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Histor and Theor 50 (Oobr 2011), 390-413 Wsn Unirsi 2011 ISSN: 0018-2656

RevIeW aRtIcle

HIStORy/PHIlOSOPHy/ScIeNce:

SOme leSSONS fOR PHIlOSOPHy Of HIStORy

On HistOricizing EpistEmOlOgy: An EssAy. B Hns-Jrg Rhinbrgr. trnsd

b Did frnbh. Snord: Snord Unirsi Prss, 2010. Pp. 128.

aBStRact

Rheinbergers brief history brings into sharp prole the importance of historyo sin or phiosophi undrsnding o hisori pri. Rhinbrgr

prsns hough bou h nur o sin b ding siniss nd hir in-

terpreters over the course of the twentieth century as emphasizing increasinglythe local and developmental character of their learning practices, thus makingthe conception of knowledge dependent upon historical experience, historicizingepistemology. Linking his account of thought about science to his own work onexperimental systems, I draw extensive parallels with other work in the localhistory of science (the ideas of Latour, Pickering, Rouse, and others) and con-sider the epistemological implications both for the relation between history andphilosophy of science and between history and theory more broadly. In doing so,I suggs h h ong-snding gp bwn h nur sins nd hisor s

human science has been signicantly bridged by the insistence upon the local,mediated, indeed historicized epistemology of actual science.

Kewords: epistemology, historicity, experimental systems, science as practice,hisor o sin, h pri o hisor

Historical epistemology . . . not only has to do with the historicity ofh sins, bu is is hisori nrpris. (26-27)

for oo ong, hough wih good rson, hisorins h bn ru o n

thinking-together of the humanities with the natural sciences.1 In h poh opositivism this always meant subordination, if not trivialization. But things havechanged dramatically in the understanding of the sciences, and the newsif we

. Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Rickert, and their cohort launched a massive effort at the turn toh wnih nur o dnd h uur sins (Geisteswissenschaften) from the positivisticencroachment of the natural sciences. See W. Dilthey, Introduction to the Huan Sciences: SelectedWorks, vol. I, ed. R. Makkreel and F. Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 989); HeinrichRickert, Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenchaft(tbingn: J. c. B. mohr, 1926). as h wn-

first century has turned, Frank Ankersmit, among others, carries on a similar effort. This is mostexplicit in Ankersmit, Sublie Historical Experience (Snord: Snord Unirsi Prss, 2005). madmiration for all these figures is heartfelt, but my message is that the battle lines have shifted.


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HIStORy/PHIlOSOPHy/ScIeNce 391

can get past the suspicions induced by two hundred years of bullyingis salutaryfor historians. The work of the last fty years has demolished the unied theory ofscience that logical positivism/empiricismprojectedupon u nur-sin-tic practices andpresuedin order to discredit the very idea of the human scienc-s.2 No unied theory of scienceand a fortiori not the positivist onestands. Inits place we have a far more disunied, situated, and contingent theory of empiricalinquir h suis both the natural and the human sciences. The grand-scale nor-mative prepossessions of the Received View in philosophy of science (thinkof Hempels covering-law claim) have proven ultimately incongruous with aneffective descriptive or explanatory investigations of concrete areas or problems.Foremost among the changes is the collapse of the view that philosophy is autho-rized to impose a priori rules upon empirical inquiry, a notion that Joseph Rousehas called epistemic sovereignty.3 as Phiip Kihr hs nod, iru nohingsuris o suh a priori conceptions in current philosophy of science, epistemol-og, or phiosoph o ngug.4 There is now a real prospect of fundamental rap-prochement between the two cultures that does not begin by consigning histori-cal inquiry to essential inferiority, as was the case with positivism.5 this is no osay there are no differences between the natural sciences and the humanities, butthe nature of those differences is very different from, and the interfaces are vastlymore fruitful than, what we have long been able to conceive.6

In part we have missed this because we have not really incorporated history ofscience into our theoretical self-reections about history more generally. Historyo sin is no on ir rn sub-spi, bu i hs oprd rg

the bordermore honestly, just over the borderof disciplinary history. Mosthistorians nd late-modern science beyond their competence, something they donot know how to integrate into their standard account of the modern world, forall that they recognize its salience.7 conrs, hisorins o sin or ong

. I have tried to reconstruct that historical development in A Nice Derangeent of Epistees:Post-Positivis in the Stud of Science fro Quine to Latour (chigo nd london: Unirsi o

chigo Prss, 2004).

. Joseph Rouse, Beyond Epistemic Sovereignty, in The Disunit of Science: Boundaries,Contexts, and Power, ed. Peter Galison and David Stump(Snord: Snord Unirsi Prss, 1996),398-416.

. Philip Kitcher, The Naturalists Return, Philosophical Review 101 (1992), 76.5. One Culture: Essas in Science and Literature, d. Gorg lin (mdison: Unirsi o

Wisonsin Prss, 1987).

. I make this argument in a forthcoming essay: Toward a Robust Historicism: Historical Practicein a Post-Positivist Environment, in Handbook of Historical Theor, d. Nn Prnr nd Srhfoo (london: Sg Prss, 2012).

. Thomas Kuhn wrote very perceptively about this in the 90s. See Kuhn, The Relationsbetween History and the History of Science [9]; reprinted in The Essential Tension (chigo:University of Chicago Press, 9), -. He observed, correctly: Despite the universal lipservice paid by historians to the special role of science in the development of Western culture duringthe past four centuries, the history of science is for most of them still foreign territory (8). Kuhnoffered a shrewd hunch about why: What historians generally view as historical in the developmentof individual creative disciplines are those aspects which reflect its immersion in a larger society.

Wh h oo on rj, s no qui hisor, r hos inrn urs whih gi h disipina history in its own right (5). In many ways things have not changed that much in disciplinaryhistory, though history of science has been through tumultuous times.


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JOHN H. zammItO392

time longed for other disciplinary consorts.8 th dsird prnr hs hngd dr-matically over the last several decades, especially with the rise of science andtechnology studies. In any event, all this has not yet, in my estimation, led to atheoretical consideration of the implications of historiography of scienceandof modern science as an unsettling cascade of disparate events in the career ofknowledgefor the understanding of historical practice (or of philosophical prac-tice, for that matter). Hans-Jrg Rheinbergers work presents a major contributionalong this line, and I wish to accentuate just these implications and impulses forhisori pri.

I. a DIGeSt Of ON HISTORICIzING EPISTEmOLOGy

Rheinbergers slender new book, published rst in German and now translatedinto English, is the fruit, as he notes, of two seminars held at the Technical Uni -versity of Berlin from 005 to 00 (Preface, unnumbered). His thesis is: thehistoricization of epistemology represents a decisive moment in the transforma-tion of twentieth-century philosophy of science (). This would seem to suggestthat the topic is a development in disciplinary philosophy, but Rheinberger doesnot mean this. His conception of epistemology is not synonymous with theoryof knowledge or with what makes knowledge scientic, as has been the tradi-tional (disciplinary) sense of epistemology and of philosophy of science, respec-tively. Rather, he claims to follow French practice, reecting on the historicalondiions under which, and the means with which, things are made into objectsof knowledge (). Referring to a pioneer of this French view, Gaston Bachelard,Rheinberger says, it [i]s not the task of the philosophers of science to dictate toscientists the conditions of possibility and the norms of their knowledge. Instead,it [i]s better rst of all to examine precisely what went on in actual laboratories(). More generally, epistemology is the quest for tools that help us to under-stand a little better the historical evolution of the sciences.9 Bu h on w hcan succeed is to drill down into the detail, the local wisdom of concrete cases,of their internal historicity (9). In order to understand particular historicaldevelopmental processes, there is no alternative but to pursue detailed investiga-tions. Empirical inquiry is inescapable . . . (0).

Rheinberger discerns over the course of the twentieth century a transition fromattempts at historicizing epistemology to attempts at epistemologizing history ofscience (5). That is, in the course of time, historical reection on epistemologybegan to merge with epistemological reection on the history of science (89).

8. One short-lived expression of this was the (rocky) marriage known as History and Philosophyof ScienceHPS for shortthat struggled through the later decades of the previous century, leav-ing as its most admirable offspring the journal Studies in Histor and Philosoph of Science . a recent conference on the state of science studies I offered my sense of this episode and of its legacy:Soundings in Once and Future HPS, Conference on Science Studies in Context, UCSD ScienceStudies Program, San Diego, California, March 9-0, 00. An ulterior motive of this review articleis to reviveby redefiningthis locus of practice.

9. Rhinbrgr, Toward a Histor of Episteic Things: Snthesiing Proteins in the Test Tube (Snord: Snord Unirsi Prss, 1997), 228. this riw ri wi ind is oninu

reverting to Rheinbergers earlier text to explicate the later one.


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This new, genuinely historical-epistemological discourse, he asserts, came outof the sciences themselves (90). He accords this decisive signicance for therionship bwn boh h hisor nd h phiosoph o sin in h sond

half of the twentieth century (5). I take this somewhat strange use of the wordboth to gesture to the internal mutations within history of science and philoso-phy of science individually as well as to their mutual relation. The point is, afterWord Wr II, hisor o sin hngd h puriw o phiosoph o sin

by claiming to offer a clearer access to what scientic practice actually had beenand proclaiming that this access should be the decisive basis for conceiving whatsin oud nd shoud b.

