Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories

322 Pages·8.208 MB·English

by  M. Norton Wise (auth.), Loren Graham, Wolf Lepenies, Peter Weingart (eds.)

FUNCTIONS AND USES OF DISCIPLINARY HISTORIES
SOCIOLOGY OF THE SCIENCES
A YEARBOOK
Editorial Board:
G. B6hme, Technische Hochschule, Darmstadt
N. Elias, Universities of Leicester and Bielefeld
Y. Elkana, The Van Leer Jerusalem Foundation, Jerusalem
L. Graham, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
R. Krohn, McGill University, Montreal
W. Lepenies, Free University ofB erlin
H. Martins, University of Oxford
E. Mendelsohn, Harvard University
H. Nowotny, European Centre for Social Welfare Training
and Research, Vienna
H. Rose, University ofB radford
Claire Salomon-Bayet, University of Paris
P. Weingart, University of Bielefeld
R. D. Whitley, Manchester Business School, University ofM anchester
Managing Editor: R. D. Whitley
VOLUME VII - 1983
FUNCTIONS
AND USES OF
DISCIPLINARY
HISTORIES
Edited by
LOREN GRAHAM
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Program in Science, Technology and Society,
Cambridge, Mass. 02139, U.S.A.
WOLF LEPENIES
Institut {iir Soziologie, Freie Universitdt Berlin
and
PETER WEINGART
Fakultdt {iir Soziologie und Forschungsschwerpunkt
Wissenschaftsforschung, Universitdt Bielefeld
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY
A MEMBER OF THE KLUWER • ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP
DORDRECHT/BOSTON/LANCASTER
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Functions and uses of disciplinary histories.
(Sociology of the sciences; v. 7)
Includes index.
1. Science-History. 2. Social sciences-History.
3. Classical philosophy-History. I. Graham, Loren R.
II. Lepenies, Wolf. III. Weingart, Peter. IV. Series.
Q125.F86 1983 907'.2 83-4588
ISBN-13: 978-90-277-1521-0 ISBN-13: 978-94-009-7035-9
001: 10.10071978-94-009-7035-9
Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company,
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All Rights Reserved
© 1983 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgement vii
Introduction ix
Biographical Statements of the Contributors xxi
PART I
The Natural Sciences
M. NORTON WISE - On the Relation of Physical Science to History
in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany 3
PETER GALISON - Re-Reading the Past from the End of Physics:
Maxwell's Equations in Retrospect 35
BERNADETTE BENSAUDE-VINCENT - A Founder Myth in the
History of Sciences? - The Lavoisier Case 53
RACHEL LAUDAN - Redefinitions of a Discipline: Histories of
Geology and Geological History 79
ROLF WINAU - The Role of Medical History in the History of
Medicine in Germany 105
PART II
The Social Sciences
ROBERT ALUN JONES - On Merton's "History" and "System-
atics" of Sociological Theory 121
MITCHELL G. ASH - The Self-Presentation of a Discipline: His-
tory of Psychology in the United States between Pedagogy and
Scholarship 143
vi Table of Contents
ULFRIED GEUTER - The Uses of History for the Shaping of a
Field: Observations on German Psychology 191
BOB SCHOLTE - Cultural Anthropology and the Paradigm-Con-
cept: A Brief History of their Recent Convergence 229
PART III
The Humanities
REINHAR T HERZOG - On the Relation of Disciplinary Develop
ment and Historical Self-Presentation - the Case of Classical
Philology since the End of the Eighteenth Century 281
Epilogue 291
Name Index 297
Subject Index 305
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The editors would like to thank the 'Stiftung Volkswagenwerk' for the
generous support of the conference on "Die Selbstthematisierung von Diszi
plinen. Zur Historiographie von Disziplinen und ihrer Auswirkung auf die
Disziplinenentwicklung", which was held September 18-20, 1981, in prepara
tion of this volume.
We also want to thank the Center of Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) of
the University of Bielefeld for having been host to this conference, thus
supporting once more endeavours in the interdisciplinary study of science.
vii
INTRODUCTION
Edward Gibbon's allegation at the beginning of his Essay on the Study
of Literature (1764) that the history of empires is that of the miseries of
humankind whereas the history of the sciences is that of their splendour and
happiness has for a long time been accepted by professional scientists and
by historians of science alike. For its practitioner, the history of a discipline
displayed above all the always difficult but fmally rewarding approach to a
truth which was incorporated in the discipline in its actual fonn. Looking
back, it was only too easy to distinguish those who erred and heretics in
the field from the few forerunners of true science. On the one hand, the
traditional history of science was told as a story of hero and hero worship,
on the other hand it was, paradoxically enough, the constant attempt to
remind the scientist whom he should better forget.
It is not surprising at all therefore that the traditional history of science
was a field of only minor interest for the practitioner of a distinct scientific
diSCipline or specialty and at the same time a hardly challenging task for
the professional historian. Nietzsche had already described the historian of
science as someone who arrives late after harvest-time: it is somebody who is
only a tolerated guest at the thanksgiving dinner of the scientific community .
The traditional history of science, when noticed at all by the practitioner
of the discipline, was in most cases nothing but a "preface history" (Kuhn);
whenever the present discipline changed its cognitive content, the disciplinary
past took on another shape and was rewritten in an almost automatic way.
Today this situation has changed considerably. A growing concern for the
