Transcripts For CSPAN3 Science And Intellectual History 20151219

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 minds. David is the author of storytelling and science, rewriting oppenheimer and the nuclear age. Just out, his attitudes towards he studies 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 fascinating book about the 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 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 and 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. So, i have 1300 other colleagues in the medical school alone, and there are for humanists. Four humanists. So, the question is not what is the place of science in intellectual history justifying or thinking about the nature of science. The question is why does 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. It is 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 science . I will do it in two parts. The first will be in my own brief work around the Human Sciences and the second part we will forward to today, anxieties and possibilities of the engagement between historians and scientists today. As sarah mentioned, my book project is called other mines, other minds, 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 problem of other minds. Using 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. In a range of studies, studies of rats, mazes, children studying puzzles and other things, these human scientists 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 slippage 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 thinking seriously about thinking slipped back and forth between 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 . The fact that passed cognition 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 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 think that we could maybe push it a bit. What i mean by that, explicitly, is that 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 manifestoesque claims. To going big and going deep. That has, if not hijacked, at least championed by a group of people who wind up being more controversial than they need to be. There is a lot of engagement to be had at a local level. My colleagues in the cognitive Science Department, the kinds of theories and thinking that they are pursuing are not the gigantic series of everything, solutions to every problem, the ted of quasireligious, talkesque 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 thing that historians are interested in. If we could dial back from the manifestoes, 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 quasibehaviorist notion, or a folkspsychological notion, that 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. If we take hold of that, not in a manifesto way, but in a more local way, weakening gauge with scientistsge with and social scientists today 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 am glad to be part of this. Every fall, i come to this conference, and a few weeks later i go to the science society. I have spent a lot of time 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 intellectual history. Maybe thats less controversial. More controversial and in my unguarded moments i have sort of claimed that science should be the Major Intellectual activity going on in the market of history. I dont think that its particularly important that thats literally true. I imagine some of you may already be making cases in your head for other fields that are equally or more important. The reason i mention that, whats crucial to appreciate is the massive scope of scientific activity i tend to focus on postwar, postworld war ii american culture. Most of my comments will be about that period, though my thoughts are not restricted to that time and place. So, in the last couple of years , according to the Science Foundation data, American University is are now producing are producing over 50,000s phds a year. Socialscience and studies. 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 claim that all of those people are or would identify as intellectuals. I do think that many of them, even though they would not count as intellectuals, they are nevertheless a part of the structure of scientific activity that produces what we would call intellectual work. Right . So they are a part of science as intellectual activity in some way. In fact, i think that one of the most interesting things that we can mull over the science of intellectual work is how it destabilizes some familiar notions of what intellectual work is and how knowledge and ideas are generated. I think that it happens in science in ways that are different, if not unique but distinct from other fields. In any case, i am going to largely going to skip over the case for including the history of science in intellectual history. That is why im calling it a working assumption. I am going to talk instead about how we might think about an intellectual history of which science in which science is a vibrant part. What i mean by that is not im not trying to make this an additive claim. This is another area in which we should train our interest, tools, skills, and intellectual stories. Though thats certainly true. I am after a bigger game here. Science is not simply just another subject to study, but science 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 thinking about science. So, im going to do two things. The first is sort of the nature of science as an intellectual activity, which i will confess i am daunted to do, because its actually not what i teach. Im more the if theres a production side and consumption side of science, i am on the latter side. But the nature of science as a social activity, what sort of activity is, seems pretty 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, and then second, i will say a little bit on science in the public sphere. Im not feeling bold enough in a momentor an unguarded to answer the question of what science is. But i think that it suffices to point out that it is the standard answer of historians, maybe academics, but it is 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 the Scientific Method as a unitary thing 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. Neither of those things have any particular relationship or similarity to what Rachel Carson was doing when she was synthesizing the literature on ecology and toxicology in the early 1960s. Science varies widely according to discipline, culture, practitioner, institution, era, geography, and so forth. Nevertheless, i will identify five things that i think are reasonably common features of science as an intellectual activity, or at least science, the social aspects of it, which i think will then have intellectual ramifications. That is the key point. All of these things over the common features of