Transcripts For CSPAN3 Science And Intellectual History 20151213

At in the History Department vanderbilt university. We are here today to talk about a number of things. Im sure that more will come out in the discussions. The intellectual work of inence, the place of science intellectual history and the relations between science and intellectual history. Many other threads as well. We have four scholars here today well placed to pick up these themes from, intriguingly, different kinds of angles and backgrounds. Let me go ahead and introduce them. To my left is henry cole, an assistant professor at yale where he holds appointments in the medical school and History Department. He is also on the faculty of cognitive science. He is working on what will be a terrific book on the history of mind and Brain Science in the late 19th century currently titled other mines other ds. David is the author of storytelling and science, rewriting oppenheimer and the nuclear age. Just out, his attitudes towards studying science in the modern united states, he is interested in nuclear history, environmental history, and the history of energy. He is currently working on a book about the way that Rachel Carson and other in other contemporary authors have shaped views on environmentalism. Andrew is a professor at harvard. He is especially interested in engagements between religion and science. Many of you know his important book, science, democracy, and the american university, from the civil war to the cold war, coming out from Cambridge University press. He is now at work on a similarly about theg book history of fear of science as a Cultural Impact since the mid20th century, temper tentatively titled the science of challenging postwar authority in america. Last but not at least, rebecca, associate professor at harvard. Her first book was called laboratory called wonderful, experiments with mice, mazes, and men. Her new book will be published in november with Yale University press, entitled database of dreams, the last quest lost quest to catalog humanity. She has been a visiting scholar in berlin for years and their on the topic of archives, historic data and cold war rationalitys. Ground rules are relatively brief, comments somewhere from seven to 10 minutes from each of our roundtables i guess a rectangular table participants. A quick round of followups to see if there are any threads that come out to see that panelists want to respond to them. Then we will open it up to you. I will just mention that the audience may need to come up to the microphone in the center of the room to ask questions of the panel. We hope that this can be as conversational as possible, getting a real discussion going on about the links between science and intellectual history. We will go on down the line and we will begin with henry cole. Mr. Cole thanks. I should say that ive never been at or participated in a roundtable that was at a roundtable. Never. I want to start by outing myself. Unlike i think anyone else up here, my main appointment is not in the History Department and not in the faculty of arts and sciences, it has been in medical school. An interesting place to have your main appointment. The reason i mention that the ticket shakes my answer to the question implicit in the title of the roundtable. Colleagues1300 other in the medical school alone, and there are for humanists. Whathe question is not is the place of science in intellectual history justifying or thinking about the nature of science. Doesuestion is why history matter. Obviously science matters. Thats the confrontation we have in debates over the curriculum down there. When i teach in the college three quarters of my students come from the natural and social sciences and im the only history class that they take. Another interesting aspect of thinking about this question. Im maybe a strange place to start, because i will think about it in that very direct way. Not necessarily the place in intellectual history, what does history have to say about . Cience i will do it in to reparts. The first will be in my own brief work around the Human Sciences and the second part we , anxietiesd to today and possibilities of the engagement between historians and scientists today. As sarah mentioned, my book project is called other mines, set in the late 19th century in a range of fields that im calling and others call the Human Sciences, including psychology, psychiatry, and sociology, as well as education theory. A range of people started to essentially attack the philosophical problem of other mines. The socalled other minds. Using the socalled new tools that they were developing in the sciences. This was a part of a standard story of the shift away from introspection before the experimental studies of the minds of others took over in psychology in the 20th century. The claim of the book, in part, is that in doing so, in p the minds not just of themselves and other psychologist, which was the german model from the 19th century, but the minds of children and nonhuman animals and others, these scientists did something kind of interesting. What they find in the minds of other beings, others, is the Scientific Method itself. Of studies, studies of rats, mazes, children studying puzzles and other things, these human scientists sanction anxious about their own science and legitimacy find the rudiments of the Scientific Method that they are defending. This is kind of to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The upshot, the thing i want to take away from our conversation today, there is an interesting slipping between subject and object. Between the scientist doing the studying and the claim of the organism in the maze or solving the puzzle that i think we can draw from. The reason i think we can draw from it is whatever you think of that slippage, and they were anxious about it as well, it was a moment where a group of people digging seriously about thinking slipped back and forth a tween the cognition that they were studying and serious anxieties and proclamations about methods. The reason i think this might be useful is that as a group of people who study cognitive practices at some level, we think about thinking in various ways, in physical and social ways. There is a potential, a risky potential to do something similar. What i mean by that Something Like how to put it . Cognitionhat passed is on the table to a certain degree in history of science and intellectual history is interesting because mostly when we talk about past thinking, we do so in terms that are relatively implicit. The direct engagement and thinking about cognitive