John G. McEvoy*

Modernism, Postmodernism and the Historiography of Science

ABSTRACT: Since its inception in the eighteenth century, the discipline of the history of science has

served a motley collection of extrinsic disciplinary interests, philosophical ideas, and cultural movements. This paper

examines the historiographical implications of modernism and postmodernism and shows how they influenced

positivist, postpositivist, and sociological interpretations of the Chemical Revolution. It also shows how these

interpretations served the disciplinary interests of science, philosophy, and sociology, respectively, and it points toward

a model of the history of science as history.

Since its inception in the eighteenth century, the discipline of the history of

science has occupied a contested intellectual terrain, shaped by philosophical and

ideological forces associated with the development and cultural entanglements of science

itself. Reflecting on the appropriation of the history of science by religious, scientific,

philosophical, and sociological ideologies and interests, I. B. Cohen wondered just what

to make of the “many faces of the history of science.” Should it be seen as a “font of

examples for philosophers, a scientific type of history, an archaeology of discovery, a

branch of sociology, a variant of intellectual history – or what?”1 This essay will explore

some of the existing philosophical and cultural features of the discipline of the history of

science and indicate some of the ways it falls short of an adequate historiography.

I have argued elsewhere that, during the second half of the twentieth century, the

historiography of the Chemical Revolution passed through three distinct historiographical

1

stages, each characterized by a dominant interpretive strategy or style.2 The first phase

was shaped by positivist and Whig notions of science as a teleologically structured body

of experimental knowledge. The “postpositivist” identification of science with global and

autonomous theorizing challenged and replaced this perspective in the 1960s and 1970s,

but it gave way in the 1980s and 1990s to the sociological view of science as a form of

practice shaped by the contingent constraints of specific agents acting in local contexts.

Having dealt extensively with the first two stages of this interpretive triad elsewhere, I

will concentrate in this essay on their relation to philosophical themes associated with the

wider cultural movement of modernism, and I will show how the transition from

modernism to postmodernism shaped the third, sociological mode of interpretation.3

Since the relation between the sequence of interpretive styles and strategies and the

individual texts and authors they informed is highly mediated, I will focus here on the

general features of interpretive paradigms, referring the reader to existing and

forthcoming studies for more detailed accounts of the fit between paradigms and

practitioners.

1. MODERNISM AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SCIENCE

Positivism

Positivist accounts of the history of science embodied philosophical principles

and assumptions associated with essentialism, historicism, and idealism.4 These

assumptions grounded knowledge in the nature of things, posited an inherent logic of

history, and upheld the identity, or correspondence, of thought and things. The

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assumption of an identity between the knowing subject and the known object informed

the positivist distinction between states of cognitive transparency, such as truth,

knowledge, illumination, objectivity, and rationality, enjoyed by the “children of light,”

and states of cognitive opacity, such as error, ignorance, prejudice, superstition, and

darkness, in which reality was occluded or distorted by the unreceptive minds of the

“children of darkness.” The dialectic between cognitive transparency and opacity played

a central role in positivist accounts of the history of science and the demarcation between

science and nonscience. Emphasizing the demarcation and “consensual” unity of science,

positivist historians argued that once astronomy and physics broke with prescientific

modes of thought in the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

scientists merely had to deploy the unique scientific method to ensure cognitive progress

in the other disciplines of science. Positivist historians saw in the history of science a

clear reflection of the unique rationality of science and its progressive, Manichean

struggle with the forces of darkness and irrationality.

The principle of expressive causality, according to which nature, society, and the

mind are the visible manifestations, or expressions, of an invisible cause, essence, or

center of things, shaped the general positivist belief in an unfolding logic, or telos, of

history. Positivists reduced the specificity of an historical event to that of a mere moment

in a dynamic totality, unfolding according to the dictates of a predetermined end. The

unfolding essence, or subject, of history imparted continuity to historical development

and homogeneity to the developing parts, so that no one aspect could outstrip or lag

behind any of the other aspects of a society. Emphasizing the cognitive efficacy of

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individual agents and the eureka-moment notion of discovery, positivist historians

emphasized problems of chronology, priority, and authorship as integral parts of the

historicist problematic of periodization, with its concern to delineate carefully and

precisely the different stages in the unfolding of past science towards present science.

According to the positivist model of the Chemical Revolution, deployed by

Herbert Butterfield, Harold Hartley, Douglas McKie, and James Partington, among many

others, modern chemistry arose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the fallacious phlogiston

theory. At the heart of this conflagration was the “genius” of Antoine Lavoisier, who took

up where Robert Boyle left off, and in a series of crucial experiments on combustion and

the calcination of metals, deployed the quantitative method of inquiry to refute the

phlogiston theory and to establish the central role of oxygen in the workings of nature.

Thus, chemistry broke with its nonscientific past and moved, inexorably and

methodically, towards the present state of scientific knowledge. Phlogistians, like Joseph

Priestley, failed to appreciate the new chemistry because their minds were clouded by the

intrusion of alien, metaphysical and religious, modes of thought into their scientific

inquiries. Lavoisier grounded chemistry in a uniform experience and a unitary method of

inquiry, which formed the basis of subsequent progress in chemistry. This progress was

linear, cumulative, and autonomous. It marked the victory of the “children of light” over

the “children of darkness.” The scientific struggle between the agents of light and the

agents of darkness had significant moral and social implications. It was the responsibility

of the positivist historian to determine the crucial moments, pivotal discoveries, and

individual contributions to this struggle, and to apportion praise and blame accordingly.

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Postpositivism

Postpositivist philosophers of science, including Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and

Thomas Kuhn, challenged the empiricist sensibilities of positivism with a theoreticist

conception of the nature of science and its historical development.5 Rejecting the

epistemological distinction between observation statements, grounded in experience, and

theoretical statements, based on conjecture, postpositivists identified knowledge with

theory. Emphasizing global rather than local theories, they replaced the positivist view of

the epistemological efficacy of individual subjects and their originary moments of

discovery with the theoreticist notion of “epistemology without a knowing subject” and

the structuralist idea of history as a “process without a subject.” Theoreticism rendered

unintelligible the essentialist view of knowledge as inscribed in the nature of things and

the historicist notion of a logic, or telos, of history. In place of the positivist vision of the

unity, linearity, and homogeneity of a single, absolute historical time, postpositivism

advanced the idea of a succession of distinct epochal times, each with its own unity,

linearity, and homogeneity. The resulting historicized models of science replaced the

formalist view of scientific theories as static sets of abstract propositions – championed

by the Logical Positivists - with a more dynamic emphasis on the role of “guiding

assumptions” in the formation and development of scientific theorizing. But the emphasis

these models placed on the conceptual unity and structure of scientific doctrines

discouraged the formation of an adequate sense of the specific historical context and

sequential development of scientific thought.

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Postpositivist historians of chemistry, such as Jerry Gough, W.R. Albury, Arthur

Donovan, Larry Holmes, and Charlton Perrin shifted the interpretive focus of the

Chemical Revolution from the domain of empirical foundations and experimental

methodology to the realm of theoretical doctrines and research traditions. They replaced

the positivist view of Lavoisier as the experimental “founder” of modern chemistry with

a focus on Lavoisier the theoretical innovator, who challenged tradition with new theories

of acidity, heat, the gaseous state, and chemical composition. Breaking with the positivist

historiography of crucial experiments, postpositivist historians rejected the idea that the

Chemical Revolution was the result of Lavoisier’s “eureka experience,” and saw it

instead as an extended conceptual process, which started before Lavoisier appeared on

1

? See I. Bernard Cohen, “The many faces of the history of science: A font of examples for philosophers, a scientific

type of history, an archaeology of discovery, a branch of sociology, a variant of intellectual or social history – or

what?” C. F. Delzell, ed., The future of history: Essays in the Vanderbilt University Centennial Symposium (Nashville,

1977), 65-110. See also J. R. R. Christie, “The development of the historiography of science,” R. C. Olby, G. N.

