The whole of this book is an argument against the continuity thesis (exemplified by Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (1992)), but I want in this note to present some general arguments and to offer some crucial concessions.
The argument that there were no sciences before Tycho saw his nova in 1572 is open to some obvious (but mostly mistaken) objections. Kuhn thought Ptolemaic astronomy was a mature science (Kuhn, Structure (1970), 68–9): it certainly had functioning paradigms and a capacity for progress. Although some of its central arguments – that all movements in the heavens are circular, that there is no change in the heavens, that the earth is at the centre of the universe, that there can be no vacuum – derived from philosophy (Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (1957) calls these ‘blinders’ (86) and ‘entanglements’ (90)), they corresponded rather well with experience. And it made possible, not only Copernicanism, but also Tycho’s research programme. Astronomy, though, was a peculiar discipline because it accepted unquestioningly the Aristotelian distinction between the sublunary and supralunary worlds. That distinction only began to break down in 1572, and with it went the notion that there might be different principles governing different parts of the universe, that there could be different sciences for different places. 1572 thus really is a crucial moment of change.
There are strong arguments for thinking that Aristotelian biology was a science (Leroi, The Lagoon (2014)). But Aristotle established no tradition of biological enquiry. In the seventeenth century William Harvey saw himself as an Aristotelian biologist, but he recognized only one person between himself and Aristotle who had understood how to conduct biological research, and that was his own teacher (and Galileo’s friend), Girolamo Fabrizi d’Acquapendente (Lennox, ‘The Disappearance of Aristotle’s Biology’ (2001); Lennox, ‘William Harvey’ (forthcoming)). Similarly, there are strong arguments for thinking that Archimedes was a scientist (Russo, The Forgotten Revolution (2004)), but his science had little influence in the Middle Ages except in so far as it could be integrated into Aristotelianism; it is only late in the sixteenth century that the mathematicians begin to imagine an Archimedean science which might supplant Aristotle (Clagett, ‘The Impact of Archimedes on Medieval Science’ (1959); Laird, ‘Archimedes among the Humanists’ (1991)). Thus the Scientific Revolution recuperated the lost sciences of Aristotelian biology and Archimedean mathematics; but very quickly it moved away from its sources: Harvey had no followers who claimed, as he did, to be true Aristotelians, and Galileo had no followers who claimed, as he did, to be disciples of Archimedes.
As far as Kuhn was concerned, Aristotelian dynamics was itself a mature science (Kuhn, Structure (1970), 10; see also Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (1957), 77–98; Kuhn, The Essential Tension (1977), 24–35, 253–65; Kuhn, The Road since Structure (2000), 15–20). Although he refused to recognize that optics was a science before Newton, because there were always competing schools (and so no ‘normal’ science), he presented Aristotelian dynamics as a successful paradigm which was supplanted in the late Middle Ages by impetus theory, which in its turn led to Galileo’s new physics (Kuhn, Structure (1970), 118–25). The test here is that ‘the successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature sciences’ (Kuhn, Structure (1970), 12). But the medieval theory of impetus produced no such transition. Aristotle continued to be the textbook, and although the theory of impetus was used to patch and mend problems within Aristotle’s theory, there were no separate treatises devoted to impetus theory (Sarnowsky, ‘Concepts of Impetus’ (2008)). Impetus theory was used to handle some anomalies, not to bring about a revolution; indeed, medieval natural philosophers were incapable of imagining a revolution that would supplant Aristotle. Because they were not conducting normal science, they never finally resolved the problems that puzzled them. There are two characteristic forms that natural philosophy takes in the Middle Ages: one is the commentary on Aristotle; the other is the collection of quaestiones, of problems to which there is no agreed solution. Over time new problems were added; old ones were never eliminated.