Rheinbergers point is that the epistemology and history of experimentationcrystallized conjointly, and this conjoint project was conducted within the scienc-es and by scientists themselves rather than as part of disciplinary philosophy ().It was concrete historical experience in the sciences that not only drove their highlydisparate projects but also elicited the meta-reection upon the generic character ofactual science that philosophy of science has always taken itself to be. The crucialupshot was that theory of knowledge became subject[ed] . . . to an empirical-his-torical regime, grasping its object as itself historically variable, not based in sometranscendental presupposition or a priori norm (). In light of this formulation, Iwould like to bring Rheinbergers post-structuralist discourse into correlation witha pragmatic-naturalist one that has arisen in recent American philosophy (and socialronsruion) o sin.10 thr r griing onrgns.11

Rhinbrgrs nrri onns in rough hronoogi sris (wih no

inn whsor o drw causal links) the most radical rethinking of modern sci-ence by its own practitioners and by its most astute observers (in history and phi -osoph). for Rhinbrgr, or h ours o h wnih nur unniipd

events induced a recursive cascade reconguring what scienceand moderni-tycould any longer have meant. The rst was the overthrow of classical phys-ics. The second was the proliferation of scientic pursuits beyond any corrallingwithin some unitary science. These two developments in the twentieth centuryform the widest contextual frame for his concrete narrative (). In light of them,it makes no sense to theorize a unied science. Nor are established disciplines thereal drivers of the modern sciences. Instead, islands of scientic rationality . . .suddenly arise on the basis of an instrument or an experiment . . . (5). Each isa highly mobile ensemble that cannot but evolve and that may well dissolve ormerge with other islands in this rhizomic archipelago.12

Rheinbergers narrative begins in the late nineteenth century, with Emil DuBois-Reymond, Ernst Mach, Henri Poincar, and mile Boutrouxall of whom,he contends, abandoned the mechanistic-determinist model for natural sciencethat had been privileged in the epoch of positivism (chap. , 5-). They stressed,

10. See, for example, Kitcher, The Naturalists Return.11. I wi disuss hs in pr II o his ri.

12. In Toward a Histor of Episteic Things, Rheinberger writes of a rhizomic network of recur-

rent epistemic practices (), and he proposes to envisage an ensemble of experimental systems andtheir intricate interactions by conceiving coherence, just as in the case of individual experimentalsystems, [as] a tinkered and patched-up coherence . . . ().


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instead, the contingency of scientic results and the intervention of the investiga-tor in all science. This demanded a shift of focus onto the conditions in which [a]scientic system could take shape (). Such conditions would be disparate andthey would be local. This imperative drove the decisive theoretical endeavors ofGaston Bachelard and Ludwig Fleck in the years between the wars (chap. , 9-). As Rheinberger understands Bachelard, experimental contexts are recursivearrangements in which new knowledge arises that constantly challenges to rethinkthe presuppositions of the method in use and calls for adjustment (). In thisprocess scientic action is permanently transforming the truths of yesterday intothe errors of today (). In a fruitful circle, knowledge is not simply iterated,but is differentially driven forward by the experimental system. Knowledgedoes not proceed asymptotically toward something like an absolute reality; ratherit moves away from something: it is fundamentally development-conditioned,that is, determined by the steps it takes (8-9). The direction that such a owof experiments takes is not mapped out in advance. It depends on the signal[s]of resistance that emerge in the research process (). Thus, objectivity is notsomething given but rather is produced in a process ofobjectication . . . ().

It is clear that Rheinbergers own fruitful notion of experimental systemsnds great resonance in the ideas of these earlier thinkers (). In the Epilogueto his rst book, he wrote: What we need, in history of science, is an economyof scientic change, where the word economy signals processes that cannotbe explicated at the level of individual consciousness.13 In this new work Rhein-berger (re)constructs a tradition of discourse evoking and enabling his own.14 Ifrequently refer to a series of French-speaking philosophers, scientists, and his-torians of science, from Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Fou-u, louis ahussr, Jqus ln, nd Jqus Drrid o mih Srrs nd

Bruno Latour; from Claude Bernard to Franois Jacob, Isabelle Stengers, and IlyaPrigogine.15 Rhinbrgr insiss h is prsning hr series, no genealog;these gures form a network dened by their difference, and yet they share thecommon pursuit of making sense of science in our time.

Rheinberger harvests a discourse of processual complexity, whose centers arelocal and emergent. Thus, with Bachelard, he afrms, the achievements of sci-ence are and remain emergent phenomena. They have the character of events,and although they may form a chain, the individual links remain historically con -tingent. Historical contingency accentuates path-dependence: each iteration re-acts out of and against the backdrop of prior iterations. [E]xperimental systemsare necessarily localized and situated generators of knowledge. Their reproduc-tive situatedness, not their logicality, mark their cohesion over time, and thustheir historicity. . . . Epistemic things, therefore, are recursively constituted andthus intrinsically historical things. They derive their signicance from their fu-ture, which is unpredictable at the real time of their emergence.16 Opnnss pus

13.Ibid., 224.

14. I submit this is a fundamental feature of intellectual self-constitution, and a key to historical

ronsruion in inu hisor.15. Rhinbrgr, Toward a Histor of Episteic Things, 21.

16.Ibid., 76.


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ph-dpndn rs hisori sruur b induing hisori no wihin

constraints. It is the hallmark of productive experimental systems that their dif-ferential reproduction leads to events that may induce major shifts in perspectivewithin or even beyond their connes. In a way, they proceed by continually de-constructing their own perspective.17

There are some interesting revisions in Rheinbergers historical narrative. Thus,he depicts Karl Poppers abstract and logical orientation to the problem of scien-tic development as ultimately less fruitful than the (anxious) historicizing of theproblem of modern science in Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger (chap. ,5-9). Husserl, in his famous Crisis, maintained that the positivist concept ofscience in our time . . . did justice neither to the constitution of the modern sci -ences nor to their history (9). In Husserl, Rheinberger stresses the convictionthat epistemological grounding and historical explanation must coincide in thelast analysis, even if he is not persuaded that Husserl could cash out his demandfor a universal historical a priori (). In Heidegger, Rheinberger nds fruit-ful the conceptualization of the local and situated character of modern sciencess priur, hnoogi orhsrd rsrh projs. eh suh rsrh

domain creates an open sphere in which rigorous pursuit is dependent on theparticularities of the objects that can be disclosed in the sphere in question ().Scientic experimentation works within a technologically framed procedure, andmodern natural science achieves a recursive cohesion . . . by drawing on tech-nological practice and returning its results back into that practice (5). WhileRheinberger recognizes the centrality of this looping action, he warns againstsuch terms as technoscience and black-boxing for their penchant to reduce toa technological determinism.18 H insiss h hr is rui dirn bwnscience and technology, even if all (modern) science denitely takes place in atechnological matrix with technological payoffs.19

The largest rupture in Rheinbergers serial narrative came with a shift of pri-macy from philosophical epistemology reecting on its own historicity to histori-cal reconstruction reecting on its epistemological implications. It set in aroundmid-century, gaining traction especially after World War II (chap. , 5-). Thiswas the moment history of science came into its own. Rheinberger sees AlexandreKoyrs history-of-ideas approach already as a theoretically demanding histo-ricization [that] contested the eld of traditional philosophizing about science(5). Above all, Koyr introduced the idea of a rupture of modern from traditionalscience, a scientic revolution.20 The idea of such a break would be taken upand radicalized by Thomas Kuhn. His promise, enunciated on the opening page ofStructure of Scientic Revolutions, was that a quite different concept of science .

17.Ibid., 36.

18.Ibid., 30.

19.Ibid., 31-33.

20. Of course, that notion of scientic revolution and of a rupture with medieval science hasbecome quite contested more recently (see, for example,Reappraisals of the Scientic Revolution, d.

David Lindberg and Robert Westman [Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press,990]), but that does not diminish the importance of Koyr or of his ideas for the constitution of thedisours o hisor o sin.


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. . can emerge from the historical record of the research activity itself. . . .21 a hextreme, Paul Feyerabend argued that methodological prescription was counter-productive for the advancement of science. Contingency intervenes in the actualcourse of history in a way that lies beyond any critical-rational schematism ().Suss hd retrospective validity to scientic results.

Rheinberger turns next to the post-structuralist moment during the 90s inFrance, set within the larger frame of the development of French science studiesfrom Bachelard and Cavaills through Canguilhem (chap. 5, 5-). Against thisbackdrop, Rheinberger traces the development of Michel Foucaults archaeologyof knowledge. Foucault put the accent emphatically on discontinuity. More, hesought deep structures, historically located rules of production which give anepisteme its form, . . . a historical a priori . . . (). With Louis Althusser, Fou-cault discerned process without a subject, a displacement into what Rheinbergercalls a structuralism of contingency (). Not surprisingly, given his formula-ions in Toward a Histor of Episteic Things, Rhinbrgr highighs Jqus

Derrida as the key contributor to this line of thought (-). He reminds us thatfrom 90 to 9, Derrida was assistant to Canguilhem at the Sorbonne (5).22Rheinberger ultimately prizes Derrida for his historical logic of supplementarityor historialitythe iterative-recursive production of meaning in the trace.