science as a social activity, which i think matter to us as intellectual historians. The first is that it tends to be highly collective and collaborative. I will leave it to others and other subfields to say how distinct that is. It is certainly my impression that at least since the middle of the 20th century, work in the Natural Sciences has suggested a high degree of organization and hence preplanning. Much higher than exists for most of humanities scholars. Among the many interpretive problems that have emerged from that reality is sorting out the roles of the areas practitioners. Its easy to say we have administrators, research scientists, 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 the enterprise that we can call science. One, collaboration. Two, science requires funding. Very often a lot. Science is expensive. And requires equipment, personnel, physical space. The material conditions of science or its absence are quite significant in shaping the kinds of questions it can be asked. Im not going to claim that this is unique, but it seems particularly characteristic of a dont think that all intellectual work would fall into that category and have the same requirements. Third, and this is where my head has been recently institutions matter and they matter really deeply. Again, perhaps more than other kinds of knowledge in the modern world, science is produced within institutional settings, many of them quite large. Much of my own research is on this phenomenon of scientific celebrity and why we sort of persist in thinking about science as the product of individual effort and individual minds when in fact that it is a really profound distortion of how almost all scientific action happens. This is a little tangent, but i read that as a way of simplifying and making humane an enterprise that has grown fairly bureaucratic, anonymous, and perhaps unsettling in that anonymity and largescale. Fourth, and 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 terms of engineering and technological innovation. I was on the airplane down here, reading a book on missile guidance, inventing accuracy. I dont think that we could take the subject of his book as an Inertial Navigation System as an idea or a piece of intellectual work. Certainly not when 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 System with sustained engagement on ideas. Forthe sort of back and discourse that is maybe not wholly dissimilar. Finally, i think that science is burdened and i chose that word carefully with the expectations of objectivity and certainty. I say burdened because i think the expectation of objectivity can limit and restrict science as much as open up avenues for it. It seems clear, for example, that on one hand, science contains a fair amount of total authority. Thats why, for example, the classic skeptics try to poke holes in it. If it had no authority and could be easily dismissed, skeptics wouldnt be trying to punch holes in it. At the same time Climate Change it seems equally clear that science rarely if ever drives policy. It is political conditions that determine what is done. In the beginning of my class, i stand up and tell students what , we are going to do is take a story that looks like a story of technological innovation, right, the history of energy, and see how it is actually a story of politics. Right . That can be really obscured 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. But in reality, not only are the politics always there, but in reality, they are also the driving force. To quickly recap that, collective activity funding institutions through anonymity and objectivity. Each of those things would present in you know putting forth its own challenge for those of us who want to social science into history and vice versa. Its that last area, the interaction between science and the public, that i want to focus say a few words about and closing. That is what i in my own research. Particularly on storytelling and the kinds of stories that we tell about science and why. What do they matter for the public understanding of science . What im working on currently is ishel carsons book, which often cited as groundbreaking, which has indeed obtain some lasting a claim, but i think its an open question as to whether it has achieved acclaim because of its technical soundness or because of the eloquent writing and the kind of comforting imagery of the kind of endemic path that she sort of wants to restore through the beautiful natural garden imagery that she is very much into. So, the interesting thing that i find about that juxtaposition is that it is not simply that the book was appealing because of how it was written. Thats fairly obvious when you read it. The book achieves authority. It achieved authority as science because of that imagery. Right . So we have the authority of her book as a technical document. It depends crucially on the nontechnical features of it. So we have the seemingly paradoxical situation in which logicaldepends for into intellectual authority on things that arent scientific. There is literature showing that that might be true even within scientific circles, but i will leave that to others. That,am curious whether to what extent might that undermine the idea of these coming together . If all observers are making judgments about science based on some kind of nonscientific factor, in what sense can we say that Scientific Authority gets exists. Isnt 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. Those are two different sorts of questions. Throughout the talk, i have sort of highlighted this distinction between the production side of science, how scientific knowledge is generated and how it is managed, use, perceived. Correct me if i am wrong, but my impression is history of science has 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. Outside of science. To do this, then, to understand the consumption of science, we need to understand not just the science but the ideas that and cultural context that science is a part of. In other words, we need historians. Thanks. Andrew can everyone hear me in the back . I dont really have my normal voice due to a cold. As i was listening to henry and david talk, it occurred to me that maybe i should scrap what i say written, and then just 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 fields, science and intellectual history starting with a kind of sad milestone in the scholarly study of science. Last tuesday, died 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 listserv for the philosophy of science, and it was an important event there because he had trained many historically minded philosophers of science at princeton. In other circles, he was completely forgotten today, but he was prominent in what most scholars now think of it as the bad