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History of Knowledge Daston
History of Knowledge Daston
l o rr ai n e d a s to n , un i v er s i ty o f ch i ca go
H
i s t o r ia n s o f s ci e nc e 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 argu-
ment? 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 classifica-
tions 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 philol-
ogy or evolutionary biology, error analysis—emerge, and how are they
braided together with older methods into a stronger rope of infer-
ence? At this point, the vertigo of all those reflections within reflec-
tions sets the mind spinning.
At the risk of infecting the reader with our disciplinary dizziness, I
would nonetheless like to sustain double vision in this essay about
how the history of science is becoming, haltingly and hesitatingly,
the history of knowledge—and why this is happening now. Section
I describes how the history of science became a discipline and how
its origins molded assumptions about what science is, who has it,
and why its history matters. This is a history recent enough for his-
torians of science of my generation (i.e., PhD circa 1980) to have ex-
perienced mostly firsthand. Section II turns to the history of knowl-
edge, an emergent field (not yet a discipline): What is it, what could it
be, and what is its relationship to the history of science?
All modern science was, well, modern, just more or less complicated—
and modern science was the only kind worth learning.
On the other hand, many of the founding narratives that twinned
the origins of modern science and of modernity tout court were de-
cidedly ambivalent about the modern mentality that had allegedly
wrought such seismic transformations. Some accounts celebrated
this supernova as a triumph of the human intellect, long overdue.
But others—and these were precisely the books that sold best and
longest and attracted generations of historians of science to the
field—were tinged with melancholy and nostalgia for the Middle
Ages, variously imagined as more enchanted, more rational, or more
gemütlich than modernity. American philosopher E. A. Burtt intoned
a dirge for the “gloriously romantic universe of Dante and Milton,
that set no bounds to the imagination of man as it played over space
and time” and had been (again, allegedly) “swept away” by Newto-
nian geometric space and numerical time.8 Alexandre Koyré, a Rus-
sian emigré who had studied in Göttingen with Husserl and later
made his career as an intellectual historian in Paris and Princeton,
regarded the transition from “the closed world to the infinite uni-
verse” as tantamount to an eviction notice from the purportedly cozy,
human-centered medieval cosmos. He was equally elegiac about how
Newtonian cosmology had jettisoned “value-concepts, such as per-
fection, harmony, meaning and aim” and brought about “the utter
devalorization of being, the divorce of the world of value and the
136
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struggling. For the first time I gave due weight to the fact that Ar-
istotle’s subject was change-of-quality in general, including the
fall of a stone and the growth of a child to adulthood.12
More than any other single figure, Kuhn was responsible for histori-
cism gaining the upper hand over modernism in the history of science
after the 1970s. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) attacked the
teleological tendencies of the history of science, denied the doctrine
of smooth, continuous scientific progress, directed attention toward
contexts and controversies, insisted on the incommensurability of
successive scientific thought-worlds, and turned the drab grammat-
ical term “paradigm” into the stuff of New Yorker cartoons. Kuhn’s
wildly successful book also converted the history of science, a tiny
field previously notorious for its musty technicalities (“impetus,”
“aether,” “phlogiston”), into a resource for the humanities, social sci-
ences, and the natural sciences, all of which adapted “paradigms” and
“scientific revolutions” (now in the plural) to their own purposes.13 In
particular, Kuhn’s engagement with and challenges to both the soci-
ology and philosophy of science briefly drew these fields to the his-
tory of science in search of empirical evidence for how science really
worked and, equally briefly, made the history of science the most
theorized branch of history, infused with philosophy, sociology, and
psychology. Kuhn himself, however, was unwavering in his convic-
tion that history of science belonged in history departments, and that
its salvation lay in rejecting the “Whiggishness” so characteristic of
the scientists’ own version of their past: “For the first time, it [science]
has become potentially a fully historical enterprise, like music, litera-
ture, philosophy, or law.”14
Kuhn’s elusive but evocative notion of the paradigm provided his-
torians of science bent on extirpating anachronism with a powerful
tool: the study of scientific practices—roughly, what scientists actu-
ally do as opposed to what they say they do. Because undeniably sci- 139
know: a jo urnal o n t he format i on of knowledg e
tacles, and a PhD. The sites of science now include not only the labo-
ratory and the observatory, but also the botanical garden, the forge,
the library, the field, the ship, and the household hearth. Geography
and chronology have also broadened: the Europe (in fact, never more
than a few western European countries and then only their leading cit-
ies) of the discipline’s origins is now dwarfed by a map that embraces
at least some parts of all continents and oceans; spectacular recent
work on ancient China and Mesopotamia has exploded the discipline’s
time frame. Almost none of these topics, actors, places, and periods
would have qualified as part of the history of science when I was a grad-
uate student in the 1970s; all of them have obliged historians of science
to rethink their subject matter in mind-stretching ways. If we are no
longer historians of modern, Western science (all three words ripe for
rethinking) and its analogues and antecedents in other times and
places, then what are we historians of ?