Rheinbergers narrative concludes with a discussion of Ian Hacking and BrunoLatour as anthropologists of science, though in radically different senses (chap. ,9-8). For Hacking, Rheinberger argues, the practice of science is a consequenceof the ontological nature of humans, their inveterate need to represent (8). ForLatour, anthropology is a eld-work approach to the hybrid interactions of na-ture, science, and society (8-8). At the end, but certainly with no claim to telicsignicance, Rheinberger situates his own work and Andrew Pickerings concep-tion of a mangle of practice (8). What they share with Hacking, with Latour andwith all the earlier protagonists of Rheinbergers chronicle, is a commitment toreconstruct the concrete course of particular scientic paths of discovery (8).

II. tHe HIStORy Of ScIeNce aND tHe PRactIce Of HIStORy

The conceptual achievement of history (and sociology) of science has been toretrieve rich instances of local generativity (science in the making) and thusto model that and how such a process is accessible to reconstruction. Scienticproblems emerge from a structure of constraints (on the problem solution) plusa general demand, goal, or explanatory ideal of the research program in questionthat certain types of gaps in those structures be lled.23 These constraints con-

21. Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientic Revolutions, 2nd d. (chigo nd london: Unirsiof Chicago Press, 90), . In the words of Thomas Nickles, Kuhn, more than any single person, isresponsible for philosophers now taking history seriously. (Quoted in Werner Callebaut, Taking theNaturalist Turn, or How Real Philosoph of Science is Done [Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press, 99], .)

22. S Rhinbrgr, Toward a Histor of Episteic Things, 8-9: I will stick to the Derridean

program . . . , and see 8-8, 0-0, 0-.. Thomas Nickles, Scientific Discovery and the Future of Philosophy of Science, in Scientific

Discover, Logic, and Rationalit, ed. Thomas Nickles, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science56 (Dordrh: Rid, 1980), 37.


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stitute a rich supply of premises and context-specic rules for reasoning towarda problem solution.24 Thus every problem is emergent, in a situation, and theconstraints that situate the emergent problem also equip the inquiry with (someof) the terms for its solution. Moreover, this whole syndrome must be taken as adynamic, not static, process, resulting in successively sharper reformulations ofa problem.25

th poin o dprur ws riud w b mih lnh, no gins h

universalism of philosophy of science but against the universalism of conven-ion soioog:

Sociologys general concepts and methodological strategies are simply overwhelmed bythe heterogeneity and technical density of the languages, equipment, and skills throughwhich mathematicians, scientists, and practitioners in many other elds of activity maketheir affairs accountable. It is not that their practices are asocial, but that they are morehorough nd o soi hn soioog is prprd o hnd.26

By the end of the 980s, Andrew Pickering came to reject the science as knowl-edge agenda as thin, idealized, and reductive.27 More concretely, it simplydos no or us h onpu pprus ndd o h up h rihnss o h

doing of science, the dense work of building instruments, planning, running, andinterpreting experiments, elaborating theory, negotiating with laboratory manage-ments, journals, grant-giving agencies, and so on.28 Thus the distinctive move inrecent science studies has been the shift from conceiving of science as knowledgeo oniing o sin s practice.29 to g h rquisi onrnss, Krin

Knorr-Cetina has argued, science studies needed to adopt a genetic nd icro-

level approach.30

Two of the most impressive theorists of this shift are Pickeringand Bruno Latour, mentioned but not really engaged in Rheinbergers narrative. Iwi r o drw ou hir powru onrgns wih Rhinbrgr.

Pickerings practical realism or interpretation of science as practice offers robus ppriion or h coplexit of science, its rich plurality of elementsof knowledge and practice, which he has come to call the mangle of practice.31As against the statics of knowledge, Pickering situates the essence of scienticlife in the dynamics of practice, that is a complex process of reciprocal andinterdependent tunings and regurings of material procedures, interpretations andtheories.32 He characterizes this dynamic as a goal-oriented dialectic of resis-

24.Ibid.

25.Ibid., 38.

26. Michael Lynch, From the Will to Theory to the Descriptive Collage, in Science as Practiceand Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 99), 98.

. Andrew Pickering, From Science as Knowledge to Science as Practice, in Pickering, ed.,Science as Practice and Culture, 5.

28.Ibid.

29.Ibid., 2.

30. Karen Knorr-Cetina, Ethnographic Study of Scientic Work: Toward a ConstructivistInterpretation of Science, in Science Observed: Perspectives in the Social Stud of Science, d.Karen Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (London: Sage, 98), -.

31. Andrew Pickering, The mangle of Practice: Tie, Agenc, and Science (chigo nd london:

Unirsi o chigo Prss, 1995).32. Andrew Pickering, Knowledge, Practice, and Mere Construction, Social Studies of Science

20 (1990), 707.


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tance and accommodation.33 It is an extraordinarily complex topology of rela-tions: the disunity, patchiness, and fragmentation of actual science turns out to bea far cry from its mythic unity.34 One must see scientic culture as endemically

patch, composed of all sorts ofheterogeneous eleents. . . .35 th inspirionfor scientic practice is the possibility of making connections bwn disp-rate cultural elements by envisioning associations or intersections, pointswhere there would be a closure of the theoretical and the experimental ele-ments oating in some measure of disaggregation in the eld.36 th spirion oscientic practice is to achieve coherence, that is, to overcome that patchiness ofthe research environment.37 Here Pickerings conceptualization of experimentalpractice is at its most dense and complex. He discerns three elements: a materialprocedure, which involves setting up apparatus, running, and monitoring it; aninstrumental model, which conceives how the apparatus should function; anda phenomenal model, which endows experimental ndings with meaning andsignicance . . . a conceptual understanding of whatever aspect of the phenom -enal world is under investigation.38 The hard work of science comes in tryingto make all these work together. It generally involves modeling after exemplarsgin in h rsrh rdiion.39 Thus, the modeling is not entirely random butriss ou o rjor o prior ndors. Hn ph-dpndn proids

sruur.40 Yet the element of radical historical contingency cannot be evaded,and the experimenter must admit, at last, that novelty just happened.41

this propr o rdi eergence is crucial for Pickering, hence his insistenceupon nding o teporalit, to real time struggles to make things work.42 asPickering sees it, resistance just happens. It is truly emergent in time.43 Re-

33.Ibid., 697.

. Andrew Pickering, Beyond Constraint: The Temporality of Practice and the Historicity ofKnowledge, in Scientific Practice: Theories and Stories of Doing Phsics, d. J. Buhwd (chigond london: Unirsi o chigo Prss, 1995), 46.

35. Andrew Pickering, Openness and Closure: On the Goals of Scientic Practice, in Experi-ental Inquiries: Historical, Philosophical and Social Studies of Experientation in Science, d. H.

lGrnd (Dordrh: Rid, 1990), 217.

36.Ibid.

37. [C]oherence, I am inclined to believe, is a constant telos of scientic practice (Pickering,Knowledge, Practice, and Mere Construction, 9); the search for coherence is constitutive opractice in its full temporality (ibid., 697).

38. Andrew Pickering, Living in a Material World: On Realism and Experimental Practice, inThe Uses of Experient: Studies in the Natural Sciences, d. D. Gooding, t. Pinh, nd S. Shr

(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 989), -.9. Pickering, Openness, . See also Beyond Constraint, 8.40. William C. Wimsatt and James R. Griesemer write of scaffoldingtemporary frames for

constructionas contrasted with foundations (Reproducing Entrenchments to Scaffold Culture:The Central Role of Development in Cultural Evolution, inIntegrating Evolution and Developent:Fro Theor to Practice, ed. Roger Sansom and Robert N. Brandon [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,00]). Similarly, Deweyans like Nickles talk of platforms. Both recognize the contingent, histori-cal, and fragile nature of these structures, but that does not detract from their actuality and indispens-bii.

41. For this phrase, it just happened, see Pickering, Knowledge, Practice, and MereConstruction, 0, etc.

42. Pickering, From Science as Knowledge, 9.43. Andrew Pickering, Objectivity and the Mangle of Practice, inRethinking Objectivit, d. a.

Megill (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 99), 5.


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sisns h o b undrsood s situatedwith respect to goals; they are denedand exist only reciprocally with respect to the associations that they block.44This leads Pickering to argue for a distinctive historicit of scientic practice.45Emergence in real time, this utter unpredictability, this radical contingency, thisrelativity-to-chance, marks what Pickering calls a culturally situated histori-cism.46 He wants to reckon with historicity as emergence, but that means he hasto acknowledge structure as well: I do indeed want to defend a historicist under-standing of scientic knowledge . . . contingency is not all that there is . . . Thereis structure . . . and it is by virtue of this structure that one can make sense of theobious h dirn uurs do susin dirn pris nd produ di-

ferent knowledges.47ch siniiss in h , h ronir o hir ignorn, nd h wi

show you a different order from what they tell. th is wh Bruno lour insissall science studies is trying to get at: not to debunk science but to reconstructiin the making. In trying to understand science in the making we do not tryto undermine the solidity of the accepted parts of science.48Science in Action(98) is Latours manual for the conduct of science studies.49 H ors gnrtheory of knowledge-production. The key to the whole work is: what is calledknowledge cannot be dened without understanding what gaining knowledgemeans.50 Emergence is the key: an original event . . . creates what it translatesas well as the entities between which it plays the mediating role.51

The argument ofScience in Action is a movement from local to global claimsand structures of knowledge. We are led from subjective to objective, from private (and therefore weak) assertion through its collective mediation to itstheoretical entrenchment as knowledge. One could conceive this as a dialec-tic.52 Latour, a good son of the French sixties, loathesAufhebung. y his Jnusmetaphor embodies temporality, contradiction, advanceelements that stronglyapproximateAufhebung! Above all, the Janus gure epitomizes historicity: pros-pect and retrospect simultaneously on the cusp of an open present. Latour con-stantly seeks to rescue openness from the alwas alread o h a priori. I takehim to be reinventing a Hegelian processual-learning approach to knowledge inrbion gins Knin a priori on.53 In Hgs Phenoenolog, the phi-

44.Ibid.

