The making of modern science

The World as We Know It: From Natural Philosophy to Modern Science, Peter Dear, Princeton, £30

This is an astonishing book. Peter Dear sets out to tell the story, in broad-brush terms, of what was learned about the natural world between 1700 and the 1930s. What is remarkable is not what he says, but what he doesn’t say.

Dear is a distinguished historian of science who has been a reliable member of what we may call the ‘social constructivist school’. The basic argument of the social constructivists is that science has no privileged access to reality. We make ‘the world as we know it’, just as we make language or the economy. Against those who would treat scientific knowledge as rational, the constructivists rely on an argument first clearly enunciated by Thomas Kuhn in 1962: the choice between competing theories can never be resolved on rational grounds. Consequently, they argue (though Kuhn did not) that the choice is ultimately determined by what one might call the political arts: power, authority and rhetoric. Dear, for example, published an article in 1985 entitled ‘Totius in verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society’. The title was a declaration of party membership. This book is, in effect, a long letter of resignation.

Kuhn was always ambivalent: he wanted to retain the possibility of talking about progress in science. The social constructivists, however, were clear. For them, ‘discovery’ (which implied ‘truth’) and ‘progress’ (which implied ‘rationality’) were forbidden words. ‘Discovery’ appears frequently in this book, and even ‘progress’ appears occasionally. ‘Authority’ has survived, but ‘rhetoric’ does not appear, and ‘rhetorical’ only appears once. Dear goes so far as to cite my The Invention of Science, a book roundly anathematised by the constructivists. Totally absent in Dear’s book is any account of scientific change presented as a choice between competing paradigms, the outcome of which is determined by non-rational criteria. Instead, there are some vague and unconvincing gestures at the content of science being determined by institutional and ideological ‘external’ factors, which is ultimately unsatisfying. Yes, modern science developed in a university setting. Yes, the Victorians used metaphors derived from factory production. Neither tells us anything very interesting about why some scientific theories succeeded while others failed.

Karl Popper attacked Kuhn for presenting science as irrational. He agreed with Kuhn that science could not claim to establish truth, but held that bad theories could be jettisoned and replaced by better ones. This was a rational and progressive process. If one was looking for a label for the intellectual position underlying The World as We Know It, one would be tempted to call it Popperian. Entirely missing is the insistence, central to the constructivist case, that science could have turned out to be something completely different if, at a key moment, the political configuration had been slightly altered.

Kuhn and his contemporaries hoped to bring about a close alliance between the philosophy and history of science. It is curious that philosophers of science are barely present in Dear’s history (Ian Hacking, the renowned Canadian philosopher of science, for example, only just scrapes into the bibliography; Popper makes the briefest of appearances in a footnote). More puzzling is the absence of any sustained account of the invention of new ways of thinking: probability, for example, or taxonomy. Their importance is stressed, but not their profound novelty. A context is offered (insurance companies were interested in probabilities), but it is perfunctory. The result is a history of science that seems curiously old-fashioned, pre-Kuhnian and pre-Foucauldian.

In a remarkable review in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Julianne Werlin has brought out the extensive overlap (in subject-matter, in language, in illustrations) between this book and an earlier book by Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World (2006). The core of that book was the claim that science is an ‘ideology’. The argument was that the truth of science is supposedly demonstrated by the ways in which science is put to practical use; but (Dear claimed) false theories can generate effective practices. Consequently, practice cannot validate theory; equally, good theory cannot guarantee effective practice. The claim that one supports the other is a logical error, a vicious circle. The book thus wedded history and philosophy, but the argument, as presented, was dreadfully weak (see Heilbron’s review), because Dear failed to acknowledge the feedback loop by which practice (starting with experimentation) leads to the revision of theory, and theory to the revision of practice. The two do not stand apart, but are intertwined, and grow together. There is no vicious circle. One really can defend science by saying ‘science works’.

‘Ideology’ is another word that barely appears in the new book (seven occurrences, including ‘ideological’). Werlin is surely right that where it was once fashionable on the left to critique scientism, the American debates over climate change and covid vaccines have meant that many of those who once sought to diminish science now want to defend it. Dear ends the book referring to yard signs during the pandemic reading ‘Science is Real’, though he does not acknowledge that the essence of the social constructivist history of science, including his own, could have been summed up in the slogan ‘Science isn’t Real’. ‘Science studies’, as in the social constructivist account of science, is, thank goodness, in rapid retreat. The pandemic changed our world in more ways than we often realise, but social constructivism was already in crisis. As early as 2004 Bruno Latour was asking ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?’

Fortunately for the critics, ‘decolonisation’ had already provided an alternative fad – the insistence that science was never a merely western enterprise. The key article here has been Steven Shapin’s ‘Placing the View from Nowhere’ (1998). (Shapin endorses Dear’s book on the cover as ‘wholly welcome’, which suggests either he has not read it with any care, or his own views have changed beyond recognition.) Dear, rightly in my mind, has not made the geographical, anti-colonialist turn: the science he describes was western, not global. He has abandoned intellectual territory, but not in order to make new conquests (to use, perhaps impermissibly, the language of colonialism). The retreat is to be celebrated, but the resulting book, for all its learning and its subtlety, is disappointing. It would have been much more interesting if he had engaged directly with the views he once held and no longer (it seems) endorses, and if he had addressed the argument that ‘science’, as we now understand the term, is a 17th- and not a 19th-century invention: as the author of Revolutionizing the Sciences (2001), on the early modern ‘scientific revolution’, he was in an ideal position to weigh the arguments on both sides.

Either move would have required him to engage with the arguments of other intellectuals and other books. There is, I fear, a notion that a ‘trade’ or popular book cannot enter into serious intellectual debates; when publishers and authors adopt this view they commit themselves to an entirely unnecessary dumbing down, for there are plenty of readers who are interested in understanding intellectual choices. Many restaurants now let you see the cook in the kitchen, so that you can watch your meal being made; books like this don’t show the chop nor let you hear the sizzle, but offer you a meal that is already plated up. It’s particularly ironic when constructivists appear reluctant to explore how their own work has come to be constructed, to acknowledge their own use of rhetoric and their own deference to authority. If the history of science has an intellectually challenging future (and one must surely hope that it does), this isn’t it.