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Science: Constructivist Perspectives, History of
Science: Constructivist Perspectives, History of Iwan R Morus, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract This article provides a summary of developments in the history of science informed by social constructivist perspectives since the 1970s. It discusses key influential texts and highlights historical themes of particular importance such as the understanding of science as local culture, the material culture of experiment, science and performance, and science and labor. The article also emphasizes the constructivist understanding of science as a species of skilled practice and the ways in which such accounts draw attention to the importance of understanding the circulation of skills in the development and consolidation of new knowledge.
Historians of science inspired by the strong program in the sociology of scientific knowledge have developed new approaches to understand science’s past. Rather than considering science as an abstract, disembodied body of ideas they have focused on science as a localized practice, embedded in material, national, and political cultures. They have looked at the work involved in making experimental phenomena robust and repeatable. They have looked at the skills involved: their origins, their translation from site to site and individual to individual, their instrumental embodiment, and the changing social status of their possessors. This has focused attention on the ways in which scientists have represented themselves, the knowledge they produce, and on the ways in which they and their products have been represented. Economic, social, and political interests were at stake in such processes. How knowledge was historically constructed was highly consequential for the organization of society. Such histories have also focused on how audiences have received, actively appropriated, and reformulated science in different contexts. Science, from this perspective, is a constant process of production, reproduction, and consumption. The last quarter of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a challenging new perspective on the sciences and their history. Drawing on developments in the social studies of science, as well as new trends in labor and social history, historians began to look at science as a local practice, rather than as an abstract, disembodied, and universal set of ideas. Such historians started looking at science as part of culture, locally constituted in particular material, social, and even political practices. Constructivist historians are interested in the detailed processes of scientific knowledge production, dissemination, and reception. They differ from more traditional social historians of science in their insistence that the content as well as the context of science is a proper focus of cultural historical analysis. Constructivist historians see science as a species of skilled practice and therefore inquire into the cultural origins of those skills; the means and the spaces through which they are produced, validated, and disseminated; and the ways in which particular forms of inquiry – and particular kinds of knowledge – have historically been characterized as scientific.
Local Cultures In their exemplary study of the early modern culture of experiment, Shapin and Schaffer lay out some of the central
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 21
concerns of the constructivist history of science (Shapin and Schaffer, 2011[1985]). Focusing on the dispute between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes concerning the validity of Boyle’s famous air-pump experiments, they use Hobbes’ critique of Boyle’s experiments to lay bare the interests underlying them and the strategies that Boyle and his allies adopted to convince others of the experiments’ reliability. They demonstrate how even such an apparently universal cornerstone of the scientific method as experiment has its origins in particular local and contingent circumstances. Making science local and examining the interests that underlie the articulation and resolution of scientific debates have been the preoccupations of constructivist history. Other pioneering studies include accounts of the ways that disillusionment with rational philosophy and mechanistic notions of causality in postwar Weimar Germany informed interpretations of quantum theory (Forman, 1971), and of the role social interests played in debates concerning the anatomical structure of the brain in the early nineteenth-century Edinburgh (Shapin, 1979). Such studies emphasize that such interests are constitutive rather than contingent features of even the most apparently abstract and technical forms of knowledge. One important outcome of constructivist history is the recognition that even the issue of what kind of activity might count as science is often the product of locally articulated debates and controversies. Not only did Boyle and Hobbes disagree as to what might reliably be inferred from the outcome of air-pump experiments, but they also disagreed as to whether or not doing such experiments should be counted as a reliable way of generating scientific knowledge at all. Similarly, members of the scientific and the medical establishment who opposed the introduction of continental ideas concerning evolution and transmutation into early Victorian England did so both because they did not recognize the practices or the practitioners involved as being properly scientific and because they disagreed with the theories themselves (Desmond, 1989). As the labels ‘science’ and ‘scientific’ gained in cultural value, so too did different groups of knowledge producers disagree more vociferously as to what kinds of people and what kinds of activity should be accorded those labels (Gieryn, 1999). Constructivist historians have identified the business of policing the constantly changing boundaries of science as a crucial part of science’s history. Through institutions, regimes of training, control of resources, and access to networks
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.85010-2