old days, the 1950s and 1960s. He was 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 contexts and viewed as abstract principles. Whether thats what gillispie did is 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 of scholars attacked with a called an a journalist an internalist historical approach. Semiotics and so forth. Let me take you back to the 1920s and 1930s and those years. The field of intellectual history and history of science were even more closely linked, perhaps indistinguishable in many instances. There was Something Else different practitioners viewed those pursuits as expressions of what we would now call history from below. To study science between the wars was to turn ones attention away from the traditional elite subjects of 19th century history kings, generals, other political and military 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. Also saw it as deeply embattled in a society dominated in their view by big business and religious orthodoxy. This included historians who then identified with the science s 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 historicallyminded philosophers. Of course, arthur lovejoy, but also John Herman Randall junior, other admirers of john dewey who saw the modern social sciences as the leading edge of moral and political progress, but also saw it as not yet effectual in a society dominated yet again by the forces of reaction. All this is a far cry from scholars seeing science as an essential 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. In separate history of science or sdf programs. Of course, intellectual historians are not always well integrated either, given the rise of the modes of cultural history that were forged in opposition to the postwar ascendance of intellectual and political history. Intellectual historians dont tend to have separate institutional poems and separate disciplinary identities in the way that historians of science do. I should mention here the history of education, including higher education, which has likewise become a separate pursuit. In many ways, more so, because it is carried out in schools of education rather than History Departments. Now, 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 as a kind of rough marker to focus entirely on the social sciences. Dorothy ross, tom haskell, many others wrote important works on the American Social sciences. But few selfidentified intellectual historians had much to say about Natural Sciences, 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 counted 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 a of science to focus on the social sciences and vice versa. The same analytic tools can be applied to all these forms of knowledge production, and that has become apparent to the new generations of scholars in recent years. Intellectual historians have borrowed all kinds of methods from the history of science. Particularly and 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. Some of us have already outed ourselves. The question of how you would label each of us here is a good thing, signaling a degree of and 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 and the history of Science Department at harvard, but formally the departments have nothing to do with one another. People on either side say we need to do something about it, but theyve in saying that for years. Nothing has changed in the nine years i have been at harvard. 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 between these two fields. As well as within neighboring areas. Historically minded practitioners in the natural and social sciences themselves, doing work within the disciplines that they study. We can learn a lot from them and vice versa. We do. We all read each others books, we borrow 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 learn a lot from sociologists and others about the material conditions of knowledge practices. We are very good at contexts and biographical and logical contexts, we devote less attention to deeper causes, especially unintentional forces. I think that attending carefully to these kinds of contexts is crucial for intellectual historians. They are very powerful tools for doing so in these closely 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. This is studies of the concept of science itself, the many different uses by historical actors of that foundational category, historians and science haveof paid attention to boundary work, as they call it. The classic demarcation problem of separating science from nonscience. There is more to be said about this, especially putting it into the context of other kinds of streams of American History and other kinds of history. Especially i think how it varies through historical actors, not just science itself, and that is important, have distinguished science from particular others. The science of religion comes to mind. Science versus politics has been a concern for some sociologists. But also science in relation to philosophy, the humanities, the arts. Perhaps even business or bureaucracy. All of those pursuits that have defined recent centuries. You can 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 science as, with all of its with. As good to think 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 if i may have gotten some of the details wrong. This was several years ago as we started on the tenure track at harvard. And he had this 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 one of the things i remember most is a moment at the end of the day when david turned to me. As contacts, i just joined the history of the Science Department but i got my phd in anthropology anthropology of signs. I think he was seeing me as any representative of the field itself. Rebecca,omething like, art historians finally ready to admit published their book objectivity. They pretty much forfeited any special rights that they would have become part of intellectual history, or admit that that was the case. Not to put a point on it, him to mean in a playful way, that once historians of the final precinct is as a privileged topic. At that precise point, the argument might go that intellectual history is a broader set of tools to understanding science. 