Of course one reason why Aristotelian natural philosophy survived virtually unchallenged through the Middle Ages was that outside three very restricted areas (the magnet, the rainbow, alchemy) experiments were not conducted, and where appeals to experience were made these never involved measurement. Thus in the vast bulk of Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (1959), the first proper experiments are those conducted by Galileo. Turn to the even vaster bulk of Grant (ed.), A Source Book in Medieval Science (1974), and we find, for example, a section entitled by its editor ‘Experiments Demonstrating that Nature Abhors a Vacuum’ (327–8), translated from Marsilius of Inghen (1340–1396). But these are experientiae or experiences: Marsilius has collected examples of phenomena which seem best explained by the claim that nature abhors a vacuum (one can suck water up through a straw, for instance). He has not conducted any experiments. When we turn to William Gilbert (On the Magnet, 1600), on the other hand, we find not only specially designed experiments, but also (something we do not find in his predecessors, such as Garzoni) experiments that require measurements.
A very powerful intellectual tradition has been dedicated to showing that medieval philosophy was a precondition for modern science (e.g. Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science (1996); Hannam, God’s Philosophers (2009)). This work builds on the pathbreaking studies of Pierre Duhem (1861–1916), Annalise Maier (1905–1971), and Marshall Clagett (1916–2005). It is no part of my argument to dispute the claim that we only have the sciences we have because Aristotle and the medieval philosophers opened up certain lines of enquiry; the first scientists inherited a set of problems from their predecessors, but their procedures for resolving those problems were new, and the intellectual tools they constructed to facilitate those procedures were drawn not from philosophy but from astronomy and the law. No medieval natural philosopher had a view of natural science as making progress, and no medieval natural philosopher was engaged in research, if we understand that to mean the gathering of relevant new information. Tycho, on the other hand, had a research programme which he conducted systematically over many years, and which he believed would resolve fundamental problems in contemporary astronomy; and with the idea of a research programme came, necessarily, the idea of progress.
Rethinking an important subject like the Scientific Revolution involves a complex process of recalibration and revaluation; topics which once seemed central become marginal, and topics which once seemed of merely antiquarian interest take on a new importance. There is a very extensive literature devoted to the relationship between Christianity and science in the early modern period.ii Some argue that belief in a creator God was a fundamental prerequisite for modern science, as it made possible the idea of laws of nature, an idea unknown in ancient Greece and Rome, or in China. Others claim that there is a particular affinity between one or other particular sort of Christianity (Puritanism, for example) and the new science.iiii I do not find these arguments convincing, although they are certainly intriguing. If monotheism was what counted, there would have been a scientific revolution in the Islamic and Orthodox worlds. If Protestantism was what counted, Galileo would not have been a great scientist. The idea of laws of nature represents a crucial test case, and theological questions do not prove to be fundamental: indeed, the key source for the concept appears to be Lucretius; and, as for the religious convictions of the first scientists, the only safe conclusion is that generalization is impossible. There are Jesuits and Jansenists, Calvinists and Lutherans, and some who have little or no belief. The first scientists appear, as far as their religious beliefs are concerned, to be a more or less random sample of the intellectuals of seventeenth-century Europe. Many of the scientists I have discussed were profoundly pious, but their religious faith was not what they had in common. To grasp this point one only has to think of Pascal and Newton, the first a Jansenist and the second an Arian.iiiiii What they had in common was not religion but mathematics and, of course, a need for freedom of expression. ‘Me tenant comme je suis, un pied dans un pays et l’autre en un autre, je trouve ma condition très heureuse, en ce qu’elle est libre,’ wrote Descartes to Elizabeth of Bohemia in the summer of 1648 (‘Carrying on as I do, with one foot in one country [France] and the other in another [the Netherlands], I find my situation very happy, in that I am free.’
The conviction that Wittgenstein was a relativist is entrenched in the literature on sociology and the history of science, although philosophers are far from united on the question (Kusch, ‘Annalisa Coliva on Wittgenstein and Epistemic Relativism’ (2013); see also Pritchard, ‘Epistemic Relativism, Epistemic Incommensurability and Wittgensteinian Epistemology’ (2010)). It seems to me to be at odds with a number of passages in which Wittgenstein expresses a quite different view of science. In a note from 1931 he wrote: ‘As simple as it sounds: the distinction between magic and science can be expressed by saying that in science there is progress, but in magic there isn’t. Magic has no tendency within itself to develop’ (Wittgenstein, ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’ (1993), 141). The fact that an enterprise makes progress does not necessarily mean I should adopt it: athletes run faster every year, but that is no reason why I should take up athletics. But science is a special case: if science gets better at understanding nature, gets better at prediction and control, then it is very difficult to see how I can remain indifferent in the face of such progress.
