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RELATIONS between the history and the philosophy of the sciences are often
debated and sometimes contested. My interest here is collaboration. I shall
describe a new analytical tool that can be used by historians and by philosophers for different purposes. It is a specialized, indeed technical, version of an
idea often used or abused elsewhere: style. The historian of science A. C.
Crombie has been writing about styles of scientific thinking in the European
tradition since the mid-1970s and his work has now come to fruition.* I heard
him lecture on the topic in 1978, and adapted the idea to metaphysics and
epistemology, changing the name slightly to styles of reasoning.3 The two uses
are complementary but to some extent asymmetric. The historian may
conclude that the philosophers use of the tool is bunk, irrelevant to understanding the past. But the philosopher needs the history, for if the tool does
not provide a coherent and enlightening ordering of the record, then it has no
more place in sound philosophy than any other phantasy.
Crombies idea is less about the content of the sciences than about their
methods. The focus is on how we find out, not on what we find out. It is out of
step with present fashion, which teaches us so much about the intricate details
of incidents and relationships. It derives from a conception of the entire
Western scientific tradition; we cannot help but recall that Spengler too spoke
of the Western style.4 Crombies ambitious analysis should remind us more,
* Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, IJniversity of Toronto,
Room 316, Victoria College, Toronto, Canada M5S lK7.
Received 5 August 199 1; in revised form 20 September 199 1.
Developed from a paper for the conference Recent Trends in the Historiography
of Science,
Corfu, 27-31 May, 1991. I have to thank Alistair Crombie for advice on this, my most recent,
adaptation
of his ideas.
2The talk was published as A. C. Crombie, Philosophical
Perspectives and Shifting Interpretations of Galileo, in J. Hintikka
ef al. (eds), Theory Change, Ancient Axiomatics and Galileos
Methodology: Proceedings of the 1978 Pisa Conference on the History and Philosophy of Science
(Dordrecht:
Reidel, 1981) pp. 271-286. His book is Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European
Tradition: The History of Argument and Explanation Especially in the Mathematical and Biomedical
Sciences and Arts (3 vols, London: Duckworth,
forthcoming).
Ian Hacking, Language, Truth and Reason, in M. Hollis and S. Lukes (eds), Rationality and
Relativism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), pp. 48-66.
Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umriss einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte
(2 vols, Munich: Beck, 1918); translated by C. F. Atkinson as The Decline of the West, Form and
Actuality (London: Allen & Unwin, 1926). Spenglers use of the word Stil is so generous that the
translator
says The word Stil will therefore not necessarily be always render.ed style (1926,
vol. 1, p. 108, n. 2). Be prepared for surprises, e.g. die Expansionkraft
der abendlandischen
Stile
(1918, vol. 2, p. 55, unchanged in the revised edition) is translated as the expansion-power
of the
Western Soul (1926, vol. 2, p. 46).
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. Vol. 23, No. 1,
Printed in Great Britain
pp. I-20,
1992.
0
0039-3681/92
$5.00 f 0.00
1992. Pergamon Press plc.
however,
citations
studies-the
life-time collection
Phrases like style of thinking
specialist
already
of Science
connotations.
has so many
of an erudite.
or reasoning
This is to be expected
connotations.
For
occur naturally
enough
with a word
example
without
the cosmologist
Stephen
temperature
laboratories,
and
indeed
two
men,
Dewar
of two
and
SNoam Chomsky, Rules and Representations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 9. He quotes a half
page from Stephen Weinberg, The Forces of Nature, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arrs
and Sciences 29 (1976), 28-29.
I. B. Cohen, The Principia, Universal Gravitation,
and the Newtonian
Style, in Relation to
the Newtonian
Revolution
in Science: Notes on the Occasion
of the 250th Anniversary
of
Newtons Death, in Zev Bechler (ed.), Contemporary Newtonian Research (Dordrecht:
Reidel,
1982); pp. 21-108, on p. 49. Cohen and Weinberg refer to Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy,
translated
from the original of 1954 by D. Carr (Evanston,
111.: Northwestern
University Press,
1970), part 2, section 9. Husserl certainly wrote at large, in this lengthy section, about Galileo as
the discoverer of a new kind of science, but I dont think he called it, in so many words, the
Galilean style. He seems to use the word Stil differently
from Chomsky,
Weinberg, Cohen,
Crombie or myself. It is used six times, twice with emphasis in the original, on page 31 of the
translation,
but always to refer to a feature of the empirically intuited world.
and Philosophers
Kostas Gavroglu,
Differences
in Style as a Way of Probing the Context of Discovery.
