Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines (review)

With some notable exceptions, such as the work of Robert K. Merton or J. D. Bernal, the history of science in this century was long dominated by positivist intellectual history and near-hagiographic biography, both of which foregrounded theoretical innovation. But arguably dating from Paul Foreman’s “Weimar Culture, Causality and Quantum Theory, 1918–1927” in 1971, ¹ concerns of the new social history, as well as those of ethnomethodology and the “new” sociology of science (the empirical programme of relativism, or EPOR) have increasingly penetrated the sacred domain of “pure” science. The resulting “new” history of science emphasizes experimental practices and technologies, and the institutional, social, economic, political, and cultural nexus in which they are situated.

The core epistemic and historical issue at stake in these new approaches can be framed two ways: To what extent is the content of science underdetermined by purely scientific evidence and considerations (which implies that other, “social,” factors might play a role in problem choice, experimental practices, and scientific belief-formation)? Or, to what extent do extra-scientific factors alone determine the epistemic content of scientific beliefs? The two formulations are not equivalent, and an affirmative answer to the former does not entail an affirmative answer to the latter.

In this collection of essays, all but the first and last previously published, Timothy Lenoir clearly demonstrates the historical and cultural contingency of the development of scientific research programmes and disciplines, and of scientific belief choice (programmes and beliefs more harmonious with broader cultural suppositions, and with the social interests of the scientists involved, are more likely to be embraced by those scientists). Chapters 2 and 3 offer what amounts to a nuanced critical literature survey of the “social turn” in the history of science and the “historical turn” in the philosophy of science, circa the early 1990s: All the usual suspects—Latour, ² Shapin and Schaffer, ³ Peter Galison, ⁴ Andy Pickering, ⁵ even guest appearances by Foucault and Bourdieu—are present and accounted for. These chapters are an excellent introduction to recent trends in the history and philosophy of science for those who haven’t attended to their neighboring sub-disciplines for a while.

Chapters 4 through 8 comprise the substantive core of the book: In them, Lenoir persuasively demonstrates that the development of specific aspects of nineteenth and early twentieth century German physiology, medicine, optics, and organic chemistry can be comprehended only by understanding the political, cultural, economic, ideological, and even artistic contexts of their creation. On these accounts, science is of a piece with culture and politics. The great virtue of these chapters is that they eschew the usual pompous generalities, and instead minutely detail specific connections, say, between scientific optics, the physiology of vision, painting style and technique, political ideology, and personal affiliations and interests (Chapter 6). Finally, Chapter 9 extends the same sort of analysis, less theoretically enlightened, or encumbered, as the case might be, to the twentieth century: to Varian Associates’ creation of nuclear magnetic resonance instrumentation and the discipline of physical chemistry.

It is in his eighth chapter, “Practical Reason and the Construction of Knowledge: the Lifeworld of Haber-Bosch,” that Lenoir provides the clearest (although still somewhat opaque) elucidation of the interpretive stance that animates the entire book. First, for his portrayal of the character of scientific knowledge, Lenoir draws upon William James’ pragmatism, as well as the phenomenology of Ernst Mach and others. Lenoir’s central epistemological claim is that the only way scientists know the world is through their practices—not only the whole concatenation of apparatus, technologies, and procedures through which nature is “produced” for scientific scrutiny, but also the social processes by which scientists negotiate and persuade. Second, and this is what sets Lenoir’s interpretation apart from others of similar ilk, these scientific practices are integral to the “seamless web” of what Edmund Husserl characterized as a “lifeworld,” which comprises “the total set of intuitive assumptions, habits, cultural practices broadly construed, and...