A remark from 1931 can easily be dismissed as unrepresentative, but we find essentially the same views in Wittgenstein’s last set of notes, On Certainty (1969). Consider the following passage:
131. No, experience is not the ground for our game of judging. Nor is its outstanding success.
132. Men have judged that a king can make rain; we say this contradicts all experience …
I take Wittgenstein to be saying that we cannot ground induction in experience, just as Hume showed that we cannot ground our notion of causation in experience; but even though we cannot ground a particular procedure in a philosophical justification, we should certainly go on using it if it is outstandingly successful. The magical claim that a king can make rain is not an ‘outstanding success’; and when we say that it ‘contradicts all experience’ what we have is a clash between their magic and our science in which our science is superior to their magic.
Compare:
170. I believe what people transmit to me in a certain manner. In this way I believe geographical, chemical, historical facts etc. That is how I learn the sciences. Of course learning is based on believing.
If you have learnt that Mont Blanc is 4000 metres high, if you have looked it up on the map, you say you know it.
And can it now be said: we accord credence in this way because it has proved to pay?
Again, the argument would seem to be that I cannot prove that Mont Blanc is 4000 metres high, but believing it, on the authority of a map, has ‘proved to pay’. In other words, the social procedures we have for establishing certain types of fact cannot be justified, but they are successful, they pay, and this is why we employ them.
And (to take one of a series of notes dealing with the idea of going to the moon: 106, 108, 111, 117, 171, 226, 238, 264, 269, 286, 327, 332, 337, 338, 661, 662, 667):
286. What we believe depends on what we learn. We all believe that it isn’t possible to get to the moon; but there might be people who believe that that is possible and that it sometimes happens. We say: these people do not know a lot that we know. And, let them be never so sure of their belief - they are wrong and we know it.
If we compare our system of knowledge with theirs then theirs is evidently the poorer one by far.
It is easy to assume that Wittgenstein’s point here is a relativist one: we say their knowledge is inferior to ours; but they say the same about us. But suppose a society which believes that one can travel to the moon by leaving one’s body, as shamans do (cf. §§106, 667), and compare it with Wittgenstein’s own world in 1950: isn’t it fair to say that the scientific knowledge of 1950, which made possible the jet engine and the atom bomb, was superior to (more successful than) the magical knowledge of a shamanistic culture? (see Child, Wittgenstein (2011), 207–12)
The same sort of point is made again:
474. This game [assuming the stability of things as the norm] proves its worth. That may be the cause of its being played, but it is not the ground.
Thus I assume that this table will continue to exist if I get up from it and leave the room. I cannot justify this belief, but believing works out well (it pays, it is successful), and this is why I continue to act as if this belief were true (this is the cause of this game’s being played).
Lastly:
617. Certain events would put me into a position in which I could not go on with the old language-game any further. In which I was torn away from the sureness of the game.
Indeed, doesn’t it seem obvious that the possibility of a language-game is conditioned by certain facts?
Take the language-game represented by Ptolemaic astronomy; that game ceased to be possible when the telescope showed that Venus has a full set of phases. Thus language-games do not simply succeed, progress, pay, or prove their worth; they can also become unsustainable if the facts change.
Taken together these passages suggest that there are some types of knowledge which are superior to others because they work, they pay, they are superior, they make progress, and they are not at odds with the known facts. We cannot provide a satisfactory philosophical justification for these types of knowledge (broadly, ‘the sciences’), but we can tell that they work, and other cultures interested in understanding, predicting, or controlling natural phenomena (and all cultures must be interested in these activities) should be able to recognize the utility of our knowledge (of our maps, or of our weather forecasts), just as indigenous Americans could recognize the advantages of horses and guns for hunting buffalo. This amounts to an anti-foundationalist but far from relativist view of science. It would follow that when scientific views are abandoned and replaced by new ones it is because the new ones are thought to be better at succeeding, paying, etc. In other words, science evolves, and it does so because theories that fail to develop, or that are unable to adapt in the face of new discoveries, are eliminated.