Philosophia 45 (1990),53-75.
Freeman J. Dyson, Infinite in all Directions: Giffbrd Lecrures Given at Aberdeen, Scorland, 1985
(New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 13.
9Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Developmenr of a Scienrifc Fact, translated from the original of 1935
by T. J. Trenn and R. K. Merton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 64.
ONicholas Jardine, The Scenes of Inquiry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
knowing is making. Nevertheless there may still be a touch too much thinking
for my pleasure.
He titles a 1988 prospectus
for his forthcoming
book,
Designed in the Mind.
Does one not hear the resonance
of Crombies
somewhat Koyrean origins? Even my word reasoning has too much to do
with mind and mouth
and keyboard;
sufficiently
invoke
the manipulative
hand and the attentive eye. Crombies last word in the title of
his book is Arts; mine would be Artisan.
But theres more to my preference for reasoning over thinking than that. It
recalls me to my roots-1
am talking about just what Aristotle called rational,
even if my analysis is better suited to the temper of our times than his.
Reasoning recalls the Critique of Pure Reason. My study is a continuation
of
Kants project of explaining how objectivity is possible. He proposed preconditions for the string of sensations to become objective experience. He also wrote
much about science, but only after his day was it grasped how communal
an
activity is the growth of knowledge. Kant did not think of scientific reason as a
historical and collective product. We do. My styles of reasoning,
eminently
public, are part of what we need to understand
what we call objectivity. This is
not because styles are objective (i.e. we have found the best impartial ways to
get at the truth), but because they have settled what it is to be objective (truths
of certain sorts are just what we obtain by conducting
certain sorts of
investigations,
answering to certain standards).
Crombie
does not expressly define style of scientific thinking
in the
European tradition. He explains it ostensively by pointing to six styles that he
in the classical
then describes in painstaking
detail. We may distinguish
scientific movement
six styles of scientific thinking, or methods of scientific
inquiry and demonstration.
Three styles or methods were developed in the
investigation
of individual
regularities
and three in the investigation
of the
regularities
of populations
ordered in space and time. These six are (I
combine
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
(f)
History
21bid., p. 10.
of Science
24 (1988), 1-12.
Western
Visions
of Science,
Nature
and
whatever
mathematics
among
the sciences,
a content,
which is where
predecessors
may have
a specific science. We do
reasoning,
(a)-(f) and
a possible list of fields of knowledge. A great many inquiries use several styles.
The fifth, statistical, style for example is now used, in various guises, in every
kind of investigation,
including
some branches
of pure mathematics.
The
palaeontologist
uses experimental
methods to carbon date and order the old
bones. The modern synthesis of evolutionary
theory is among other things a
synthesis of taxonomic and historico-genetic
thought.
I start with a canonical list of styles descriptively determined by a historian
who, whatever his axes, is not grinding any of mine. As a philosopher I need to
discover, from his examples, at least a necessary condition
for being such a
style. We are not bound to accept Crombies preferred descriptions,
nor to
conclude
with exactly his arrangement
of styles. I shall list three related
reasons why we may diverge and then give two examples.
(1) Crombie offers an account of the classical scientific movement
and
tailors his characterizations
to the long period of time in which that movement
was formed and firmed up. He tends to leave a given style at the date when it is
securely installed. His discussions of mathematics
end with Keplers revivals of
Greek mathematics.
His exposition of the first three styles dries up at the end
of the seventeenth century. Only the final style is developed for the nineteenth
century,
with Darwin
being the major figure. But I as philosopher
am
decidedly Whiggish. The history that I want is the history of the present.
Thats Michel Foucaults phrase, implying that we recognize and distinguish
historical objects in order
modify Crombies list not
(2) Crombies (a)-(f) is
later than its predecessor
Crombie
recounts,
composed
inquiry,
but that
of two classical
of (b), but
the postulation
and
measurable
quantities.
It is by and large phenomenal
science. Something else
began just about the end of the period in which Crombie describes (b) and (c).