Cantor, J. R. R. Christie, and M. S. Hodge, eds., Companion to the history of modern science (London, 1990), 4-22. 2

? See John G. McEvoy, “The Chemical Revolution in context,” The eighteenth century: Theory and interpretation, 33

(1992), 198-216; idem, “In search of the Chemical Revolution: Interpretive strategies in the history of chemistry,”

Foundations of chemistry, 2 (2000), 47-73.3

? For a discussion of positivist and postpositivist interpretations of the chemical revolution see John G. McEvoy,

“Positivism, Whggism, and the Chemical Revolution: A study in the historiography of science,” History of science, 35

(1997), 1-33; idem, “Postpositivist interpretations of the chemical revolution, Canadian journal of history, 36 (2001),

453-469. For reasons of space and convenience, I will ignore the Whig tradition in this essay, referring only to its

symbiotic cousin ‘positivism.’ 4

? This section outlines material covered fully in McEvoy, “Positivism” (ref. 4), which places the positivist

historiography in the wider movement of nineteenth-century historicism, which included Hegel and Marx. 5

? See McEvoy, “Postpositivist” (ref. 4) for a fuller discussion of the material covered in this section.

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the scientific scene and was completed only after he left it. Assimilating the history of

science to the history of ideas, postpositivist scholars explored a variety of links between

the conceptual upheavals of the Chemical Revolution and eighteenth-century theories of

knowledge, matter, language, and composition. Emphasizing the transcultural cognitive

autonomy of science, postpositivist scholars developed “internalist” accounts of the

Chemical Revolution, which upheld its causal independence of the socioeconomic

conditions of eighteenth-century Europe. Cognitive autonomy, not contextual

dependence, was the order of the day for positivists and postpostitivists alike.

Modernism

Connecting positivism and postpositivism to modernism is not without its

difficulties. The literature on modernism and postmodernism is vast and varied, but

despite the obvious centrality of science and its interpretation for “the narrative

construction of ‘modernity,’” little scholarly attention has been paid to the significance of

the history and philosophy of science for an understanding of modernism and

postmodernism.6 Connections are also obscured by the complexities and ambiguities

associated with the vocabulary of modernism and postmodernism, which acquires

different connotations from the perspective of art, architecture, science, social theory,

history, and philosophy. Thus, while some commentators focus on the “high modernism”

6

? Joseph Rouse, “Philosophy of science and the persistent narratives of modernity,” Studies in history and philosophy of

science, 22 (1991), 141-162, on 143. See also Peter Galison, “History, philosophy, and the central metaphor,” Science

in context, 2 (1988), 197-212. This essay integrates the views of Rouse and Galison into a broader discussion of

modernity as a philosophical movement.

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that flourished in art and literature between the World Wars, others use the terminology

of modernism to characterize the upheavals that took place in philosophy and culture in

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is also disagreement over the meaning of

“modernism”; while some scholars equate it with the “Enlightenment promotion of

rationality and freedom,” others relate it to the less-confident hope for aesthetic

redemption or ironic affirmation of modern life associated with Nietzsche.7 Similarly,

while some commentators view postmodernism as a disguised, degenerate, and

ephemeral version of modernism, serving conservative political functions, others view it

as an epochal break with the modern world.8 It is impossible here to do justice to the

complexities and ambiguities associated with modernism and postmodernism, and no

attempt will be made to discuss the dynamic “aporias” that impelled them. With an eye

on the development of the philosophy and sociology of science over the last two hundred

years, the term “modernism” will be used in this essay to identify and characterize the

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? Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a philosophical problem: On the dissatisfactions of European high culture (Oxford,

1991), 115-121. Pippin’s view of a single philosophical thread running through diverse expressions of modernism

shapes the account of modernism given in this essay. See also Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, “Introduction:

Subjectivity and modernity’s other,” Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, eds., Modernity and identity (Oxford, 1992),

1-30 for an account of the distinction between “high modernism” and “low modernism.” 8

? See, e.g., Alex Callinicos, Against postmodernism: A Marxist critique (New York, 1989), 1-8; Andreas Huyssen,

“Critical theory and modernity: Introduction,” New German Critique, 26 (1982), 3-11; David Couzens Hoy, “Splitting

the difference: Habermas’s critique of Derrida,” Maurizio P. d’Entrèves and S. Benhabib, eds., Habermas and the

unfinished project of modernity: Critical essays on the “Philosophical discourse of modernity” (Cambridge, 1996),

124-146. Pippin (ref. 8), 156-164 suggests that modernism and postmodernism constitute different responses –

opposition and acquiescence – to the shared experience of the meaninglessness of the modern world. What modernists

experienced as loss, postmodernists viewed as mere change. While the modernist hero “transfigures the world,” the

postmodern “spectator” builds up “a storehouse of memories” (Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” Paul

Rabinow, ed., The Foucault reader (New York, 1984), 32-50, on 40-41).

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philosophical and cultural sensibilities ushered in by the socioeconomic transition from

feudalism to capitalism and usually associated with the principles and practices of the

Enlightenment. The term “postmodernism” will be used to characterize the challenge to

the philosophical sensibilities of modernism associated with the rise of poststructuralism

and the “failed revolt” of May 1968 in Paris.9 A full appreciation of the cognitive force,

cultural significance, and historiographical implications of modernism requires a

consideration of its emergence from the premodern world.

If, as Frederic Jameson argued, postmodernism is “the cultural logic of late

capitalism,” then modernism may be regarded as the cultural matrix of earlier,

commercial and industrial, capitalism.10 The emergence of capitalism involved a “long

drawn-out transition from feudalism,” in which the modern institutions and cultures of

individuality and autonomy replaced the premodern world of communal integration and

the unity of being.11 In feudalism, the economic, social, political, and personal realms of

life were integrated parts of a hierarchical unity, in which the individual was constituted

by a web of relations to nature, society, and God. In the feudal estate, the personal and

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? See, e.g., Lawrence Cahoone, “Introduction,” Lawrence Cahoone, ed., From modernism to postmodernism: An

anthology (Oxford, 2003), 1-13, on 2-8; Charles Lemert, “General social theory, irony, postmodernism,” Steven

Seidman and David Wagner, eds., Postmodernism and social theory (Oxford, 1992), 17-46; Callinicos (ref. 9), 82, 144-

145, 164-171. 10

? See Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism,” New left review, 146 (1984), 53-93,

on 77-80; Jean Baudrillard, “From symbolic exchange and death,” Cahoone, (ref. 10), 421-434.11

? Mikuláš Teich, “Afterword,” Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, The Enlightenment in national context (Cambridge,

1981), 215-217, on 216. See also Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a politics of culture,” H. Aram Veeser, ed., The new

historicism (New York, 1989), 1-14, on 4-8; David Ingram, Habermas and the dialectic of reason (London, 1987), 22-

28; Pippin (ref. 8), 4-5.

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social identities of the individual were inseparable, and the economic activity of the

production and distribution of wealth embodied the hierarchical social relations of the

system, which were simultaneously political and personal. With the rise of capitalism,

this system of mutually constitutive parts gave way to a society based on clear-cut

distinctions between the economic, social, and political realms.12 The interconnected

world of feudalism disintegrated and its parts were reorganized into formally contained

realms of distinct activities, including science, religion, art, politics, and economics. The

organic unity of nature, society, and the self in feudalism gave way to a mechanistic

conjunction of autonomous realms, in which each of these elements were independently

constituted by internal principles of identity and regulation.

The cognitive and cultural counterpart to this socioeconomic process of

simultaneous dissolution and autonomization involved the seventeenth-century split

between rational man and mechanical nature, scientific explanation and hermeneutical

understanding, as well as the emergence of the Enlightenment notion of the self-defining

subject.13 Self-assertion and self-definition were the guiding principles of modernity,

accounting for its focus on the present and its superiority to the past.14 Medieval and

early-Renaissance thought defined the self in relation to the cosmic order and equated

reason with the eternal verities held in common by the human and the divine mind. The

real task of knowledge on this view was the construction of metaphysical systems based

12

? The classic discussion of the connection between the rise of capitalism and the dissolution of feudalism can be found

in Marx’s “On the Jewish question” and The German ideology. For a clear and concise discussion of these connections

see Robert L. Heilbroner, The nature and logic of capitalism (London, 1986), 89-95. See also McEvoy, “Context” (ref.

3), 205-211.