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of patronage, natural philosophers and scientists have struggled to circumscribe and discipline their own and others’ knowledge-producing activities. This localist historical perspective leads to recognition of the extent to which the production and validation of scientific knowledge are contingent upon more or less informal networks of trust. In order for particular groups or individuals to be considered reliable spokespersons for nature, they have to be trustworthy. They have to be the kinds of people who can be relied upon to tell the truth. This opens up the possibility of producing a cultural history of truth and objectivity. The marks of being trustworthy vary depending on time and place. In early modern England, for example, trustworthiness was considered the hallmark of the gentleman (Shapin, 1994). As a result, many of the informal (and more formal) rules of early modern gentlemanly behavior became enshrined as codes of conduct for the nascent scientific community as well. Some historians have argued that the increased scientific reliance on precision measurement and self-registering instrumentation since the beginning of the nineteenth century may be regarded as efforts to circumvent the need for trusting individuals with knowledge production (Schaffer, 1988). Others have pinpointed the increasing quantification of science as a means of overcoming the problem of trust in the production and particularly in the transfer of knowledge (Porter, 1995). The attention to local culture also emphasizes the historical importance of space and spatiality in the production and consumption of scientific knowledge (Livingstone, 2003).
The Material Culture of Experiment Constructivist history of science pays particular attention to the process of experiment. Experimentation is taken to be a matter of human agents actively engaged in constructing the natural world around them (Gooding et al., 1989). The material culture of experiment is a crucial focus of attention. Historians have worked to recover the kinds of material resources required for successful experimentation. They have traced the emergence of the laboratory as a specialized space within which experiments take place. They have emphasized the ways in which successful manipulation of nature requires the experimenter to manipulate material and social resources successfully (Latour, 1988). Michael Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic induction, for example, involved as much his marshalling of the Royal Institution’s considerable resources as it did his artful manipulations of materials in the laboratory (Morus, 1998). Constructivist historians have identified as well the important ways in which individual scientific reputations hinge upon recognition of the property relationship between experiment and experimenter. Priority disputes in science are frequent and virulent precisely because of the ways in which experiments embody the skills and reputations of their makers (Iliffe, 1992). Seeing experiment as a skilled activity, constructivist historians have focused on understanding the historical origins of the kinds of skills required in order to carry out experiments. They have investigated how particular skills have been transferred into the laboratory from other settings, such as workshops or factories. Historical experiments have been replicated
in an effort to better understand the tacit, unarticulated skills required for their successful performance. Such studies have shown how iconic experiments, such as James Prescott Joule’s famous paddle-wheel experiments establishing the mechanical equivalent of heat during the 1840s, were contingent upon the technical know-how that Joule and his workers derived from their experiences in the family brewery (Sibum, 1995). Historians have also looked at the politics of skill in the laboratory and elsewhere, investigating the division and distribution of hierarchies of skilled activity within science at different times and places. Much attention has been devoted to the historical transmission of material resources and skilled personnel that accompanies the standardization of experimental practices. Work in this vein has shown how experiments move from being instances of highly skilled, difficult to replicate, and delicate procedures performed in highly circumscribed settings to being robust, standardized, and readily reproducible embodiments of group knowledge (Galison, 1987). Apparently self-evident features of experimentation, such as precision measurement, are shown by constructivist historians to have a history. Measurement can be taken to be an expression of particular cultural values (Wise, 1995). The rise of metrology, for example, was an expression of science’s increasing embeddedness in and contribution to a rapidly bureaucratizing and industrializing Western culture. Measurement could be regarded not only as a means of disciplining nature, rendering it more amenable to standardized routines of inquiry, but also as a means of disciplining the scientific workforce. Nineteenth-century scientific managers, such as George Biddell Airy, the English Astronomer Royal, regarded their laboratories and observatories as industrial workplaces and used regimes of routinized measurement and calculation to impose an industrial discipline on their workforces (Ashworth, 1998). In the late nineteenth-century laboratories at Cambridge or Glasgow, natural philosophers such as James Clerk Maxwell or Lord Kelvin saw in regimes of precision measurement in teaching and research, an expression of their affinity with industrializing society (Schaffer, 1992). Constructivist historians have investigated how adherence to cultural values like precision came to be taken as a hallmark of what it meant to be properly scientific. Such historians have also investigated the relationships between the material cultures of the laboratory and of fieldwork, showing how workers in the field, such as twentieth-century primatologists, have developed their own distinctive material and methodological cultures and disciplines (Rees, 2009). Constructivist historians have interrogated theory, using the analytical tools developed to understand experiment to look at theory as a form of cultural practice as well. From this perspective, processes of theory construction and dissemination are seen in terms of the pedagogical training and practical skills required to participate in highly specialized theoretical cultures (Warwick, 2003).