ities and social sciences as well as the sciences (and turning the
translation of Wissenschaft or sciences humaines—or physis or ziran or
shizen—from a headache into a research topic). Finally, it allows his-
torians to follow practices wherever they may lead, however remote
these may be from anything resembling latter-day science. Even the
most audacious studies of science in context have tended to hitch
the new practice, site, or actor in question to old stars: the history
of experiment is linked to Robert Boyle; the Renaissance court as sci-
entific site to Galileo.18 The history of knowledge promises to loosen
the hold of canonical people (the pantheon of Aristotle, Copernicus,
Kepler, Galileo, etc.) and topics (whatever resembles or leads to mod-
ern science).
However, the term has all the vices of its virtues: what doesn’t it
cover? Its flexibility could easily turn rubbery. For example, the his-
tory of knowledge is currently being applied to at least two different
and arguably incompatible research programs. One approach wields
the term in order to recuperate forms of knowledge that have histor-
ically been denigrated as substandard, including the skills of crafts-
men; the natural history of hunters, farmers, shepherds, sailors, and
other practical experts of the great outdoors; the medical recipes of
women and other noncertified healers; and generally the many forms
of knowledge cultivated by nonelites in many times and places (often
flagged by the prefix “ethno,” as in “ethnobotany”). Another approach
marching under this banner studies the history of learning (especially
philology) and more broadly of the humanities: many (but by no means
all) cultures boast impressive traditions of erudition, and some of
these (e.g., those devoted to the study of Sanskrit and Latin grammars)
have produced regularities as steady as almost any revealed by the
natural sciences. Of course these traditions have little in common
with those of craftsmen and ethnonaturalists. They are pursued by a
tiny, highly educated and socially exclusive elites who emphatically
side with the knowledge of the head over that of the hand. 143
know: a jo urnal o n t he format i on of knowledg e
are reordered: botany was the glamorous Big Science of the eighteenth
century; classical philology ruled the roost for much of the nineteenth;
in the past twenty years genetics has dethroned high energy physics
as the queen of the sciences. The form science might well emerge as
one interestingly distinct species of the genus knowledge, but it is un-
likely to be the only one. Another (and related) species might be the
complex “bureaucratic knowledge,” that formidable armamentarium
of record-keeping, classifying, controlling, and labor-dividing prac-
tices that emerges over and over again in different times and places.
And even if some historians of science remain preoccupied with the
question of what makes science as a way of knowing distinct, the
answer presupposes a broad and deep knowledge of other ways of
knowing.
Pursued from a cross-cultural and cross-historical perspective, the
history of knowledge may well have consequences for our current
classifications of knowledge and ways of knowing. The most familiar
and most influential classifications of knowledge are the ones that
are made concrete in the arrangement of books on library shelves
or in the physical organization of buildings on university campuses.