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on intrinsic, a priori links between man, nature, and society. The Enlightenment mind

rejected the idea of an intrinsic link between the self and the cosmos: the knowing mind

encounters the world as a set of de facto contingent correlations.15 Thus, Kant criticized

eighteenth-century empiricist and rationalist philosophers for their lingering appeal to

empirical and metaphysical foundations for knowledge; he developed his transcendental

philosophy as a “way of demonstrating the autonomy, the self-grounding authority of

modern thought and therewith modern culture.”16 The desire to purge Kant’s “critical”

philosophy of its own dogmatic residues shaped the philosophical contours of nineteenth-

century German Idealism, which culminated in Hegel’s notion of “self-positing spirit.”

While Enlightenment thinkers from Descartes to Kant identified modernity with the

principle of subjectivity, an all-consuming activity of self-knowledge, self-discovery, and

self-production, Hegel’s doctrine of “absolute spirit” moved beyond the level of isolated

subjects to an autonomous domain of objective reason.17 In a similar vein, Max Weber

identified the spirit of modernity with the differentiation of the traditional unified

worldview of religion and metaphysics into the autonomous cultural- and value-spheres

of science (truth), morality (normativity), and art (taste), a process that Jurgen Habermas

sought to complete in the twentieth century, when he insisted upon the irreducibility of

“the objective, subjective, and the intersubjective dimensions of rationality.”18 The same

logic of purification and autonomization fostered twentieth-century aesthetic modernism,

which called for “the differentiation of the purely aesthetic from other realms of human

endeavor, such as ethics, politics, religion, or economics.”19 As Habermas noted,

modernism consisted in “the relentless development of the objectivating sciences, of the

universalistic foundations of morality and law, and of autonomous art, all in accord with

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their own immanent logic.”20 Sundering the unified cosmos of the premoderns into

distinct spheres of cognition and action, defined, validated, and regulated by their own

inner logics, modernism populated reality with an array of distinctions and dualisms, such

as those between subject and object, society and nature, human and nonhuman, reality

and language, knowledge and faith, and science and nonscience. The secularized world of

modernism made the autonomous individual the subject of knowledge, the source of

values, the possessor of rights, and the focus of utility 21.

The modernist philosophy of autonomy involved an analytical conception of

formal reason, a representational theory of thought and language, and a secular and

progressivist view of history. These accounts of reason, language, and history shaped the

development of positivist and postpositivist philosophies of science and provided the

critical foil for the emergence of postmodernist sensibilities associated with the sociology

of scientific knowledge. The transition from feudal unity and integration to capitalist

autonomy and differentiation gave modernism its critical, normative and formal

orientation. Starting with the attack on scholasticism, religious authority, and feudal

power, modernism upheld the self-sufficiency of reason and grounded knowledge in

rational processes independent of accepted tradition, dogma, or authority and oriented to

the instrumental service of humanity. Bereft of specific metaphysical and empirical

content, modernist reason was formal and procedural, concerned with abstract forms of

knowledge and methods of inquiry.22 The emergence of a sense of epistemological

autonomy also coincided with a shift in the activity of the knowing mind, in which the

associative and analogical understanding of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance gave

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way to analytic reason. Instead of “drawing things together” in a web of resemblances,

the modern mind discriminated between things by “establishing their identities” and,

thereby, their “differences” from other things.23 Although modernism extended the

boundaries of new identities, it viewed the forms of identity as circumscribed and fixed,

positing “centered” subjects or closed structures, compelled by inner norms or

principles.24 The logic of identity and difference buttressed the modernist notion of

autonomous spheres of thought and action, operating according to their own inner logics

and within strict disciplinary limits and institutional boundaries.25 These analytical and

formal sensibilities shaped the positivist and postpositivist accounts of the unity,

autonomy, and internal development of science.

Rejecting traditional sources of legitimation and justification, modernism had “to

create its own normativity out of itself.”26 But autonomy threatened heteronomy, as

modernism sought to impose its self-generated principles and values on the refractory

world around it. Propounding universal principles, rather than local traditions and

arbitrary conventions, the autonomous spheres of modernism did not “simply coexist

uncompetitively.” Criticism and denunciation were the order of the day. The modernist 13

? See Fred D. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy, “Introduction: The crisis of understanding,” F.D. Dallmayr and

T.A. McCarthy, eds., Understanding and social inquiry (London, 1977), 1-15, on 1-3; John G. McEvoy,

“Understanding the Copernican Revolution: Essay review of Hans Blumenberg, The genesis of the Copernican world,”

Teaching philosophy, 12 (1989), 145-160, on 155-160. See also McEvoy, “Context” (ref. 3), 208-211. 14

? See, e.g., Pippin (ref. 8), 1-8; John G. McEvoy, “The Enlightenment and the Chemical Revolution,” R.S. Woolhouse,

ed., Metaphysics and the philosophy of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Essays in honour of Gerd

Buchdahl (Dordrecht, 1988), 307-325, on 309-311; Foucault (ref. 13), 39-42; Richard Rorty, “Habermas and Lyotard

on postmodernity,” Richard J. Bernstein, ed., Habermas and modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 161-175, on 170-171;

Robert Wallace, “Introduction to Blumenberg,” New German critique, 32 (1984), 93-108, on 93-99.

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urge to extend the boundaries and stretch the limits of rationality generated “an endless

series of reductionist and antireductionist moves,” in which the reductionists tried “to

make everything scientific, or political (Lenin), or aesthetic (Baudelaire, Nietzsche)” and

the antireductionists showed what such attempts left out.27 In this competitive,

expansionist cauldron, modernism generated “logocentric, transcendental totalizing meta-

15

? For a discussion of Renaissance and Enlightenment mentalities see Michel Foucault, The Order of things: An

archaeology of the human sciences (New York, 1973), 3-214; Brian Vickers, “Analogy versus identity: The rejection

of occult symbolism,” Brian Vickers, ed., Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984), 95-

164; Keith M. Baker, From natural philosophy to social mathematics (Chicago, 1975), 109-128; Ernst Cassirer, The

philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston, 1955), 3-36; Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, 1975), 3-11.16

? Pippin (ref. 8), 120. See also Ibid, 45-61; Foucault (ref. 9), 32-42. 17

? Pippin (ref., 8), 51-79 and 120-122. See also Fred Dallmayr, “The discourse of modernity: Hegel, Nietzsche,

Heidegger, and Habermas,” P. d’Entrèves and S. Benhabib (ref. 9), 59-96, on 59-74.18

? Peter Dews, Logics of disintegration: Poststructuralist thought and the claims of critical theory (Cambridge, 1987),

103. See also Ingram (ref. 12), 148-151; Rorty (ref. 15). 19

? Martin Jay, “From modernism to postmodernism,” J.C.W. Blanning, ed., The Oxford illustrated history of modern

Europe (Oxford, 1996), 255-278, on 260. See also ibid, 259-262; Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism, modernism, and

postmodernism,” New left review, 152 (1985), 60-73, on 66-67; Jurgen Habermas, “Modernity versus postmodernity,”

New German critique, 2 (1981), 3-14, on 9-11.20

? Jurgen Habermas, “Modernity: An unfinished project,” d’Entrèves and Benhabib (ref. 9), 38-58, on 45.21

? Richard Wolin, “Modernism vs. postmodernism,” Telos, 62 (1984-84), 9-29, on 9-10. See also F. R. Ankersmit,

“History and postmodernism,” History and theory, 28 (1989), 137-153; Greenblatt (ref. 11), 8; Jameson (ref. 11), 61;

Ingram (ref. 12), 80; Bruno Latour, We have never been modern (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 1-48.22

? See Pippin (ref. 8), 51-61 and 115-116; Rouse (ref. 7), 146.23

? Foucault (ref. 16), 55. See also ibid., 17-77; Ingram (ref. 12), 22-28; Vickers (ref. 16).

24 See Douglas Kellner, “Popular culture and the construction of postmodern identities,” Lash and Friedman (ref. 8),

141-175, on 141-143.25

? David Ingram, “Blumenberg and the philosophical grounds of history,” History and theory, 29 (1990), 1-15, on 13-

14.