Science as Performance One notable outcome of constructivist historical work has been to make the identity of the scientific practitioner itself problematic. Being a scientist is not a self-evident activity: the
Science: Constructivist Perspectives, History of
word itself is of comparatively recent, early nineteenthcentury origin. Scientific practitioners in the past occupied a number of different cultural niches. Constructivist historians have shown how natural philosophers at different times and places have been engaged actively in carving out social spaces for themselves and their work. Galileo’s position at the Medici court in Renaissance Florence, for example, was not ready-made. Galileo had to work hard to promote the idea of a philosopher or mathematician courtier that he could then fulfill (Biagioli, 1993). He had to fashion himself into the kind of person who could easily inhabit that cultural niche and then to orient his work so that it would fit into the milieu of Italian Renaissance court life. The same could be said of Humphry Davy and his efforts to forge a place for the fashionable natural philosopher in Georgian London (Golinski, 1992). Constructivist approaches share with the ‘new history’ an emphasis on the important role of individual agents’ artful engagement in constructing both themselves and their worlds. Recent work has paid particular attention to the body of the scientific practitioner (Lawrence and Shapin, 1998). This is an outgrowth of the insistence on viewing scientific practices and the knowledge they produce as being embodied. Scientific practitioners at different times and places have needed to be particular kinds of human beings with specific bodily attributes. The ways in which those attributes were held to be best produced – whether by birth, self-discipline, or rigorous training – have been a focus of increasing historical attention. Historians have examined, for example, the relationship between bodily, mental, and moral discipline in Victorian electrical metrology (Gooday, 2004). The bodily interaction of practitioners with their experimental apparatus and the spatial organization of their laboratories have come to be recognized as playing an important role in the production of knowledge. The organization of such spaces and the kinds of material interactions between practitioners, and between them and their instruments, that have been taken to produce reliable knowledge are now seen as contingent and open to historical investigation. Not only the identity and activities of the practitioner producing knowledge, but also the role of the audience for such productions is now recognized as constitutive. Audiences for scientific knowledge do not simply act as passive receivers of settled and unproblematic matters of fact. They have an important and active role to play in the articulation and resolution of controversies. During the early modern period and well into the nineteenth century, experiments were often performed before an audience. This was not simply a matter of demonstration. Members of the audience – prestigious and often named individually – played an important role in validating the knowledge produced. Their reputations could be used to underwrite the matters of fact they had witnessed. Audiences have participated in and responded to the processes of knowledge production through a variety of media, from direct witnessing to the virtual witnessing of reading a scientific paper at first hand, to the reception of second- or third-hand reports in museums, newspapers, reviews, or popular handbooks. Public scientific performances are therefore an important part of the dynamic process of knowledge production and validation. This draws attention to the visual culture of science
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too, and the historical construction of seeing as the paradigm of knowing (Morus, 2006).