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 an advisor. In order to do that, i want to take a minute to examine the the points that he made in the book objectivity. I willbe used follow that with a few more words about subjectivity. He has a relatively new manifesto. I think it is useful and attempting to do for subjectivity with the previous officers authors did for objectivity. Objectivity the book, which many of you are familiar with, came out in 2008. It derives from an earlier talk. She asked does objectivity have a history . This was years after the field of history of science had moved on. To show a grand conciliation of truth from homer to the present day. Waves of challenges to these grandma grant mark succeeded in breaking it up in the 1930s with marxist approaches. Later in the 1960s with the Strong Program from edinburgh, 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. How do scientists look at the 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. From the early modern, to the range of scientific endeavors including anatomy, biology, meteorology, with a particular emphasis on the study of snowflakes. This is an interesting move. They moved into the terrain of oldschool intellectual history 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. It may sound like oldschool intellectual history, but they go on to show there are no shifts between these commitments. There is no simple replacement. Each new regime supplements rather than supplants the others. Sequence matters, history matters. They emphasize not abstracted regimes, but the ways that tools are used. Experiments, practices. The kind of materiality of the atlases. In time, as they described it, succeeded by the blindside of mechanical objectivity. In this last succession, which arose in the 1930s and 1940s, y described how accompanied by a wave of confidence when scientists became more confident than ever before in history. You could argue that they seemed to argue that mechanical objectivity began to break and trained judgment emerged as a way to incorporating tactics. Rather than relying on mechanical trained judgment became a necessary supplement to how significant the truth was discerned. And how patterns were discerned discovered in evidence. I will summarize this point. The arrival of trained judgment in the epistemic findings of objectivity. It is coincident with the revolving sensibility of scientists scientists in the 30s and 40s were incorporating these faculties into their work. Historians were identifying the process of science making. It mattered that was out shaping a low activity, as well as a high one. They saw science making as shot through with subjectivity. Coming back to it, this is what david was responding to. Objectivity, the book is a kind of metaintellectual history. It took me several years to tonk that there appeared through. At there appeare i want to end with some thoughts about subjectivity. Stephen chapin presented a talk about sciences of subjectivity. Seeing it is too soon often relegated to being the rosencrantz and guildenstern of intellectual history. As he puts it in that essay, a warming world we have done as bring the ideal of objectivity into alignment with reality, ironically to make it more objective. Objectivity is still the major player. Whenever get to subjectivity, that is his point. On the other hand, pure subjectivity is a dustbin concept. In redressing this, chapin makes two moves. He has a recourse intellectual history and rather traditional way. To understand how subjectivity works, he says that judgment must be understood among aesthetic philosophers. David hume, Immanuel Kant and others. He tries to figure out if they had any collective shared sense of how judgment happens. He decides, not really. ,here is something to work with and he continues in his second part, looking at ethnography is subjectivity. He tries to look for taste areas in daily life that relates to science. How do opera lovers come to love opera . How do marijuana lovers come to love marijuana . How to tasters learn how to discern taste . That is his most recent project. What struck me is that he is recruiting intellectual history as a kind of ethnography of subjectivity. Both of these projects employ a range of methods. They draw on whatever method is demanded to pending on the need. Science is still special in the studies. Whatever can be brought at the moment, science is still special in the studies in the future studies they may emerge. I suspect that this question can only be answered by the individual practitioner. Asking himself or her health of about their own epistemic commitments. [applause] we have a lot on our rectangular table. All of your we want to hear from, but i think if we could try this, my mind is buzzing isuestions about science special . Whether our panelist want to just pluck one or two things out of what was said and respond to it . Then, we will bring everybody else into the discussion. Andy i want to champion davids definition of science. Thousands of scholars have tried to define science. And never sounds like that, it is always one characteristic about method for a particular type of subject matter. It is 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. What might be called science over 500 years of history. My definition is a little bit more like the usual definitions, a little bit more method centered. There are a lot of different ways of defining science. To mark the importance of what david has done, it is really helpful. Toecca has it in her notes write the titles of his recent books at some point. David i wonder about defining science that moved to define science and social activity is the way somebody who is a historian of intellectual history would approach the problem. I do not attack it as intellectual history. A part of me is wondering, whether or not i should be doing that. Is science special . Is i do media discourse, and it is treating science that something special, for my purposes, it is special. There is certain logic to that. It does matter. It matters whether or not and to what extent that media discourse is right. Betweent separation consumption and production. My perception is that there is more work on the production side. , have tried to ignore that ignoring that is seeming less tenable. Andy i think it is important that you use that with objectivity. What emerges from recent scholarship is that lots of kind of knowledge have tried or claimed objectivity. There is nothing entirely unique about science. Thewhat is unique about times we live in, all of the burdens relating to science. There is something important in those images themselves. That jump in on something david said, 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. We are thinking about science as a category of analysis, innings to be interrogated to think about it at every level. What is seen as outside are unimportant. What is science as a particular kind of covering category as opposed to the social sciences are environmental science. Or environmental science. When do we use the more particular terms. Let me ask if anybody else was to say anything before he moved outward. It would be nice to have questions. We need to come up to the microphones for these questions. If people just want to pop up. I want to applaud the panel. I think it was excellent. I want to