practices, psychology, and the theory of mind in general is very limited in the history of science in intellectual history. It happens, of course, but for reasons i will mention in a minute, we backed away from that engagement. The neuroscientist down the hall from me in the med school who study decision. , who study judgment under uncertainty, if i were to say im directly engaging with them in my project on the history of the Human Sciences, you could get kind of a bad taste in the back of your mouth. For good reason, i think. There is this legacy of psychohistory, nero history, of recent calls for deep and big history. They leave us sort of anxious about the relationship today between different ways of talking about thinking and thinking about thinking. What i wanted to just kind of put on the table for us is that i think that anxiety is justified, but i think that we could maybe push it a bit. What i mean by that, explicitly, to a certain degree the thing that we fear, the thing we are anxious or skeptical of in the direct engagement by historians with other kinds of scholars thinking about thinking is the kind of big manifesto ask ue claims. That has been championed by a group of people who wind up being more controversial than they need to be. There is a lot of engagement to a local level. My colleagues in the cognitive science department, the kinds of theories they are pursuing are not the gigantic series of everything, solutions to every problem, the kind of cause i really just ted talkesque talks of a solution, they are much more grounded. Closer to the ways that we talk about people. How do people with particular contexts decide to do things or come up with hypotheses . Its the kind of things its the kind of thing that historians are interested in. If we could dial back from the , from the calls to go big and go deep and treated more locally, i do think that there is much profit to be gained. I think that what we sort of miss out on when we pursue a kind of was i behaviorist notion, thatrist whats going on is thinking the way that we do, were doing this sort of tacit version of what i talked about 100 years ago. Going back and forth between how i account for my own thinking and how others are thinking. There is a sort of slippage that happens. , not inke hold of that a manifesto way, but in a more local way, weakening gauge with social scientists on our own terms. Thats what i wanted to say. I will pass the mic. David thanks. Thanks to henry and everyone for being here. I bet to be part of this. Every fall i come to this conference and a few weeks later i go to the science society. Timee spent a lot of thinking about the connection between the two and im glad to be part of this conversation. My working assumption is that science should be a major part of social history. Maybe thats less controversial. More controversial and in my unguarded moments i have sort of should beat science the Major Intellectual activity going on in the market of history. That itsink particularly important that thats literally true. Some of you may already be making cases in your head for other fields that are more important. The reason i mention that, whats crucial to appreciate is of scientificope activity i tend to focus on postwar, postworld war ii american culture. Notgh my thoughts are restricted to that time and place. Years the last couple of we are now producing over 50,000s phds threeyear. A recent 2014 report found that there were 16. 2 million americans employed in what they call science and engineering related jobs. These are big numbers. I am certainly not going to peoplehat all of those are or would identify as intellectual. I do think that many of them, even though they would not count as into count as intellectuals, they are nevertheless a part of the structure of scientific activity that produces what we would call intellectual work. They are a part of science as intellectual activity in some way. In fact i think that one of the is thateresting things we can mull over the science of intellectual work and how it destabilizes some familiar notions of what intellectual work is and how knowledge and ideas are generated. Happens int it science in ways that are different, if not unique but distinct from other fields. In any case on largely going to skip over the case for including the history of science in intellectual history. How we might think about an intellectual history of which science in which science is a violent vibrant part. Is imn by that not trying to make this an additive claim. This is another area in which we ,hould train our interest tools, and intellectual stories. Though thats certainly true. Im after science is not simply just another subject is lovely, but finance is something that prompts us to think about the intellectual history in distinctive ways. In terms that we might not think about or might not think about as fully if we were not sticking with science. So, im going to do two things. The first is sort of the nature of science as an intellectual confess iwhich i will am daunted to do, because its not really what i teach. Im more the if theres a production side and consumption , the nature of science as a social activity, it seems germane to our purposes here. I will give that a go. And so to that question on the first point on the one point, what is the nature of science in the public sphere . In aot feeling bold enough guarded way to answer the question of what science is. But i think that it suffices to point out that it is the of being varied and complicated. However, i think that that is an important enough point, given our sort of default assumption to science as a unitary thing or method that unites very scientific disciplines. Its worth emphasizing that it varies tremendously. The work of contemporary biomedical researchers is very different from what einstein was doing in the Patent Office in switzerland at the turn of the last century. Things have any particular relationship or similarity to what Rachel Carson was doing in the early 1960s. Widely according to discipline, culture, practitioner, institution, era, geography and so forth. Nevertheless i will identify five things that i think are ofsonably common features the social aspects of science, which will then have intellectual ramifications. All of these things over the common features of science as a social activity that matter as an intellectual story. The first is that it tends to be highly collective and collaborative. I will leave it to others to say how distinct that is. It is certainly my impression century work in the Natural Sciences has suggested a high degree of