist and scientific journal editor David Brewster (best known today as the name behind Brewster’s angle), who ran extracts in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, and published his own screed in the Quarterly Review.
Babbage and Brewster were concerned that British science, unsupported by the state (which had just dissolved the Admiralty’s floundering Board of Longitude in 1828), was well behind the Continent, particularly France, where post-Revolutionary governments generously supported science and (more…)
Understanding Scientific Communities April 13, 2008
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Arnold Thackray, David Edgerton, David Kaiser, Operations Research, Paul Ceruzzi, Steven Shapin
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To elaborate a bit on Friday’s post, this chart
represents a fairly wide study of a lot of different communities–understanding their official organizational relationships, understanding who the players are, what their backgrounds are, who they talked with, and understanding what they thought the purpose of their work was. It is impossible to simply take a text produced by one part of this chart and understand its historical significance, without understanding what the other people on this chart were doing. In other words, it would be almost impossible to really understand the historical development of a field like operations research (OR) if presented in a case study format. This is why I think it’s so important that journal articles do as much work as possible to guide the audience around a historical milieu.
Understanding a community and its culture is really a challenge, and I’d love to see some intriguing new ways of writing about it. On the subject of OR, Paul Ceruzzi was just telling me about his new book on the development of military contractors (OR, R&D, etc…) in the Tyson’s Corner area of the DC suburbs, which I think is a pretty illuminating approach to studying a poorly-defined community. Dave Kaiser’s new book on the postwar physics bubble looks at shifts in physics pedagogy reflecting a shifting physics demography. David Edgerton’s Warfare State comes off as a bit clunky, but it’s an important new perspective on the British state-sponsored scientific community (and others). Several months ago, I mentioned an internet project we’re hoping to get some funding for here at the AIP to try and create an internet guide to the postwar American physics elite. But this is an old question–back in the ’70s, for example, Steve Shapin and Arnold Thackray were pushing prosopography as an important method of studying what we mean by a scientific community–but prosopography has had only a few champions since. Are there any other exemplars out there?
Ether Wave Propaganda 