This is (as it happens) the view of science put forward in this present book, which, it would therefore seem, is authentically in the tradition established by Wittgenstein. But Wittgenstein’s texts are puzzling, problematic, and unfinished. They are open to more than one reading. I have no great quarrel with those who wish to read Wittgenstein as a relativist, providing they do not use this reading to justify a relativist history of science. If pointing out that Wittgenstein himself was not a relativist in his understanding of science helps persuade historians to abandon their hostility to what they (misleadingly) call ‘Whig history’ then it is worth debating what Wittgenstein really meant. For note that to say that a practice pays, succeeds, proves its worth is, of necessity, to make a retrospective judgement: we can only distinguish good science from bad science, on Wittgenstein’s account, with the benefit of hindsight. And we cannot opt simply to ignore the distinction between good and bad science, because if we do we will miss one of science’s peculiar characteristics, that it makes progress.
The question of what Wittgenstein really thought must, in any event, be kept separate from the question of his influence: On Certainty was not published until 1969, by which point a view of Wittgenstein as an uncompromising relativist was firmly established. And so his texts played a decisive role in legitimizing the new post-Kuhnian history of science because they were wrongly read as endorsing a thoroughgoing relativism. (See also below)
This book is directed against three types of relativism. First, there is the claim that history must be written without benefit of hindsight. This claim, which dates back to Butterfield’s book The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), had no discernible influence in the history of science until the 1960s. It can’t be right: it is only hindsight, for example, which enables one to identify Columbus’s discovery of America as a key moment in the development of modern science (see, in general, MacIntyre, ‘Epistemological Crises’ (1977)). Second, there is the claim that the concept of rationality is always culturally relative. This claim derives from Wittgenstein but began to have a major impact on history and philosophy of science after the publication of Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science (1958). It is, I maintain, incompatible with any grasp of the achievements of modern science. And, third, there is the claim that, in science, successful claims and failed claims should be understood and explained in exactly the same way, an argument which originates with David Bloor’s Knowledge and Social Imagery (1976) and which Bloor named ‘the strong programme’. This argument involves denying that scientific claims are ever adopted because they fit the evidence better than the alternatives. Its consequences for the history of science have been, it seems to me, pernicious. Each of these arguments, of course, has become part of a larger intellectual movement which may loosely be labelled ‘postmodernism’. Postmodernism has, I believe, a great deal to teach naïve realists, but as naïve realism hardly gets a look in among historians of science these days I have concentrated here on its defects, not its merits.
Of course, the question of how best to interpret the strong-programme approach is much disputed: see the marvellous exchange of fire between Bloor, ‘Anti-Latour’ (1999) and Latour, ‘For David Bloor’ (1999): I find Latour’s reading of Bloor entirely convincing. For an effective critique, see Laudan, ‘The Pseudo-science of Science?’ (1981).
Harry Collins, founder of the Bath School, whose work is closely related to that of the Edinburgh School, is happy, at least on occasion, to employ the word ‘relativism’ unequivocally and identify those he regards as fellow relativists and aids to relativism: Collins, ‘Introduction’ (1981). But ‘relativism’ is rather like the word ‘atheism’ in the seventeenth century: lots of people attack it but few own up to it; and when they do they insist in defining the word in their own peculiar way (Bloor, ‘Anti-Latour’ (1999), 101–3). The result is a certain amount of confusion over who can fairly be called a relativist and who cannot. I have been repeatedly told, for instance, by people who should know better that Shapin is not a relativist, and certainly he rarely uses the word: nevertheless, he has recently explicitly identified himself as a ‘methodological relativist’, in other words as a supporter of the strong programme (which is not, from a sociological point of view, surprising, as he was a member of the Edinburgh Science Studies Unit from 1973 to 1989). Shapin practises what he preaches by giving an explanation for his own belief in the reliability of scientific knowledge which could equally be applied (in a different culture) to a belief in witchcraft: ‘My confidence in science is very great: that is just to say that I am a typical member of the overall overeducated culture, a culture in which confidence in science is a mark of normalcy and which produces that confidence as we become and continue to be members of it.’ (Shapin, ‘How to be Antiscientific’ (2010), 42 = Labinger & Collins (eds.), The One Culture? (2001), 111; compare Collins’s claim that those who believe in astrology are making a social mistake (in Labinger & Collins (eds.), The One Culture? (2001), 258–9); see also Shapin’s exposition of the ‘equivalence postulate’: Shapin, ‘Cordelia’s Love’ (1995), and the description of the ‘relativist genre’ in Ophir & Shapin, ‘The Place of Knowledge’ (1991), 5, which is evidently, on Shapin’s part, a self-description). I address Shapinesque relativism in Chapter 15.
