The value of the history of science

My Sciblings Bora, John, Brian and Benjamin have asked what the value of the history of science is to scientists. Below the fold is my apologia for writing a stonking great history of a scientific concept (species, in case the sidebar wasn't enough hint), in which I defend the worth of intellectual history to historians. Maybe it will add something to this debate. It is from the preface to my book. I hope the history of science is worthwhile, but it is interesting that the people who most wanted my book to be published are scientists working in the field on which I am writing, so I think it has value in their eyes.

Why look at one concept in science, out of context of the larger theories, practices and societies in which it occurs? Why trace “species”? This sort of question is raised by both philosophers and historians when histories of scientific ideas are written.

Philosophers tend to dislike history for several reasons. One is that they often address issues and ideas as if the opponent is sitting across the symposium table from them, no matter whether that opponent lived last week, last century or last millennium. Philosophers of science often treat history as a source of anecdotes to illustrate some more general point, such as the way the Copernican Revolution changed philosophical understanding, or how genes overcame vitalism. Famously or infamously, Imre Lakatos “rationally reconstructed” the history of scientific ideas in a footnote, because history is messy, and failed to clearly illustrate the philosophical point.

Historians tend to dislike intellectual histories, because they treat ideas as free-floating objects (“free-floating rationales” as Dennett calls them) independent of the individual psychologies and life histories, and of the social conditions in which they were raised and elaborated. Also, histories of ideas are too easy to do. All you need do is find some apparent resemblance between ideas at time a and time b, and you have a narrative. Historians, rightly, want to see actual historical influences, and the effects of social and cultural contexts, the differing epistemes at work.

Both professions can go too far. I think history comes in a number of scales, which following a practice in ecology, I will call alpha history, beta history, and gamma history. Alpha history is done by investigating archives, and looking at locales and artefacts. It is hard and local work, and will give the data of the larger scale histories. Beta history is done by covering a restricted period, or biography, or event. It relies on the alpha material, and synthesises it into a narrative explanation of the subject. Gamma history, though, is out of fashion. Rather than being a “life and times” or “history of the period”, it attempts to take alpha and beta historical work and synthesise a grand scale narrative. And because a really grand scale narrative is almost impossible to do by one person, it pays to limit the subject to something manageable. This book is at the edge (some might uncharitably say, over the edge) of that limit. But if gamma history is not worth doing, why is alpha and beta history?

Philosophy of science has become increasingly grounded in history. It is becoming the norm for philosophers of science to appeal closely to the historical development, failures as well as successes, or a given discipline or problem. Majorie Grene and Ian Hacking are perhaps the exemplars of this approach, although David Hull has also made a plea for actual examples in philosophy of biology [Hull 1989]. And historians of science such as Polly Winsor and Jan Sapp have offered excellent case studies and narratives of all three kinds for philosophers to use. There is a shift towards this now, and that might justify a conceptual history at this time. However, there’s another reason for writing this now, and that is that if philosophers don’t do this, and historians don’t, the scientists will, and have. A major target of this book is the scientist-developed essentialism story of the past 50 years. Polly Winsor and Ron Amundson, among others, have written critiques of the view that before Darwin, every biologist was held in thrall to Aristotle’s essentialist biology, but there is no overall summary of this. Also, the essentialism story is used to justify or critique various species conceptions by the biologists themselves. History has a role in scientific debate.

Generally, scientists have a “rolling wall of fog” that trails behind them at various distances for different disciplines, above which only the peaks of mountains of the Greats can be seen. In medical biology, for instance, this wall is about five years behind the present. Little is cited before that, and those works that are, are cited by nearly everyone. So there is a tendency for what Kuhn called “textbook history” to become the common property of all members of the discipline. However, taxonomy is an unusual discipline, in that the classical works are more widely cited and appealed to than in most other sciences. The ideas of an eighteenth century Swede or French author can carry weight in a way that the genetics or physics of that time do not. Partly this is because a large element of taxonomy is conceptual: logical and metaphysical ideas, which change slowly, carry probative force. So asking “what is a species?” is to ask a historical as well as a present question, and how the notion of species arrived at the present debate in part defines that debate.

Doing this kind of history is rather like trying to work out the past from a series of old photographs in a box in the attic you got from your grandparents. Faces appear in various guises, resemblances recur, and it is almost impossible to identify exactly who is whose child, friend or mere passers-by. Nevertheless, having that box of snapshots, one is richer for it in understanding both the past and the present.

So I seek absolution from each of these three professions – philosophy, history, and biology. I believe I can show there is a basic error involved in the essentialism story that can be resolved by a conceptual history. Scientific history is at least partially conceptual, so I don’t think it is illicit to write a conceptual history. But the conceptual history of an idea? That might be too much. Well, this is not exactly the history of an idea. It is a combined history of various ideas and words that have a subtle ambiguity in philosophy and biology. And it is my claim that this ambiguity has confused the present debate over species in both fields.

Hull, David L. 1989. A function for actual examples in philosophy of science. In What the philosophy of biology is: Essays dedicated to David Hull, edited by M. Ruse. Dordrecht: Kluwer: 309-321.