These are the classifications that our feet trace day in, day out. They
chart the relationships of both literal and figurative distance be-
tween disciplines that determine which colleagues we see regularly
and which we see hardly ever.
A glance at this typical arrangement of buildings and faculties on
almost any university campus confirms what most of us take for
granted: mathematics is close to physics, physics and astrophysics
occupy the same building, and the music center is very far away from
all of them. If this were a medieval university (and if medieval uni-
versities had had campuses), astronomy, mathematics, and music
would have all been clustered together, as disciplines of the quadriv-
ium, while physics would have been elsewhere, housed with phi-
146 losophy, the study of universal causes. History, biology, and geology
spring 2017
would have shared quarters, since all were concerned with particu-
lars (historia, as in both “history” and “natural history”). Nowadays,
however, we are not surprised to see that history and literature de-
partments are close to the library, nor that the laboratory sciences
flock together as birds of a feather on the opposite side of the campus.
Rendered in brick and mortar, in mock Gothic or modernist cubes,
these are the classifications of knowledge that guide our steps and
our assumptions about what knowledge is—the map of its great con-
tinents, its large and small provinces, and the oceans that separate
them.
What would this map look like if it were redrawn to reflect shared
practices rather than subject matter (currently divided between the
realms of the natural and the human)? Some surprising affinities
might emerge: the empirical practices of historians and organismic
biologists might resemble each other more closely than either resem-
bles philosophy—which in turn might show more analogies with the-
oretical physics (though not experimental physics). The analysis of
variability among texts and among observations in classical philology
and astronomy, respectively, exhibits some striking similarities—per-
haps because these practices share a common history.23 Historical lin-
guistics, philosophy of science, and behavioral economics all make use
of the techniques of Bayesian probability, and the algorithms that drive
internet search engines are simply the venerable humanist methods of
compiling citations and concordances on steroids.24 None of this im-
plies that the current division of the academic landscape into the nat-
ural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities is groundless; only
that it is neither inevitable nor without alternatives. The advantage of
studying knowledge practices is not to erase all distinctions but rather
to query the necessity of the ones we have—and to imagine others
based on criteria closer to how disciplines actually conduct inquiry.
To realize this vision of the history of knowledge would also re-
quire changes in how the history of science itself conducts inquiry. 147
know: a jo urnal o n t he format i on of knowledg e
far as any discipline spans the natural sciences, social sciences, and
humanities in terms of both subject matter and methods, it is the his-
tory of science. So why tamper with success?
There are two compelling reasons to do so. The first is that we are
in the uncomfortable position of teaching our students a narrative
that we know is gravely flawed if not outright false, as shown by
three decades of the best research in the field. The first ironic sen-
tence of an influential undergraduate textbook encapsulates this
predicament: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution,
and this is a book about it.”25 Analogous soul-searching is going on
in other specialties: medievalists point out that the traditional divi-
sion between “Latin” and “Muslim” science is nonsensical when re-
ferring to intellectual traditions with common origins and countless
exchanges (not to mention the incoherence of opposing a language
to a religion);26 historians of science and empire argue that it is the
essence of natural knowledge to be in circulation among cultures,
on explicit analogy with commodities.27 As every teacher of under-
graduate survey courses knows, it won’t do to bombard students
with the latest studies that debunk the old narrative about the birth
of modern Western science if there’s no new narrative to put in its
place—and one that is just as sweeping and memorable as the old
one. That is one urgent reason to undertake the arduous synthesis
that a genuine history of knowledge would require.
