On Fri, 15 Jan 1999, brian whatcott wrote:
> I'll take a shot at this one.
> 1) The essence of 'science' is repeatable physical experiment
> butressed with plausible theoretical models.
>
> [etc - stuff deleted about the importantce of journal papers and
citations]
So if I happen to be interested in C18 natural history, let alone early
modern alchemy, the object of my study is not 'science'. However, I happen
to think that such subjects *are* worth studying, and if you want me to
rename my area of interest as something along the lines of History of
(attempts at) natural knowledge rather than 'History of science', then
fine. If you define 'science' as narrowly as this, then I suppose you can
easily put numbers to concepts such as doubling time - but it ignores the
variety of knowledge-making practices which have occurred in historical
periods, and in non-Western societies, and surely these are of historical
interest.
When I started this thread, I'm afraid I rather assumed that pre-1800
history was worth studying (and I suggest this remains true even when
opposed by arguments along the lines of 'more people/scientists live(d) in
the C20 than in all earlier periods'). From some of the responses, I start
to wonder if I was wrong. Maybe we shouldn't worry that few of the next
generation of scholars are going to be interested in anything more ancient
than the C20...?
I do agree with the earlier comment that lack of language training may be
part of the problem. While we were talking about this at the Manchester
conference, we wondered if, additionally, people were more happy studying
familiar practices (ie modern science, rather than more alien alchemy) -
it being easier to start work on such subjects. But then we might ask
questions about the background of historians of science, since we might
think that the familiarity with modern science expected of someone with a
science background would make them more likely to study modern periods,
while someone with an historical background would be more willing to study
older stuff. However, I have to admit that our impromptu survey on this
didn't yield any significant correlations. But I would be interested to
hear about other people's thoughts on this.
Aileen.
***********
Aileen Fyfe
Dept. of History and Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge
Free School Lane (+44 1223) 740 537
Cambridge CB2 3RH [log in to unmask]
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