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