5. Pickering, Knowledge, Practice, and Mere Construction, 0.46. Pickering, Beyond Constraint, 5.47.Ibid.

48. Bruno lour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 98), 00.9. Bruno Latour has been following scientists around for years. Now he wants us to follow him

following them around (Steven Shapin, Following Scientists Around, Social Studies of Science8 [988], 5).

50. lour, Science in Action, 220.

51.Ibid., 78.

52. Of course, Latour repudiates dialectics: Dialectics literally beat about the bush. (Brunolour, We Have Never Been modern [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 99], 55) Still,the straight lines of philosophy are of no use when it is the crooked labyrinth of machinery andmachinations . . . we have to explore. (Latour, On Technical Mediation Philosophy, Sociology,

Genealogy, Coon Knowledge [99], 0).5. Of course, Latour repudiates Hegel explicitly: by believing that he was abolishing Kants

separation between things-in-themselves and the subject, Hegel brought the separation even more


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losopher knowingly accompanies the groping subject on the path to (self- andworld-) discovery that the philosopher has already traced. That ts: for Latourscience or knowledge is always only recognition. The risk in recapitulation is: wemisremember how we got here. Latour urges we resist the overweening tempta -tion to tell the story as if we knew all along what we only came to know. He seesphilosophy (not just Hegels)and science, tooalways trying to cover its owntracks, tidying all-too-human process into pure products. Latour (but also Hegelin what is most memorable in his Phenoenolog) wns o uncover the making.The rst time we encounter some event, we do not know it; we start knowingsomething when it is at least the secondtime we encounter it, that is, when it is fa-miliar to us.54 Knowdg r is recognition. Simply, the new object emergesfrom a complex set-up of sedimented elements each of which has been a newobject at some point in time and space.55 Nature . . . always arrives late, too lateto explain the rhetoric of scientic texts and the building of laboratories.56 lourhas his Janus make the indicative utterances: the old face proclaims, Nature isthe cause that allowed controversies to be settled, while the young face rejoins,Nature will be the consequence of the settlement.57 lbororis anufacturefacts and machines: Laboratories generate so many new objects because they areable to create extreme conditions and because each of these actions is obsessivelyinscribed.58 Intervention combined with documentation: Laboratories are nowpowerful enough to dene realit.59

Three key gures in feminist science studies have advanced this new onp-tion of knowledge, evidence, justication, and objectivityKaren Barad, DonnaHrw, nd N. Khrin Hs.60 Invoking Niels Bohrs philosophical-physi-cal critique of Newtonian physics, Barad makes clear what representationalishas meant for conventional thought: that observation-independent objects havewell-dened intrinsic properties that are representable as abstract universal con-cepts.61 Bohr insisted that the object could not be conceived apart from the agen-cies of observation, and that these formed an irreducible non-dualistic whole,phenoenon or eventbehind which it was impossible to reach. That is, what

fully to life. He raised it to the level of a contradiction, pushed it to the limit and beyond, then made itthe driving force of history (Latour, We Have Never Been modern, 5). Dewey found another, morecongenial Hegel; see John Dewes Philosoph of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel, d. John

Shook and James Good (New York: Fordham University Press, 00), and James Good,A Search forUnit in Diversit: The Peranent Hegelian Deposit in the Philosoph of John Dewe (Lanham,MD: Lexington Books, 005).

54. lour, Science in Action, 219.

55.Ibid., 92.

56.Ibid., 94.

57.Ibid., 99.

58.Ibid., 90.

59.Ibid., 93.

0. Joseph Rouse, Feminism and the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge, in Feinis,Science, and the Philosoph of Science, ed. Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson (Dordrecht:Kuwr, 1996), 202.

. Karen Barad, Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality,

Difference: A Journal of Feinist Cultural Studies 0 (998), 9. See also Barad, Meeting theUniverse Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction, in Nelson and Nelson,ds., Feinis, Science, and the Philosoph of Science, 161-194.


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is bing dsribd b our horis is no nur is, bu our priipion within

nature.62 Reality is not an observation-independent object, but a phenomenon.Barad argues, the world in which we live . . . is sedimented out of particular prac-tices that we have a role in shaping, and this is not only an epistemological butn onoogi poin, in hr iw.63 Making the world intelligible through certainpractices and not others . . . we are not only responsible for the knowledge that weseek, but, in part, for what exists.64

Donna Haraway vehemently repudiates representationalism as a ventriloquis-tic and depoliticizing expert discourse of passionless distance, in which thenatural scientist serves as the perfect representative of nature, that is, of the per-manently and constitutively speechless objective world.65 Rejecting such sun-worshipping stories about the history of science and technology as paradigms ofrationalism, Haraway insists upon artifactualism: not new representations, butnw pris.66 What Haraway seeks, she writes in Modest Witness, is ques-tions of pattern, . . . shifting sedimentations of the one fundamental thing aboutthe worldrelationality.67

Like Barad and Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles is critical of representationalismbecause she fears representation may be too passive a concept to account for thecomplexities involved in what she claims is an active process of self-organiza-tion that depends on prior learning and specic contexts.68 Hs s his on-ception constrained constructivism. It is not that constraints tell us what realityis. this h nno do. Bu h n us whih rprsnions r onsisn

with reality, and which are not.69 th is wh consistenc is h bs h nbe hoped for: it is local, it is limited, but it can be good enough. The concreteinteractions with the ux are always richer and more ambiguous than languagecan represent, and yet a synergy between physical and semiotic constraints . . .brings language in touch with the world.70

Drawing on these theorists and others, Joseph Rouse identies as most centralto empirical work in recent science studies . . . the embodiment of scientic under-standing in laboratories and material practice, in non-verbal images and models,and in the textual materiality of language.71 Rouse embraces a post-episteo-logical conception of science and scientic knowledge, as part of a general de-

. Barad, Getting Real, 9.

63. Ibid., 0. See also Karen Barad, Agential Realism, in The Science Studies Reader, d.Mario Biagioli (New York: Routledge, 999), -.

. Barad, Getting Real, 05.5. Donna Haraway, The Promise of Monsters, in Cultural Studies, d. lwrn Grossbrg,

Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 99), . Haraway writes of the epis-temological and social power of the scientist as authorized ventriloquist for the objective world(Haraway, Modest Witness, in Galison and Stump, eds., The Disunit of Science, 429).

. Haraway, The Promise of Monsters, 98-99.. Haraway, Modest Witness, 9.8. N. Katherine Hayles, Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater

of Representation, in Realis and Representation, d. Gorg lin (mdison: Unirsi oWisonsin Prss, 1993), 29.

69.Ibid., 33.

70.Ibid., 38.71. Josph Rous, How Scientific Practices matter: Reclaiing Philosophical Naturalis

(chigo nd london: Unirsi o chigo Prss, 2002), 68.


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ationary approach to knowledge.72 What is the post-epistemological concep-tion, in Rouses view? My sense is that it entails two key tenets: that ontologytakes precedence over epistemology and that knowing is always situated. Rousesees traditional epistemology as the aspiration to a detached assessment of thetotality of scientic knowledge and its relation to an objective world understoodas something apart.73 Crucial here is the contention that epistemology presumedthat knowledge demarcates a coherent, surveyable domain of inquiry.74 Rousproposes to disentangle the notion of knowledge from the twin telos of complete-ness and certainty that has haunted the epistemological tradition.75 equ sus-p is h noion odetachent: the idea of disembodied minds representing theworld.76 He identies all these errors with the notion of representationalism.We must conceive of knowing as concretely situated and as more interactivethan representational.77 Knowledge (in the form of epistemic alignment) is bestunderstood not as a system of propositions or a cognitive state but as a situationin the world.78 This deationary view of knowledge is a shift from thinkingabout a putative object that a concept could describe to thinking about a practicein which the concept is used.79 An ontology of knowing would pursue sig-nicance and intelligibility . . . without postulating any representations in whichknowledge is located.80 We must understand knowledge as embedded withinspecic ways of engaging the world.81

The essential point for Rouse is: science discloses not objects or laws inde-pendent of us and our concerns, but phenomena that we are a part of.82 th onnature we can encounter manifests itself through scientic practices.83 Thus ob-

jects only exist within phenomena. That is, an object shows up as a denitelybounded system with determinate capacities within such phenomena, through themodication of some other aspect of the phenomenon.84 Wh gs disosd isnot some denite object . . . but a eld of not-fully-determinate possibilities.85This is so because the material systems that focus scientic research always outrunprojections and conceptualizations of them.86 Rouse invokes Rheinbergers notionof epistemic thing as precisely this sort of not-yet-determined phenomenon at is-sue that mobilizes further research.87 for Rous, h nw pproh nis rdi

72. Josph Rous, Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophicall (Ih,

NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 99), . See his What are Cultural Studies of Scien-

tific Knowledge? Configurations 1 (1993), 1-22.73. Rous,How Scientific Practices matter, 159.