disciplinary past can be found in different fields, ranging from physics to the
human and social sciences, including the humanities. In many cases, this
new interest in the history of scientific disciplines is combined with a critical
evaluation of the "traditional" history of science.
Historians of science have - as one can well understand - probably been
the last to take note of the allegation from critics, notably sociolOgists, that
they often reproduce an ideology of science which mainly reflects the interests
ix
Loren Graham, Wolf Lepenies, and Peter Weingart (eds.), Functions and Uses of Dis
cipliTlJlry Histories, Volume VII, 1983, ix-xx.
Copyright © 1983 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
x Wolf Lepenies and Peter Weingart
in legitimation of the scientific profession. Thus, an 'Ideologiekritik' of the
history of science could easily point out that the reconstruction of scientific
development which focuses on the "great men" and on the linear and accu
mulative sequence of discoveries represents a distorted picture of which not
only the epistemological implications and assumptions could be drawn into
question but which also coincided all too neatly with an idealized picture of
the scientific enterprise. To reveal the ideological function of the history of
science can hardly come as a total surprise since the ideological functions of
general history are widely recognized.
To assume however that all historians of science are deliberately serving
to legitimate the cause of pure science and its elites would be far-fetched.
How, then, can one account for that happy coincidence? Evidently one has
to ask what the (possible) relations are between science, i.e. individual disci
plines or groups of them, and the histories that are being written about them.
The stories presented in this volume are varied, complex and sometimes,
we think, even amusing. In order for the reader to appreciate some of the
generalizations that we have drawn from their messages it is necessary to
present these first.
The Natural Sciences
It is not by accident that we have begun with case studies from the natural,
the "hard" sciences where, as the lore of science has it a connection between
the development of the discipline and its historiography is only conceivable
as a one-sided dependence of the latter on the former. To some extent that
point is made in Peter Galison's article on the Re-Reading of the Past from
the End of Physics. But Galison identifies all together three functions of the
reinterpretation of past accomplishments in physics: pedagogic, heuristic
and justificatory ones and the examples he gives lend support to the thesis
that at least in the case of the latter the writing of history affects the advance
ment of the discipline itself.
Norton Wise looks at the history of physics from the perspective of
. the history of ideas and establishes the case that the physical scientists
in Germany participated in the late nineteenth century reaction against
materialism. This means in part an attempt to build new bridges between
the historical disciplines and the natural sciences. In particular, Ernst Mach
Introduction xi
and his positivism and the energeticists around Wilhelm Ostwald adopted as
an 'ideal of explanation' in the physical sciences several premises traditional
in German historicism. The modes of connection between physics, its history
and the general political context perhaps remain implicit in this analysis but
should not be overlooked. Wise suggests the disciplinary debate between the
'Natur' - and 'Geisteswissenschaften' both on the level of the universities and
in a national political context and the dominance of the historicist paradigm
in conservative-liberal political philosophy as two such modes.
Bensaude's article on Lavoisier looks at the historiography of chemistry
from a different perspective. How does one proceed from the notion of
revolution to that of foundation, from historic talk to mythical narrative?
she asks and goes on to show which factors, epistemological, historical,
philosophical and socio-political, accounted for the erection of Lavoisier
as an 'immortal monument', for the establishment of the founder myth.
Lavoisier himself was a party in this process by taking the strategic move in
the opening remarks of his Traiti! eJementaire of not mentioning his prede
cessors at all and instead presenting his work as an entirely new basis, a
radical foundation of chemistry. A consequence of this was that "all those
concerned described the chemistry of the nineteenth century as an extension
of the Lavoisian enterprise". The founder myth had consequences not only
for the history of chemistry but for chemistry itself, as Bensaude shows in
the reluctance of the reception of atomism in France which she attributes
to the system of authority in French chemistry based on the commitment
to Lavoisier at the time.
Laudan's account of the relation between 'Histories of Geology and
Geological History' focuses on the legitimizing role of history writing but she
can identify at the same time how, depending on the particular state of the
discipline, the specific form in which that takes place may vary. Thus Lyell's
historical introduction to the Principles of Geology was intended to promote
a revolution in geology by showing how the methodology adopted in the past
had prevented geology from becoming a respected science. In the early his
tories of plate tectonics such as Wilson's and Cox's the goal was the reverse
insofar as the revolution which by now was interpreted in Kuhnian terms had
to be stabilized. This was attempted by showing that the revolution of plate
tectonics was very much like other revolutions in science and merely proved
that geology was a true member of the community of scientific disciplines.