Science Studies and the History of Science

Abstract

Introduction: Hard-hearted AdamantThe current relation between science studies and the history of science brings to mind the opening scenes of A Midsummer Night's Dream (or, minus the fairies, the high school comedy of your choice): Helena loves Demetrius, who used to love Helena, but now loves Hermia, who loves Lysander.A perfervid atmosphere of adolescence hangs over the play: rash promises, suicide threats, hyperbolic but sincere pledges of love and enmity, and, above all, the breathless sense of everything being constantly up for grabs.Transposed from the enchanted wood of Oberon and Titania to the disenchanted groves of academe, it is science studies that fancies itself in the role of the spurned Helena, once courted but now rejected by the history of science.Sheila Jasanoff, speaking qua president of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, recently complained of a "somewhat onesided love affair" with the history of science and a certain "jitteriness about being caught out in risque ´company [that] marks the hiring practices of our major history of science departments." 1 While her society has awarded some of its highest prizes to historians of science, those ungrateful Demetriuses were off flirting with the discipline of history, which in turn was in hot pursuit of cultural anthropology.What fools these mortals be.Yet there was a time when Helena was wooed by Demetrius, and the history of science once was smitten by science studies.The story of infatuation and subsequent estrangement follows, I suspect, a more general pattern in the 1.Sheila Jasanoff, "Reconstructing the Past, Constructing the Present: Can Science Studies and the History of Science Live Happily Ever After?" Social Studies of Science 30 (Aug.

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