preplanning. Than existed for most of humanitys scholars. Among the many interpretive problems that have emerged from that reality is sorting out the. Oles its easy to say we have administrators, publicists, fundraisers, technicians for meteors. Right . But there is a lot of good scholarship blurring those distinctions and there is good reason to think of all of those groups as critical players in can callprise that we science. One, collaboration. Requireso, science funding. Very often a lot. Its expensive. It requires physical space, personnel. The material conditions of science or its absence are significant in shaping the questions it can be asked. Im not going to claim that this , but it seems particularly characteristic of a lot of modern science and i dont think that all intellectual work would fall into that category and have the same requirements. Head, and this is where my has been recently institutions matter and they matter really deeply. Again, perhaps more than other kinds of knowledge in the modern world, scientists science is produced within many institutional settings, mostly quite large. Research is on this phenomenon of scientific celebrity and why we sort of in thinking about science as the product of individual effort and individual mimes when in fact that it is a really profound distortion of hall how almost all scientific action happens. I read that as a way of and making humane and enterprise that has grown fairly bureaucratic, anonymous, and unsettling in that anonymity and largescale. For number four, this is something that its not all science but i can think many examples of it. The intellectual work that goes on in science can be hidden. Particularly in innovation. , was on the airplane down here reading a book on missile guidance accuracy. I dont think that we could take as anbject of his book idea or a piece of intellectual work. What we are talking about john dewey or something, right . At the same time i dont see how he can avoid recognizing coming up with an inertial navigation with sustained engagement on ideas. It is maybe not wholly dissimilar. Finally, i think that science is burdened and i chose that were carefully with the expectations of objectivity and certainty. I say burdened because they think the expectation of objectivity can limit and restrict science as much as open up avenues for it. Thats why, for example, the classic change skeptics with site if it had no authority and could be easily dismissed, skeptics wouldnt be trying to punch holes in it. At the same time climate it seems equally clear that science rarely if ever drives policy. Im going to tell the students what we are going to do is take a story that looks like a story of technological innovation and see how it is actually a story of politics. Right . That can be really of skewered, because it looks technological innovation has a way of naturalizing itself and making it seem as though its the only way the culture could have gone. Not only are the politics they are, in reality, but they are also the driving force. To quickly recap that, collected at collective activity funding institutions through anonymity and objectivity. Each of those things would you know putting forth its own challenge for those of us who want to break history and vice versa. Its that last area, the interaction between science and the public, that i want to focus on. Particularly on storytelling and the kinds of stories that we tell about science and why. What do they matter for the. Ublic understanding her book, often cited as groundbreaking, has the sheep think its ant i open question as to whether it has achieved lust achieved acclaim because of its technical soundness or because of the eloquent writing in the kind of comforting imagery of the mimetic path that she sort of wants to restore through the beautiful natural garden imagery that she is very much into. So, the interesting thing i find it is not is that simply that the book was appealing because of how it was written. Thats fairly obvious when you read it. He book achieves authority it achieved authority as science because of that imagery. Right . It depends crucially on the nontechnical features document. They are impending for the intellectual authority on things that arent scientific. Literature showing that that might be true even within scientific circles, but i will leave that to others. I was curious, to what extent might that undermine the idea of these coming together . If all observers are making judgments about science based on a scientific factor, in what sense can we say that Scientific Authority gets it . If it is better to talk about nonscientific frameworks that are competing, some of which are more harmonious with Scientific Consensus than others and thus look like Scientific Authority, even though they are just like Everything Else about some kind of political or cultural value system. That might seem like its a slippery slope to relativism relativism, to which been accused. I dont think its true. You can certainly believe, as we should, but some things are naturally correct in some things are naturally wrong, it just means we have to disassociate the truth of a theory from why someone will accept it. I have highlighted this distinction between the production side of science, how it isenerated and how managed, use, perceived. History of science is been more on the former side and people have complicated well those prophecies of knowledge and production and we are really well into trying to understand the consumption side of it as well. And as often as not, the dominant factors in shaping this history really lie not in science, but in culture and politics. Then, to understand the consumption of science, we need to understand not just the science but the ideas that science is a part of. Thanks. Andrew can everyone hear me in the back . I dont really have my normal because of a cold. Maybe i should just wrap what i have written, i thought as i listened to henry and david talk. Then i thought i would say amen, that would probably not be sufficient for a roundtable, so i will go back to what i was planning to do. The institutional histories of the two fields, siam and intellectual history starting with a kind of sad milestone in the scholarly study of science. Diedtuesday charles puls at the age of 97. Anyone know who that is . A few of you, yes. His death was not widely reported, but im on the his serve listserv for the philosophy of science and it was an important event there. Fullhistorically minded officer philosophers of science at princeton. Most scholars now think of it as the bad days, the 50s and 60s. Best