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 k