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narratives that anticipated all questions and provided predetermined answers.”28 The

resulting reductionist models of scientific knowledge, shared by positivists and

postpositivists alike, emphasized the unity of its theoretical structure, the universality of

its concepts and methods, and the necessity of its instantiations. The modernist

problematic of legitimation also issued in the famous distinction between the context of

discovery and the context of justification, which positivist and postpositivist scholars

used to distinguish the historians task of describing how scientific discoveries were, in

fact, made from the more important job of the philosopher, who developed abstract

models of knowledge for “the criticism as well as the reform of what exists.”29

Modernist dualisms of subject and object, mind and body, inner and outer

assimilated knowledge and language to the category of “representation.” Upholding

Descartes’ view of the dualism of mind and body and Locke’s concept of knowledge as a

“mental process,” modernism replaced the premodern “hylomorphic conception of

knowledge,” which involved “the subject’s becoming identical with the object,” with the

concept of knowledge as the possession by the mind of “accurate representations of an

object.” While ancient and medieval thought had only a tenuous hold on the distinction

between inner “mental states” and the “external world,” seventeenth-century philosophers

took it seriously enough “to pose the problem of the veil of ideas,” the problem that made 26

? Jurgen Habermas, The philosophical discourse of modernity: Twelve lectures (Cambridge, 1987), 7. See also

Callinicos (ref. 9), 29-38.27

? Rorty (ref. 15), 167-168. See also Latour (ref. 22), 13-48.28

? Pauline Marie Rosenau, Postmodernism and the social sciences: Insights, inroads, and intrusions (Princeton, 1992), 6. 29

? See ibid., 3-11; Foucault (ref. 9), 45-46; Carl Matheson, “Brown’s rationality,” Social Epistemology, 6 (1992), 35-43;

John G. McEvoy, “A revolutionary philosophy of science: Paul K. Feyerabend and the degeneration of critical

rationalism into skeptical fallibilism,” Philosophy of science, 47 (1975), 49-66, on 51.

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epistemology central to modern philosophy.30 As nature became an “object,” human

beings became “subjects,” the source of all truth and meaning.31 The problematic of

representation is also evident in the change in linguistic sensibilities that accompanied the

transition from the Renaissance to the Classical episteme. For philosophers of the

Renaissance, language resided in the world as a system of signs enmeshed in the

resemblances and similitude of things. The Classical episteme, which provided the

underpinnings for the Enlightenment mind, severed this intimate link between words and

things. The interpretation of the language of nature gave way to the representation of

nature in the language of men.32 Modernism dissolved the premodern “fusion of semantic

and causal relations,” which ascribed to names the ability “to possess the power of things

to which they refer.”33 By separating the causal from the rational, the descriptive from the

normative, modernism tied rationality to referentiality, viewing justification, or

legitimation, as a referential relation between ideas, or statements, and the world they

seek to represent. In this manner, modernism bequeathed to positivist and postpositivist

philosophers of science the problematic of realism.

Modernism’s self-legitimating break with the past made time an integral

component of reality and produced a tensile sense of history as simultaneously

revolutionary and teleological. Looking forward to a future that would shatter the past,

30

? Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the mirror of nature (Princeton, 1979), 45-51. See also ibid., 17-69; Vickers (ref. 16),

95-115. 31

? See Rosenau (ref. 29), 49-50.32

? See Baker (ref. 16), 109-128; Foucault (ref. 16), 17-63; Owen Hannaway, The chemists and the word: the didactic

origins of chemistry (Baltimore, 1975), 62-72. 33

? Ingram (ref. 12), 24; Rorty (ref. 31), 9. See also Ingram (ref. 12), 19-31.

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modernists maintained that events “took place not only in history but through history.”34

Inherently dynamic and revolutionary, modernism conquered space with time, making it

“a locus through which to get from A to B, rather than a place to live in.”35 Valorizing the

novelty of the future, modernism interpreted the passage of time not as a cycle,

decadence, or a falling, but as an abolition of the past. Modernists saw themselves as

separated from the past not by “a certain number of centuries,” but by revolutions,

breaks, and ruptures “so radical that nothing of the past survived in them.”36 The

modernist identity was inextricably linked to the notion of time as the sure arrow of

progress that separated them from the premoderns. But the modernist sense of future

novelty collided with the logocentric requirements of self-legitimation and produced

“teleological narratives” of progressive emergence and justification, according to which

history unfolds in “homogeneous, empty time.” The resulting historiography of the

victors celebrated a single revolutionary break with the past, which required no more

revolutions “to fulfill the promise of the new.”37 The historicist notion of the unity and

homogeneity of modern time shaped the positivist historiography of science and

influenced in a more ambiguous way the historical sensibilities of postpositivism.

Modernism and the Philosophy of Science

34

? Brook Thomas, “The new historicism and other old-fashioned topics,” A. Veeser, (ref. 12), 182-203, on 188. 35

? Lash and Friedman (ref. 8), 10. See also Perry Anderson, “Modernity and revolution,” New left review, 144 (1984),

96-133; Callinicos (ref. 9), 29-32; Wallace (ref. 15), 100. 36

? Latour (ref. 21), 68. See also Callinicos (ref. 9), 29-32.37

? Thomas (ref. 35), 189-193.

17

Philosophical modernism provided a dynamic template for the development of

positivist and postpositivist philosophies and historiographies of science.

Notwithstanding their considerable semantic, epistemological, and methodological

differences, positivist and postpositivist philosophers of science used modernist

narratives of legitimation to link scientific practices and results to rationality, progress, or

truth.38 Positivists and postpositivists formulated “grand narratives” of the hierarchical

unity of the different cognitive levels – observation, theory, method, and instrumentation

- of science grounded in general theories of meaning, knowledge, and language. More

specifically, the modernist philosophy of autonomy and separation shaped the positivist

view of the unity of science and the demarcation of science from nonscience.

Modernism’s self-legitimating search for universal principles linked the unity of science

to the deployment of a single, universal method, language, or theoretical structure,

grounded in a shared domain of unitary experience. Viewing metaphysics as the

successor of theology, positivism demarcated between science and metaphysics in a way

that emphasized the practical usefulness of the former and the scholastic uselessness of

the latter. The positivist preoccupation with the unity and demarcation of science further

harmonized with the modernist vision of the formation of autonomous spheres of thought

and action developing within strict disciplinary boundaries, according to their own inner

logics. But there was a tension in the narrative of modernity between the celebration of

“the epistemic autonomy of increasingly specialized domains of knowledge … and their

unification by formal procedures of reasoning and justification.” While the positivists

“subordinated the claims of disciplinary autonomy within the sciences to formal method

and the unity of science,” the postpositivists emphasized “the autonomy of disciplines

18

and research programs within disciplines.”39 Theoreticism substituted the autonomy of

reason for the autonomy of the subject. While positivists and postpositivists alike upheld

the arationality assumption, which emphasized the social autonomy of reason by

restricting the sociology of knowledge to the explanation of beliefs that could not be

explained in terms of their rational merits, theoreticism also maintained an absolute

distinction between thought and reality, thereby rendering unintelligible positivist

attempts to ground thought in experience, or language in the world. But the postpositivist

turn against the formal unity of science was incomplete. Although the historical school of

postpositivists rejected the abstract, formal, static models of explanation and justification

developed by the Logical Positivists, they still distinguished between the abstract,

generalisable content of theories and their specific historical contexts. They also

envisioned universal structures, or patterns, for the internal development of science, as is

evident in Kuhn’s “timeless cycle of epochs: normal science, crisis science, revolutionary

science, and the return to normal science.”40 If the positivist doctrines of empirical

certainty and eureka discoveries in science represented classical modernism’s attempt to

ground knowledge in the “self-certainty of subjectivity,” then postpositivism’s notion of

“knowledge without a knowing subject” marks “late” modernism’s fallibilistic construal

of the rationality, universality, and autonomy of scientific thought and action.41

38

? See Galison (ref.7) and Rouse (ref. 7).39

? Rouse (ref. 7), 148. See also ibid., 156-16040

? Galison (ref. 7), 207.41

? See David Couzens Hoy, “Splitting the difference: Habermas’s critique of Derrida,” d”Entrèves and Benhabib (ref. 9), 124-146, on 126.