known for a major 1960 book called the edge of objectivity. He wrote an essay on the history of scientific ideas. He has come to symbolize, rightly or wrongly, the approach the thomas has said to have exploded two years later. Books, stamps, partly because of the title, standing for a body of work focusing on objectivity as the defining feature. Identifying the history of science as a mode of intellectual history in its most abstract form. The study of canonical works by the leading and most seminal theorists taken out of their s and viewed as abstract principles. Whether thats what he did is it another question, but he symbolizes this methodological approach against which virtually all students of science defined themselves. In this story couldnt has said to have open himself to all in the story he has been set to open himself to all kinds of attacks, operating on a purely intellectual plane. In short, the idea of the history of science as a form of high intellectual history. As i have suggested, this account has its shortcomings. The history and philosophy of science as its called, before various groups attacked the internal list, historical approach. Semiotics and so forth. Let me take you back to the 1920s and 1930s and those years. The history fields were more closely linked, perhaps indistinguishable in many instances. There was Something Else different, practitioners viewed those pursuits as expressions of what we would call history from below. To study science between the wars was to turn ones attention away from the traditional elite of 19th century history, kings, generals, leaders, to the domain of everyday culture and forces of cultural insurgency. Scientists of that era, especially social scientists, saw the work is fundamentally liberatory. They also felt deeply embattled in a society dominated in their view by big business and religious orthodoxy. This included historians who then identified with the science as they came to identify it more as humanist around world war ii. Between the war historians and many others who located science on the side of the people against those interest. They worked alongside historically minded philosophers. Of course, arthur lovejoy, John Herman Randall junior, other admirers of john dewey who saw the modern social sciences as the leading edge of moral and political progress, seeing it as not yet effectual in a society dominated yet again by the force of reaction. From scholars cry seeing science as an intimate part of the power structure around the apparatus of modernity. During the same decades we have seen the operations diverge as the history of science has become an increasingly separate pursuit, often undertaken outside History Departments entirely. Of course, intellectual historians are not always well integrated either, given the rides the rise of the modes of cultural history around the ascendance of intellectual and political history. Intellectual historians dont tend to have separate institutional poems and thatities in the way historians of science do. I should mention here the history of education, including higher education, which is likewise become a separate pursuit. In many ways, more so, carried out in schools of education rather than History Departments. Mal, none of this is to say that intellectual historians no longer write about science at all. Many of them do. But until recently we could take 2000 of that rough marker to focus entirely on the social sciences. Dorothy ross, tom haskell, many others wrote important works on the American Social sciences. A few self identified intellectual historians had much and because of this the conceptual traffic between those fields was rather limited. Also, this is true because of the other side historians of science focused on what was trumpeted as science in the 20th century, mainly the Natural Sciences in the areas of technology, medicine, that sort of thing. In the 21st century the barriers have started to come down. Thanks to my fellow panelists, others who are not with us, joe isaacs, john carson. The difference in subject matter often remains. Intellectual historians are much more likely than other historians to focus on the social sciences and vice versa. The same analytic tools can be applied and that has become a parent to the new generations of scholars in recent years. Intellectual historians have borrowed all kinds of methods from the history of science. Particularly in partly for that reason it is no longer a great bugaboo for historians of science. Its no longer as important as it once was to try to keep those disciplinary identities hermetically sealed off from one another. To keep people in those scholarly boxes. Have already outed ourselves. The question of how you would is a good of us here thing, signaling a degree of and laugh the degree of intellectual traffic that is important. I happen to be friends with rebecca, but there are few personal connections between the faculty in the history of the science departments and formally they have nothing to do with one another. People on their side say that we need to do people on either side say we need to do something about it, but theyve in saying that for years. There have been some obvious advantages in history of science programs that are larger than the other departments, but it is crucial to keep the intellectual traffic flowing. Historically minded practitioners in the natural and ,ocial sciences themselves doing work within the disciplines that they study. Them andarn a lot from vice versa. We all read each others books, borrowing liberally from each other. I would like to see these changes take on more substantial forms in the future by bringing together more regularly all the kinds of scholars who concern themselves with past and present modes of knowledge production. Intellectual historians can can learn a lot from sociologists and others about the material conditions of knowledge practices. Contexts andood at devote less attention to deeper causes, especially unintentional forces. I think that attending carefully to these kinds of contexts is crucial for intellectual historians. There are very powerful tools for doing so in these socially adjacent fields. I want to see this kind of traffic continue. Let me close with a quick plug for a particular study that i find useful. The concept of science itself, the many different uses by historical actors in that category, historians and sociologists have paid attention to boundary work, as they call it. Classic demarcation work of separating science from nonscience. Aboutis more to be said this, especially putting it into the context