I call it the laboratory
style, characterized
by the building of apparatus
in
order to produce phenomena
to which hypothetical
modelling may be true or
false, but using another
layer of modelling,
namely models of how the
apparatus
and instruments
themselves work. The relationship
between the
laboratory
style, call it (bc), and styles (b) and (c) is complex. Peter Galisons
Wilbur
Knorr,
The Evolution of rhe Euclidean Elements:
Incommensurable Magnifudes (Dordrecht:
Reidel, 1975).
of
metaphor
of a trading
zone between
the producers
of analysed
On the contrary
experimentation
and
in which
either (b) or (c) is in full play on its own. On the one hand, despite all the talk
about intervening
variables and the like, many of the social sciences operate
only at the empirical level of(b). On the other hand cosmology and cognitive
science - none other than the chief modern instances of the Galilean style so
admired by Weinberg and Chomsky - remain at the level of (c), hypothetical
modelling. Those sciences answer to observation
but experimental
manipulation and intervention
is almost never practicable.
That is precisely why
Weinberg
and Chomsky
invoke (a certain Koyrt?an vision of) Galileo to
legitimate their own work. Cosmology and cognitive science remain sciences
that represent; the laboratory
style introduced
sciences that intervene.
I judge that the laboratory
style began about the time that Boyle made the
air pump in order to investigate the spring of the air. It is characteristic
of
styles that they have popular myths of origin. Crombies list strikes the right
note just because it codifies familiar legend. How could it be otherwise if one is
recapitulating
European
science from within? There was that legendary
moment when, as Althusser put it, Thales discovered the continent of mathematics. Next in the list of continents is and Galileo discovered the continent
of mechanics.
Well, Galileo
is everybodys
favourite
hero -not
only
Chomsky and Weinberg but also Husserl, for whom Galileo is simply The
Hero of Science, and also Spengler. Crombies
talk on styles of scientific
thinking, that aroused my interest long ago, was about-Galileo.
At that same
conference Winifred Wisan read a paper titled Galileo and the Emergence of a
New Scientific Style.16 All these authors referred chiefly to some aspect of style
(c), so let us not forget that according
to Stillman
who, by
the purest use of style (b), established the very first experimental
and quantitative law of nature. Galileo is the stuff of myth. Althusser continued,
and
Marx discovered the continent
of history. Good myth, wrong man; I much
prefer Michel Foucaults retelling with Bopp, Cuvier and Ricardo. Cuvier, as
14Peter Galison,
The Trading Zone: Coordinating
Action and Belief in Modern Physics,
Chapter 8 of his Image and Logic (forthcoming).
In fact the trading zone idea will be useful in
describing
any investigation
that employs several styles. It is often not the case that a single
investigator
is at home in more than one style of reasoning. Rather there is a collaboration,
in
which someone expert in style (x) makes use of a handy robust core of techniques from style Q).
This is most familiar from cookbooks
of statistical reasoning prepared
for different fields of
science, and now sold as quite literally mindless computational
packages.
Louis Althusser, Polificsand History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx (London: New Left
Books, 1972), p. 185.
161n Hintikka et al. op. cir. note 2, pp. 31 l-339.
For an explanation
of Koyrts contribution
to the myth, see A. C. Crombie, Alexandre Koyr6
and Great Britain: Galileo and Mersenne, History and Technology 4 (1987), 81-92.
many
have noticed,
is questionable,
but Bopps
Jansenist
by a man
of the world
of the calculus
of
probabilities,
or so wrote Poisson. * And I take Schaffer and Shapins book
subtitled Ho&es, Boyle and the Experimental Life as setting out the myth of
origin for the laboratory
style. Their hero, as both Bruno Latour and I have
observed, is not a person but an instrument,
the apparatus,
the air pump.19
Styles, to continue Althussers metaphor, open up new territory as they go. I
am sure that the Indo-Arabic
style of applied mathematics,
little interested in
postulation
but dedicated to finding algorithms,
is a distinct style with, of
course, non-European
origins. I call it the algorismic style. The algebrizing of
geometry, the Arabizing
of the Greek, was an essential piece of territorial
expansion. Every such expansion is contested. We can overhear todays battles.
For example: are computer generated concepts and proofs really mathematics?