19

Epistemological and semantic differences between positivism’s vision of a unitary

experience for science and postpositivism’s insistence on theoretical pluralism in science

surfaced in their divergent articulations of the modernist problematic of realism. While

the “naïve realism” of positivism restricted the ontological and epistemological

significance of science to its observational terms and statements, the main thrust of

postpositivism was in the direction of “critical realism,” which anchored the ontology and

epistemology of science to its theoretical terms and principles. The antirealist themes of

instrumentalism – associated with a minority of positivists – and idealism – in Kuhn’s

writings, for example – should be viewed as minor deviations from the modernist

problematic of realism. While instrumentalism reiterated premodern concerns with

“saving the phenomena,” idealism prefigured postmodernist themes associated with

sociological constructivism. The modernist problematic of truth and reference issued in

an array of “depth models,” such as those of essence and appearance, latent and manifest,

signifier and signified, self and other, which were the ineluctable targets of postmodernist

deconstructions predicated on the claim that “there is no reality which is not itself already

image, spectacle, simulacrum, gratuitous fiction.”42

Modernism’s valorization of time as simultaneously revolutionary and

teleological shaped the positivist view of a single Scientific Revolution, followed by the

synchronized, homogeneous, and continuous development of the different disciplines of

science along the same line of historical progress. Registering classical modernism’s

attempt to ground knowledge in the “self-certainty of subjectivity,” the positivist

historiography of science located the motive force of this development in the eureka-42

? See Eagleton (ref. 20), 62. See also Jameson (ref. 11), 58-62; Lash and Friedman (ref. 8), 23-25.

20

discoveries, crucial experiments, and creative insights of individual men of genius at one

with nature. Although the postpositivist doctrine of “knowledge without a knowing

subject” replaced the positivist vision of the unity, linearity, and homogeneity of a single,

absolute historical time with the idea of a succession of distinct epochal times, each with

its own unity, linearity, and homogeneity, it still upheld modernism’s valorization of

time, emphasizing the growth of knowledge, the link between rationality and progress,

and the developmental nature of paradigms, programs, and traditions. As Feuerbach said

of Hegel, positivist and postpositivist alike focused on “exclusive time,” rather than

“tolerant space,” recognizing “only subordination and succession,” the “monarchical”

subsumption of the past under the aegis of the present.43 Replacing modernist metaphors

of temporal progress with postmodernist images of spatial dispersion, sociologists of

scientific knowledge called for more contextualized accounts of the places of the

production and proliferation of scientific knowledge.

POSTMODERNISM AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SCIENCE

Naturalism and the Sociology of Knowledge

Opposition to postpositivism soon emerged among sociologists of scientific

knowledge and sociologically inclined historians of science, who replaced idealist

notions of the unity and autonomy of scientific thought with an awareness of the

particularity and materiality of scientific practices. In 1982, John Christie and Jan

Golinski proposed a new historiography for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

chemistry, in which they criticized "the old internalism" because it identified science with

43

? See Zawar Hanfi, ed., The fiery brook: Selected writings of Ludwig Feuerbach . Translated with an introduction by

Zawar Hanfi (New York, 1972), 54.

21

"the processes and products of the intellect" and emphasized "the influence thereon of

activities such as speculative natural philosophy, matter-theory, epistemology,

methodology, and natural theology." Highlighting "the problematic nature of the

relationship between such factors and the practice of chemistry," they sought "to

investigate the conditions of perpetuation of chemical practice and discourse." Focusing

on chemistry as a "historical practice," they argued that factors falling on both sides of

the divide between "the old internal/external dichotomy" constituted eighteenth-century

chemistry as a "didactic discipline."44 The burgeoning program of the sociology of

scientific knowledge shaped Christie and Golinski’s new historiographical proposal,

which replaced normative distinctions between internal and external, rational and

arational, beliefs with causal accounts of the social origins of all beliefs, rational and

arational, scientific and nonscientific. These developments had a profound influence on

the discipline of the history of science, generating numerous studies that denigrated

positivism, rejected “philosophical appropriations of history,” and articulated

contextualist models of the relation between science and society.

Practitioners of the sociology of scientific knowledge rejected the normative

distinction between internal, rational beliefs and external, arational beliefs in the name of

44

? J. R. R. Christie and Jan V. Golinski, “The spreading of the word: New directions in the historiography of chemistry,

1600-1800,” History of science, 20 (1982), 235-266, on 235-237. For an account of the internal-external distinction

from the perspective of the social history of science see Roy MacLeod, “Changing perspectives in the social history of

science,” I. Speigel-Resing and D. de Solla Price, eds., Science, technology, and society: A cross-disciplinary

perspective (London, 1977), 149-195. For an overview and critical assessment of the numerous forms of the internal-

external distinction see Steven Shapin, “Discipline and bounding: The history and sociology of science as seen through

the externalism-internalism debate,” History of science, 30 (1992), 333-369.

22

“naturalism,” which explained the formation of scientific beliefs without assessing their

epistemic significance, or validity. According to the Strong Programme, developed by

David Bloor, a scientifically adequate sociology of scientific knowledge should focus on

the social causes of scientific beliefs, and posit the same kinds of causes for all beliefs –

including those of the sociologists of knowledge – whatever their epistemic status.

Philosophers of science were quick to criticize the Strong Programme, arguing that the

claim that “all beliefs are socially caused, rather than well-founded,” implies that the

beliefs of the sociologist of scientific knowledge “have no relevant rational credentials

and hence no special claims to acceptability.”45 Pressing their point, philosophers of

science concerned with the rationality of science treated all sociologists of knowledge as

“constructivists,” accusing them of reducing science to a cultural artifact, with no

cognitive relation to, or input from, the external world.

While some sociologists of knowledge, like Michael Mulkay and Karen Knorr-

Cetina for example, embraced this label enthusiastically, others associated with the

Edinburgh School insisted on a materialist ontology, empiricist methodology, and realist

epistemology for science. Indeed, sociologists of scientific knowledge did not champion

a relativistic view of science, so much as sidestep, or dissolve, the normative issue of

relativism. They insisted that “all forms of knowledge should be understood in the same

manner,” not that they be “judged as equally valid.”46 Unlike the philosophical relativist,

45

? Larry Laudan, Progress and its problems: Toward a theory of scientific growth (Berkeley, 1977), 201. See also ibid.,

ch. 7; David Bloor, Knowledge and social imagery, 2nd edn. (Chicago, 1991), 3-16; Ernan McMullin, “The

rational and the social in the history of science,” J. R. Brown, ed., Scientific rationality: The sociological turn

(Dordrecht, 1994), 127-164.

23

who denied the differential credibility of beliefs, “the aim of the relativist sociology of

knowledge is not to ignore or deny such variation, but to explain it.”47 Philosophers and

sociologists of science talked past each other at this point, with the former clinging to the

modernist problematic of normativity and the latter succumbing to postmodernist

suspicions of “narratives of the legitimation of knowledge.”

Postmodernism

In his seminal study The Postmodern Condition, Jean-Francois Lyotard defined

“postmodern as incredulity toward [the] metanarratives” of modernism, which deployed

such “grand narratives” as the dialectic of Spirit, the emancipation of humanity, and the

progress of science to unify and legitimate the separate sciences and their separate

practices. Loosening the all-embracing grip of philosophy’s grand narratives,

postmodernism identified science as a particular “language game,” incapable of

legitimating, or being legitimated by, any other language game. Lyotard insisted that the

autonomous disciplines of science are the sole sources of their own limited, local, and

provisional forms of legitimation.48 Postmodernism projected an image of science that 46

? Michael Mulkay, Science and the sociology of knowledge (London, 1979), 61. See also Karin Knorr-Cetina and

Michael Mulkay, “Introduction: Emerging principles in the social study of science,” idem, eds., Science observed:

Perspectives in the social studies of science (London, 1983), 1-17, on 1-5; David Bloor, “Anti-Latour,” Studies in

history and philosophy of science, 30 (1999), 81-112; Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and John Henry, Scientific

knowledge: A sociological analysis (Chicago, 1996), ch.1 and 200-202.47

? Bloor (ref. 47), 102; Golinski (ref. 1), xi.48

? Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984), The Postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (Minneapolis, 1984), xxiv, 31-47,

and 60-71. See also Rosenau (ref. 29), 5-6; Martin Kildruff and Mehra Ajay, “Postmodernism and organizational

research,” Academy of management review, 22 (1997), 453-481, on 456-462.

24

was radically different from those developed by positivism and postpositivism.