ask henry question. It is prompted by a question i was asked, im still thinking about davids question. Im fascinated that there is a historian in the medical program. When i graduated harvard, 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 . This question to meet was, why would we want to do that . He was serious, i thought it was a joke. I am wondering whether, is i realize they have not been there that long, but it is interesting that they have decided they should have an intellectual historian. What are you finding already from your colleagues about history echo we can all agree that there is a lot of traffic between the two disciplines. Find thatus if you there is that kind of receptivity among the scientists themselves. Henry i have two thoughts. In the medical school, there are four of us. There is receptivity most never mostly on the part of the students. Has anyone here been to medical school . I do not know this until i got there and started teaching the curriculum it is crazy. , they sit for five hours a day five days a week and a rotating group of lecturers come in and lecture them on biochemistry and also some other things and one of them is a historian. The reaction is amazing. They get cell structure, they get the stuff they get the other lectures, and all of the sudden, in our lectures we look at why do we think that the foundations of medicine are science. It was not like i was saying anything particularly innovative. Those medical students did ask that. There is a receptivity on the part of the students because they are not getting the heart issues on the curriculum. History is a hard place, issues of social justice and where they can get those conversations. Psychology is a different story. I am teaching a lecture course that has been hundred 50 students enrolled. No one knows why this happened. One of the reasons, it has to do with how they can get that humanities credit by taking something that is the history of what they do. A lot of these kids are psychology majors. The real reason is slightly more interesting. The yalea real call in faculty for this kind of interdisciplinary course. It is both a call from the faculty and the students. There is this weird convergence where both groups are interested in that kind of conversation. Just on paper, it seems to be the case. Thate that it is something intellectual historians can take advantage of. Not in a craven way. Not that we all have to gravitate towards a to survive. They are eager for the conversation and tools would bring to the topic. Both students and faculty. There is hope they are in that sense. Part of what i was going to say, we should be similarly open to the resources of the scientific conceptualization. Whether it is about cognition or anything else. I think that is a very live debate. Theave various stories of complex neural complex. We were talking about the varieties of history. Usa question of the traffic between sciences who are thinking and conceptual terms not just integrity as critics always. But engaged. I think there is hope there. Yes, come on up. My name is richard keating. I want to address it to david, his precipitation. I appreciate it. It occurred to me that one area where scientific creation and production is not the humanities so much as in the arts. That is making movies. Putting on and producing a play. Those analogies might be worth exploring. The related thing is, there is a play in the west end of london called photograph 51. It is about rosalind franklin, the code dna foundress who did not get credit and did not get the nobel. It is very much the attention between the tension between the individual and the collective, rather than just collective. Who gets the credit for the discoveries . , what herthing is mistake where she did not make the breakthrough is in reading and xrays. Science becomes an interpretive as well as the discovery activity. There is a lot of potential. I was really struck by making a film and putting on the play serving as a kind of scientific research. Except finally, it would be like if you made a movie and there were several directors on the set. They all which scene was concluded in the way that the dna research there was so on and so forth. They are vying directors all on the same parts. David i agree completely. 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 films and plays. 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. I am even thinking that this notion of competition between directors for credit. Even that oversimplifies a bit. The classic thing we focus on my priority disputes and what that. Even that distorts the notion of what science is. It suggests that the only is which signs of narrative are we going to adhere to. It leaves the basic narrative about the greatest process the same. Creative process the same. I think the suggestive think you have raised about film, it is like how many people who are behind the actor or actress that you see are actually responsible for that work . Performance. There is a tremendous about amount they are. There. There. I am a historian of science in philadelphia. David and andrews comments were particularly helpful in helping me understand the tensions i see between history and intellectual his between history of science and intellectual history. It is much harder to think of the relationship between history of science and history of intellectuals. This has been an ongoing theme. When scientist cannot often do those activities, the type of unemployed scientists can take up writing for magazines. Usually a writer is not considered a scientist in that way. When they do occupy the public we are, they are often not doing it from a position of opposition alateen. Or they are often not doing it from a critical position. Occasionally they are, but it is rare. I would like to pose that question. What does it mean to think about scientist at intellectuals . Know several of you have thought about this issue, i will of to hear your thoughts about this issue. David i think it is a great question. It. Nt know the answer to i think it is fascinating and a rich area to explore. Offuld say that it started it it is whatever our solution we come up with comes to that attention, it will probably involve a rethinking of what we mean by intellectual. Certain kind of prominent, public, intellectual, largely regarded scholar. Of the best those examples to pick from. Are prettyentists clearly not intellectuals from that model. I wonder if we need to rethink what that model is. What were talking about. Who we identify as intellectuals. And whether the practices of science can help us rethink that. I guess the other question is, is, since the history of science is arguably a history of the institution, not a history of scientist. Does that suggest that we interrogate