Science at Work This kind of history also looks at the many ways in which nature has been used historically as a model for social organization. The constitution of the natural economy has frequently been used as a powerful argument in favor of particular ways of ordering society (Roberts et al., 2008). Natural theology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example, was widely used as an argument in favor of existing social hierarchies. Evolutionary theories were similarly cited to support new, meritocratic visions of society. The proper social economy was often held to mirror the natural order. Constructivist historians have shown how models of nature and society in the past were frequently mutually sustaining. They were produced together. Discussions in mid-nineteenth-century thermodynamics surrounding issues of work and waste in natural economies were coextensive with arguments concerning the proper organization of work and the minimization of waste in political economy (Smith and Wise, 1989). Proponents of new forms of industrial organization looked to nature for their models, while scientists looked to factory organization as a model for the best means of ordering the search for truth. Different models for the organization of scientific work often expressed different understandings not only of how nature was ordered but also of the proper politics of knowledge production. Nineteenth-century scientific gentlemen, for example, regarded scientific work as a highly disciplined, hierarchical, and increasingly specialized activity. In principle, it was open to all. In practice, however, it could only be conducted properly either by, or under the supervision of, properly trained and vocationally committed ‘gentlemen of science’ (Rudwick, 1985). Other social groups had different notions of the politics of knowledge. The gentlemen’s vision excluded women and artisans, for example, from anything other than a supportive role in making knowledge. Working-class men, on the other hand, could construct their own very different accounts of how knowledge making ought to be organized (Secord, 1994). Through constructivist historical analysis, many of the traditional analytical categories employed by historians and sociologists of science have become recognized as being themselves in need of careful historical contextualization. Pronouncements by historical actors concerning matters such as the scientific method, experimentation, objectivity, or even more novel analytical categories, such as skill, are not to be taken at face value. Such pronouncements usually carry considerable freight. Deciding what kind of activity might properly be considered as an experiment, for example, is not straightforward. At different times, experimentation has been regarded as both a public and a private process. It has been characterized as both a fundamentally communal and an essentially individual activity. Again, what it means to be a skilled worker has changed a great deal since the early modern period. Skill, like method, or even science itself, is a historical construction. By looking at science as a preeminent cultural activity, constructivist histories of science have made it possible
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to raise a whole host of new questions concerning the ways in which human beings, in the past, have tried to make sense of the world around them. Rather than seeing science as a static, monolithic edifice, constructivist history recognizes it as a constantly changing process of production, reproduction, and consumption; its boundaries continually shifting and its meaning always open to renegotiation.
See also: Chemical Science: History and Sociology; Citizen Science; Constructivism and Constructionism: Methodology; Experiment in Science and Technology Studies; History and the Social Sciences; History: Overview; Physical Sciences: History and Sociology; Science, History of; Scientific Knowledge, Sociology of; Social Constructivism.