74.Ibid., 140.

75. Rous,Engaging Science, 194.

76. Rous,How Scientific Practices matter, 163.

77.Ibid., 146.

78.Ibid., 187.

79.Ibid., 199.


81.Ibid., 149.

82.Ibid., 331.

83.Ibid., 22.

84.Ibid., 274.

85.Ibid., 343.86.Ibid., 338.

87.Ibid., 75. Hr, Rous drws on Rhinbrgr, Toward a Histor of Episteic Things.


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new temporality in scientic practices: if one takes seriously the material, institu-tional, and discursive embodiment of scientic understanding, scientic researchruns ahead of what it can already clearly articulate.88 In such a naturalistic frame,Rouse writes, questions of justication, consistency, clarity, and so forth . . . nowarise more locally . . . drawing upon more wide-ranging considerations. . . not scien-tic knowledge as a totality, but particular scientic practices, projects, and claims,understood as ongoing interactions between knowers and the world known.89 this, normativity arises from practical involvement in siuion whos subsqundevelopment is not yet determined. . . . [There are] real possibilities for making a(signicant) difference in how things subsequentl turn out.90

Rouse discerns six signicant common themes in the new processual re-constructions of scientic practice.91 First, all emphatically acknowledge the dis-unit of science. One must renounce the attempt to survey scientic practiceas a whole and pronounce on its aim and legitimation.92 Sond, h bjuroring explanations of science, whether internal or external. Instead, theyconcern themselves with the emergence of meaning within human practicesin which meaning is best understood as an open and dynamic engagement withthe world.93 Third, they accentuate the localism and materiality of scienticpractices as against conceptions of the effortless and immaterial universality ofscientic reasoning and knowledge.94 Fourth, they recognize constant trafcacross boundaries between scientic and other practices in the world.95 Boundr-ies are always tentative and uid. There is trafc in all directions across whateverboundaries . . . too heavy for any signicant autonomy of a domain of scienticpractices from others.96 In particular, this emphasis on openness of boundarieshighlights the importance of difference, power, ideology, and the proliferationof incommensurabilities, distortions, silencings, and other failures of understand-ing and communication.97 Fifth, according to Rouse, they adopt a subversiverather than an antagonistic stance to scientic practices; they challenge the for-mulation of the question rather than proposing an alternative to its traditionalanswers.98 Over against the legitimation project common to all earlier efforts,the new project emphasizes that indeterminacy, instability, opacity, and differ-ence must play a more prominent role. Finally, a critical engagement with thepractices of the sciences must replace the normative anemia shared ironicallyby both value-free science and relativist social constructionism.99 for Rous,


89.Ibid., 159.

90.Ibid., 26.

91.Ibid., 242.

92.Ibid., 236.

93.Ibid., 33, 221.

94.Ibid., 249.

95.Ibid., 250.

9. Joseph Rouse, Understanding Scientific Practices, in Biagioli, ed., The Science StudiesReader, 445.

97. Rous,Engaging Science, 233.98.Ibid., 254.

99.Ibid., 25, 21.


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interpretive readings are thus part of the culture of science and not an explana -tion or interpretation of it from outside.100

There is much that is persuasive about Rouses synthesis, but it occasions somersrions s w.101 I do not believe that in dismissing epistemic sovereigntyone forecloses epistemology altogether, though, of course, it will require re-specication. Rouses view seems less plausible as a disputation with actual em-pirical practice of science studies than as one with a universalism that certainlycharacterized the received view of philosophy of science and the early, StrongProgramme view of a sociology of scientic knowledge. In stressing meaningand understanding as against explanation, my rst impression is that Rouse isrecurring to the long-standing quarrel in the human sciences between interpretiveor hermeneutic approaches and those that pursue nomothetic universalism alongmore positivistic lines.102 However, dismissing an sort of explanation, includingthe kind of specic accounting that is a key part of contextual-historical practice,seems to me to extend a legitimate philosophical quarrel with one species of ex-planatory thinking to a general rule that does not sit well with a lot of concretepractice. To be sure, such concrete practices of interpretation and explanation aimat a localism that takes the materiality of situations very seriouslywhether thisbe a laboratory apparatus or a channel of distribution for claims, that is, whetherphysical or textual. But questions of cumulation and stabilization as positivefeatures of scientic practices get too short shrift in Rouses account. Lookingfrom within a situation, I believe that context, consistency, and above all the con-straints of cumulation and stabilization need to be taken more richly into view,alongside both the radical novelty of emergence and the problematics of pow-er/knowledge that Rouse rightly stresses. The emphasis on path-dependency inRheinberger seems, accordingly, a more apt conceptualization.

All these endeavors in the study of science provide resources for robust herme-nui pri. Indd, on oud rdsrib h nw hisoris o sin in qusi-

Hegelian language (of a pragmatist-revisionist, Deweyan variety) as models ofdialectical objectication, making a substantial contribution to the understandingo hisori hng gnr.103 The challenge for historical theory is to nd a

100.Ibid., 255.

0. Rouses last two claims occasion the most doubt in me. First, he argues for a subversive

rather than antagonistic stance toward scientific practices. How does this subversion by sciencesudis ronsru h pri o sins fro the inside? I am not so confident as Rouse about allthis. Just this makes problematic Rouses argument that science studies play a participatory ratherthan external role in the practices of science.

0. See Adrian Hayes, Causal and Interpretive Analysis in Sociology, Sociological Theor 3(985), -0; The Interpretive Turn: Philosoph, Science, Culture, ed. David Hiley, James Bohman,and Richard Shusterman (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 99). The most influ-ential formulation came from Clifford Geertz, the idea of thick description. See Clifford Geertz,The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 9).

103. Guy Axtell refers to Deweys emphasis on the generation of criteria for problem-solvingthrough the method of intelligences and the study of the mutual conditioning of means and ends(Guy Axtell, Normative Epistemology and the Bootstrap Theory, Philosophical Foru [99],-). Pragmatism has always advocated opening epistemology onto a plane of psychologi-

, soi nd hisori ondiioning h us across . . . neat divisions (Guy Axtell, Logicism,Pragmatism, and Metascience: Towards a Pancritical Pragmatic Theory of Meta-level Discourse,PSA 1990, o. I, 46).


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language to articulate this extraordinarily rich dialectic in its concreteness with-out losing purchase on its situatedness in larger nests of causality and meaning.W nd o dop hisori ngug wih h dii rihnss o riu

what Pickering has called the topology, the temporality, and the materiality ofpris.104

III. cONclUDING IReNIc HOPe

Rheinberger sees twentieth-century science and philosophy becoming inveteratelyembroiled in historicization. But, conversely, he adds, history (as practice) getsembroiled with science and philosophy: it becoes experimental, epistemologi-cal. Historians of science . . . have to conceive of themselves as being engagedin an experimental exploration of experimental reasoning.105 [T]he historianspri . . . oninuous rorins h hisori undrsnding o h pross

of reorientation we see at work in the sciences.106 Epistemological groundingand historical explanation must coincide in the last analysis . . . in a regressiveinquir (Rckfrage), Rheinberger infers from Husserl (). It was Canguilhemwho proposed that the history of the sciences could itself be taken as an epis-temological laboratory (). That is, the object of the history of science is . . .the particular historicity of scientic discourse, insofar as it expresses a proce-dure that is normalized from within, but is punctuated by accidents, impeded orthwarted by obstructions, and interrupted by crises . . . (). That frameworkmodels more than just the history of the sciences.

The scientists representation of their own histories provoked a radical newdeparture in the history of science as a eld of study. The living practice of thenatural sciences must be distinguished from the ofcial paper form, as Rhein-berger cites from Ludwig Fleck (9). As Nickles put it, Good Science [i]s BadHistory.107 Scientists tend to tell just-so stories about their successes, tacitlyrewriting the past to conform to their present.108 That seeming historical naivetbetokens something essential about historicity, however.109 Each scientic noveltydid recongure everything that had gone before, just as each work of art displacesthe meaning of all the artworks that preceded it.110 Bu h onrs is also h

104. Pickering, Beyond Constraints, 55.

105. Rhinbrgr, Toward a Histor of Episteic Things, 139.106.Ibid., 11.

107. Thomas Nickles, Good Science as Bad History, in The Social Diensions of Science, d.Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 99), 85-9.

108. In the spontaneous history of the scientist, the most recent developments tend to takeon the meaning of something always already present, albeit hidden, as the research goal from thebeginning. . . (Rheinberger, Toward a Histor of Episteic Things, 185).

109. The retrospective view of the scientist as a spontaneous historian is not only concealing butin many respects also revealing. It reminds us that an experimental system is full of stories, of whichthe experimenter at any given moment is trying to tell only one (ibid.).