I agree with Bricmont and Sokal in their contributions to Labinger & Collins (eds.), The One Culture? (2001), that ‘methodological relativism cannot be justified unless one also adopts philosophical relativism or radical skepticism’ (244). It is important to distinguish between methodological relativism (which is the adoption of relativism as a method) and a very different position with which it can easily be confused, methodological agnosticism, the claim that one cannot know a priori which method will work and which will not – a position I would defend – which is perfectly compatible with the claim that ex post facto one can see that one method is more successful than another (a claim that methodological relativists are committed to denying): see Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1996), 173.
Shapin also advocates ‘a methodological disposition towards charity’ (4). In Leviathan and the Air-pump he and Schaffer wrote, ‘Following Gellner, we shall be offering a “charitable interpretation” ’ of Hobbes, and cited an article by Gellner which had first appeared in 1962, and the use made of it by Harry Collins (on whom, see below, No. 9). In fact, Collins was quite clear that he was not following, but rather going against, Gellner (Collins, ‘Son of Seven Sexes’ (1981), n. 15), for Gellner’s article was, in his own words, a ‘plea against charity’ (Gellner, ‘Concepts and Society’ (1970), 48); he held that ‘Excessive indulgence in contextual charity blinds us to what is best and what is worst in the life of societies. It blinds us to the possibility that social change may occur through the replacement of an inconsistent doctrine or ethic by a better one … It equally blinds us to … the employment of absurd, ambiguous, inconsistent or unintelligible doctrines’ (42–3). It is my book, not Leviathan and the Air-pump, which advocates following Gellner. Indeed, Gellner stated my overall argument precisely: ‘In recent centuries, there has been an important shift from the use of merely social to genuinely cognitive concepts: this is normally known as the Scientific Revolution. Wittgensteinianism makes it impossible to ask any questions about this event, for on its terms nothing of the kind could ever occur, could make any sense’ (Gellner, Relativism and the Social Sciences (1985), 185). No wonder Shapin insists that ‘[t]here was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution’! (Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (1996), 1).
It should be stressed that those who were trying to build the new science were acutely aware of how one might claim to provide a sociology of knowledge but wanted to escape from a world in which knowledge was entirely socially determined: cf. Bacon on the Idols (Bacon, Instauratio magna (1620), 53–80 (Book 1, §§23–68) = Bacon, Works (1857), Vol. 4, 51–69), and Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), esp. 125–35, 194–5. For reviews of Shapin’s A Social History of Truth, see Feingold, ‘When Facts Matter’ (1996) and Schuster & Taylor, ‘Blind Trust’ (1997).
This raises a larger issue in the interpretation of Kuhn. Joel Isaac has claimed that the apparent similarities between Kuhn’s work and a number of nearly contemporary works are a retrospective construction (Isaac, Working Knowledge (2012), 232), but he does not consider the influence some of these works had on Kuhn. Thus he says that Kuhn ‘hit upon’ the concept of a paradigm in 1958–9 (234), ignoring the possibility that Hanson had an influence on Kuhn. (Feyerabend, when he read Structure in draft, found it altogether too reminiscent of Hanson: Hoyningen-Huene, ‘Two Letters’ (1995).) Isaac also thinks that the apparent similarities between Kuhn’s Structure and Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge (1958) are misleading, despite the fact that in Structure Kuhn refers to Polanyi’s book as ‘brilliant’ (44; it is sometimes said that Kuhn plagiarized many of his ideas from Polanyi. Thus MacIntyre wrote that Kuhn’s view of natural science ‘seems largely indebted to the writings of Michael Polanyi (Kuhn nowhere acknowledged any such debt)’ (MacIntyre, ‘Epistemological Crises’ (1977), 465). The bracketed statement is simply false: the acknowledgement is there from the first edition, though it is overlooked in the index to the third and later editions.) So, too, with the similarities between Kuhn and Feyerabend, despite the fact that they were in close communication during 1960 and 1961 (Hoyningen-Huene, ‘Three Biographies’ (2005)). Isaac claims that reading Kuhn, alongside these other authors, as an opponent of positivism ‘conflates the reception of Kuhn’s book with the historical context of its composition’ (4; the classic reception text is Shapere, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ (1964)). But Kuhn himself approved the interpretation Isaac seeks to overturn (Kuhn, The Road since Structure (2000), 90–1).