Bibliography Ashworth, W., 1998. John Herschel, George Airy, and the roaming eye of the state. History of Science 36, 151–178. Biagioli, M., 1993. Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Desmond, A., 1989. The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Forman, P., 1971. Weimar culture, causality, and quantum theory, 1918–1927: adaptation by German physicists and mathematicians to a hostile intellectual environment. Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3, 1–115. Galison, P., 1987. How Experiments End. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Gieryn, T., 1999. Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Golinski, J., 1992. Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment Britain, 1760–1820. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gooday, G., 2004. The Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gooding, D., Pinch, T., Schaffer, S. (Eds.), 1989. The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Iliffe, R., 1992. In the warehouse: privacy, property and priority in the early Royal Society. History of Science 30, 30–68. Latour, B., 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Lawrence, C., Shapin, S. (Eds.), 1998. Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Livingstone, D., 2003. Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Morus, I.R., 1998. Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition and Experiment in Early Nineteenth-Century London. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Morus, I.R., 2006. Seeing and believing science. Isis 97, 101–110. Porter, T., 1995. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Rees, A., 2009. The Infanticide Controversy: Primatology and the Art of Field Science. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Roberts, L., Schaffer, S., Dear, P. (Eds.), 2008. The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Rudwick, M., 1985. The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Schaffer, S., 1988. Astronomers mark time: discipline and the personal equation. Science in Context 2, 115–145. Schaffer, S., 1992. Late Victorian metrology and its instrumentation: a manufactory of ohms. In: Bud, R., Cozzens, S. (Eds.), Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions and Science. SPIE Optical Engineering Press, Bellingham, WA, pp. 23–56. Secord, A., 1994. Science in the pub: artisan botanists in early nineteenth century Lancashire. History of Science 32, 269–315. Shapin, S., 1979. The politics of observation: cerebral anatomy and social interests in the Edinburgh phrenology disputes. In: Wallis, R. (Ed.), On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge. University of Keele Press, Keele, UK. Shapin, S., 1994. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Shapin, S., Schaffer, S., 2011[1985]. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (first ed., 1985), second ed. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, pp. 139–178. Sibum, H.O., 1995. Reworking the mechanical value of heat: instruments of precision and gestures of accuracy in early Victorian England. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26, 73–106. Smith, C., Wise, N., 1989. Energy & Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Warwick, A., 2003. Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL. Wise, N. (Ed.), 1995. The Values of Precision. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Abstract This article provides a summary of developments in the history of science informed by social constructivist perspectives since the 1970s. It discusses key influential texts and highlights historical themes of particular importance such as the understanding of science as local culture, the material culture of experiment, science and performance, and science and labor. The article also emphasizes the constructivist understanding of science as a species of skilled practice and the ways in which such accounts draw attention to the importance of understanding the circulation of skills in the development and consolidation of new knowledge.
Historians of science inspired by the strong program in the sociology of scientific knowledge have developed new approaches to understand science’s past. Rather than considering science as an abstract, disembodied body of ideas they have focused on science as a localized practice, embedded in material, national, and political cultures. They have looked at the work involved in making experimental phenomena robust and repeatable. They have looked at the skills involved: their origins, their translation from site to site and individual to individual, their instrumental embodiment, and the changing social status of their possessors. This has focused attention on the ways in which scientists have represented themselves, the knowledge they produce, and on the ways in which they and their products have been represented. Economic, social, and political interests were at stake in such processes. How knowledge was historically constructed was highly consequential for the organization of society. Such histories have also focused on how audiences have received, actively appropriated, and reformulated science in different contexts. Science, from this perspective, is a constant process of production, reproduction, and consumption. The last quarter of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a challenging new perspective on the sciences and their history. Drawing on developments in the social studies of science, as well as new trends in labor and social history, historians began to look at science as a local practice, rather than as an abstract, disembodied, and universal set of ideas. Such historians started looking at science as part of culture, locally constituted in particular material, social, and even political practices. Constructivist historians are interested in the detailed processes of scientific knowledge production, dissemination, and reception. They differ from more traditional social historians of science in their insistence that the content as well as the context of science is a proper focus of cultural historical analysis. Constructivist historians see science as a species of skilled practice and therefore inquire into the cultural origins of those skills; the means and the spaces through which they are produced, validated, and disseminated; and the ways in which particular forms of inquiry – and particular kinds of knowledge – have historically been characterized as scientific.
