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Uncertain knowledge: An image of science for a changing world
the most controversial figures in the secondary literature on Victorian science. This new biography by Adrian Desmond concludes the story of his life begun in The Devil’s Disciple (1994). Desmond picks a course between previous interpretations of Huxley which have portrayed him as a tireless opponent of clerical and aristocratic forms of authority, and a progressive representative of workers and women, or alternately, as the architect of a new elitism of experts, the high priest of a religion of science, and an ideologue of middleclass patriarchy. In this second volume, we leave behind the radical and iconoclastic youth who stalked the social and political margins in the 1840s and 1850s and take up with the pillar of scientific establishment, who became President of the Royal Society in 1883, and privy councillor under a Tory Government in 1892. For Desmond, Huxley’s passage from reformist into reactionary is effectively that of British liberalism, which increasingly assumed the ideological defensive (if not the rear-guard) against working class socialism and the women’s movement. Steadfastly individualist, Huxley rejected the more aggressive forms of social-scientific regimentation, namely eugenics, advanced by younger colleagues towards the end of the century. In his last years, he plotted a strategic withdrawal from the volatile public arenas which scientific elites could no longer command. It is perhaps ironic that Huxley’s most tenacious politicking, which installed biology as a research discipline in British institutions of higher education, should have facilitated the retreat of men of science from the larger social stage. In this story of the rise and dignified decline of a scientific liberal, Desmond resolves the conflicting portraits of Huxley as both democrat and autocrat. But in the process, Desmond generates another, more interesting, paradox. Here, as in his previous studies of Victorian paleontology, morphology and medical reform, Desmond’s approach has borrowed from mainstream social history, and from the sociology of knowledge pioneered at Edinburgh, Bath and elsewhere. These new historiographies have been used to great advantage by a wide range of historians from the early 1970s. Notably, they have served to challenge the prevailing internalist model of the progress of scientific thought. In his own earlier work, Desmond portrayed Huxley’s science as an expression of the rising industrial middle class. Onto this class-based plot, Desmond grafted narratives of professionalisation and religious reform, namely the advance of Protestant dissent upon Anglican hegemony. In these accounts, complex and interlaced social actors and forces took precedent, and biography took a back seat. His narratives depended upon the attribution of motives and intentions to welldefined social interests and to the stable social structures, like class, gender, and profession, that underlay them.
More recently, Desmond has tried to transfer these features of social history and the sociology of knowledge onto the genre of biography. By taking up this genre, he claims to be popularising the ‘new contextualist history of science’. In so doing, however, he glosses over the contests and divisions within that history, most notably those over the genre of biography itself. Indeed, many scholars working in the fields from which Desmond borrows have raised considerable objections to the biographical method, precisely because it makes the individual the locus of agency and the generator of change. In retrospect, moreover, the structures which gave explanatory bite to the new social history of science, have come to seem as reified as the ‘nature’ which previous generations took to underlie all knowledge. Since the early 1980s a range of new approaches to the history of science have emerged which seek explanations neither in the individual nor in the social structure, but in the continuous negotiations between individuals, groups and material objects. Desmond offers an approach which combines the deep explanation of social structures with the dramatic unfolding of private thoughts and personal feelings: the class and gender history of the Victorian age played out in the domestic and professional life of one man of science. The achievement has its price, however. In the course of Desmond’s book we learn, for example, that Sir Joseph Whitworth, the Derbyshire steel manufacturer and inventor of the 45calibrc rifle for the War Office, turned f100 000 of his profits from munitions into science scholarships. Whitworth made Huxley a guest at his estate, and offered Huxley’s colleague, the mathematician Thomas Hirst, a corporate position. Another of Huxley‘s closest associates, the physicist John Tyndall, gave lectures on Whitworth’s guns. But the exposition of these social and material networks, so central to the exercise of scientific knowledge and power, flow breathlessly by as the narrative returns to its dramatic centre -the individual lift -which strains to accommodate them. Huxley’s mind must form a stage on which, for example, social Darwinist capital vies with socialist labour. (Thus, Desmond takes us inside the composition of Huxley’s last public address on ‘Evolution and Ethics’. Here we find Huxley’s own embattled mind pitted against the cosmic force of struggle itself - the nature and society, red-in-toothand-claw, that Huxley, as Darwin’s Bulldog, had helped to fashion.) If Desmond succeeds in tracing the movements of a whole society in one person’s thoughts. the constituents of that society are flattened thereby into a two-dimensional backdrop. We have not the time or space to see how, and of what, they are made. These shifts between the mind’s eye and the social tableau may only seem abrupt to an academic historian. But if Desmond’s style and genre are pitched towards a much wider