that notion the question you raise at the beginning, to what extent of intellectual history is or should be or at all. Andy that is an interesting question. I see that opposition. Part of what is going on is a sick definition issue. Those activities are not deemed scientific when scientists engage in them. That is the heart of the intellectual, self identity. That points to another opposition that i did not mention earlier. Science is defined in relation and is subsumed under the idea of philosophy. Modern understandings of science. They are there is supposed to be a different mode of generation of knowledge claims. A lot of what we think of as the growing objectivity of science is just the growing objectivity of the way science is written about, especially professional articles. Other kinds of writings that are associated fiercely for particular purposes with science, war is associated with it. The atomic bomb era for example. Scientific read as a movement for certain purposes, or just read as a Political Movement for others. Aboutefinitional issue what a traditional intellectual is, that kind of enlightenment model in fines being some type of new alternatives in the 20th century. I want to add one other thing but i also wonder about a phrase that has been bouncing around is knowledge production. Which is 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. Which someone invoked earlier but there is another way of thinking about knowledge which is not as embedded in particular spears or an institution. It may be a whole complex of ways of thinking about how a particular claim gets authorized or generated and circulated. It crisscrosses both of these feels that maybe a place where some of the traffic that everyone is calling for an is evident in your own careers is happening. The term knowledge production or knowledge creation may be a useful one. Come on down. Come on up. I feel like bob barker. Come on down. Sorry. Im an independent scholar in minneapolis. This powell has gotten me thinking about what might be our own objectivity problem. Or certainty problem as intellectual historians and why in a weird way, it might make us , afraid of using scientific tools. I was out of a bunch of panel with a bunch of neuroscientists at the university of minnesota. It is about deep history and science. This rising young star was the last one to present. He said we will know anything that is going on in your consciousness. When we have sensitive and of interests and would be we just able to map it on atlas we just dont have the machines yet. I said i didnt think that was necessarily true. We exchanged cards, but he never got back to me. [laughter] i understand why historians are loath to say this particular theory or body of literature in neuroscience is the one. The physiology of stroke is very important to the history of Woodrow Wilson and world history. But you dont want to reduce it to, Woodrow Wilson had a stroke and that is why this happened. I think why this gets me thinking about a problem with their discipline is although we , dont like to provide universal answers. For human activity we do care , about that smoking gun. All the time. We know this is what he was thinking. Because look what he wrote one day before. Look what she read todays days two days before and underlined. Some questions need to be answered with just a preponderance of evidence. I am wondering if science can help us get around. I wonder if we are trained to look for that smoking gun. I wonder of science can help us get around that. Anybody want to take that . Andy any kind of strong distinction between humanistic or interpretive and social scientific mode and the Natural Science mode, is artificial, they are both fundamentally interpretive practices. What is different is this burden of the language of objectivity and certainty. Most lots of practicing scientists deny that they are achieving some kind of certain knowledge. Historically some of the , greatest challenges to the image of objectivity. Ive come from working scientists trying to come up with operational contests or some kind of formula. Theres always that temptation. Its particularly important when it comes to funding and politics and things like that to claim that language of certainty. Within the scientific enterprise, people have rated themselves in lots of different ways. There is not the same kind of distribution in our field. Im going to give you objective you dont have people sayingim going to give you objective truth for all time. That is a history of contingency and some of those expectations have been loaded on to other fields in the past. I think the word burden is incredibly useful for stating ive thought about a lot. What im not sure that scientists benefit entirely. There are premerger there are very major cost of having that kind of weight and a lot of folks have chafed under it. Someone like james conant. After world war ii desperately , trying to get out from under the idea that science has objectivity. It has that kind of unique quality. Or 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. I had 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. You will construct a relatively local theater that relies on key values and is not certain. To hear you say there is a neuroscientist that says we will know everything and most of the narrow ive talked to a the first people to admit that we know nothing. We barely know anything at all about the way the brain works and the way it produces the film the mental phenomena we live with. [laughter] it also matters who thinks they know the answers. This is partly what a number of people who work in Public Perception say. To the limitedn claims of the science or a scientist leaves their hands. Some of the fascination and can can run to 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. There are so many Different Levels from that kind of workaday science. All the way up to Major Political decisions about where funding streams go. In which the science is transformed. It may look conversely different at the base. Its not some superstructure but it goes to the top wherever the , big money is. It looks very different. Did anyone else want to . Rebecca it reminds me of the conversation i had with my colleagues. There is an ethnography of scientists. She said why would you choose to , do a historical study. Finds the advantages of Scientific Study is that you actually are there when the work is done. You can watch them and you can andh them drop the whatever lose a bunch of the study. Or be there for the accident that doesnt get into the official version. Or diary. That raises 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. Of total knowledge. Even two weeks ago the Obama Administration ratified that program about using the language of the