The History of Science and the History of Knowledge

Abstract

The History of Science and the History of Knowledge lorraine daston, university of chicago H istorians of science are caught in a hall of mirrors whenever we try to reflect on how we know what we know and why what we know is worth knowing.At one level, we confront this question just as any other discipline would: What are our sources and standards of evidence?Acceptable forms of argument?Criteria for a significant topic and a satisfactory explanation?But at another level-indeed, a mise-en-abîme of further levels-we are the discipline charged with historicizing just such questions about the how, what, and wherefore of knowledge: What counts as knowledge in a given epoch and culture and why?How do classifications and hierarchies among kinds of knowledge (say, theology and mathematics in thirteenth-century Paris, or Confucian ethics and silk manufacture in Ming dynasty China, or the sciences and the humanities right now) reshuffle?How do new ways of knowing-the controlled experiment, constructing a genealogy in historical philology or evolutionary biology, error analysis-emerge, and how are they braided together with older methods into a stronger rope of infer-

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