Copyright 8 1997 Elsewer Science Ltd. All right reserved. 0160.9327/97/$17.00
and more diverse audience, they are nonetheless also instruments which shape that audience. From this vantage point, Desmond’s work poses a formidable challenge. Is it possible to write biography, and thus to broaden the audience for the history of science, without the dramatic device of intentionality, the proven recourse of psychology, and the epic backdrop of great movements and peoples, rising and falling? Can others generate counter-narratives which, rather than dispensing social structures and interests to explain actors’ intentions, unfold the work that produces structures, defines interests, and thus frames subjectivities? Puul White
Uncertain Knowledge: An Image of Science for a Changing World by R.G.A. Dolby Cambridge University Press, 1996. f40.00/US$59.95 hbk (xi + 365 pages) ISBN 0 521 56004 7 My shelf of books about science for the general reader is becoming too crowded. To earn a place on it nowadays, a new work must satisfy certain basic criteria. The first criterion is obviously readability: it must be clearly written, intelligible to the non-specialist, and interesting. On all these counts, this book passes with flying colours. The second criterion, surely, is accuracy: it must be free from patent errors or misrepresentations. Again, in spite of many essential simplifications, this book is remarkably well-informed over a wide range of topics, ranging from cognitive psychology to the history of ideas. By these two criteria alone, it can be thoroughly recommended as, say, a general text-book for an introductory course on ‘the nature of science’. These days, however, I impose a third criterion which is much more rarely satisfied: the argument must be epistemologically non-partisan. The ‘science wars’ that are now ravaging academia and confusing the attentive public are fuelled by naive fanaticism on both sides. Happily, Dolby patiently propounds a middle way. demolishing scientistic dogmas such as that the defence of scientific truth requires absolute realism as well as contrary doctrines such as that healthy scepticism demands massive doses of sociological relativism. The difficulty with this middle way is that it has to traverse so many different viewpoints. If we have learnt anything about science in the past thirty years, it is that it has many dimensions - philosophical, social, psychological and material. Dolby has the uncommon talent of being able to take a balanced view of science in all its aspects as an organized body of knowledge, as an elaborate cultural institution, as a domain of individual cognition and as an arena of con-
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flitting material interests and policies. What is more, he explains how these various perspectives inter-relate, indicating clearly the limitations of an account based on any one of them. Indeed, one of the principal virtues of this book is that it tells us that science is an exceedingly complex system, and yet explains in simple words the many mundane linkages that make its behavior intelligible in principle, even though unpredictable in practice. It is not a defect, therefore, that the multiplicity of topics do not obviously cohere into an overall ‘model’. The problem in
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constructing such a model is to find a stable starting point. Dolby grounds his argument very convincingly on the conception of ‘immediate reality’ that infuses individual cognition, but does not give much attention to how these separate realities are combined and transformed into the collective representations that constitute scientific knowledge in its institutional form - representations that eventually re-enter each individual scientist’s ‘immediate reality’ . Perhaps such an argument cannot be closed. We are dealing with a reflexive system where everything interacts in both directions with
almost everything else. For example, does the formal rationality of science enable consensus, or does the necessity of consensus require just this type of rationality? There is clearly a causal connection, but which way does it operate? Well, I would need at least ten times this space even to mention the numerous similar questions that this admirable book gently provokes. Reading it would be a wonderful cure for anyone suffering from the complacent delusion that they knew all the answers.