Local Cultures In their exemplary study of the early modern culture of experiment, Shapin and Schaffer lay out some of the central
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 21
concerns of the constructivist history of science (Shapin and Schaffer, 2011[1985]). Focusing on the dispute between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes concerning the validity of Boyle’s famous air-pump experiments, they use Hobbes’ critique of Boyle’s experiments to lay bare the interests underlying them and the strategies that Boyle and his allies adopted to convince others of the experiments’ reliability. They demonstrate how even such an apparently universal cornerstone of the scientific method as experiment has its origins in particular local and contingent circumstances. Making science local and examining the interests that underlie the articulation and resolution of scientific debates have been the preoccupations of constructivist history. Other pioneering studies include accounts of the ways that disillusionment with rational philosophy and mechanistic notions of causality in postwar Weimar Germany informed interpretations of quantum theory (Forman, 1971), and of the role social interests played in debates concerning the anatomical structure of the brain in the early nineteenth-century Edinburgh (Shapin, 1979). Such studies emphasize that such interests are constitutive rather than contingent features of even the most apparently abstract and technical forms of knowledge. One important outcome of constructivist history is the recognition that even the issue of what kind of activity might count as science is often the product of locally articulated debates and controversies. Not only did Boyle and Hobbes disagree as to what might reliably be inferred from the outcome of air-pump experiments, but they also disagreed as to whether or not doing such experiments should be counted as a reliable way of generating scientific knowledge at all. Similarly, members of the scientific and the medical establishment who opposed the introduction of continental ideas concerning evolution and transmutation into early Victorian England did so both because they did not recognize the practices or the practitioners involved as being properly scientific and because they disagreed with the theories themselves (Desmond, 1989). As the labels ‘science’ and ‘scientific’ gained in cultural value, so too did different groups of knowledge producers disagree more vociferously as to what kinds of people and what kinds of activity should be accorded those labels (Gieryn, 1999). Constructivist historians have identified the business of policing the constantly changing boundaries of science as a crucial part of science’s history. Through institutions, regimes of training, control of resources, and access to networks
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.85010-2
225
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of patronage, natural philosophers and scientists have struggled to circumscribe and discipline their own and others’ knowledge-producing activities. This localist historical perspective leads to recognition of the extent to which the production and validation of scientific knowledge are contingent upon more or less informal networks of trust. In order for particular groups or individuals to be considered reliable spokespersons for nature, they have to be trustworthy. They have to be the kinds of people who can be relied upon to tell the truth. This opens up the possibility of producing a cultural history of truth and objectivity. The marks of being trustworthy vary depending on time and place. In early modern England, for example, trustworthiness was considered the hallmark of the gentleman (Shapin, 1994). As a result, many of the informal (and more formal) rules of early modern gentlemanly behavior became enshrined as codes of conduct for the nascent scientific community as well. Some historians have argued that the increased scientific reliance on precision measurement and self-registering instrumentation since the beginning of the nineteenth century may be regarded as efforts to circumvent the need for trusting individuals with knowledge production (Schaffer, 1988). Others have pinpointed the increasing quantification of science as a means of overcoming the problem of trust in the production and particularly in the transfer of knowledge (Porter, 1995). The attention to local culture also emphasizes the historical importance of space and spatiality in the production and consumption of scientific knowledge (Livingstone, 2003).
The Material Culture of Experiment Constructivist history of science pays particular attention to the process of experiment. Experimentation is taken to be a matter of human agents actively engaged in constructing the natural world around them (Gooding et al., 1989). The material culture of experiment is a crucial focus of attention. Historians have worked to recover the kinds of material resources required for successful experimentation. They have traced the emergence of the laboratory as a specialized space within which experiments take place. They have emphasized the ways in which successful manipulation of nature requires the experimenter to manipulate material and social resources successfully (Latour, 1988). Michael Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic induction, for example, involved as much his marshalling of the Royal Institution’s considerable resources as it did his artful manipulations of materials in the laboratory (Morus, 1998). Constructivist historians have identified as well the important ways in which individual scientific reputations hinge upon recognition of the property relationship between experiment and experimenter. Priority disputes in science are frequent and virulent precisely because of the ways in which experiments embody the skills and reputations of their makers (Iliffe, 1992). Seeing experiment as a skilled activity, constructivist historians have focused on understanding the historical origins of the kinds of skills required in order to carry out experiments. They have investigated how particular skills have been transferred into the laboratory from other settings, such as workshops or factories. Historical experiments have been replicated