When I was a student I went around with some topologists who would talk
and draw pictures and tell tall stories; today, when I have topological
house
guests, the first thing they do is set up their Mats in my basement,
not
calculating
but generating
ideas to which real-time computation
is integral.
And I know others who say that my friends have stopped doing mathematics.20
Thats how it is, when a style goes into new territory.
For all these differences in emphases, I do not differ significantly
from
Crombie either in my individuation
of styles or in how I describe them.
Without his three volume vindication
of his canonical list I would be left with
dubious
anecdotes
and fables. Im not claiming
that Im on solid nonideological ground when I resort to a historian for an initial individuation
of
styles. I claim only a certain independence:
his motivation
is very different
from mine, but the list he presents admirably suits my purposes. It is a good
workhorse
of a list that holds no surprises. To use yet another obsolete
metaphor, it covers the waterfront, and provides a directory to the main piers,
in a readily recognizable and fairly satisfactory way. And it could be the wrong
waterfront
for me. Maybe hes describing a once wondrous but now gutted
Liverpool,
pursuits
like
Perhaps
I should
Felixstowe
nineteenth
denim
and
instead
tourism-
San Francisco
harbours
be attending
that
history
to a bustling
has
container
or Oakland.
Maybe science as we know it began
century and the philosopher, who is not an antiquarian,
up leisure
passed
by.
port
like
late in the
should just
forget about the olden times. I dont think so. The proof of my confidence that
Crombies list remains germane is, however, not a matter of principle but of
the success of the resultant philosophical
analysis.
Our differences lie not in the identity of styles or their description, but in the
use to which we put the idea. Crombies advance notice of his book begins:
When we speak today of natural science we mean a specific vision created within
Western culture, at once of knowledge and of the object of that knowledge, a vision
at once of natural science and of nature.21
This is history
anthropology
Regardless
an invitation
of interest,
to a comparative
philosophical
historical
or historical,
10
and
arts
mediating
mans
experience
questions
of nature
at different
as perceiver
and
or statistical
studies
way to reason:
they have
nor independently
development
great many
identified
of a style of reasoning.
novelties
11
sentences
objects to be correct
Every
style of reasoning
prior to the
introduces
including
such as languages,
to be understood
12
ongoing
and creative
objects,
way. Mathematicians
numbers
and shapes,
in a single laboratory.
has
well taught, even when similarities in the surface grammar and in possible ways
of inquiry may make us think that sentences we investigate using them are
beyond question bivalent, closer scrutiny abetted by a stern theory about
meaningfulness
may make us sceptical.
The kinds of sentences that acquire positivity through a style of reasoning
are not well described by a correspondence
theory of truth. I have no instant
objection to a correspondence
theory for lots of humdrum sentences, what we
might call pre-style or unreasoned
sentences, including the maligned category
of observation
sentences. But I reject any uniform all-purpose semantics. The
instant objection to correspondence
theories, for sentences that have positivity
only in the context of a style of reasoning,
is that there is no way of
individuating
the fact to which they correspond,
except in terms of the way in
its truth,
J. L. Austin
observation
sentences
13
namely
in subject-predicate
style. As
or subject-relation-object
to
form. I
falls a
of the Laboratory
Sciences,
14
topic of stability
is positively
trendy,
that
understanding
is a step towards
Supplement
the self-authenticating
grasping
occupied
the correspond-
the quasi-stability
character
of styles of
of science. I doubt
that
Crombie
agrees with this. If so, our difference would not be between a
historical judgement
and a philosophical
one, but rather a philosophical
difference between two students, one an historian and one a philosopher. Other
historians, of a more constructivist
bent, will hold that my doctrine of selfauthentication
does not go far enough; in any event, the issues are philosophical, not historical.
In respect of stability I do wholly endorse one much used lemma from the
strong programme in the sociology of knowledge. The truth of a proposition
in
no way explains our discovery of it, or its acceptance by a scientific community, or its staying in place as a standard item of knowledge, Nor does being a
fact, nor reality, nor the way the world is. My reasons for saying so are not
Edinburgh
ones; they are more reminiscent
of very traditional
philosophy.