behavioral sciences. We kind of live in this moment of the return of the confidence. Even if not all neuroscientists might participate. Or behavioral scientists. Some of the sensibility or the lessons from these kinds of conversations. Can be usefully applied. Henry did anyone see the overly honest methods . It was a big phenomenon in which scientists admitted in covert language of the reasons they get the results they get. Is in the method section, an example was i use this primer but because it was the only one the lab had. It was a tacit admission. It was thousands of scientists. There is a certain amount of selfawareness but its a problem of translation. Andy when watsons book came out everyone went crazy because he was just sort of a normal data. He was competitive and kind of a jerk and this was theoretical. It was heretical. Come on down. This is maybe a spin on the science special question. What your thoughts are of any kind of Scientific Literacy or training that historians of science might need . It seems to me traditional things that historians of science were looking at. There seemed to be traditional know how to trace fundings and look at institutions and look at social connections. Can that go too far in the of the other direction where we miss individual insights where we are not actually focusing on that aspect of the knowledge production. . I went down a rabbit hole of reading 1970s feminist critiques of science. It seemed clear to me that there are many critics of science but the ones made by women who were practicing scientists was totally different from the critiques made by people who are not. Does that matter . Is scientists are in terms of is science special in terms of how we go about thinking about this. Traditionallyn trained as historians . Im curious for your thoughts. My gut reaction is that it seems maybe its more than just of questions like language or statistical training. Of what ive looked most at. Robert oppenheimer whose actual scientific work i cant come close to it. And Rachel Carson, a lot of which i can. I was really struck by the different sort, not that theyre better worse, but whether i can engage with the science or not. When i can engage with the science or not. Its not better or worse but i think its a really live question right now. Henry not the 70s but the 1980s has a an answer to this question. Its the old question of structure how do we know that we , are making genuine decisions about the tools were using or are they being imposed by others. What she says is the myth, the idea that we are relatively rational tool using intellectuals as we go about our daily business. Doing things that are more or less rational in pursuit of more or less considered inns is a myth and it hasnt been around forever and it is wellintentioned. We blows this model on historical actors to say they may say he may have gotten it wrong from our perspective but it is a myth that has consequences. The big consequence is that we lose sight of the way that those decisions were made. They are structured all the way down. Going one level deeper. The model of 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. Whether or not they are boundaries between science or other disciplines and the humanities or the social sciences as well as the boundary that seems to be going on between history of science and intellectual history. It seems like the discussion is assumed that that breaking down boundaries is always a positive thing. What i have come across is now people are saying there is value in having boundaries separating different intellectual inc. Ecosystems. Disciplinary ecosystems. Sometimes we introduce something new and great things happen but other times, massive die out tappan. What about boundaries might be a positive thing and preserving these kind of separate spheres . That have contributed great works what kind of impact would and what kind of impact would upsetting those boundaries have . Thanks. Rebecca to use information across disciplines does not always mean that is already way health. Whateveris value to you use but its just that it becomes a kind of, i think the of doing that is evermore on the scholar. How we would situate ourselves. Ultimately we do make a choice. Strategyes a matter of drawing unconsciously on certain and tools that may help you. And borrowing maybe but not necessarily the vote for interdisciplinary studies. Breeds a kind of enthusiasm. The we are the world of scholarship, which may not be the most helpful. I tell graduate students what else would you like to write about. What else do you want to teach . They doart of the work whether they are institutionalized or not is that they facilitate and make easier certain kinds of traffic. Its easier for historians of science and separate programs to work alongside anthropologists and for them to work alongside and put the methods study of science in dialogue with the study of other kinds of cultural practices that are not covered at all by anything of science studies. I think it is important to see them all as part of a larger enterprise. Which is the study of past and present. Knowledge practices or cultural practices. And to make sure that you know that you can borrow 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. Its also a matter of institutions. Coffenberg 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 there is an anonymous amount of 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. Social organization one of the , ways that the history of science has been incredibly productive. As a limited space or a space perceived to have certain kind of boundary is as attention, humanistic understandings of science or humanist interpretive ways of knowing or describing kinds of the world. Waysery opposition in some has been deeply productive. As anyone who is ever been in an Interdisciplinary Group sees the shoring up of their own sense of rightness. And their training compared to the interpol adjust or the medical folks or whatever. I dont mean to trivialize the learning that happens in those situations. There is something about this. If none of those lines existed, them, andt have there werent stakes that people felt their methodology, we would have nothing to argue against. It would impoverish all those things. That those fields. Come on up, kevin. We clearly care about science. Because we are sitting here. Do they care about us . I asked that in a really important way. If you study the 20th century history of science which you will do more than i do you get , these continual hopes for the promise of science. They areg us to and constantly frustrated. Whether its the hope for science or the gallup pollsters that you have talked about. The atomic scientists, i am become death is oppenheimers famous line. Even today in a medical school, some of the most interesting questions are endoflife questions. From a humanist perspective. We can keep people alive a lot longer but is it worth it . Where do we draw the line . My question is 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 . Visit our hope to solve all of the problems . Its a big question but i would love to hear your thoughts. Andy i teach on religion and science at harvard and it is a massive course. Students are really interested and many of them want to take a course on science for the requirement but it is really important to them. They are starting to see how the sausage gets made. They are starting to see size of the job rather than something fun to think about. 