This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 12 May 2011, by Todd Suomela.
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12 May 11
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To return to this blog’s recent exemplar of post-Marxist social history of science, Morris Berman’s account of the early years of the Royal Institution: his references to the “epistemology of modernization” and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966) refer not to the acts of learning or constructing ideas, per se, but to the rationales that underlie a modern, industrial way of life. The argument in Berman’s book is that a “legal ideology of science” psychologically, culturally, and socially smooths over structural disjunctures in the logic of society, constraining political action, and precluding the possibility of a more logical and just polity.
By contrast, the “cultural history of knowledge” (as I will call history inspired by the “sociology of scientific knowledge” and related programs) adhered to the doctrine of symmetry, admitting no preference for one or another system of ideas, which allowed for a more “naturalistic” description of history. By handling systems of knowledge evenly, drawing on Thomas Kuhn, cultural history dismissed the possibility that any one system would win out by virtue of its innate obviousness. This point was supposed to make cultural history into a potent talisman against Whiggism.
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Cultural historians seem comfortable declaring that any old study hasn’t been done because some historiographical prejudice — whether professional, philosophical, or popular is usually left ambiguous — has prevented some new facet of “culture” from being seen. The liberty taken with the historiographical power to declare things invisible renders scholarship eternally path-breakingly heroic, but never synthetic, thus releasing it from any real scholarly responsibility, except to avoid committing a few basic taboos often afflicting more popular or philosophical historiographies.
It has been said (among others, by Shapin (paywall)) that cultural historians need to leave behind their “jargon” and to take their message to a broader audience. But it is exactly this jargon that makes the cultural history of knowledge, as it is currently practiced, sustainable. I would argue that the jargon does not allow scholars to communicate complicated and subtle ideas to each other (which would be the case with a true “hyperprofessionalism”). Rather, it seems to allow scholars to construct their thoughts in such an arcane way as to prove to themselves that they do not think about science like other people do. In fact, this is precisely why it is believed that the message needs to be better popularized.
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