of other kinds of history. Especially i think how it varies through historical actors, not just science itself, distinguishing science from. Articular others the science of religion comes to mind. Science versus politics has been a concern for some sociologists. Philosophy, the humanities, the arts. Perhaps even business and their. All of those pursuits that have defined recent centuries. To get at some of the deepest dynamics of the modern era by exploring how various groups have defined science in relation to its perceived alternatives and competitors and different framings. A philosopher of science, sandra harding, once described it as good to think with. I will close by suggesting that science for intellectual historians is good and important to think about. Thanks. Rebecca i might need a microphone. Can you . Even though i dont have a cold, thank you. I have two microphones. Ok, tell me if you can hear me in the back. Ok, good. So, i want to thank david for organizing this panel and sarah for hosting it. It has been fruitful to hear what has come before and your connections to what we have talked about. I look forward to the discussion. I will begin with an anecdote that has stuck in my mind, even details some of the wrong. This was several years ago as we started on the tenure track at harvard. There was a great idea to host a conference that would examine the intersection of intellectual history and history of science. He kindly invited me to join the enterprise and cohosted. One of the things i remember most was a moment youre the end of the day when david turned to me and your i should just say as context, i had just joined the History Department but i got my phd in anthropology another outing anthropology of science. I think he was seeing me as a fieldentative of the itself. Something like that rebecca, arent historians of science ready to admit, after the publication of the book around the subjectivity of science itself, that they have forfeited any special rights they might once have had . That they should become part of intellectual history or admit that thats the case . Not to put too fine a point on it. Hoisted by their own vigorous specializing on the subject with metaphors, i took him to mean in a playful way that once historians have done it so thoroughly as to take on objectivity in the final precinct, isnt it time to give up the ghost of science as a privileged topic with a privileged set of raconteurs . The argument might go the intellectual i may be misremembering this. I think i said that i felt called upon to say no. We should not dissolve the field. I have often come back to that. This caused me to revisit what david was saying. And you and i both had David Hollander as a mom advisor. Points made in the book objectivity. The place of science within intellectual history. And also a few more words about subjectivity. A relatively new manifesto that is useful in that it is trying to do for subjectivity what previous authors did for objectivity. Book, which many cameu are familiar with, out in 2008. It derives from an earlier talk. Does objectivity have a history . This was years after the field of history of science had moved on. Conciliation of to the presentr day. They succeeded in breaking it up in the 1930s with marxist approaches. Later in the 1960s with the edinburgh. Ram from this led to the complete dominance of constructivism in the history of science as a field. Objectivity also derives from a longer paper called the image of objectivity. This was about modes of observation. Look at thetists things from which they derive their conclusions. This origin point remains significant. The word atlas is never mentioned. Although it is in fact a study of scientific atlas image collections. Anatomy, biology, cartography with a particular emphasis on the study of snowflakes. This is an interesting move. Historyol intellectual and yet they are bringing with them a sensibility that i would describe as the history of science. Through making images central, the authors trace the epistemic commitments. They trace how those changed. It is quite an ambitious book. It begins with the early modern. And goes up to the present day. There is no simple replacement. Each new regime supplements rather than supplants the others. They emphasize not abstracted regimes, but the ways that tools are used. Experiments, practices. Materiality of the atlases. The relationship of truth to nature is aided by mechanical objectivity. Succession, which arose in the 1930s and 1940s, scientists became more confident than any other time in history. Rather than reclining on. Echanical trained judgment became a necessary supplement to how significant the truth was discerned. And how patterns were discerned in evidence. The arrival of trained judgment in the epistemic findings of objectivity. Scientists in the 30s and 40s were incorporating these faculties into their work. Were identifying the process of science making. They saw science making as shot through with subjectivity. Objectivity the book is a kind of metaintellectual history. To end with some thoughts about subjectivity. Talken chapin presented a about sciences of subjectivity. Soon oftenoo relegated to being the rosencrantz and guildenstern of intellectual history. Hustled off the stage to sound. Too soon. We can add to objectivity doses of subjectivity. Hand, purer subjectivity is a dustbin concept. In redressing this, chapin makes two moves. Has a recourse intellectual history and rather traditional way. To understand how subjectivity he says that judgment must be understood among aesthetic philosophers. Kant ande, immanuel others. He continues by looking at ethnography is subjectivity. How do opera lovers come to love opera . How do marijuana lovers come to . Ove marijuana that is his most recent project. That he is me is recruiting intellectual history as a kind of ethnography of subjectivity. Employ ahese projects. Ange of methods they draw on whatever method is demanded to pending on the need. Science is still special in the studies. I suspect that this question can only be answered by the individual practitioner. At their own epistemic commitments. [applause] we have a lot on our rectangular table. My mind is buzzing with questions. Is science special . To our panelists want to just pluck one or two things out of what was said and respond to it . Andy i want to champion davids definition of science. Scholars have tried to define science. There is always some description of method or subject matter. Never about a kind of social organization. This is a really important move. Ive done a lot of work in the