I
would transfer to truth (and to reality) what Kant said about existence, that it
is not a predicate, adding nothing to the subject. I may believe that there was a
solar eclipse this summer because there was one in the place I was then staying;
the eclipse is part of the explanation
of my belief (a view which might be
resisted in Edinburgh),
along with my experience, my memory, my general
knowledge, the folder01 in the newspapers etc. But the fact that there was an
eclipse, or the truth of the proposition
that there was an eclipse, is not part of
the explanation,
or at any rate, not over and above the eclipse itself. This is no
occasion to develop that theme, except to say that anyone who endorses the
Edinburgh
conclusion,
that truth is not explanatory,
should want an understanding of the stability of what we find out, and not settle for because thats
the way that the world is. I shall now sketch how the theory of styles of
reasoning may provide such an understanding.
The idea of self-authentication
is only a step, a fingerpost,
towards an
understanding
of the quasi-stability
of some of our knowledge. We shall not
progress further by thinking about method in general, let alone science in
general. Each style of reasoning
has its own characteristic
self-stabilizing
techniques. An account of each technique requires detailed analysis, specific to
the style, and it is aided by vivid historical illustration.
Each is a long story.
Ive three very long papers in press, about the statistical, the mathematical
and
the laboratory styles, and am preparing similar material for the taxonomic and
Y%arting with John Durant, Is Science only an Invention?, a review of Alan G. Gross, Tire
Rhetoric of Science, Times Literary Supplement,
15 March 1991, p, 19, and letters by Mark
Weatherall,
29 March; Neil Hirschson,
12 April; Alan Gross, Christopher
Lawrence, and Steven
Shapin, 19 April; and Durant, 12 April.
15
the historico-genetic. 25There is little overlap between these essays, because the
techniques and the histories involved differ substantially from case to case.
Almost the only thing that stabilizing techniques have in common is that
they enable a self-authenticating style to persist, to endure. Talk of techniques
is unfamiliar, but my main innovation is organization. Many of the techniques
that I describe are quite well-known, but, I claim, inadequately understood.
For example, Duhems famous thesis about how to save theories by adjusting
auxiliary hypotheses is (by one measure) exactly 114th of the stabilizing
techniques that I distinguish in the laboratory sciences. I owe much more to
recent work by Andy Pickering, to whom I would attribute another 314th.26
Overall we are concerned with a mutual adjustment of ideas (which include
theories of different types), materiel (which we revise as much as theories) and
marks (including data and data analysis). All three are what Pickering calls
plastic resources that we jointly mould into semi-rigid structures. I should
emphasize that, although I use Duhem, this account does not go in the
direction of the underdetermination of theory by data (Quines generalization
of Duhems remarks). On the contrary, we come to understand why theories
are so determinate, almost inescapable. Likewise my account of the stability of
the mathematical style owes much to two unhappy bedfellows, Lakatos and
Wittgenstein. It introduces an idea of analytification -of how some synthetic
if a priori propositions are made analytic: thus the logical positivist doctrine of
the a priori is historicized. But we no more arrive at the radical conventionalism or constructionalism sometimes read into Remarks on the Foundations of
Mathematics than we arrive at the underdetermination
of theory by data.
A happy by-product of this analysis is that not only has each style its own
self-stabilizing techniques, but also some are more effective than others. The
taxonomic and the historic-genetic styles have produced nothing like the
stability of the laboratory or the mathematical style, and I claim to be able to
show why. On the other hand, although Mark Twain, Disraeli or whoever
could, in the earlier days of the statistical style, utter the splendid canard about
lies, damn lies, and statistics, the statistical style is so stable that it has grown
its own word that gives a hint about its most persistent techniques: robust.
In the case of statistics there is an almost too evident version of selfauthentication (the use of probabilities to assess probabilities). But that is only
2Statistical
Language,
Statistical Truth and Statistical Reason: The Self-Authentication
of a
Style of Reasoning, in E. Mcmullin (ed.), Social Dimensions of Science (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre
Dame University
Press, 1992), 130-157.
The Self-Vindication
of Laboratory
Science, in
A. Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 2963. Radically Constructivist
Theories of Mathematical
Progress, to appear in an issue of Iride
edited by A. Pagnini.
26A. Pickering,
Living in the Material
World, in D. Gooding
et al. (eds), The Uses of
Experiment:
Studies in the Natural Sciences (Cambridge:
Cambridge
University
Press, 1989),
275-298.
