Final Comment

Simon Schaffer; Steven Shapin

doi:10.1086/691419

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Final Comment

https://doi.org/10.1086/691419

Final Comment

Mar 1, 2017
Isis
Simon Schaffer +1 more

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Previous articleNext article FreeSecond LookFinal Comment Authors’ ResponseSimon Schaffer and Steven ShapinSimon Schaffer Search for more articles by this author and Steven Shapin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTo have your book looked at once is satisfying; to have it looked at twice—and so long after it was written—is surprising. For the lucky authors, the temptation is to assume that their work has lasted because of its intrinsic merits; but it’s a temptation to be resisted. After all, there might be many other reasons for longevity. When we think of academic works that have now stuck around for a long time, we find some that we admire for their insight, novelty, scholarly flair, or readability; some that persist because they are Examples of Error, offering welcome target practice for Right Thinkers; some sufficiently oracular and allusive that they encourage all-in academic wrestling matches for their correct interpretation; and others whose “survival” is moot because they are more commonly cited than read. We can—just—understand why wholly or mainly programmatic works might be discussed and contended over for many years, but our book was, in substance, an empirical study of passages in and around seventeenth-century experimental practice.True, we meant to exemplify what seemed to us better ways of dealing with the categories of “the social” and “the natural,” of “intellectual and social order,” of what was reckoned to be “internal” and “external” to science. We also tried to unsettle and reframe then-and-now common talk of “factors”—scientific and social. These prompts were indeed therapeutically intended, and we considered them to have some application outside of the historical passages examined. We thought that there were, in the 1980s, some major resistances to such sensibilities. By identifying problems of social-order understood as proper to sociology with those of knowledge-order accounted as the province of philosophers, our aim was certainly not to banish talk of boundaries and distinctions between such enterprises but, rather, to help in the interpretative task of making sense of them.As it turned out, the book had little effect on the historiography of seventeenth-century natural philosophy. That’s one reason why it’s so remarkable that generous space has been made in the pages of Isis for this impressive group of readings and rereadings. And maybe rewarding too: when Hobbes’s Leviathan was cited in Parliament for “blasphemy and profaneness,” Samuel Pepys recorded that its secondhand price tripled.The book was written over thirty years ago, and both authors have gone on to other things. We have, in general, been reluctant to jump into the many controversies that have swirled around it, and we recall responding to criticism on only one occasion—when the book’s factual accuracy was significantly called into question. (All authors, we think, are bound to do that.)Six or seven years ago, when Princeton University Press asked us to provide an introduction to a new edition, we found it easy to view the thing, as it were, from the outside—reminding readers of the specific historical and institutional circumstances from which it emerged and considering the original reviews—critical, approving, mixed, bland, and point-missing—as Signs of the Times. As some second-lookers discover, the book contains instances of out-of-date language and a few concerns that, they judge, no longer greatly animate historians or social scientists. Of course it does. How could it not? We offer neither excuses nor defenses for having written a book in the mid-1980s that reflects some concerns of that period.What puzzled us as the book continued to attract attention and commentary, and especially as the new edition was prepared, continues to puzzle us now: first, why the book has not yet followed the fate of the dinosaurs; second, why, despite the predictions of some first-lookers who admired the thing, it has not spawned generically imitative offspring. About the second puzzle, we have no very good ideas, but we suppose this may have something to do with the book’s blurred genres. These kinds of things aren’t easy to write; they call out for collaboration; and, as we’ve been told from time to time by younger scholars, they’re not professionally prudent—easy to “misunderstand” and not such a good idea if you’re looking to position yourself in the now-brutally-competitive disciplinary job market. The book was a first effort by two scholars—one then young, one even then not so young. But, to paraphrase Christopher Marlowe, all that was another country; and, besides, the academic culture from which it emerged is well dead.So we thank all involved in this exercise, but, in being asked to respond, we find ourselves in a situation that is not so much difficult as impossible. There are two reasons for this—one specific to recent events, the other a matter (for the authors) of principle. The particular reason for difficulty is the extended reflection represented by the Princeton reissue. Responding to our second-lookers here would inevitably repeat much of what we wrote in the introduction to that edition, and we should not do that. (We would inevitably, and rightly, be accused of double-dipping, and that is bad manners.) The second reason is an Old Chestnut in some strands of sociology and in cultural and literary theory: it concerns the extent to which authors can ever dictate, control, or even substantially influence the interpretations subsequently made of their work. We accept that we cannot, and we think that no author can. Of course, if the world was differently arranged we would have liked to influence readers’ opinions—who then wouldn’t? That we consider the interpretative arguments in the book to be already sufficiently clear is also to say we’re like any other authors, having done the best we could, seeing no reasons to withdraw our arguments, and feeling that there is nothing to apologize for—save, possibly, for the use of one or two ironic or allusive expressions that have, surprisingly, been read either literally or in isolation from the contexts invoked in the sentences preceding. (Consider here the book’s last sentence.) That some readings and evaluations have left us bewildered—and we specially mention here the notion that the book is a form of social reductionism, showing the “influence” of “social factors” on science—is, again, to make us type-specimens of the authorial species.A book is like a ship that authors build and launch on the sea, but whose journey they cannot steer. As authors of this book, we tried to be clear, reliable, and, we hoped, interesting, but we were never so foolish as to think we could dictate, or even substantially affect, what readers later made of our efforts. So we are deeply grateful for the second-lookers’ interest, but any material response would look like an attempt to control what cannot be controlled. We want to enact in practice what many scholars embrace only in principle.NotesSimon Schaffer is Professor of History of Science at the University of Cambridge. He has written on the history of physical sciences and the social history of scientific knowledge and technique. In 2015 he was awarded the Caird Medal by the National Maritime Museum. He has recently published La fabrique des sciences modernes (Seuil, 2014) and coedited The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom; [email protected].Steven Shapin is Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. He has written about early modern science and about entrepreneurial science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. More recent work deals with the history of ideas about food and eating, with taste, and with the place of subjectivity in knowledge making. Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA; [email protected]. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 108, Number 1March 2017 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/691419 © 2017 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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