history of science. I have tried to take a stab at a very broad definition. Might be called science over 500 years of history. A little bit more like the usual definitions. There are a lot of different ways of defining science. It is really helpful. David that moved to define science and social activity is the way somebody who is a historian of intellectual history would approach the problem. I am wondering whether or not i should be doing that. Is assigned special . Science special . If i do look at media discourse. For my purposes, it is special. Theres a certain logic to that. It does matter. To what extent that media discourse is right. Betweeneparation consumption and production. My perception is that there is more work on the production side. Ignoring that is seeming less tenable. Andy what emerges from recent scholarship is that lots of kind of knowledge have tried or claimed objectivity. It is not unique about science. It is unique about that. E live in the times that we live in. Even if you are following immediate perception of what science is, there are always ways to uncover what is not being covered in a kind of definition. The thing about Sciences Category of analysis, it needs to be interrogated every level. What is seen as outside are unimportant. Is a particular kind of covering category as opposed to the social sciences are environmental science. When do we use the more particular terms. Lets have some questions. We need to come up to the microphones for these questions. I want to applaud the panel. I think it was excellent. I want to ask henry question. Im fascinated that there is a historian in the medical program. I had been a graduate student at stanford. On the history of psychology. I asked who now is teaching the history of psychology at harvard . Was, why would we want to do that . Whether, isng interesting they decided they should have an intellectual historian. Agree that there is a lot of traffic between the two disciplines. Is there that kind of receptivity among the scientists themselves. Henry in the medical school, there are four of us. There is receptivity most never part of the students. Has anyone here been to medical school . It is crazy. They sit for five hours a day five days a week and a rotating group of lecturers come in and andure them on biochemistry also some other things and one of them is a historian. The reaction is amazing. Structure, they get the stuff they get the other lectures and all the sudden in we look at why do we think that the foundations of medicine are science. Everyone of those made students students. Responded to that. Psychology is a different story. Theres a course that has 350 students enrolled. No one knows why this happened. They can get their humanities credit by taking something that is the history of what they do. The real reason is slightly more interesting. There is a real call in the l faculty for this kind of interdisciplinary course. Convergences weird where both groups are interested in that kind of conversation. Not in a craven way. Not that we all have to go toward stem courses. What are the ideas the ring to the topic, students and faculty. We should be open to the resources of the scientific community. That is a very live debate. Complex numeral eural complex. He is about how the mind works. Fridays of history. Varieties of history. Not just interrogating his critics but more than that. More questions. My name is richard keating. David, one area where scientific is notn and production the humanities so much as in the arts. Making movies. Putting on plays. Work. Analogies might there is a play in the west end of london called photograph 51. The woman who contributed to the finding of dna but didnt get credit and didnt get the nobel prize. The fight between the individual and the collective. Who gets credit for the discoveries. What her mistake was in reading an extra rate. Science becomes an interpretive as well as the discovery activity. I was really struck by making a film and putting on the play serving as a kind of scientific research. They would be like if you made a movie and there were several directors on the set. That dna research, there was watson and crick but there was also rosalyn franklin. David your question reminded me that i was thinking of the arts. I am wondering why i didnt write it down. I hadnt thought about film in place. I was thinking more in terms of the visual arts. There is a literature in our history about the myth of the great artist. Which has some important parallels with what we are talking about. Similar things are accomplished. Both film and stage are great examples. Even this idea of Competition Among directors for credit. Even that oversimplifies a bit. It suggests that the only the basic narrative of the creative process. The suggested thing about what you have raised. Who are behind the actor or actress that you see are actually responsible for that work . There is a tremendous about there. I am a historian of science in philadelphia. Helpful ins were understanding the tension between history of science and intellectual history. It is much harder to think of between history of science and history of intellectuals. This has been an ongoing theme. Scientists dont often use those activities. If the scientists writes for that kind of magazine, she is no longer a scientist. When they do occupy public sphere, they dont release to it from a position of opposition. Occasionally they are. Is rare. I would like to pose that question. How does one thing about science and intellectuals . David i dont know the answer the question. It is a fascinating area to explore. Whateverhether we do, it will involve ariz thinking of what we mean is intellectual. Scientists are pretty clearly not intellectuals from that model. If we need to rethink what that model is. What were talking about. Who we identify as intellectuals. To what extent is, since the history of science is arguably the institution. Shouldve it be a history of intellectuals at all. Andy these activities are not deemed scientific when scientists engage in them. It is not part of the scientists selfidentity. Relations defined in and is subsumed under the idea of philosophy. Modern understandings of science. There is supposed to be a different mode of generation of knowledge claims. What we think of as the growing objectivity of science may just be the growing objectivity of how science is written about. Other kinds of writings that are associated with science. Or disassociated with. The atomic bomb era. Is a very important site of negotiation. It is a very important site of negotiation. Knowledge production. A