110. Rheinberger repeatedly draws attention to the work of George Kubler, The Shape of Tie:Rearks on the Histor of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 9), as a decisive comple-ment in the history of art for the project he has undertaken in the history of science. Kubler seeks to

conceptualize formal sequences in terms of intrinsic trajectory, as a set of solutions to a commonproblem. The entity composed by the problem and its solution constitutes a form-class (ibid., 30).This allows him to conceptualize this developmental series in terms of a determinate network: The


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case: What can be discovered is laid down by the successive series of precedingdiscoveries (9). This internal historicity is the product of a history as pro -cess (9). Retrospect and recursiveness are the essence of historicity. In Hegelsold and beautiful formulation, the owl of Minerva takes ight only at dusk.111 Inthe words of Bachelard, empirical thought is clear in retrospect, whn h pp-ratus of reason has been developed.112 Rheinberger elaborates: The new, in thisconception, does not come into the world as a clear and distinct idea, but ratherbrings itself into relief ex post facto, as it were. It results from a recursive process(). Recursive displacement is both the goal and the engine of the experimentalsystem of science.

In h epiogu oToward a Histor of Episteic Things, Rheinberger invokestwo seminal voices. The rst is the legendary philosopher of biology, MarjorieGrene, who wrote: Wh cant we check our beliefs against reality? Not, as scep-tics believe, because we cant reach out to reality, but because were part of it. 113(We can read this as the primacy of ontology over epistemology.) The second is aphilosophically minded biologist, Stuart Kauffman, who concluded hisAt Hoein the Universe with the penetrating admonition: All we can do is be locallywise.114 (We can read this as the situatedness of knowing.) Rheinberger citedthese authors to sum up his long argument about science and writing, an argu -ment that was in fact about the practice of history as much as about the practiceof science. In his new book, Rheinberger accentuates the interface of science,philosophy, and history in/as historicizing epistemology. Not only the history,but also the historiography of the sciences is a process driven from behind. . .. The concepts of historical narration are shaped and reshaped from immersionin an epistemological laboratory.115 Such a historicizing comes to grips withGrenes point about our embroilment in the real by embracing Kauffmans ad-

closest denition of a formal sequence that we now can venture is to afrm it as a historical networkof gradually altered repetition of the same trait. . . . In cross section let us say that it shows a network,a mesh, or a cluster of subordinate traits; and in long section that it has a ber-like structure of tem-poral stages, all recognizably similar, yet altering in their mesh from beginning to end ( ibid., 33). Iis in such a frame that Kubler proposes we can best understand invention or discovery: Inventionslie in this penumbra between actuality and the future, where the dim shapes of possible events areperceived. These narrow limits conne originality at any moment so that no invention overreachesthe potential of its epoch (ibid., 59). All prior positions are part of the invention, because to attainthe new position the inventor must reassemble its components by an intuitive insight transcending

the preceding positions in the sequence (ibid., 58). The parallels with the theory of experimentalsystems elaborated by Rheinberger, and of the mangle of practice elaborated by Pickering in sci-ence studies, is striking. Kubler views as most regrettable what he calls our long reluctance toview the processes common to both art and science in the same historical perspective. What such arapprochement would recognize is the common traits of invention, change, and obsolescence that thematerial works of artists and scientists both share in time (ibid., 8-9).

111. G. W. f. Hg, Philosoph of Right, transl. T. M. Knox (Oxford and New York: OxfordUnirsi Prss, 1967), Pr, 13.

112. Gson Bhrd, The Foration of the Scientific mind[98] (Manchester, UK: Clinamen,2001), 24, id in Rhinbrgr, On Historiciing Episteolog, 63.

113. Rhinbrgr, Toward a Histor of Episteic Things, 227, iing mrjori Grn, A

Philosophical Testaent(chigo: Opn cour, 1995), 17.

114. Rhinbrgr, Toward a Histor of Episteic Things, 8, citing Stuart Kauffman,At Hoe

in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organiation and Coplexit (Oxford: OxfordUnirsi Prss, 1995), 303.

115. Rhinbrgr, Toward a Histor of Episteic Things, 139.


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monition: not only is being locally wise all we can do; there is no place else to be(real)! Humans are always already situated. This is why we have to reject a viewfrom nowhere.116

Rheinberger shows us the historicity of scientic practice as concrete empiri-cal inquiry; what I wish to do is to read that conversely, to see historical practiceas yet another empirical inquiry whose historicity is recuperable precisely as lo-calized process. If all we can do is be locally wise, then what we need to bedoing is rinrpring our pris s h siud rri o siud pross.

This means we have to renounce grand systems as premises, but the metanar-rative that has been disparaged relentlessly for the last thirty years of historicaltheorizing was never a necessary foundation for historical practice. We have tounderstand that history proceeds by widening frames from an always local andsituated point of departure. It is the iterative path of actual experiencealwayslocal, partial, contingent, and falliblethat history retraces in a manner that isqu o, pri, oningn, nd ib. Bu nihr ph is nir bind

groping nd nihr nd b ruiss.117

What I propose to harvest rst is that science, philosophy, and history are so inex-tricably interwoven that none can make sense outside their nexus.118 Phiosoph oscience traditionally saw its project as the appraisal of scienticproducts (horis,laws) in terms of validity, with no regard to the process of their emergence. Thisdisinion hd no on onpu bu so disciplinar implications. Having dis-inguishd onpu h norative enterprise of appraisal from the descriptivenrpris o ouns, i od hs nrpriss o spr disciplinar contin-

gents in h sud o sin.119 Appraisal was the exclusive purview of philosophy,whrs ouns oud b o pshoog or soioog or hisor.120 The taskof evaluation of the products of scientic inquiry, of establishing the epistemologi-

. Thomas Nagel, The View fro Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 98).. Rheinberger celebrates the idea that scientific practice entails a significant element of grop-

ingin French, ttonneentas he cites from Michel Serres (Rheinberger, Toward a Histor ofEpisteic Things, 5, , 0, ). This is a significant revindication of empirical inquiry alongBonin ins gins r ong in o rionis-posiiis insisn on h prdn o hor

that we can trace back at least to a famous exchange between Immanuel Kant and Georg Forster inh ighnh nur.

8. This is why in his first study Rheinberger explicitly avowed: This book is written for bothscientists and historians as well as philosophers of science (Rheinberger, Toward a Histor of

Episteic Things, 2).9. It followed Reichenbachs distinction of the context of discovery from the context of justi-

fication. In terse terms, Carl Kordig summarizes the Received View as follows: Discovery is fordsripion on, or pshoog nd h hisor o h soioog o sin. Jusiiion, howr,

is for the philosophy of science and epistemology. Discovery is subjective. Justification is objective.It is also normative (Discovery and Justification, Philosoph of Science 5 [98], 0). See alsoElie Zahar, Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Invention? British Journal for the Philosophof Science (98), -; Ewa Chmielecka, The Context of Discovery and the Context ofJustification: A Reappraisal, in Polish Essas in the Philosoph of Natural Science, d. WdswKrajewski, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 8 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 98), -; HarveySiegel, Justification, Discovery and the Naturalizing of Epistemology, Philosoph of Science 47(980), 9-; and Paul Hoyningen-Huehne, Context of Discovery and Context of Justification,Studies in Histor and Philosoph of Science 18 (1987), 501-515.

0. [T]he old epistemology claimed to be prior to, and conceptually more fundamental than, thediverse empirical sciences. . . (Larry Briskman, Historicist Relativism and Bootstrap Rationality,The monist0 [9], 509).


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cal import of such products . . . falls squarely on the shoulders of the philosopherof science, wrote Harvey Siegel.121 Not even the scientists themselves were privyto this highest sanctum. Scientic decisions are one thing, the justication of sci -entic decisions another. . . . For what we are after, in the context of justication, isan account of the justicatory force of the scientists reasons for adopting [a giventheory]; an account that enlightens us as to why those reasons are goodreasons.122Even history of science acknowledged this hierarchy in its distinction of internalfrom external historyof the immanent, rational evolution of scientic knowledgefrom the intervention of psychological, political, economic, or other extraneousinuences.123 Richard Burian characterized such philosophy of science as act-ing h sorignjudge of scientic achievement: it is the philosopher who rstreveals theoretical structures perspicuously, who claries theories and cognitivesndrds b whih h r judgd, nd who sssss h ogi onsquns o

theoretical claims according to universally valid methodological and epistemo-logical standards.124 Burian raised three objections to this Received View. First,it made real scientic practice totally irrelevant, triggering the question of whysuch logicism should be considered a philosophy of science. Sond, i oud noprove that these standards held constant for all scientic practice over the course ofhistory. Third, it could not grasp the distinct career of a theory (what Rheinbergerwould characterize as the local, developing experimental system) and its relevanceto scientic rationality. Provoked by all this hubris, history of science and sciencestudies set about debunking this Received View.

