The Identity of the History of Science and Medicine

Andrew Cunningham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781409440246
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351219525
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In these essays, Andrew Cunningham is concerned with issues of identity - what was the identity of topics, disciplines, arguments, diseases in the past, and whether they are identical with (more usually, how they are not identical with) topics, disciplines, arguments or diseases in the present. Historians usually tend to assume such continuous identities of present attitudes and activities with past ones, and rarely question them; the contention here is that this gives us a false image of the very things in the past that we went to look for.

I


GETTING THE GAME RIGHT: SOME PLAIN WORDS ON THE IDENTITY AND INVENTION OF SCIENCE

1. Identifying science

ARE WE studying the right subject? I ask this question as a historian of science, and my question concerns how we do, and how we should, go about our self-imposed task of writing the history of science. In asking whether we are studying the right subject I do not mean to suggest that we should abandon our discipline for another. I mean: when we set out to study the history of science, are we properly equipped to identify science in the past in order to study it? When we decide to put some episode into our account of the history of science, have we identified it correctly: was it science in any meaningful sense? To be able to answer this question in the affirmative we obviously need to be in possession of criteria which enable us to identify science in the past correctly every time. For our story properly to be about science, it has to be not about non-science: we have to be able to distinguish science in the past from all the things that it was not and that were not it. It lies at the very heart of our self-imposed enterprise as historians of science, this issue as to the nature and identity of science itself. Behind everything we do lies the assumption that we are getting this identification right, that we can indeed identify science in the past without any problem or doubt. And it follows that if we get it wrong – if we are identifying the wrong thing as science – we will be writing myths, hallucinations and romances which can only purport to be a history of science: we will be writing accounts of events which may not have happened, and of the adventures of a something which may well not have existed.

And yet the tools we currently use to make this identification are not very sophisticated. For in practice all we do is simply assume that the presence of science in the past identifies itself to our eyes as enquiring historians. We read old documents, and it comes leaping off the page into our eyes: here is some science, this should be in our history of science! That is what it feels like. There may be the odd marginal case (such as Paracelsus), but in general this way of proceeding seems to work: it gives us a history of science which includes Copernicus, Kepler and Newton as practitioners, but which excludes Shakespeare, Columbus and Luther. And very rarely does it lead to any problems, for there is broad (almost total) agreement amongst historians of science as to what does, and what does not, ‘count as’ past science and who does and who does not qualify as a past scientist.

Yet it should be obvious that, although it may indeed feel as though science in the past is identifying itself to us as we do our research, what is actually happening is that we – the historians – are the active agents: that we are actually taking to our investigation a ready-prepared set of finding guides to identify past science. If it ‘looks like science’ to us, then we believe that it will ‘look like science’ to our colleagues and readers; indeed, if it ‘looks like science’ to us, then for us it is (or more properly, was) science! That is to say, what in practice determines whether some past episode, piece of work or whatever was or was not science, is whether it fits, to the satisfaction of the historian, some template which the historian carries around in his mind. Yet for some reason or other we are not usually aware that this is happening, and if pressed we would probably point to something other than ourselves as providing the criteria for positive identification: we would say that the thing or event in question is ‘self-evidently’ an instance of science, or we would point to old documents as being (or containing) the ‘evidence’ for the presence of a given instance of science in the past. To be able to point to a physical thing such as an old document feels conclusive: we can hold in our hands the evidence which ‘speaks for itself’, evidence both tangible and audible. And yet the real arbiter of ‘what counts as science’ in the past for us to study, is in fact not an old document, nor some passage in an old document. Nor are instances of past science remotely ‘self-evident’. The arbiter is us: the historian in the present. And this is the problem.