Fundamentally opposed to essentialism, historicism, realism, and the associated

problematic of reference and rationality, this image conveyed a sense of “the

fragmentary, heterogeneous, and plural character” of thought, language, reality, and the

self.49 Encouraging pluralism, relativism, and antirealism in the philosophy of science,

postmodernism – reflexively attuned to its postmodern identity – encompassed a plurality

of philosophical arguments and strategies to uphold a nominalalist image of science and

its fragmented historical identity. Postmodernism was “a time of nominalism in a variety

of senses (from culture to philosophical thought.)”50

Postmodernism as a coherent philosophical and cultural movement emerged in the

cultural revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, though it reached maturity only in

the reactionary atmosphere of Reagan-era economics and Cold War strategy. Birthed by

the frustrated revolutionary aspirations of French left-wing intellectuals in 1968,

postmodernism framed the liberation struggles of gender and racial minorities in Europe

and North America in the 1970s and early 1980s, only to be coopted in the 1980s by the

interests of a resurgent cultural and political establishment in Britain and the United

States. Postmodernism was intensely political, and the divergent political contexts in

which it flourished issued in significant variations in its nominalist premises and

naturalist strategies.51 In its revolutionary and oppositional formulation, associated with 49

? Callinicos (ref. 9), 2. See also Ingram (ref. 12), 22.50

? Frederic Jameson, “Marxism and postmodernism,” New left review, 176 (1989), 31-46, on 36. See Richard Bernstein,

The new constellation: The ethical-political horizons of modernity/postmodernity (Cambridge, 1992), 225 for an

account of the reflexive nominalism that portrays postmodernism itself as a “juxtaposition rather than an integrated

cluster of changing elements that resist reduction to a common denominator, …”

25

French poststructuralism and feminism, the incredulity towards metanarratives expressed

the desire to escape from all totalizing systems of thought and action and the association

of order and autonomy with configurations of violence inherent in the will to power.

Giving shape to the reactionary mode of postmodernism, which valued “consensus and

community,” rather than escape and revolution, Richard Rorty responded to “avant-

garde” escapism with an antinormative emphasis on the “brute contingencies that unite us

all” and the defense of a program of social engineering “in which society as a whole

asserts itself without bothering to ground itself.”52 Thus, the postmodernist movement

split into two broad countervailing currents of thought, one emanating from Continental

philosophy and associated with a skeptical view of knowledge and the slogan “anything

goes,” and the other, more “indigenous to Anglo-North American culture,” prepared to

affirm one set of beliefs over another, but in a fallible, tentative, and relativistic manner.53

While sociological naturalism eschewed epistemological evaluation of any sort, its

antinormative orientation was closer to the affirmative relativization of knowledge to

context and circumstances than to the skeptical obliteration of knowledge entirely.

Nevertheless, many of the analytical categories – concerning the nature of science and its

relation to society – deployed by sociological naturalists came from the skeptical

cauldron of Continental philosophy. The mingling of the previously distinct traditions of

analytical Anglo-American philosophy and speculative Continental philosophy is a

characteristic feature of postmodernist sociology of scientific knowledge.

Although postmodernism slipped its early political moorings, drifting from leftist

opposition to centrist and conservative support for the political establishment, its initial

26

oppositional formation left a lasting impression on the basic contours of its philosophical

sensibilities and orientation. Postmodernism’s original break with the modernist

problematic of legitimation occurred with the perception of French left-wing

intellectuals, such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard, that

the French Communist Party refused to live up to its revolutionary ideals when it failed to

support the student revolution in Paris in May 1968.54 Viewing the “official left”

as a “double and pseudo-rival of the Gaullist regime,” these thinkers concluded that

trying to replace one system with another system would end up with a system that

resembled the one that was replaced.55 Rejecting both the Gaullist state and its

Communist pseudo-rival, the “disillusioned children of 1968” refused to have anything to

do with the totalizing logics of capitalism, communism, or any of the other

metanarratives of modernism. Turning their back on class struggle and the global patterns

of legitimation associated with it, they looked elsewhere, in the struggles of local

communities and minorities, for the revolutionary spirit of 1968. But they used these

local struggles and the ideas they spawned not to overthrow modernism and replace it

with a new system, but to rethink or reform it from the inside, to “deconstruct” or go

beyond it, to struggle “against and within it.”56 Deconstructing the modernist problematic

of legitimation, postmodernism involved “an inverted millenarianism,” in which

51

? See Steven Seidman, “Postmodern social theory as narrative with moral intent,” Steven Seidman and David G.

Wagner, eds., Postmodernism and social theory (Oxford, 1992), 47-81, on 48-53; Lemert (ref. 10), 29-31; Cahoone

(ref. 10), 4-7 and 221-223.52

? Rorty (ref. 15), 175. See also ibid, 174-175; Rorty (ref. 31), 62-63; Pippin (ref. 8), 158-164. 53

? See Rosenau (ref. 29), 14-20; Kildruff and Ajay (ref. 49), 456-458. See also Jurgen Habermas, “Neoconservative

culture criticism in the United States and West Germany: An intellectual movement in two political cultures,” R. J.

Bernstein, ed., Habermas and modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 78-94.

27

“premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of

the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class,)” and of course, “the end

of history.”57

Postmodernists linked the predilection for totalizing and systematizing thought

and practice to the “rational demands for unity, purity, universality, and ultimacy”

inherent in the modernist problematic of autonomy and legitimation.58 Postmodernists

rejected modernism’s privileging of reason (over emotions) because of the dominating,

oppressive, and totalitarian consequences of its claim to universalism. They opposed the

modernist idea of a unique and determining scientific method, and the associated

program for unification and the reconciliation of opposing viewpoints, with the idea of a

multiplicity of conflicting scenarios and outlooks. While “skeptical” postmodernists

replaced the global order of modernism with a sense of the fragmentation, disintegration,

and meaninglessness of life, in which the absence of truth left only play, farce, parody, or

pleasure, “affirmative” postmodernists adopted more localized, less dogmatic modes of

legitimation, contextually ranking values and building domain-specific models of

rationality.59 In this manner, postmodernism called for the “deconstruction” of the

rational distinctions between true and false, subject and object, knowledge and power,

reality and appearance, past and present, and “all the other modernist dichotomies.”60

Thus, postmodernism replaced the modernist notion of the self-defining, autonomous

subject, and the associated idea of pre-existent essences and structures determining

individual events and actions, with a view of the role of local agents and specific

practices in the temporary formation of fleeting meanings, values, and knowledge-claims.

28

Questioning the “generally accepted relation between author, text, and reader,”

postmodernists rejected the associated ideas of authorial intent and objective textual

content, and emphasized the power of the reader “to define and create textual meaning.”61

The relativization of truth and meaning to contexts and circumstances involved replacing

representational and realist models of language and thought with antirealist views of a

language-laden reality and relativist doctrines of the role of rhetoric and persuasion in the

constitution of scientific knowledge. Detaching science from the representational

function and universalizing aspirations of theory, postmodernism pointed to the role of

concrete practices and implicit skills in the construction of local and regional forms of

knowledge. Replacing unity with diversity, totalization with fragmentation, and

autonomy with dependence, postmodernism insisted that, embedded in local contexts of

control and domination, science is neither value-free nor necessarily progressive.

Suspicious of the historian’s claim to know and represent the past, postmodernists

questioned the distinction between past and present; they fragmented the homogeneous,

evolving linear time of modernism into a procession of fleeting moments in which

nothing is entirely present or absent. Time and space are relative, the temporary

constructions of fleeting and fragmentary moments. Escaping the legitimating tyranny of

modern time and the restrictions of space associated with it, postmodernism instituted the

reign of “pastiche,” in which an ontology of “undifferentiated immediacy,” the 54

? See Seidman (ref. 52), 49-50; Lemert (ref. 10), 29-31; Peter Starr, Logics of failed revolts: French theory after May

’68 (Stanford, 1995), 27-29.55

? Starr (ref. 55), 27-28. See also ibid., 22; Callinicos (ref. 9), 4-5.56

? Lemert (ref. 10), 31-32.57

? Jameson (ref. 11), 53; Rosenau (ref. 29), 65.