Thus, history of science came to be at loggerheads with philosophy of sci-n.125 Nicholas Jardine posed the plaintive query: Why do historians and phi-losophers of science expect to prot from each others inquiries: and why aretheir expectations so apt to end in disillusionment. . .?126 The expectations wereperhaps most elegantly formulated in a squib from Imre Lakatos: Philosophy of

. Siegel, Justification, Discovery and the Naturalizing of Epistemology, 0.122.Ibid., 0. Karl Popper exemplified this disciplinary sense of philosophical hegemony: to

me the idea of turning for enlightenment concerning the aims of science, and its possible progress, tosociology or to psychology (or . . . to the history of science) is surprising and disappointing. Popperminced no words in 95: while the Logic of Discovery has little to learn from the Psychologyof Research, the latter has much to learn from the former (Karl Popper, Normal Science andIts Dangers, in Criticis and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrove

[Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 90], 58). He lamented, all I have said beforeagainst sociologistic and psychologistic tendencies and ways, especially in history, was in vain(ibid., 57-58).

123. The Rise of modern Science: External or Internal Factors , ed. George Basalla (Lexington,MA: D.C. Heath, 98); For a more recent and quite different view of internal vs. external history,see Steven Shapin, Discipline and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science as Seen throughthe Externalism/Internalism Debate,Histor of Science 30 (1992), 333-369.

124. Richard Burian, More than a Marriage of Convenience: On the Inextricability of History andPhilosophy of Science, Philosoph of Science 44 (1977), 5.

5. For this increasingly confrontational relation, see William Rehgs characterization of Kuhnsgap in his Cogent Science in Context: The Science Wars, Arguentation Theor, and Haberas(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 009).

. Nicholas Jardine, Philosophy of Science and the Art of Historican Interpretation, in Theor

Change, Ancient Axioatics, and Galileos methodolog: Proceedings of the 1978 Pisa Conferenceon the Histor and Philosoph of Science, ed. Jaakko Hintikka, David Gruender, and Evandro Agazzi(Dordrh: Rid, 1978), I, 341.


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science without history of science is empty; history of science without philoso-phy of science is blind.127 Working through these expectations we can elucidatethe mutual disillusionment. One element in the squib Lakatos lifted from Kantseems fairly straightforward: history of science without philosophy of scienceis blind.128 th rsons wh hisorins o sin nd phiosoph o sin,Kuhn observed in the late 90s, are, at once, apparent and well known.129 Noon did hisorins borrow onr ters from the philosophy of science, but itsupplied them with methodological and epistemological standards, nd prhpsn wih hprobles h ndd insiging.130 Howr, no sing phioso-

phy of sciencenot the historicist versions of Imre Lakatos, Steven Toulmin,or Larry Laudan, not Kuhn himself, and certainly not the Received Viewproved adequate to historical purposes. In the words of Mary Hesse, What hasin fact happened is that, far from philosophy providing criteria for history, allforms of historical investigation, internal as well as external, have led to radicalquestioning of all received philosophical views of science.131 As Nickles put it,providing intelligible descriptions and explanations of conceptual discoveriesis extremely difcult both for philosophers and for historians.132 H bord,reasoning is so complex and content-specic that no simple logic of discoverycould possibly do justice to it.133 For the empirical disciplines the abstract-uni-versal norms thematized in philosophy of science began to appear increasinglyirrn.134 Philosophical models of proper evaluation are irrelevant to the his-torians task. Indeed, with their typical stress upon the formal, abstract propertiesof verbal argument, they can even impede an adequate naturalistic understandingof actual judgments. . . .135 Historians have made the best of eclectic choicesamong plausible terms, programs of investigation, and problems to generate arobust body of work. The younger generation of historians of science . . . [t]o aperson . . . dene themselves explicitly, if sometimes oppositionally, to the theo-

. Imre Lakatos, History of Science and Its Rational Reconstruction, Boston Studies in thePhiosoph o Sin8 (1971) (= PSA 1970), 91.

128.Ibid.

9. Kuhn, The Relation between the History and the Philosophy of Science, in The EssentialTension, 10.

0. [H]istory of science . . . is always written from the point of view of a particular philosophy

of science (John Passmore, The Relevance of History to Philosophy of Science, in ScientificExplanation and Understanding: Essas on Reasoning and Rationalit in Science, d. Nihos

Rescher [Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 98], 98).131. mr Hss,Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosoph of Science (Bloomington and

london: Indin Unirsi Prss, 1980), 7.

. Nickles, Scientific Discovery and the Future of Philosophy of Science, .133.Ibid., 16.

. Even in philosophy of science a clear trend has emerged aimed at disciplinary or problem-specific methodological and meta-methodological study. Philosophy of science has increasinglyopted to work within the local domain of a scientific specialty. Indeed, Steven Fuller proclaimedin 99, the future of the philosophy of science lies either in some other branch of science studies(especially history and sociology) or in the conceptual foundations of the special sciences. (Fuller,Philosoph of Science and Its Discontents, 2nd ed. [New York: Guilford Press, 99], xii).

5. Donald MacKenzie and Barry Barnes, Scientific Judgment: The BiometryMendelismControversy, inNatural Order: Historical Studies in Scientific Culture, d. Brr Brns nd SnShpin (Br His nd london: Sg, 1979), 191-192.


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JOHN H. zammItO410

retical agendas of the sociologynot the philosophy of science.136 Specically,no historian r Kuhn hs rid hr hnd diining phiosophi ssonsfrom the history of sciencethough some philosophers have: Lakatos, Laudan,and [Dudley] Shapere. . .137 Instead, the estrangement became quite deep.138

What remains to be claried is the other element in the Lakatos squib: philoso-phy of science without history of science is empty.139 The challenge is: Just howdoes history serve as evidence for normative methodology; how do the facts oh ps onn wih wh oughtto be done in the future?140 Rihrd Brnsin,for example, claims: [A]n appeal to the past, to the history of philosophy, or to amore general cultural and social history is never sufcient. . . . I . . . reject the ideathat historyin any of its formsis or can be a foundational discipline, that it cananswer the questions that we ask in philosophy.141 th is o s, h srosnfactvalue dichotomy, ostensibly upheld from Hume forward, remained en-trenched as the last dogma of positivism.142 By the 980s, in fact, epistemologi-cal historicism appealed to only a distinct minority within mainstream Americanphiosoph o sin, whos prpondrn onrns urnd o h rssrion o

scientic realism.143 As Steve Fuller put it, with the latest round of the scienticrealism debates, philosophers of science have returned to a quasi-transcendentalmode of arguing. . . .144 By the beginning of the 990s, the link between historyof science and mainstream philosophy of science became signicantly attenuated.Thus, Fuller observed in 99, the past fteen years have witnessed a steady re-treat behind disciplinary boundaries.145 Sad but true, . . . HPS has gradually lostits momentum.146 In sr pubiions, h o-oundr o h journ Studies in

Histor and Philosoph of Science bemoaned this eventuality, and the Philosophyof Science Association organized a panel to discuss it.147 th rnd did no b,and many programs in HPS closed or mutated into other congurations.

136. fur, Philosoph of Science and Its Discontents, 3.

137.Ibid., 2.

138. S Rhg, Cogent Science in Context.

9. Lakatos, History of Science and Its Rational Reconstruction, 9.0. James R. Brown, History and the Norms of Science, PSA 1980, o. I, 237.. Richard Bernstein, History, Philosophy, and the Question of Relativism, inAt the Nexus of

Philosoph and Histor, d. B. Dunhur (ahns, Ga, nd london: Unirsi o Gorgi Prss,

1987), 11, 17.

. It needs to be consigned to the ash-heap with all the rest. See Hilary Putnam, The Collapse

of the Fact/Value Dichoto and Other Essas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 00);Jack Nelson, The Last Dogma of Empiricism? in Nelson and Nelson, eds., Feinis, Science, andthe Philosoph of Science, 59-78.

143. Scientific Realis, d. J. Leplin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 98). Thereare not a few philosophers even now who would claim that philosophy has no need of history, forexample, Andr Kukla: I think that the importance of history of science to philosophy of sciencehas been greatly exaggerated (Scientific Realism, Scientific Practice, and the Natural OntologicalAttitude,British Journal for the Philosoph of Science 5 [99], 99).

. Steve Fuller, Is History and Philosophy of Science Withering on the Vine?, Philosoph ofthe Social Sciences 21 (1991), 150.

145.Ibid., 149.

146. fur, Philosoph of Science and Its Discontents, 3.