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. Its no fun. I went off and became a historian. Those students, and a lot of it does come to focus on science and religion. Especially the question about the certainty of any knowledge. I had students come to me a lot during office hours. I dont know if this is true of psychology. A lot of them have personal backgrounds that are interesting in relation to their scientific location. Vocation. I once had a pair students come to my office, each of them talking about William James and early pragmatism and struggling with these questions about certainty and pragmatism. And fallible as an. They were talking about the scientific truths theyve been raised in. The other was talking about the religious truths may have been raised in so theres something deep in terms of teaching about science to this particular age. Especially to those who are going to do it as practitioners. Its really important to them as well as to us. David i am struck by the similarity in our answers in your answers. The question about technology. The question about psychology. What if we take the students out. Of the question. We all have a lot of experience with science minded and or science identified or technically motivated students. Who are interested in the humanities and these Big Questions once they are introduced to it. Does that translate to other levels and other audiences. . Of function ofnd a moments of relative leisure at an openminded point in peoples lives. . I dont know. I would like to think that that is the evidence of our classroom suggests that it is doable. In other circumstances but it might be most visible. At these moments that are, i dont want to say that they are unimportant. There is a, it doese some distance from the people who make funding decisions. For the senate or Something Like that. Just to toss this out maybe from left field. If we take knowledge practices being part of the culture that is often invisible to us and how we think about the world and going back to henrys thoughts about cognition. There certain kinds of scientific interpretation is now current. Could be deeply influenced by certain kinds of humanistic work. There is an argument out there that, i keep returning to neuroscience, very flexible interchange between organism and environment. Its so way that the humanist has been thinking about for a long time. That theme around image is more human and that there is the link between the biological sciences and the social sciences may come around. I would want to push that too far. We might want to think about what kinds of frames humanists have made and provided for scientific work and scientific interpretation . Henry do they care . We can say that and we say that them but does it impact and it can but 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 and history, but much of it is not the kind of things they are doing in the academy. There is one level which is to bring those ideas out wider than the little world that many of us inhabit. But there is a question of engagement within that world but it does not happen as often as it might. When it does happen, it comes with this anxiety about the administration shifting all the money. And tasty land grabs. They are admitting undergraduates with 30 stem potential to 50 stem potential. Rebecca academics always are theres a way we can produce that does not produce those anxieties. Rebecca i think of science cares about is is an important question and academics always are often think that the scientists dont care that much about the history. The second part of the question was really interesting. The second part of your question was really interesting about is our hope that science, to what extent can we all participate . It brings a back to the question posed by several different interlocutory. 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 . What are academic practices . How is the academic the world the world of intellectuals . I dont had articulated by think youve post something extremely important. I want to think more about it. I think we are just that are closing point. At our closing point. There is no way to wrap up. Thingsd to pull out two prefer the thinking conversation. I think it was rebeccas question is science special which we might want to modify is to say how and when it is special. I dont know if thats the word but how is it generative . The other i was struck by people , talking about outing themselves. Want to think about outings in a different way out of our own , particular millieu , places where there is this kind of cross dialogue going on. Away from the intellectual moorings. Maybe to think about institutionalizing better than we have how this goes on. So its not just in a rare panel or in davids mind as he gets on a plane to leave. To think about where we could , those moments butto think about where we could continue these interesting conversations at the nexus of the history of science and intellectual history. Knowledge practices and we could add on to the list. Where might that have been best . Happen best or at least more often and more productively that has so far. Thank you. To everybody. [applause] [applause] good work, everybody. You are watching American History tv, all weekend, every weekend on cspan three. To join the conversation, like a us on facebook. Each week american artifacts taking to museums and Historic Places to learn what artifacts reveal about American History. Williamsburg was the capital city of virginia from 1705 to 1779. Next we take a tour of the , reconstructed colonial Capital Building with the site supervisor. Tom hay. We will learn about the house of burgesses in the role of the royal governor on the eve of the american revolution. Welcome to the capitol building. Here at colonial williamsburg. The General Assembly met in jamestown starting in 1619. They would meet in jamestown for 80 years. Finally moving to what was then known as Middle Plantation and renamed for the king, king william as williamsburg. By 1704 the Capital Building had been built on this spot