Historiography of Not-So-Recent Science

Abstract

With most categories now apparently contestable in professional historiography, historians of science (so-called) surely feel especially vulnerable - not least those concerned with periods prior to the nineteenth century. If the 'early modern' dangerously implies teleology, the 'modern' implies a terminus from which the only exit seems to be the postmodern;1 all such labels invite accusations of progressivist historicism and, for the acutely trained historian of science, of latent whiggishness (for we are all postmodernists now). One could always obviate the difficulty of the term 'early modern' by ditching talk of 'modern' history altogether (its origins lying only in an opposition to 'ancient' history, after all), and speaking instead of 'recent' history; the conventional antecedent might be called history. But pragmatically speaking, there seems to be no great conceptual problem lurking behind this particular issue of terminology. Where one chooses to place the demarcation between differentiated periods is another question, of course. The present article takes a look at some of the most recent work on the period C.1500-C.1700, that is, on the late Scientific Revolution. It is of significance that such an article cannot claim to be even remotely comprehensive; I focus on a few issues that seem to be worthy of especial note.SCIENCE ETC.An additional burden for historians of pre-nineteenth-century science nowadays concerns the problem of 'science' itself: specialist historians seem increasingly agreed that science as we now know it is an endeavour born of the nineteenth century.2 Disagreement remains rife, however, about whether the general term 'science' may legitimately be used for earlier periods or, indeed, for other cultural regions than the European. The Latin word scientia and its cognates had specific meanings, at once extensive and restricted, in usages derived from academic, scholastic sources. To the extent that we might wish to confine ourselves to the categories of activity recognized by our historical actors, it would behoove us to the corresponding (and shifting) cultural boundaries as in some way definitive of our subject matter. Thus, the history of science for the not-so-recent period, which follows the now conventionally meaningless 'medieval' (older?) period, might confine itself to those fields of endeavour concerned with necessary demonstration of their conclusions, as well as with those areas in which controversy over such scientific status took place. Yet most scholars would regret the necessity of therefore including within the 'history of science' those subjects, such as the law or theology, which were often themselves regarded as scientiae.The usual solution to this problem has long been to put the word 'science' as an actor's category to one side in favour of focusing attention on those topical areas of study that seem to correspond, more or less, to areas of present-day scientific attention. The approach calls for selective attention to activities in the past the coherence of which is provided by that of activities in the present, and thus to run a grave risk of 'present-centredness' , the more expansive version of whiggishness.3 The danger here lies in imposing a systematic distortion on the categories of the past by heedlessly understanding historical activities as having been carried out under the categories of the present. Nonetheless, an effective recommendation to do just this, using the rubric 'protoscience', has recently been put forward by Pamela Smith.4 Smith uses the term 'protoscience' to designate studies that trace the early modern development of modern scientific objects, practices, and theories, what we might call the history of protosciences such as astronomy and physics. Her idea is to avoid the implication that such histories would take their objects of study as fixed by having their focus be upon the development of particular ways of thinking and practice that have come to constitute our contemporary sciences. …

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