different way of carving all this up. The self identity the intellectual on the one hand and the history of science on the other. Knowledge practices have been more at home in the history of science. It is another way of thinking about knowledge. Not as embedded in the spears sphe or institutions. The term knowledge production or knowledge creation may be a useful one. Come on down. Im an independent scholar in minneapolis. What might be our own objectivity problem. In a weird way, it might make us afraid of using scientific tools. A bunch of neuroscientists at of minnesota. Y missing minneso a this rising young star was the last one to present. Said we will know anything that is going on in your consciousness. We just dont have the machines yet. I said i didnt think that was necessarily true. , but he neverards got back to me. I understand why historians are loath to say this particular theory or body of literature in is the one. The history of stroke is very important to the history of Woodrow Wilson and world history. Dont want to reduce it to, Woodrow Wilson had a stroke and that is why this happened. Provide like to universal answers. We do care about that smoking gun. We know this is what he was thinking. Look what he wrote one day before. Look what she read todays days before and underlined it. Some questions need to be answered with just a preponderance of evidence. I am wondering if science can help us get around. Andy any kind of strong distinction between humanistic or interpretive and social scientific mode and the natural , is artificial, they are both fundamentally interpretive practices. Ofs burden of the language objectivity and certainty. Scientistscticing deny that they are achieving some kind of certain knowledge. Challenges greatest to the image of objectivity. I can come up with operational concepts are some kind of formula. Temptation. Ys that to claim that language of certainty. Themselvesreadying in relation to this. You have that same kind of distribution in our field. Your have people saying, im going to give you objective truth for all time. Haveof those expectations been loaded on to other fields in the past. Is incredibly useful for stadium point that ive thought about a lot. Im not sure that scientists benefit entirely. A lot of folks have chafed under it. Someone like james conant. Desperately trying to get out from under the idea that science has objectivity. It has that kind of unique quality. The unique burden of the 20th century. That accounts for some of these rhetorical differences. Henry it may just be a product of how i was trained. If i found the smoking gun in a story i was telling, i would be devastated. I dont know what i would do. A student was going to make an argument about neurasthenia but she said she couldnt find someone from the 19th century saying it. I said great. That is what you want. That is what argument is. Youre not can you find a huge microscope to find the answer about Human Knowledge in the mind of a mouse. Most of the nurse areologists that spoken to the first to admit that they dont know everything. The limited claims of the science or a scientist leaves their hands. Can of the fascination and fronting of the neuroscientists takes us very far afield from practitioners. The kind of funding institutions and governments that believe this is the next thing. There may be a way to interrogate these things. Their summary different levels. From that kind of workaday science. Political decisions about where funding streams go. It may look conversely different at the base. That doesnt the top. Wherever the big money is. Rebecca it reminds me of the conversation i had with my colleagues. Scientists. Of choose to do a historical study. Why the advantages of Scientific Study is that you actually are there when the work is done. You could be there for the accident that doesnt get into the official version. The question of historical study does not necessarily lead to this kind of interpretive work that can be extremely gratifying. That kind of sensibility can be brought to bear on emerging enterprises. Which are so often overcome by this rhetoric. Two weeks ago the Obama Administration ratified that program about using the language of the behavioral sciences. It is a return of the confidence. Mightl neuroscientists participate. Lessons from these kinds of conversations. Henry did anyone see the overly honest methods . I use this method because it was. He only one of the land had admission. Cit andy when watsons book came out everyone went crazy because he was just sort of a normal data. This is a span on the is science special question. Can you think of any specific training that historians of science might need . It seems to me traditional things that historians of science were looking at. We are not actually focusing on that aspect of the knowledge production. Hole ofown a rabbit reading 1970s feminist critiques of science. Does that matter . Are in terms of how we go about thinking about this. Looking at the two subjects i have looked the most that, whose actualeimer scientific work i cant come close to it. I really struck by the different sort, not that theyre better but whether i can engage with the science or not. It is a really live . Now. Henry how do we know that we are making genuine decisions about the tools were using or are they being imposed by others. Myth, the idea that we are relatively rational tool using intellectuals as we go about our. Aily business it hasnt been around forever and it is wellintentioned. They may say he may have gotten it wrong from our perspective but it is a myth that has consequences. Of the way that those decisions were made. Going one level deeper. The tool user is a way of thinking about individual scientists is a model that itself needs to be critiqued. And it has been critiqued by feminists in the 1980s. There has been a lot of talk about different boundaries. The boundary that seems to be going on between history of science and intellectual history. That breaking down boundaries is always a positive thing. Now people are saying there is value in having boundaries separating different ecosystems. C. What about boundaries might be a positive thing and preserving these kind of separate spheres . What kind of impact would upsetting those boundaries have . To use information across disciplines does not always mean that is already way. Ealth the work of doing that is evermore on the scholar. How we would situate ourselves. We do make a choice. Drawing unconsciously on certain tools that may help you. The vote for interdisciplinary studies. The we are the world of