For whether our account of the history of science can claim to be referring to anything meaningful at all depends on whether we have got an appropriate concept of ‘what science is’ – a concept appropriate, that is, to the past that we are seeking to explore. It is our concept of ‘what science is’ which is going to determine all the history that we write in our discipline. It determines ‘what counts’ as an appropriate question for us to ask or topic for us to study, ‘what counts’ as an appropriate answer or account for us to give, and what is the proper way for us to do the research. It is thus the major determinant of the account we can give of the history – of ‘what happened in the past’ with respect to science. That is why we need to investigate this matter of the identity of science – what kind of thing it is – for only then will we be able to know whether the history of science that we write bears any determinable relation to the past, the human past, it is supposedly about.

So this is where we need to call on an important distinction. We need to distinguish between on the one hand that set of assumptions and techniques by which we find out about the past (let us call it our ‘historiography’) and, on the other hand, what we use them to find out, i.e. what happened in the past. Now, if we are to get a valid picture of the past, and of science in the past, then our ‘historiography’ must be a suitable tool for the job, it must be as a key for a lock: our assumptions and techniques must be appropriate for our goal. Yet currently it is the historian in the present who (whether aware of it or otherwise) sets the criteria for ‘what counts as science’ in the past he or she studies. This can hardly be appropriate: uninspected concepts of and about the present can hardly legitimately be used as a measure either of what happened in the past or of whether something or other happened in the past. In other words, ‘what looks like science’ to us now in the present is simply that: our view from the present. It cannot in itself be taken as a legitimate criterion for identifying what was science in the past. This misapprehension arises from our ‘present-centredness’ as it has been termed: from the fact that we look at the past with both eyes in the present.¹ I shall be arguing that until the historian can, in some way, ‘get out of the present’, then the history he or she produces can never be (or be known to be) authentically about the past and true to what happened in the past. But if he or she can do this, then the picture that the history of science will then present will be radically different from the one we are familiar with.

2. The specialness of science

The first and major obstacle standing in our way and hindering us from discovering what kind of thing that science is of which we want to write the history, is the apparent specialness of science. For if science is different in kind and quality from all other subjects, from all other pursuits, and from all other truths, then presumably different criteria would apply to the writing of its history (and perhaps even for its identification) than the historian would apply elsewhere. That science is indeed special is something we are led (and lead each other) to believe, and it is this very specialness which attracted many of us to study the history of science in the first place. But it is in this apparent specialness of science that our present-centredness as historians of science finds its source. So we need to start with that very specialness, lest it bedevil the rest of our enterprise.

To do this we need to start with a fact about the present, the present predicament, a fact which as historians of science we quite simply take for granted. This is the enormous importance that science has for our society today. Science, its claims and achievements, totally dominate our modern outlook. The world we live in, the physical, the technological, and the intellectual world, is deeply pervaded and affected by the presence of science and scientists. We take this fact for granted: that is to say, it is because we live in a world which has been profoundly structured by the achievements of science and scientists, that we treat it as ‘natural’ that science is the authentic way of looking at the world. And this is to be expected. In the same way we tend to take the dominant moral values of western society for granted too, and treat them as ‘natural’, as somehow acultural.

In taking science for granted because it is dominant in our own society today, we also take for granted a certain kind of claim about the nature of science: that it produces ‘objective’ findings, and hence that it is itself ‘objective’.² It is in this that its specialness supposedly consists. Most historians of science never in fact mention whether or not they think that science produces ‘objective’ findings; nor do they bother their heads with what the philosophers of science have to say about this. But our actual practice reveals that we do think this: we act and write as if we believe (in my formulation) that science unproblematically ‘reads off the truth about Nature from Nature, and in the categories of Nature’. Treating this as a ‘natural’ attitude to hold, we historians of science set out to write a history of science which matches it: a history about how man learnt to read off the truth about Nature from Nature and in the categories of Nature. It is our untroubled acceptance of the ‘naturalness’ of science and of the ‘objective’ nature of science, that leads us to write like this; to put it another way, the objectivity of science seems to demand that we write a history of the emergence of its objectivity. That we take this attitude to the history of science is due to our ‘present-centredness’.