. See Larry Laudan, Thoughts on HPS: 0 Years Later, Studies in Histor and Philosoph of

Science 0 (989), 9-. Laudan continued this lament in The History of Science and the Philosophyof Science, in Copanion to the Histor of modern Science, d. R. c. Ob, G. N. cnor, J. R. R.Christie, and M. J. S. Hodge (London and New York: Routledge, 990), -59. See the session of


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What are the prospects for a revival of HPS? There isand there should beno going back to the old relationship. But might there be a new one? I want to holdstrongly for the prospect of renewed HPS, but I believe that history ofphioso-phy and science is the ultimate warrant for history andphilosophy of science.That is, as a historian, I am interested in adequate description and explanation ofwhat philosophy and science have been in the modern period, and I contend thatwithout their mutual constitution, no adequate account is possible; indeed, it isfundamentally misguided to believe that we can understand philosophy withoutrrn o nur sin or nur sin wihou rrn o phiosoph.

to dn h hisor ofphiosoph nd sin, nd hus rins HPS on his

empirical and modest foundation, it will be necessary to put behind us the masternarrative that privileges physics as the paradigm of all science (indeed, all knowl-edge) and to consider the variety of sciences in the emphatic plural. It will alsobe necessary to recognize that knowledge is always a collective or communalacquisition, so that social epistemology and the sociology of knowledge will beat the core of any historical reconstruction. And, nally, it will be necessary tog ps h hprbo on de sicle constructivism, which could not nd away past language to take seriously the dogged concern with an actual materialworld that has been at the heart of science throughout the modern period, at ther s.148

Naturalisms return in philosophy of science is timely for those of us who seekto afrm the soundness of historicism against not only its old-fashioned positivist,but equally against its postmodern, critics. Nickles, Briskman, and others havetermed this a broadly bootstrap account of the growth of knowledge.149 In hwords of Dudley Shapere, we learn whatknowledge is as we attain knowledge,. . . w rn how to learn in the process of learning.150 As Nickles puts it, a de-fensible historicism does not rule out a bootstrap account of the development ofknowledge; on the contrary, it requires it!151 Human knowledge has grown by

the Philosophy of Science Association, 99, entitled What Has the History of Science to Say tothe Philosophy of Science? with contributions by Michael Ruse, David Hull, Rachel Laudan, RobertRihrds, nd mrg vido (PSA 1992, o. 2, 467-496).

8. See my essays against constructivist hyperbole: Are We Being Theoretical Yet? TheNew Historicism, The New Philosophy of History and Practicing Historians, Journal of modernHistor , no. (99), 8-8; Ankersmits Postmodern Historiography: The Hyperbole of

Opacity, Histor and Theor , no. (998), 0-; Reading Experience: The Debate inIntellectual History among Scott, Toews and LaCapra, inReclaiing Identit: Realist Theor andthe Predicaent of Postodernis, ed. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-Garcia (Berkeley:University of California Press, 000), 9-; Rorty, Historicism and the Practice of History: APolemic, inRethinking Histor: The Journal of Theor and Practice 0, no. (00), 9-; WhatsNew in the Sociology of Knowledge, in Handbook of the Philosoph of Science: Philosoph ofAnthropolog andSociolog, ed. Stephen Turner and Mark Risjord (Oxford: Elsevier Press, 00),9-85; Historians and Philosophy of Historiography, inBlackwell Copanion to the Philosophof Histor, ed. Aviezer Tucker (Oxford: Blackwell, 008), -8; What is to be done?manifestosfor Histor and the Mission of History Today,Historicall Speaking 9, no. 6 (2008), 30-32.

9. Nickles, Good Science as Bad History, 9; Briskman, Historicist Relativism and BootstrapRationality. See also Nickles, Remarks on the Use of History as Evidence, Snthese 69 (1986),253-266.

50. Dudley Shapere, What Can the Theory of Knowledge Learn from the History ofKnowledge? inReason and the Search for Knowledge, Boson Sudis in h Phiosoph o Sin78 (Dordrh: Rid, 1984 ), 185.

5. Nickles, Good Science as Bad History, .


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JOHN H. zammItO412

means of a self-transforming, dialectical or bootstrap process, rooted in varia-tion, selective retention, and triangulation of historically available resources.152The model here should be learning as a process, not truth as a whole: we mustsrss on sp o Hg gins nohr.153 Nickles afrms a Deweyan Hege-lianism: embracing Hegels methodological insights, his anti-dualism, and hishistoricist and sociological tendencies.154 This pragmatist-naturalist reception is,he aptly afrms, only weakl Hgin bus . . . i prsupposs no rnsn-dent Reason that shapes the overall developmental process.155

Under these new auspices, I seek a reconciliation between the human and thenatural sciencesboth to open out the hermeneutic dimensions of actual natu-ral-scientic inquiry and to retrieve a sense of disciplinary legitimacy for the hu-man sciences, and specically history. Postmodern theory has lumped all em-pirical inquiry with positivism, a reductive simplication to discredit connectionbetween history and evidence or warrant and thus arrogate history to ction. If werst dispense with the positivist delusion of what science ust be, s w s wihthe postmodernist delusion that language can never refer in n ognii worh-while manner, we can turn to the question of what historical inquiry can be, ndput the methodological and epistemological questions of historical practice backinto a sane context. History ofphilosophy and science, as an empirical inquiry withoningn nd ib sndrds o djudiion or dqu nd idn, nd

not despair of intersubjectively conrmable results. History is no more a matter ofction than natural science, though in both the scope for imaginative constructionhas been systematically downplayed in the epoch of positivist ascendancy.

Working out the epistemological and methodological character of historicalouning, hn, is nssr ur o his ronsiuion o HPS. Whn phi-

losophy of science abandoned the context of discovery to the empirical humansciences, it left a major theoretical matter to be claried, namely how it was thathistory (and the other empirical human sciences) were to proceed in such empiri -cal inquiry and to appraise their own efcacy.156 As Nickles put it, historians andphiosophrs have succeeded in making intelligible the routes to several importantdiscoveries.157How did they do that? Historical practice presumes that reason-ing [in science and elsewhere] usually is so complex and context-specic that itis pointless to seek a universal algorithm.158 That does not make it pointless, how-ever, to take methodological bearings, to theorize the endeavor, and to use, in ourtheorizing, the exempla of intelligibility that we appear to possess. The wantof totality does not betoken want of concreteness. Hilary Putnam evokes the keycaution from John Austin: enough is not everything, but enough can be enough.159

152.Ibid., 117.

153. th is, Hg s horis o dii pross s gins Hg s phiosophr o oi.

5. Nickles, Integrating the Science Studies Disciplines, in The Cognitive Turn, d. Snfur (Dordrh: Kuwr, 1989), 248.

55. Nickles, Good Science as Bad History, .5. For a brave effort to articulate these matters across a broad canvas, see Roger Smith, Being

Huan: Historical Knowledge and the Creation of Huan Nature (New York: Columbia UniversityPrss, 2007).

5. Nickles, Scientific Discovery and the Future of Philosophy of Science, 0.158.Ibid., 16.

59. Hilary Putnam, The Craving for Objectivity, New Literar Histor 15 (1984), 239.


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That is what is so promising in Rheinbergers historicized epistemology, withits local wisdoms.

The whole idea of dialectic is that one never starts from nowhere.160 A problemis inconceivable without a context; it is always already mediated. If there is no ul-timatefoundation, there is always someplatfor.161 The process model of historyof science offers us a rich vein through which to explore our own path-depen-dency and recover our situated point of departure. Two points can be established.firs, retrospectivel we can trace the routes of (some of) our insights. Second,making intelligible those successes can empower us, both psychologically andmethodologically, to undertake new inquiries. Not only can we be condent thatproblems and constraints do not fall out of the sky, but we can be hopeful thatwe can reiterate at least some of the moves that led us through prior solutions andlearn how to attempt new ones.162 Rioni is h onp w n riuto afrm that science has indeed found a way of bootstrapping stabilized pastresults and practices into the future.163 Therefore, with Nickles I am forced toreject [hyperbolic postmodernism], historicist though I am, as an untenably strongform of historicism.164 With Nickles, too, I believe the project now is to temperour historicism with a dose of (pragmatic) naturalism, and achieve thereby amore Deweyan sort of balance.165 I think we need a theory that registers theentrenchento pris, boh s pprus nd s onps, gnring (ph-

dpndn) sruurs h r hrognous nd ph, bu nonhss r nd

bindinghence a theory ofconstraints. And I think we need a theory that regis-rs eergence: h rdi no h rups h onr o n nd

gn in hisor.166 th is, I s h proj o ronsiu HPS in pr wih

the project of working through a robust historicist philosophy of history. I ndRheinbergers work a vital resource in that project.

JOHn H. zAmmitO

Rice Universit

0. The dialectic does not simply set to work in a blind and immediate fashion, but proceedsrather from the indispensable insight that a beginning must always be made at a specific anddeterminate point, if indeed a beginning is to be made at all (Rdiger Bubner, Closure and theUnderstanding of History, in Bubner, The Innovations of Idealis [Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniversity Press, 00], 9).

. In the long run, the conception of a sequence may serve as a scaffolding, which it may beonnin o disrd r on, r i hs gin ss o prious inisib porions o h hisori

edifice, Kubler observed in The Shape of Tie, 32.. Nickles, Scientific Discovery and the Future of Philosophy of Science, 9.. Nickles, Good Science as Bad History, 0.164.Ibid., 88.

165.Ibid., 116, 89.

166. A model that offers extraordinary resonance, in my view, is William Wimsatts notion ofgenerative entrenchment. See Wimsatt, Generativity, Entrenchment, Evolution, and Innateness:Philosophy, Evolutionary Biology, and Conceptual Foundations of Science, in Where Biolog meetsPscholog: Philosophical Essas, ed. Valerie Hardcastle ( Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press,99), 9-9; Wimsatt, Developmental Constraints, Generative Entrenchment, and the Innate-Acquired Distinction, in Integrating Scientic Disciplines (Dordrh: mrinus Nijho, 1986),

85-08, and Wimsatt,Re-engineering Philosoph for Liited Beings: Piecewise Approxiations toRealit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 00). For an instance of this kind of conver-gn, s Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science, d. m. Noron Wis

(Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 00).

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