scholarship, which may not be the most helpful. Isil graduate students i tell grduate studentsts what else would you like to write about. Not covered at all in the history of science studies. It is important to see them all as part of a larger enterprise. The study of past and present. Knowledge practices or cultural practices. That you that you know not just the other but the fields that they are in dialogue with. There needs to be a kind of intellectual commons were different scholars can learn from each other. It is the responsibility to keep an eye on what happening. He cosponsored the radcliffe seminar that rebecca and i did. Cases like that where people really sit down together in a room and say hey i found this. There is in the normas amount of parallel work going on and it is important to keep the conversation going to the extent that we can. I was try to think about the different ways that the history of science and intellectual history have been talked about here. This sort of conceptual apparatus. One of the ways that the history of science has been incredibly productive. Ways of knowing or describing the world. It has been deeply productive. Anyone who is ever been in an sees theiplinary group shoring up of their own sense of rightness. As opposed to the anthropologist or the medical folks or whatever. I dont mean to trivialize the learning that happens in those situations. Existed,f those lines and wouldnt have a stake in particular kinds of methodology, we would have nothing to argue against. It would impoverish all those things. We clearly care about science. Do they care about us . I asked that in a really important way. You get these continual hopes for the promise of science. Frustrated. Stantly the gallup pollsters that you have talked about. The atomic scientists, i am become death is oppenheimers famous line. Some of the most interesting questions are endoflife questions. We can keep people alive a lot longer but is it worth it . Whose fault is that . Is it big science . Is it the burden of getting grants and you have to promise the new millennium . Is it our hope that we impose on to science . Andy i teach on religion and science at harvard and it is a massive course. It is really important to them. They are starting to see how the sausage gets made. When i started college i was a physics major. I was thinking about black holes. I had no idea you had to work in the lab. That sounds boring. I went off and became a historian. A lot of it does come to focus on science and religion. Students come to me a lot during office hours. A lot of them have personal that are interesting in relation to their scientific location. I once had a pair students come , each of them talking about William James and early pragmatism and struggling with these questions about certainty and pragmatism. They were talking about the scientific truths theyve been raised in. To this about science particular age. Especially to those who are going to do it as practitioners. David i am struck by the similarity in our answers in your answers. The question about technology. We take the students out. Will all have a lot of experience with science minded and motivated students. Does that translate to other levels and other audiences. Not just a kind of function of a moments of relative leisure at an openminded point in peoples lives. Think that that is the evidence of our classroom suggests that it is doable. It might be most visible. That are, ients dont want to say that they are unimportant. Feel like, it does some distance from the people who make funding decisions. Just to toss this out maybe from left field. How we think about the world and going back to henrys thoughts about cognition. There certain kinds of scientific interpretation is now current. People are deeply influenced by certain kinds of humanistic work. There is an argument out there , i keep returning to neuroscience, very flexible interchange between organism and environment. In the way that the humanist seven thing about for a long time. The link between the biological sciences and the social sciences may come around. I would want to push that too far. Humanists of claims have made and provided for scientific work and scientific interpretation . Henry do they care . We asked that a lot. It has to happen. If you walk into a bookstore now, one of the first things you are going to encounter is books about your mind and your brain but much of it is not the kind of things they are doing in the academy. We to bring those ideas out wider than the little world that many of us inhabit. Happen, it comes with this anxiety about the administration shifting all the money. Admitting undergraduates with 30 stem potential to 50 stem potential. Rebecca academics always are that the scientists dont care that much about the history. The second part of the question was really interesting. , tour hope that science what extent can we all participate . What is the place of the intellectual . How do we see ourselves as intellectuals . How do we bring this sensibility to our own work. What do we do . Articulated by think youve post something extremely important. I want to think more about it. I think we are just that are closing point. Point. Ur closing we might want to modify the question to say how and why is science special . How is it generative . I was struck by people talking about outing themselves. Out of our own particular bill millieu , places where there is this kind of cross dialogue going on. Away from the intellectual moorings. Institutionalizing better than we have how this goes on. To think about where we could continue these interesting ofversations at the nexus the history of science and intellectual history. Where might that have been best . Or at least more often and more productively that has so far. Thank you. [applause] [applause] you come into this house and there is so much to do. There is so much coming at you. Obama we are here digging up soil because we are about to plan a garden. At the end of the day, my most important title is still mom in chief. In 2008 Michelle Obama the first africanamerican first lady. Lady, her focus has been on social issues such as poverty and education and healthy living. Addressing childhood obesity. Obama, at 8 00 p. M. Examining the public and private lives of the women who filled the position of first lady. Each week american artifacts takes you to different places. Williamsburg was the capital of virginia from 1705 to 1779. We take a tour of the reconstructed colonial capital building. House ofearn about the burgesses and the role of the colonial governor. Welcome to the cal