29

“singularity of singular events,” is described without reference to underlying meanings,

originary sources, or intended goals, thereby replacing the critical orientation of

modernism with a “flat and affirmative universe of discourse.”62 Eliminating the enduring

norms, identities, and memories of modernism, postmodernism replaced the “thematics

of time and temporality” with a spatialized “field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity

without a norm.”63 Eschewing the dynamism of time for the stasis of space, sociologists

of scientific knowledge inscribed knowledge, power, and identity “in place and not in

time”; they focused on the dispersed (physical and social) sites and networks of

knowledge production and dissemination, rather than on its historical development.64 The

denial of temporality, of the diachronic course of history, registered nominalist

sensibilities, naturalist inclinations, and antirealist tendencies, which regulated the

sociology of scientific knowledge and had a profound impact on the historiography of

science.

The sociology of scientific knowledge

Sociologists of scientific knowledge used a variety of postmodernist philosophical

strategies to break with idealism, essentialism, and historicism, and to develop a 58

? Ingram (ref. 12), 77.59

? In her very useful analysis of postmodernism, Rosenau (ref. 29) uses the terms “skeptical postmodernism” and

“affirmative postmodernism” deployed in this essay. 60

? Lemert (ref. 10), 32.61

? Rosenau (ref. 29), 20-21.

30

disciplinary identity fractured by the philosophical tensions between modernism and

postmodernism. Rejecting “the idealist tendency to refer directly to concepts as

‘scientific,’ ‘symbolic,’ ‘ideological,’ and so on,” sociologists of scientific knowledge

insisted that the conflict between ideas is really a confrontation between the people who

hold them.65 While the Edinburgh School replaced theoreticism with materialist accounts

of the causal role of local, social interests in the development of knowledge,

ethnomethodologists focused on the situated practices of individual agents in particular

contexts, and constructivists like Bruno Latour developed the voluntarist thesis that

science is the rhetorical mobilization of allies who have lost the will for further dissent. 66

Denying that abstract theories and formal methods have inherent significance,

sociologists of scientific knowledge treated them as instruments in the material,

rhetorical, and political struggles of individual scientists operating in local communities.

The Edinburgh School classified theoreticism as a species of essentialism, which

treats scientific objects, such as electrons, protons, and neutrons, as “essentially identical

62

? Richard Wolin, “Modernism vs postmodernism,” Telos, 62 (1984-85), 9-29, on 18.63

? Jameson (ref. 11), 64-65.

64 See, e.g., Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin, “The places of knowledge: A methodological summary,” Science in

context, 4 (1991), 3-21, on 12.

65

? Barry Barnes, “On the conventional character of knowledge and cognition,” Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay (ref. 47), 19-

51, on 49.66

? See Bloor (ref. 46), 33-73; Barry Barnes, “Natural rationality: A neglected concept in the social sciences,”

Philosophy of the social sciences, 6 (1976), 115-125, on 116-117; Michael Lynch, Scientific practice and ordinary

action: Ethnomethodology and the social studies of science (Cambridge, 1993), 1-38; Bruno Latour, Science in action:

How to follow scientists and engineers through society (Cambridge, MA), 61-62.

31

entities,” with essential properties “manifested identically” in every particle.67 On this

view, concepts and theories acquire inherent meaning and rules of usage, which

determine their future use and application, by picking out and characterizing specific

kinds of objects and their essential properties. Denying the reality of universals and the

efficacy of rules, the Edinburgh School adopted a Wittgensteinian form of nominalism,

which based the use of words and the meaning of concepts on the “resemblances,” rather

than the identical features, of individual things, and left their future use and application

open-ended and uncertain. Postmodernist developments in the Continental philosophies

of structuralism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics reinforced and further articulated

these nominalist tendencies, as can be seen in the deconstructionist themes associated

with poststructuralism, ethnomethodology, and reception theory. These developments

replaced any notion of predetermined meaning or truth, whether in the form of

synchronic structures, transcendental egos, totalizing texts, authorial intentions, or

interpretive traditions, with the dispersed and chaotic collection of the material and

discursive practices of individual agents in local contexts.68 While the Edinburgh School

and the Bath relativists used nominlist arguments to relativize scientific knowledge

to social circumstances, “constructivists” and ethnomethodologists, like Latour,

Woolgar, and Knorr-Cetina, deployed them to defend antirealist theories of meaning,

which denied the existence of extra-discursive objects and maintained that the “facts” of

science are “social constructs.”69 When practitioners of science studies replaced

67

? Barnes, Bloor, and Henry (ref. 47), 85. See also ibid., 54-59, 62-73.68

? For accessible accounts of these developments see Gary Gutting, French philosophy in the twentieth century

(Cambridge, 2001), 249-257, 324-327, 388-390; Terry Eagleton, Literary theory: An introduction (Minneapolis, 1983),

54-90, 127-150.

32

representational models of science-as-knowledge with constructivist models of science-

as-practice, they embraced “a trademark of ‘postmodern’ thought,” which questioned the

distinction between subject and object inherent in the realist-antirealist debate.70

Sociologists of scientific knowledge distanced themselves from any historicist

notion of a logic, or intrinsic dynamic, of history. They questioned the postpositivist view

of the determining role of “guiding assumptions,” or “global theories,” in the

development of science by appealing to Wittgensteinian and poststructuralist notions of

the underdetermination of actions by rules; Kuhnian ideas of the role of concrete

exemplars and tacit knowledge in the development of science; ethnomethodological

views of the cognitive efficacy of individual agents and situated logics; Foucauldian

concerns with the microphysics of the knowledge-power nexus; and deconstructionist

assaults on the totalizing texts of structuralism. They opposed theoreticism with

nominalist arguments against the generalizing function of theories and for a “tinkering”

view of experiments and the constitutive role of scientific instruments in the production

of facts.71 Denying any intrinsic relation between different kinds of social interests and

different kinds of knowledge, the Edinburgh School defended the “social use” model of

science, according to which connections between science and society are “historically

contingent” outcomes of how local agents use available cognitive resources to further

69

? See, e.g., Barnes, Bloor, and Henry (ref. 47); Harry Collins, “An empirical relativist programme in the sociology of

scientific knowledge,” Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay (ref. 47), 85-113; Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory life:

The construction of scientific facts (Princeton, 1979); Karin Knorr-Cetina, “ The ethnographic study of scientific work:

Towards a constructivist interpretation of science,” Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay (ref. 47), 115-139.70

? Andrew Pickering, “From science as knowledge to science as practice,” idem, ed., Science as practice

and culture (Chicago, 1992), 1-26, on 8.

33

their social interests.72 Viewing science as a social construct, sociologists of scientific

knowledge shifted the locus of science from the contexts of the discovery and

justification of scientific theories and facts to the context of their dissemination and

reception in the scientific community. They located the core of science in its texts,

instruments, and institutions, which they viewed not as means for the communication and

transmission of prior knowledge, but as discursive devices involved in the simultaneous

formation of knowledge and the community of knowers.73 These philosophical arguments

and strategies issued in a finitistic view of knowledge, according to which the

application of concepts is a matter of innovative judgment at the local level, which is not

determined by theoretical principles, linguistic rules, past usage, or social interests.

The intermingling of modernist and postmodernist themes in the sociology of

scientific knowledge produced discordant images of the nature of society and its relation

to science.74 Adopting the modernist distinction between subject and object, society and

nature, and the associated representational model of science-as-knowledge, the

Edinburgh School used the “ostensive” model of society to explain agents’ theoretical

71

? See John G. McEvoy, (ref. 3), 198-216.72

? See, e.g., Barnes (ref. 67), 47-51; Bloor (ref. 46), 163-173; Steven Shapin, “Social uses of science,” G.S. Rousseau

and Roy Porter, eds., The ferment of knowledge: Studies in the historiography of eighteenth-century science

(Cambridge, 1980), 93-13973

? See Jan V. Golinski, “Language, discourse, and science,” Olby, Cantor, Christie, and Hodge (ref. 2), 110-123 for a

good discussion of the distinction between language and discourse in the various analytical frameworks that shaped the

sociology of scientific knowledge.

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beliefs about the world in terms of their preexisting social interests.75 Rejecting the

modernist problematic, a range of theorists, including Latour, Pinch, and Knorr-Cetina,

integrated constructivist views of science-as-practice into a “performance” model of

society, according to which society is “something achieved in practice by all actors,”

scientific as well as social.76 Foucault, in turn, pursued a third way which, instead of

identifying knowledge with power or delineating the social determination of science,

“articulated” discursive practices on nondiscursive practices.77 Steven Shapin and Simon

Schaffer blended these models of science and society in their influential accounts of

seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy, according to which science

sustained itself by “cultivating,” rather then constructing or representing, social

interests.78 These interpretive strategies had a significant influence on social historians of

the Chemical Revolution.