Thus Isaac understates the significance of Structure’s direct attack on positivism, which, according to Kuhn, underpinned ‘the most prevalent contemporary interpretation of the nature and function of scientific theory’ (Kuhn, Structure (1996), 98–103; Isaac, Working Knowledge (2012), 231–2; for a summary account of this contemporary interpretation, see Hesse, ‘Comment’ (1982), 704), and misrepresents the context of Structure’s composition. Isaac’s ‘local’ reading of Kuhn in a Harvard context is valuable, but Kuhn left Harvard in 1956; the key text for a Harvard reading should therefore be not Structure but The Copernican Revolution, published in 1957, a text which Isaac largely ignores – and Structure is (as Isaac occasionally seems to acknowledge) correctly read as an engagement in a much wider, international, anti-positivist debate.
For a more cautiously formulated rejection of ‘constraint’ talk, see Shapin, ‘History of Science and Its Sociological Reconstructions’ (1982), 196–7. What Shapin offers is essentially a circular argument: talk of constraint is incompatible with relativism, but historians are committed to relativism, consequently they must not talk of constraint. Second, he relies on the Duhem–Quine thesis to claim that what constrains scientists is not reality but a particular description of reality; but it is wrong to assume, as this claim does, that the outcome of scientific disputes is always open-ended. When Galileo saw the phases of Venus there was no alternative way of describing what he had seen; nor could there be, unless one was prepared to question assumptions that everyone, with good reason, held in common (that light travels in straight lines, for example).
One of the reasons, of course, for abandoning the old retrospective stories is that they were profoundly unsatisfactory, as Elton and a whole series of scholars after him showed for the English Civil War (Elton, ‘A High Road to Civil War?’ (1974)), and as Cobban and a whole series of scholars after him showed for the French Revolution (Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964)). But the fact that a job has been done badly does not mean it cannot be done better, and it is hard to imagine how a situation in which we have no explanation for the English Civil War, other than that it was an unfortunate accident (which simply begs the question of why it was impossible to put Humpty together again) can be regarded as satisfactory. Nor can I see why historians should cede many of the most interesting questions to other disciplines – politics, philosophy, sociology – simply because they require a consideration of beginnings and endings.
The simple truth is that the definition of Whig history has got tighter and tighter year by year. But in history of science the issue of so-called Whig history is particularly vexed because it is used to censor any acknowledgement that there is progress in science, and so to entrench the equivalence postulate as a principle of historical method. Here, too, attitudes have become more restrictive with each passing year. In 1996 Roy Porter, an historian as opposed to Whig history as anyone, published a work (evidently written earlier, perhaps in 1989) in which he referred to the Scientific Revolution as resulting in ‘substantial and permanent achievements, full of future promise’ and wrote of ‘the advancement of science’ (Porter, ‘The Scientific Revolution and Universities’ (1996), 538, 560; compare Porter, ‘The Scientific Revolution’ (1986), 302). It is time to release the ratchet.
Golinksi is perhaps also typical in his muddle-headed view that the relativism of the strong programme can and should be used ‘as a tool rather than as the expression of a totalizing skepticism’ and in suggesting that constructivism can be regarded as ‘complementary to a range of other approaches’ (x–xi). It is true that sophisticated supporters of the strong programme insist that they are not relativists when going about their daily lives, but they do not suggest that you can be a part-time relativist when studying science as an historian or sociologist; their relativism cannot be picked up and put down like a tool because it is a methodological postulate which rules non-relativist questions out of order – in that respect, they are relativists through and through.