The second is that our originary disciplinary neurosis has spread
far beyond our discipline. Even if we historians of science handle
phrases such as “modern Western science” with tongs and punt on
the question of exactly what we are historians of, the world at large
observes no such niceties. And I do mean the world at large: the image
of science and modernity as a race of civilizations, in which there are
losers and winners, has overflowed the academic lecture hall. When
Narendra Modi, currently prime minister of India, gives speeches
in which he claims that the Hindu god Rama flew in an airplane be- 149
know: a jo urnal o n t he format i on of knowledg e
150
Notes
1. For brief overviews of the history of the history of science, see Lorraine
Daston, “Science, History of,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behav-
ioral Sciences, ed. James D. Wright (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 21:241–47; and, on
more recent trends, Robert E. Kohler and Kathryn M. Olesko, eds., introduction
to Clio Meets Science: The Challenges of History (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2012), 1–16.
2. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmil-
lan, 1925; 45 printings 1925–2008; at least 30 translations); Herbert Butterfield,
The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 (London: G. Bell, 1949; 33 printings 1949–
2013; at least 13 translations). Both books are still in print.
3. In addition to Whitehead and Butterfield, other classics of the genre in-
clude E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of the Modern Physical Sciences (1924;
rev. ed., 1932; 30 printings 1924–2014), and Alexandre Koyré’s Études galiléennes
(1940) and especially his From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957; 14 En-
glish printings and 15 French, 1957–2011). All of these books are also still in
print, with multiple translations into many European and several Asian lan-
guages. In German, Edmund Husserl’s Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaft und
die transzendentale Phänomenologie (comp. 1935–37; posthumously published in
1954) also belongs in this group, but its publication and reception history is
more complicated. However, Husserl’s views on Galileo and the modern mental-
ity were widely diffused through his student Koyré’s publications long before
Husserl’s own lectures saw the light of print.
4. Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 (New York: Free
Press, 1957), 7.
5. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1967), 3.
6. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 5.
know: a jo urnal o n t he format i on of knowledg e
19. See, e.g., Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of
Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Huri Islamoglu and
Peter Perdue, eds., Shared Histories of Modernity: China, India, and the Ottoman Em-
pire (London: Routledge, 2009).
20. Dagmar Schäfer, “Frames of Reference in the History of Science: China
and the Rest,” paper prepared for the roundtable “History of Science in a World
of Readers,” History of Science Society annual meeting, November 4, 2016, At-
lanta. I am grateful to Professor Schäfer for several illuminating conversations
about the history of science in China.
21. Karine Chemla, ed., The History of Mathematical Proof in Ancient Traditions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); F. Jamil Ragep, “Ibn al-Shatir and
Copernicus: The Uppsala Notes Revisited,” Journal of the History of Astronomy 47
(2016): 395–415.
22. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Com-
merce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-
nia Press, 2005); Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cul-
tural Encounter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Daniela
Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic En-
lightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
23. Lorraine Daston and Glenn W. Most, “The History of Science and the His-
tory of Philologies,” Isis 106 (2015): 378–90.
24. Daniel Rosenberg, “An Archive of Words,” in Science in the Archives: Pasts,
Presents, Futures, ed. Lorraine Daston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017),
271–310.
25. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996), 1.
26. Katharine Park, “Rethinking the History of Western Science Narrative,
Translation, and the Longue Durée,” http://www.einsteinforum.de
/veranstaltungen/rethinking-the-history-of-western-science-narrative
-translation-and-the-longue-duree/. Rivka Feldhay and F. Jamil Ragep, eds., Be-
fore Copernicus: The Cultures and Contexts of Scientific Learning in the Fifteenth Century
(Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).
27. James Secord, “Science in Transit,” Isis 95 (2004): 654–72; Harold J. Cook,
Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circu-
lation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and
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know: a jo urnal o n t he format i on of knowledg e
James Delbourgo, eds., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence,
1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009).
28. “Indian Prime Minister Claims Genetic Science Existed in Ancient Times,”
The Guardian, October 28, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/28
/indian-prime-minister-genetic-science-existed-ancient-times.
29. Sonja Brentjes, Edis Tanner, and Lutz Richter-Bernberg, eds., 1001 Distor-
tions: How (Not) to Narrate the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology in Non-
Western Cultures (Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 2016).
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