in an effort to better understand the tacit, unarticulated skills required for their successful performance. Such studies have shown how iconic experiments, such as James Prescott Joule’s famous paddle-wheel experiments establishing the mechanical equivalent of heat during the 1840s, were contingent upon the technical know-how that Joule and his workers derived from their experiences in the family brewery (Sibum, 1995). Historians have also looked at the politics of skill in the laboratory and elsewhere, investigating the division and distribution of hierarchies of skilled activity within science at different times and places. Much attention has been devoted to the historical transmission of material resources and skilled personnel that accompanies the standardization of experimental practices. Work in this vein has shown how experiments move from being instances of highly skilled, difficult to replicate, and delicate procedures performed in highly circumscribed settings to being robust, standardized, and readily reproducible embodiments of group knowledge (Galison, 1987). Apparently self-evident features of experimentation, such as precision measurement, are shown by constructivist historians to have a history. Measurement can be taken to be an expression of particular cultural values (Wise, 1995). The rise of metrology, for example, was an expression of science’s increasing embeddedness in and contribution to a rapidly bureaucratizing and industrializing Western culture. Measurement could be regarded not only as a means of disciplining nature, rendering it more amenable to standardized routines of inquiry, but also as a means of disciplining the scientific workforce. Nineteenth-century scientific managers, such as George Biddell Airy, the English Astronomer Royal, regarded their laboratories and observatories as industrial workplaces and used regimes of routinized measurement and calculation to impose an industrial discipline on their workforces (Ashworth, 1998). In the late nineteenth-century laboratories at Cambridge or Glasgow, natural philosophers such as James Clerk Maxwell or Lord Kelvin saw in regimes of precision measurement in teaching and research, an expression of their affinity with industrializing society (Schaffer, 1992). Constructivist historians have investigated how adherence to cultural values like precision came to be taken as a hallmark of what it meant to be properly scientific. Such historians have also investigated the relationships between the material cultures of the laboratory and of fieldwork, showing how workers in the field, such as twentieth-century primatologists, have developed their own distinctive material and methodological cultures and disciplines (Rees, 2009). Constructivist historians have interrogated theory, using the analytical tools developed to understand experiment to look at theory as a form of cultural practice as well. From this perspective, processes of theory construction and dissemination are seen in terms of the pedagogical training and practical skills required to participate in highly specialized theoretical cultures (Warwick, 2003).
Science as Performance One notable outcome of constructivist historical work has been to make the identity of the scientific practitioner itself problematic. Being a scientist is not a self-evident activity: the
Science: Constructivist Perspectives, History of
word itself is of comparatively recent, early nineteenthcentury origin. Scientific practitioners in the past occupied a number of different cultural niches. Constructivist historians have shown how natural philosophers at different times and places have been engaged actively in carving out social spaces for themselves and their work. Galileo’s position at the Medici court in Renaissance Florence, for example, was not ready-made. Galileo had to work hard to promote the idea of a philosopher or mathematician courtier that he could then fulfill (Biagioli, 1993). He had to fashion himself into the kind of person who could easily inhabit that cultural niche and then to orient his work so that it would fit into the milieu of Italian Renaissance court life. The same could be said of Humphry Davy and his efforts to forge a place for the fashionable natural philosopher in Georgian London (Golinski, 1992). Constructivist approaches share with the ‘new history’ an emphasis on the important role of individual agents’ artful engagement in constructing both themselves and their worlds. Recent work has paid particular attention to the body of the scientific practitioner (Lawrence and Shapin, 1998). This is an outgrowth of the insistence on viewing scientific practices and the knowledge they produce as being embodied. Scientific practitioners at different times and places have needed to be particular kinds of human beings with specific bodily attributes. The ways in which those attributes were held to be best produced – whether by birth, self-discipline, or rigorous training – have been a focus of increasing historical attention. Historians have examined, for example, the relationship between bodily, mental, and moral discipline in Victorian electrical metrology (Gooday, 2004). The bodily interaction of practitioners with their experimental apparatus and the spatial organization of their laboratories have come to be recognized as playing an important role in the production of knowledge. The organization of such spaces and the kinds of material interactions between practitioners, and between them and their instruments, that have been taken to produce reliable knowledge are now seen as contingent and open to historical investigation. Not only the identity and activities of the practitioner producing knowledge, but also the role of the audience for such productions is now recognized as constitutive. Audiences for scientific knowledge do not simply act as passive receivers of settled and unproblematic matters of fact. They have an important and active role to play in the articulation and resolution of controversies. During the early modern period and well into the nineteenth century, experiments were often performed before an audience. This was not simply a matter of demonstration. Members of the audience – prestigious and often named individually – played an important role in validating the knowledge produced. Their reputations could be used to underwrite the matters of fact they had witnessed. Audiences have participated in and responded to the processes of knowledge production through a variety of media, from direct witnessing to the virtual witnessing of reading a scientific paper at first hand, to the reception of second- or third-hand reports in museums, newspapers, reviews, or popular handbooks. Public scientific performances are therefore an important part of the dynamic process of knowledge production and validation. This draws attention to the visual culture of science
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too, and the historical construction of seeing as the paradigm of knowing (Morus, 2006).