Golinski is also wrong to suggest that it is only with the outbreak of the Science Wars that the constructivist enterprise lost its sense of direction. In fact, by the time of the Sokal hoax (1996), the enterprise was already in deep trouble. From outside, it had been subjected to a devastating critique: Laudan, ‘Demystifying Underdetermination’ (1990). The gathering sense of crisis was marked by Bruno Latour’s statement, as an insider: ‘After years of swift progress, social studies of science are at a standstill’ (Latour, ‘One More turn After the Social Turn’ (1992), 272). They were, and (despite Pickering, The Mangle of Practice (1995), which represents an important attempt to get back on the right road) they still are.
It is now fifteen years since Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt published a collection of essays entitled Beyond the Cultural Turn in which they sought – but did not find – a way out of what they called ‘our current predicament’ (Bonnell & Hunt, ‘Introduction’ (1999), 6). Alas, there are still plenty of people who think, with Nick Wilding, that ‘social constructivism does not go nearly far enough.’ Wilding suspects that in the seventeenth century ‘scientific practice was so localized and nontransferable that the idea of a norm belongs to an Enlightenment, rather than early modern, epistemological landscape’ (Wilding, Galileo’s Idol (2014), 136–7). Such an approach inevitably renders the Scientific Revolution totally invisible. It implies that Galileo’s claim that it is impossible, in defiance of nature, to turn falsehood into truth, was entirely misconceived; that Hobbes was wrong to admire Galileo as the founder of a new type of knowledge; and that Diderot’s dream represents the beginning, not the end, of the story of the birth of the scientific enterprise. And, of course, it is wrong: the transferability of Galileo’s new science is straightforwardly demonstrated by a list of the cities in which his work was published in the fifty years after his condemnation in 1633: Strasbourg (1634, 1635, 1636), Leiden (1638), Paris (1639, 1681), Padua (1640, 1649), Lyon (1641), Ravenna (1649), London (1653, 1661, 1663, 1665, 1667, 1682, 1683), Bologna (1655–6, 1664), Amsterdam (1682), to which may be added the popularizing works of Mersenne, Danese, Wilkins, and others. If this is localism, what would its opposite look like?
I give dates of publication as on the title page: Locke’s Essay came out in 1689, but the title page says 1690; Popper’s Logik der Forschung came out in the autumn of 1934, but the title page says 1935; Koyré’s Études are dated 1939 but came out in 1940. The exception is Walter Charleton’s Ternary of Paradoxes; there are two distinct editions dated 1650, one of which actually appeared in 1649, so I give 1649 as the publication date in order to show which edition I have used.
I date years as beginning on 1 January. Newton’s first publication is dated 6 February 1671/72: I call this 1672.
I have preserved original spelling and punctuation in quotations, except that I have regularized ‘u’ and ‘v’, and ‘i’ and ‘j’.
Over the last decade the scholarly enterprise has been transformed by the internet. All the early modern texts cited here are to be found on the internet, some at subscription services (Early English Books Online (EEBO); Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)) but many at open-access sites (Google Books, Gallica).
In particular, my research on the history of words has been internet based. The key sources are as follows: 1. For English, the Oxford English Dictionary, supplemented by the search facilities in EEBO and ECCO. EEBO searches all titles and, apparently, some 25 per cent of texts (but, in reality, rather more than that, as many texts are duplicated in several editions), while ECCO searches (very erratically) all texts on the database (which is nearly complete). One can also search early-modern-English dictionaries at http://leme.library.utoronto.ca. 2. For French, the public-access dictionary collection at http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/contentdictionnaires-dautrefois. 3. For Italian, the Vocabolario degli accademici della Crusca (1612) at http://vocabolario.sns.it/. 4. For all languages, and particularly for Latin, the resources at Google Books and other collections of ebooks (such as archive.org and gallica.bnf.fr). I have not noted the date of these searches, but the bulk of the book was written in 2012–14: outcomes will change, of course, as further materials come on line and as the OED is revised.
But this is only part of my debt to the internet: day after day the postman has brought packages of books to my door, acquired from far-flung corners of the world. Seventeenth-century scholars sometimes felt they were drowning in an ocean of books. As the piles on and beside my desk have grown I, too, have had this feeling, but mostly I have felt as though I were far out at sea, unsure where or when I would make landfall but delighted to be on my own voyage of discovery.