16
the material,
institutional
requirements
for
Language,
Truth
and Reason,
The historian
17
There is the
strategy
explaining
what is peculiar
about
science, distinguishing
**Richard Rorty,
Is Science a Natural
Kind?, in E. McMullin
(ed.), Conslruction
and
Constraint: The Shaping of ScientiJic Rationality (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press,
1988), pp. 49-74.
29Bernard Williams, The Scientific and the Ethical, in S. C. Brown (ed.), Objectivity and
Cultural Divergence (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 214: cf. Bernard Williams
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana,
1985), p. 138-139.
18
mathematics
or create phenomena
in the laboratory
to which our models are
true. The persistence of a style demands some brute conditions
about people
and their place in nature. These conditions are not topics of the sciences, to be
investigated
An account
of them has to be brief and banal because there is not much to say.
of styles.
(I 984).
469476.
op cit., note 19, and Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations ofNatural History.. Towards an
qf Science (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990). My own abuse of what
Wittgenstein meant by anthropology
has, on this occasion, more in common with Atran than with
Latour. This is because Atran is concerned with what makes possible the taxonomic style (d), and
he has a Chomskian
vision of a universal and innate folk-taxonomy
-see
my review essay,
London Revien, qf Books, 21 February
1991. Latours
projected
anthropology
of science is
sublimely anti-innatist.
On the other hand these two authors have something in common, which is
indefinitely distant from Wittgensteins
professed concerns: Atran is doing real anthropology
as I
write. studying classification
out there in the Gautemalan
jungle, while Latour and Woolgars
Lahorafory
Life now serves as a role-model
for a generation
of young ethnographers
of the
laboratory.
Latour,
Anthropology
19
face, for I am not talking about what we usually mean by technology, namely
the development, application and exploitation of the arts, crafts and sciences.
What I mean by philosophical technology is the philosophical study of certain
techniques, just as philosophical anthropology is the study of certain aspects of
man, epidemiology of epidemic diseases.
We have finally reached the fundamental difference between the historians
and the philosophers use of the idea of a scientific style of thinking or
reasoning, a difference that has nothing to do with disagreements about history
or divergence in philosophies. Crombie leads us to a comparative historical
anthropology (moved, he has also told us, by the experiences of teaching in
Japan, and of crossing parts of Asia and its oceans when visiting his native
Australia). I invite what I call philosophical technology: a study of the ways in
which the styles of reasoning provide stable knowledge and become not the
uncoverers of objective truth but rather the standards of objectivity. And when
asked how those techniques could be possible at all, I fall back on a few and
very obvious remarks about people, of the sort to which Wittgenstein has
already directed us. Less all-encompassing histories will provide the social
conditions within which a style emerged and those in which it flourished; less
ambitious essays in philosophical technology will describe, in a more finegrained way, the ways in which a style took on new stabilizing techniques as it
pursued its seeming destiny in new territories. Comparative historical anthropology is a fundamentally different enterprise from either philosophical
anthropology or philosophical technology.
I began by saying that the philosopher requires the historian. If Crombies
three volumes do not present a coherent ordering and analysis of European
scientific practice and vision, then my talk of self-authenticating styles and of
philosophical technology would be suspect. That is why I called the relation
between the history and the philosophy of the sciences asymmetric. The
philosopher who conceives of the sciences as a human production and even
invention requires the historian to show that analytic concepts have application. After learning from the historians analysis I turn to a different agenda,
which, you will have noticed, summons all the old gang: truth, reality,
existence. But also, as is always the case in philosophy, we are directed to a
complementary range of entirely new topics, such as philosophical technology.
For all the manifest differences of endeavour between the historian and the
philosopher, they have this in common: we share a curiosity about our
Western scientific vision of objectivity. That is as central a philosophical
concern as could be: the core question of Kants first critique. Crombies
volumes will, I hope, be read in part as an account of how conceptions of
objective knowledge have come into being, while the philosopher can describe
the techniques, which become autonomous of their historical origins, and
which enable styles of reasoning to persist at all. Yet I would not push this
20
division of labour too far. Objectivity, in its several guises, is a hot topic for
active historians of science such as Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, Theodore
Porter and many others. Even when objectivity
is not explicitly in view,
however much the historian
may
history is imbued with philosophical
abjure philosophical
issues, every sound
concepts about human knowledge, nature