The nominalist tendencies of postmodernism encouraged historians of science to

emphasize the “specificity” of eighteenth-century natural philosophy and the fragmented

nature of the Enlightenment and the Chemical Revolution. Drawing on deconstructionist

74

? For a classic confrontation between the forces of modernism and postmodernism see Bloor (ref. 47); idem, “Reply to

Bruno Latour,” Studies in history and philosophy of science, 30 (1999), 131-136; Bruno Latour, “For David Bloor …

and beyond: A reply to David Bloor’s ‘Anti-Latour’,” Studies in history and philosophy of science, 30 (1999), 113-129.75

? For a discussion of the “ostensive” and “performance” models of society discussed here see Shirley S. Strum and

Bruno Latour, “Redefining the social link: From baboons to humans,” Social science information, 26 (1987), 783-802.76

? Ibid, 785.77

? See Michel Foucault, The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language (New York, 1972), 162-165.78

? See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life

(Princeton, NJ, 1985), 339-340.

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and Foucauldian notions of discourse and its practices, Wilda Anderson and Jan Golinski

analyzed the role of rhetorical and discursive devices in the simultaneous production of

knowledge and the community of knowers in the Chemical Revolution.79 Viewed in these

terms, the texts of the Chemical Revolution did not represent preexisting truths or

meaning so much as marshal resources to recruit, persuade, and control their readers. In

a similar vein, Bernadette Bensuade-Vinncent, Lissa Roberts, and Simon Schaffer

showed how the instruments of the Chemical Revolution – Lavoisier’s balance and

calorimeter and Priestley’s eudiometer – not only measured nature, but also disciplined a

community of users and mediated with the wider culture. Like Christie and Golinski,

these and other commentators focused on the nature and identity of chemical practices in

the eighteenth century. Postmodernism shaped a variety of historiographical strategies

designed to contextualize the Chemical Revolution by focusing on the rhetorical forms

and discursive functions of its texts and instruments in relation to the social and

institutional contexts in which they were deployed.

CONCLUSION: BEYOND MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM.

As Bruno Latour noted, “history did not really count” for the moderns and

postmoderns.80 Instead of grasping the Chemical Revolution as a product of history, a

specific mode of temporality, modernist and postmodernist historians of chemistry

viewed it as a scientific discovery, a moment of rationality, or a matrix of practices and

79 See McEVoy, “Search” (ref. 3), 58-60 for references and further discussion of the issues considered here.

See also William Clarke, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, “Introduction,” idem, eds., The sciences in

Enlightened Europe (Chicago, 1999), 3-31. 80

? Latour (ref. 22), 81.

36

interests that happened to have occurred in the past. They subsumed history under the

disciplinary interests and categories of science, philosophy, or sociology, and they failed

to develop an adequate account of the moments of continuity and discontinuity in

scientific change. While positivist and postpositivist historians encompassed scientific

change within an overarching identity, or series of identities, postmodernist historians

lost sight of the pattern of historical change in a bewildering array of local actors and

specific situations. If postpositivist historians transformed the rising curve of historical

development, envisioned by the positivist historiography, into an horizontal series of

discrete and immobile line-segments, postmodernist historians shattered it into ‘a

thousand points of light,’ each moving according to its own devices. But the dispersing

thrust of postmodernism did not move beyond the modernist framework of progressive

development, merely using anachronistic references to confuse and shock the

“‘modernist’ avant-gardes.” Modernist temporality, with its image of history as “an

ordered front of entities sharing the same contemporary time,” could not do justice to the

dynamic autonomy and irreducibility of historical events, “which pertain to all sorts of

times and possess all sorts of ontological statuses.”81 An adequate account of scientific

and historical change requires a just recognition of the complexity of historical events

and the temporality that informs them.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault used the notion of

complexity to characterize the specificity and autonomy of history.82 While they opposed

the essentialist and historicists view of the unity, linearity, and homogeneity of a single,

81

? Ibid., 72-74,

37

absolute historical time, they also rejected the pluralistic orientation of the Annales

authors, who affirmed “the existence of different temporal strata and rhythms – the

political, the economic, the geographical – without attempting to establish any systematic

link between them.”83 Accordingly, Althusser viewed a social formation as a “decentered

totality,” in which each instance, level, or practice possesses its own autonomy and causal

efficacy within a system of causal efficacies. This system does not determine the content

or mode of temporality of its levels, but their “locus of effectivity,” their complex

relations of cause and effect, dominance and subordination, order and arrangement. Like

the postmoderns, the Althusserean historian recognizes that an historical assembly is not

“an ordered front of entities.” But whereas the postmoderns constructed collages of

explicitly anachronistic and contemporary entities, the job of the historian is to portray

“polytemporal” assemblies of diverse modes of temporality - the new, old, progressive,

regressive, cyclical, or stagnant – no one of which is more outdated or contemporary than

any other one. The past is never truly finished, and the historian is enjoined to develop a

balanced sense of the specificity, relative autonomy, and dynamic interrelatedness of the

diverse modes of temporality that make up an historical assembly in which the living past

is an integral part of the present.84

Larry Holmes drew attention to the complexity of historical events when he

criticized existing accounts of the Chemical Revolution because they failed to do justice

82

? See Louis Althusser, Reading “Capital” (London, 19680); Michel Foucault (ref. 78). See also McEvoy,

“Search” (ref. 3), 61-63.

83 Dews (ref. 19), 112.84

? See Latour (ref. 22), 74.

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to “the complexity of the event.”85 Instead of focusing on a “group of subproblems,” such

as the discovery of oxygen, the reform of the nomenclature, or the discursive deployment

of the balance as the “defining thread” of the Chemical Revolution, Holmes showed how

“the various thematic strands that historians have isolated as crucial factors were

interwoven” in the dynamic unfolding of Lavoisier’s career. Insisting that the Chemical

Revolution was a “complex multidimensional episode,” an unfolding network of

theoretical, experimental, discursive, institutional, cultural, and social strands, he called

for the integration of “scholarly essays that highlight specific topics” into “a story that

must someday be told on a grander scale.”86

The historian of the “grander scale” must show how the Chemical Revolution was

a complex, multidimensional system, constituted by patterns of interaction between

numerous elements and levels, with diverse modes of temporality. Many of these

elements and levels have already been identified and characterized in the scholarly

literature; they include empirical objects, theoretical strategies, experimental practices,

epistemological principles, linguistic conventions, pedagogical and professional

organizations, and social, cultural, and economic institutions, values, and regularities.87

The historian of the “grander scale” must first characterize the internal content of the

elements and levels in a way that recognizes their relative autonomy and modes of

85

? Frederic Lawrence, Eighteenth-century chemistry as an investigative exercise (Berkeley, CA, 1989), 114. 86

? Ibid., 114. 87

? See, e.g., John G. McEvoy, “Continuity and discontinuity in the Chemical Revolution,” A. Donovan, ed.,

The Chemical Revolution: Essays in Reinterpretation, Osiris, 2nd series, volume 4(Philadelphia, PA, 1988),

195-231; Jonathan Simon, “The Chemical Revolution and Pharmacy,” Ambix, 44 (1998), 1-13.

39

temporality. The pattern of interaction between these elements and levels, each with its

own historicity, must then be spelled out not by reducing the content or form of any one

or more of them to one or more of the remainder, but by placing them in a relational

complex structured by the systemic requirements of a “decentered totality.” On this

model, the familiar issues of the Chemical Revolution, such as the discovery of oxygen,

the phlogiston-oxygen debate, the deployment of the balance, the reform of the

nomenclature, and the definition of a chemical element, will be referred, in the specific

modes of their temporality and connectedness, to the field of history, which is irreducible

to “the law of an alien development,” whether scientific, philosophical, or sociological.88

As a complex system, or system of systems, the Chemical Revolution was neither a

dispersed collection of disparate events, nor a linear sequence of defining moments, but a

dynamic pattern of “multiple existences,” with a definite shape and duration. It is the task

of the historian of the Chemical Revolution to identify this pattern and determine its

duration.

88

? Foucault (ref. 78), 127. See also McEvoy, “Search” (ref. 3), 64-68.

40