John Ziman
Copyright 0 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All right resewed. 0160-9327/97/$17.00
More recently, Desmond has tried to transfer these features of social history and the sociology of knowledge onto the genre of biography. By taking up this genre, he claims to be popularising the ‘new contextualist history of science’. In so doing, however, he glosses over the contests and divisions within that history, most notably those over the genre of biography itself. Indeed, many scholars working in the fields from which Desmond borrows have raised considerable objections to the biographical method, precisely because it makes the individual the locus of agency and the generator of change. In retrospect, moreover, the structures which gave explanatory bite to the new social history of science, have come to seem as reified as the ‘nature’ which previous generations took to underlie all knowledge. Since the early 1980s a range of new approaches to the history of science have emerged which seek explanations neither in the individual nor in the social structure, but in the continuous negotiations between individuals, groups and material objects. Desmond offers an approach which combines the deep explanation of social structures with the dramatic unfolding of private thoughts and personal feelings: the class and gender history of the Victorian age played out in the domestic and professional life of one man of science. The achievement has its price, however. In the course of Desmond’s book we learn, for example, that Sir Joseph Whitworth, the Derbyshire steel manufacturer and inventor of the 45calibrc rifle for the War Office, turned f100 000 of his profits from munitions into science scholarships. Whitworth made Huxley a guest at his estate, and offered Huxley’s colleague, the mathematician Thomas Hirst, a corporate position. Another of Huxley‘s closest associates, the physicist John Tyndall, gave lectures on Whitworth’s guns. But the exposition of these social and material networks, so central to the exercise of scientific knowledge and power, flow breathlessly by as the narrative returns to its dramatic centre -the individual lift -which strains to accommodate them. Huxley’s mind must form a stage on which, for example, social Darwinist capital vies with socialist labour. (Thus, Desmond takes us inside the composition of Huxley’s last public address on ‘Evolution and Ethics’. Here we find Huxley’s own embattled mind pitted against the cosmic force of struggle itself - the nature and society, red-in-toothand-claw, that Huxley, as Darwin’s Bulldog, had helped to fashion.) If Desmond succeeds in tracing the movements of a whole society in one person’s thoughts. the constituents of that society are flattened thereby into a two-dimensional backdrop. We have not the time or space to see how, and of what, they are made. These shifts between the mind’s eye and the social tableau may only seem abrupt to an academic historian. But if Desmond’s style and genre are pitched towards a much wider
Copyright 8 1997 Elsewer Science Ltd. All right reserved. 0160.9327/97/$17.00
and more diverse audience, they are nonetheless also instruments which shape that audience. From this vantage point, Desmond’s work poses a formidable challenge. Is it possible to write biography, and thus to broaden the audience for the history of science, without the dramatic device of intentionality, the proven recourse of psychology, and the epic backdrop of great movements and peoples, rising and falling? Can others generate counter-narratives which, rather than dispensing social structures and interests to explain actors’ intentions, unfold the work that produces structures, defines interests, and thus frames subjectivities? Puul White
Uncertain Knowledge: An Image of Science for a Changing World by R.G.A. Dolby Cambridge University Press, 1996. f40.00/US$59.95 hbk (xi + 365 pages) ISBN 0 521 56004 7 My shelf of books about science for the general reader is becoming too crowded. To earn a place on it nowadays, a new work must satisfy certain basic criteria. The first criterion is obviously readability: it must be clearly written, intelligible to the non-specialist, and interesting. On all these counts, this book passes with flying colours. The second criterion, surely, is accuracy: it must be free from patent errors or misrepresentations. Again, in spite of many essential simplifications, this book is remarkably well-informed over a wide range of topics, ranging from cognitive psychology to the history of ideas. By these two criteria alone, it can be thoroughly recommended as, say, a general text-book for an introductory course on ‘the nature of science’. These days, however, I impose a third criterion which is much more rarely satisfied: the argument must be epistemologically non-partisan. The ‘science wars’ that are now ravaging academia and confusing the attentive public are fuelled by naive fanaticism on both sides. Happily, Dolby patiently propounds a middle way. demolishing scientistic dogmas such as that the defence of scientific truth requires absolute realism as well as contrary doctrines such as that healthy scepticism demands massive doses of sociological relativism. The difficulty with this middle way is that it has to traverse so many different viewpoints. If we have learnt anything about science in the past thirty years, it is that it has many dimensions - philosophical, social, psychological and material. Dolby has the uncommon talent of being able to take a balanced view of science in all its aspects as an organized body of knowledge, as an elaborate cultural institution, as a domain of individual cognition and as an arena of con-
Endeavour
Vol. 21(3) 1997
137
flitting material interests and policies. What is more, he explains how these various perspectives inter-relate, indicating clearly the limitations of an account based on any one of them. Indeed, one of the principal virtues of this book is that it tells us that science is an exceedingly complex system, and yet explains in simple words the many mundane linkages that make its behavior intelligible in principle, even though unpredictable in practice. It is not a defect, therefore, that the multiplicity of topics do not obviously cohere into an overall ‘model’. The problem in
138
Endeavour
Vol. 21(3) 1997
constructing such a model is to find a stable starting point. Dolby grounds his argument very convincingly on the conception of ‘immediate reality’ that infuses individual cognition, but does not give much attention to how these separate realities are combined and transformed into the collective representations that constitute scientific knowledge in its institutional form - representations that eventually re-enter each individual scientist’s ‘immediate reality’ . Perhaps such an argument cannot be closed. We are dealing with a reflexive system where everything interacts in both directions with
almost everything else. For example, does the formal rationality of science enable consensus, or does the necessity of consensus require just this type of rationality? There is clearly a causal connection, but which way does it operate? Well, I would need at least ten times this space even to mention the numerous similar questions that this admirable book gently provokes. Reading it would be a wonderful cure for anyone suffering from the complacent delusion that they knew all the answers.
John Ziman
Copyright 0 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All right resewed. 0160-9327/97/$17.00