Now the problem with this is that if (as most of us customarily do) we take the objectivity of science and its findings for granted in our work on the history of science, then we do not allow ourselves to raise a single question about the nature of science, or about the appropriate shape of a valid history of science. For we are taking for granted that science is special – rather than asking historical questions about how and why people in the past (and hence we ourselves) came to realise that it was special, or came to see it as special, or perhaps came to make it special. Our present-centredness has already settled our views about the nature of science, and hence of the appropriate shape of a valid history of science, long before we start our research. And because our minds are already made up, the history we write gives us the illusion that it proves that the history of science actually consisted of a sequence of people learning, with increasing accuracy and sophistication over time, how to read off the truth about Nature from Nature and in the categories of Nature. But here we are going round in a circle. First we shape the past of science to our own preconceptions about the nature and importance of science – preconceptions which are derived from the present. And then we take the past of science (as now shaped by us) as confirming the appropriateness of the history that we write about it!

To get out of this dilemma we need to do two things. Firstly we need to see the specialness of science as an issue which the historian needs to investigate. Secondly, having separated the subject (science) from our evaluation of it, we need to put aside that specialness from our considerations for the time being. Once we do this we can see that the same criteria will apply to writing the history of science as apply to the histories of other subjects. But if we do not do this, we will simply be writing self-serving and self-confirming history, from which all properly historical questions have been refused application. I appreciate that this is going to be a difficult matter, and may seem like a call to repudiate the whole point of our enterprise. But to put the specialness, the ‘objectivity’, of science temporarily aside is not to deny that science may be unique in certain respects; nor is it to deny that science produces findings with a special (‘objective’) status. It is simply the crucial first move for us to make in order for us to be able to understand what kind of thing science is, and thus ask properly historical questions about science and its history.

3. Science as human activity

Our assumption about the specialness of science (I have been arguing) has stood in our way of treating the history of science historically: our assumption that it has (or our attribution to it of) a unique specialness has inhibited us from asking (for instance) how it got that specialness – perhaps the most interesting historical question that could be asked about it. But having now put aside for the moment our concern with the specialness, the ‘objectivity’ of science, we are now in a position to look at science just like anything else, and to ask historical questions about it, just as we might about anything else. Thus we can now turn to the question of what kind of thing that ‘science’ is of which we want to write the history, without begging the question as to its status and how it acquired that status.

My contention is that science is a human activity, a human practice. It is an activity, and it is an activity engaged in only by humans. As a claim it should be pretty uncontroversial, and I hope that no historian of science would want to deny it. For the histories of science we produce normally include accounts of people in the past (named individuals, usually) engaged in those uniquely human activities of ‘thinking’, ‘investigating’, ‘drawing conclusions’ and so forth which are central and essential to the practice of science: ‘thinking’ and ‘investigating’ are activities which demand the use of the human mind or brain and of human hands as tools of the thinking mind, and cannot be carried out without them.

But if I can gain ready acquiescence to my contention that the practice and practising of science is a human activity, is that all it is? Is there something about the practice or the practising of science which is more than human activity, which lies outside of human activity? The practising scientist of course takes as his raw material the world ‘out there’; and it is the business of the practising scientist to produce products of a certain kind: laws, statements, judgements, findings, conclusions, theories, knowledge, truths, things to believe about the world ‘out there’. But although we may want to ascribe a special kind of status to these products (to these laws, findings and so on), yet the actual production or producing of them lies wholly within the human activity of practising science. In this sense, then, everything about the doing of science, everything about its practice, is a human activity, wholly a human activity, and nothing but a human activity.³

Now, if the practice of science is a human activity, wholly a human activity, and nothing but a human activity, then we should hardly be satisfied with setting out to produce history of science which merely makes just some concession to this, which by lucky chanc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: ‘We will not anticipate the past, our retrospection will now be all to the future’
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Natural Philosophy / Science Identity Issues
• 2. The Identity of ‘Medieval Science’
• 3. The Identity of Particular Investigative Projects
• 4. Disease Identity
• Index