Science at Work This kind of history also looks at the many ways in which nature has been used historically as a model for social organization. The constitution of the natural economy has frequently been used as a powerful argument in favor of particular ways of ordering society (Roberts et al., 2008). Natural theology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example, was widely used as an argument in favor of existing social hierarchies. Evolutionary theories were similarly cited to support new, meritocratic visions of society. The proper social economy was often held to mirror the natural order. Constructivist historians have shown how models of nature and society in the past were frequently mutually sustaining. They were produced together. Discussions in mid-nineteenth-century thermodynamics surrounding issues of work and waste in natural economies were coextensive with arguments concerning the proper organization of work and the minimization of waste in political economy (Smith and Wise, 1989). Proponents of new forms of industrial organization looked to nature for their models, while scientists looked to factory organization as a model for the best means of ordering the search for truth. Different models for the organization of scientific work often expressed different understandings not only of how nature was ordered but also of the proper politics of knowledge production. Nineteenth-century scientific gentlemen, for example, regarded scientific work as a highly disciplined, hierarchical, and increasingly specialized activity. In principle, it was open to all. In practice, however, it could only be conducted properly either by, or under the supervision of, properly trained and vocationally committed ‘gentlemen of science’ (Rudwick, 1985). Other social groups had different notions of the politics of knowledge. The gentlemen’s vision excluded women and artisans, for example, from anything other than a supportive role in making knowledge. Working-class men, on the other hand, could construct their own very different accounts of how knowledge making ought to be organized (Secord, 1994). Through constructivist historical analysis, many of the traditional analytical categories employed by historians and sociologists of science have become recognized as being themselves in need of careful historical contextualization. Pronouncements by historical actors concerning matters such as the scientific method, experimentation, objectivity, or even more novel analytical categories, such as skill, are not to be taken at face value. Such pronouncements usually carry considerable freight. Deciding what kind of activity might properly be considered as an experiment, for example, is not straightforward. At different times, experimentation has been regarded as both a public and a private process. It has been characterized as both a fundamentally communal and an essentially individual activity. Again, what it means to be a skilled worker has changed a great deal since the early modern period. Skill, like method, or even science itself, is a historical construction. By looking at science as a preeminent cultural activity, constructivist histories of science have made it possible
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to raise a whole host of new questions concerning the ways in which human beings, in the past, have tried to make sense of the world around them. Rather than seeing science as a static, monolithic edifice, constructivist history recognizes it as a constantly changing process of production, reproduction, and consumption; its boundaries continually shifting and its meaning always open to renegotiation.
See also: Chemical Science: History and Sociology; Citizen Science; Constructivism and Constructionism: Methodology; Experiment in Science and Technology Studies; History and the Social Sciences; History: Overview; Physical Sciences: History and Sociology; Science, History of; Scientific Knowledge, Sociology of; Social Constructivism.
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