Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka, and Scientific Imagination by Stamos David N

Author:Stamos, David N. [Stamos, David N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438463919
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Contextualist History of Science

There are different ways of doing history, and they need not converge given the very same topic. One way is history of ideas, which is popular among philosophers of science and scientists themselves. This is to trace the evolution of particular ideas, their relations with contemporary and earlier ideas, determining who came up with what and how, what someone’s concept of something was, and so on. Among professional historians of science, however, history of ideas has lost out to what is known as contextualist history of science. As Bernard Lightman, one of its practitioners, puts it, “The hallmark of contextualist studies is their emphasis on the way scientific ideas are embedded in material culture such that there are no insides or outsides of science.” Appearing “full-blown” in the 1980s, and allowing for different kinds of contexts, Lightman adds that contextualist history of science “allowed historians to avoid the false analytical distinction between science and society (or base and superstructure), dissolve the categories external and internal, and begin to transcend the science/society dualism.”162

One can get no clearer picture of this way of doing history of science than by turning to its two main leaders or models, namely, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, explicitly hailed as paradigms of history of science writing.163 In their enormously successful Darwin, they tell us that “Our Darwin sets out to be different—to pose the awkward questions, to probe interests and motivations, to portray the scientific expert as a product of his time; to depict a man grappling with immensities in a society undergoing reform,” that “We want to understand how his theories and strategies were embedded in a reforming Whig society.”164 There is a subtle yet discernible philosophy lurking at the foot of each of the seven hundred or so pages of text (exclusive of endnotes, bibliography, and index)—and it is best described as Kuhnian-Rortian. Let me present a précis of my case.165

In his biography of T.H. Huxley, Desmond tells us that “At the dawn of the twenty-first century ‘reason’ seems a precarious, value-laden yardstick, and one which has an infuriating habit of changing allegiance.” Huxley, we are then told, was attempting to establish “a rival evolutionary priesthood” and Desmond’s biography is “the human story behind these sea-changes.”166 As one reviewer put it, prefacing her review by pointing out that with “this new contextual history, we are in danger of throwing the proverbial baby out with the bath water,” in the nearly 650 pages of text “Huxley the scientist is often difficult to find,” and Huxley the scientist, she concludes, “deserves better.”167

In their second book on Darwin, Desmond and Moore attempt to show that Darwin’s theory of common descent for human races—that the human races evolved from a single ancestral species, his position on the monogenism-polygenism debate that was raging in his day, mankind as one species versus mankind as a genus of more than one species—was motivated primarily not by evidence but by a “moral passion,” such that their new biography of

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