Steven Shapin

Phrenological Knowledge and the Social Structure of Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh

Summary This account of the conflict between phrenologists and anti-phrenologists in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh is offered as a case study in the sociological explanation of intellectual activity. The historiographical value and propriety of a sociological approach to ideas is defended against accounts which assume the autonomy of knowledge. By attending to the social context of the debate and the functions of ideas in that context one may construct an explanation of why the conflict took the course it did.

The sciences of subjectivity

In historical and ethnographic studies of the making of scientific knowledge, there has been a long-standing fascination with deflating certain stories about objectivity. Among the resources used to achieve that deflation have been the notions of subjectivity, which has been treated more as a trouble for objectivity than as a knowledge-making mode open to systematic study. I describe notions of subjectivity implicated in that inattention; I trace potentially constructive links between contemporary science studies and resources in 18th-century philosophical aesthetics; I draw notice to available engagements with the mode of subjectivity known as taste, and, especially, gustation and olfaction; and I suggest ways in which we might study the achievement of intersubjectivity in these domains.

Property, Patronage, and the Politics of Science: The Founding of the Royal Society of Edinburgh

The institutionalization of natural knowledge in the form of a scientific society may be interpreted in several ways. If we wish to view science as something apart, unchanging in its intellectual nature, we may regard the scientific enterprise as presenting to the sustaining social system a number of absolute and necessary organizational demands: for example, scientific activity requires acceptance as an important social activity valued for its own sake, that is, it requires autonomy; it is separate from other forms of enquiry and requires distinct institutional modes; it is public knowledge and requires a public, universalistic forum; it is productive of constant change and requires of the sustaining social system a flexibility in adapting to change. Support for such an interpretation may be found in the rise of modern science in seventeenth-century England, France, and Italy and in the accompanying rise of specifically scientific societies. Thus, the founding of the Royal Society of London may be interpreted as the organizational embodiment of immanent demands arising from scientific activity—the cashing of a blank cheque payable to science written on societys current account.

Descartes the doctor: rationalism and its therapies.

During the Scientific Revolution one important gauge of the quality of reformed natural philosophical knowledge was its ability to produce a more effective medical practice. Indeed, it was sometimes thought that philosophers who pretended to possess new and more potent philosophical knowledge might display that possession in personal health and longevity. Rene Descartes repeatedly wrote that a better medical practice was a major aim of his philosophical enterprise. He said that he had made important strides towards achieving that aim and, on that basis, he offered practical medical advice to others and advertised the expectation that, taking his own advice, he would live a very long time. This paper describes what cartesian medicine looked like in practice and what that practice owed to the power of modernist Reason.

The Ivory Tower: The History of a Figure of Speech and Its Cultural Uses

This is a historical survey of how and why the notion of the Ivory Tower became part of twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural vocabularies. It very briefly tracks the origins of the tag in antiquity, documents its nineteenth-century resurgence in literary and aesthetic culture, and more carefully assesses the political and intellectual circumstances, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, in which it became a common phrase attached to universities and to features of science and in which it became a way of criticizing practices and institutions deemed to be ‘irrelevant’. The paper concludes by reflecting on the tags relationship to pervasive cultural tropes and how its modern history may be used to appreciate better where science and its academic setting now stand in the ancient debate between the active and contemplative lives.

Trusting George Cheyne: Scientific Expertise, Common Sense, and Moral Authority in Early Eighteenth-Century Dietetic Medicine

Whenever physicians give directions to patients there is always a question of their authority to do so: what is it that they know, and who is it that they are, that gives them this authority? The problem is fully general, but it takes especially interesting forms in early modern dietetics, where patients were reckoned to possess much pertinent and reliable knowledge, and where medical dietetics occupied terrain already densely occupied by moral prudence. This article addresses these issues in relation to the writings and practice of George Cheyne (1671-1743), iatromechanist, dietary writer, and fashionable physician. Special attention is given to the relation between Cheynes scientific expertise and the texture of the advice he gave to two patients, the printer and novelist Samuel Richardson and Selina, countess of Huntingdon.

Hyperprofessionalism and the Crisis of Readership in the History of Science

There is a crisis of readership for work in our field, as in many other academic disciplines. One of its causes is a pathological form of the professionalism that we so greatly value. “Hyperprofessionalism” is a disease whose symptoms include self‐referentiality, self‐absorption, and a narrowing of intellectual focus. This essay describes some features and consequences of hyperprofessionalism in the history of science and offers a modest suggestion for a possible cure.

Head and Hand: Rhetorical Resources in British Pedagogical Writing, 1770-1850

All pedagogical writings and theoretical treatments of the process of education tend to be developed on the basis of particular conceptions of the constitution of the mind, the nature of thought, and the relationship of knowledge and thinking. Such conceptions may take the form of explicit psychological theories, or they may be informal, taken-for-granted models and presuppositions to which appeal is routinely made as arguments proceed. In what follows we shall examine these conceptions as they are manifested in a selection of educational writings of the period I770 to I850 in Britain, and we shall show how they were employed both to devise and to justify educational programmes.1 The writings of this period and place make a particularly interesting case study, since they derive from a context characterized by rapid innovation in education, when intense concern with pedagogical problems was felt by a wide range of upper and middle-class groupings. The rapid changes in the distribution of wealth, power and social standing induced by the processes of industrialization had stimulated a re-appraisal of the functions and effectiveness of existing educational provisions and a search for new forms and institutions. Writers frequently laid bare their assumptions and cognitive models, as well as their goals and interests, in an unusually clear and distinct fashion. While we use historical materials, our intention is not simply to offer a study of a particularly accessible historical context. Rather, it is to use the context, and the material selected from it, as a forum wherein to raise some issues evidently of general significance in the understanding of pedagogical writings. The general predicament of pedagogy is that it is bound to proceed on the basis of assumptions which are difficult to develop and correct via empirical feedback, and which are peculiarly liable to be influenced by social interests and conceptions of the social order. By observing this in our chosen context we put ourselves in a better position to consider how we might take account of this continuing problem.

A taste of science: Making the subjective objective in the California wine world

This article is about the relationship between the categories of the subjective and the objective in the late 20th-century California wine world, about attempts to transform ‘soft’ subjective judgments into ‘hard’ objective descriptions and evaluations, and about the role of both sensory science and chemistry in such attempts. It focuses on research done at the University of California, Davis, from about the 1950s to the 1980s by the enologist Maynard Amerine, his co-workers, and successors. It suggests ways in which these materials might prompt attention to the role of subjective judgment and the marketplace in other forms of late modern science.

Proverbial Economies: How an Understanding of Some Linguistic and Social Features of Common Sense Can Throw Light on More Prestigious Bodies of Knowledge, Science for Example

An evaluative contrast between learned expertise and lay knowledge is a pervasive and longstanding feature of modern culture. Occasionally, the learned have pointed to folkish proverbs to illustrate the inadequacies of common-sense reasoning and judgement. Proverbs are said perspicuously to display the superficiality, the imprecision, and even the logical contradictions of common-sense thinking. I offer an interpretation of proverbs in their naturally occurring settings as epistemically powerful, mnemonically robust, practically pertinent, and referentially flexible. My purpose is not just to recuperate the value of proverbial reasoning but, ultimately, to show the relevance of such reasoning to a revised appreciation of modern technical practices, including science, technology and medicine. To that end, the paper concludes with some speculative remarks about the linguistic forms in which the heuristics of present-day technical practices are expressed and transmitted.