Understanding the World

Philosophy was redefined at the end of the nineteenth century in response to claims that science exhausted everything that could be known, and that consequently philosophy could no longer continue to play any role in our understanding of the world. In finding a new role for philosophy, the Neo-Kantians construed it as form of clarification and systematization of science. The argument was that the legitimacy of science as the pre-eminent form of understanding the world depended on its unity, but it could not establish this relying on its own resources: for that, philosophy, qua theory of the foundations of science, was needed. Philosophy completes science, by establishing its unity on an a priori basis. But Neo-Kantian attempts to ‘ground’ science in philosophy raise the question whether philosophy is best placed to provide such grounding, and these questions came to a head in the wake of the Great War.

The Problem of the Human Sciences

In the nineteenth century there arose claims to scientific standing that were highly contested, and provoked a new kind of metascientific enquiry. The accreditation and ranking of disciplines were rationalized in terms of the internal structure of science, but they were predominantly extra-scientific in origin, and were more than anything else an elaborate exercise in legitimation. The issues centred on accounts of human behaviour that had traditionally been the preserve of religious and metaphysical teaching. These included ethics, where efforts were now afoot to put it on a scientific standing, as well as areas that had the character of a loose combination of moral, political, and economic views which could now be claimed to have been put on a scientific footing. The dispute between Whewell and Mill on the scientific standing of the new disciplines became transformed into a philosophical project of understanding the nature of science.

Introduction

Science had virtually no public standing before the beginning of the nineteenth century. This chapter illustrates the transformation that occurred in that era, and sets out a case for exploring the kinds of questions raised in the book proper if we are to understand this transformation. It identifies developments from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and highlights the kinds of issues that we must deal with if we are to understand these developments.

Science and the Shaping of Modernity

This chapter provides an overview of all four volumes of the Science and the Shaping of Modernity series, by drawing together key themes that run through the volumes. It explores some of the main historiographical questions—particularly the difference between the emergence of science and the consolidation of a scientific culture—and looks at the relations between science and religion, science and technology, and science and civilization.

The Modernization of the Population

The ‘civilizing process’ comes to be articulated in scientific terms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Central to this exercise is the establishment of norms for everything from bodily proportions to social behaviour. These developments were linked to worries about the degeneration of the population. Eugenics, which identified favourable and unfavourable inherited traits, promoted the former and advocated measures to inhibit reproduction of the latter. As part of this process, what emerged was the invention of the modern notion of ‘intelligence’, which now becomes a criterion of social standing, notionally replacing those of class, race, and birth. This chapter examines a shift of mentality inherent in these developments, in the concern to shape the population into the kinds of people who can occupy a scientifically modelled form of civilization. At the core of this lies the shift from reason to rationality, and we explore some of the consequences of this shift.

The Promotion of Unification

The nineteenth-century cultural elevation of science puts it in some respects in an analogous position to that previously occupied by religion in marking out Western civilization. Beginning in the nineteenth century in Germany, France, and Britain, there developed a comprehensive cultural investment in the idea of the unity of science, which played a crucial role in taking over this task from religion. In this chapter the political, social, and ideological motivations behind the nineteenth-century advocacy of the unity of science are explored. At the same time, it examines the formative moves in the establishment of the unity of science, particularly the attempts of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to regiment the sciences, that is, to decide what to include and what to exclude from the rubric of science, and to order and rank those that it included.

The Evolution of Civilization

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries science was promoted as the key to the progress that was now associated with civilization. In Comte’s influential Cours de Philosophie Positive, society was to be reformed on a resolutely scientific basis, and two kinds of development of a Comtean programme are distinguished: Buckle’s explicitly Comtean attempt to place the historical understanding of civilization on a scientific basis, and Spencer’s attempt to account for the evolution of civilization along biological lines. In this chapter the uptake of these ideas in the East is examined, and the question of the role of technology in the development of civilization is raised.

Technology and the Limits of Scientific Theorizing

There are two questions central to understanding the nature and role of technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First, there is the problem of how technology engages with science. To the extent to which science and technology can be integrated, what might once have been thought of as scientific developments should in fact be conceived in terms of a mixture of theory, experiment, and theory-free invention. This unstable mixture is what confers on ‘science’ its unruly character. Second, there is a great difference in the values of science and engineering and their approaches to problem solving, evident in physical and engineering approaches to aerodynamics in the early decades of the twentieth century. The association of science and engineering means that we must take seriously the non-discursive products of science, particularly machines, and then we encounter questions very different from those that concern us in the study of ‘pure’ science.

The Unity of the Life Sciences

This chapter deals with the historical path in the life sciences, exploring attempts to unify evolutionary theory with other developments in the life sciences. The development of the life sciences in the nineteenth century not only involved the meeting of trajectories along two distinct and seemingly autonomous paths, the physiological and the historical, but the latter involved at least three distinct forms of enquiry which came to align themselves with one another, in a process of qualified mutual reinforcement rather than assimilation. The central argument is that the life sciences remain irreducibly pluralistic, despite the attempts at unification pursued by advocates of the ‘New Synthesis’, and in this capacity can act as a model for the sciences more generally.

The Unity of the Physical Sciences

This chapter looks at whether the relations between the physical sciences could actually have followed the reductionist, hierarchical approach that many have assumed. The aim is to show in some detail the intractable problems that dogged attempts to unify physics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The importance of an extra-theoretical, experimental tradition in physics is stressed, and significant attention devoted to the development of electromagnetism and energy physics, which has the strongest claim to unificatory ambitions. More generally, the chapter explores the rationales behind unification, distinguishing it from establishing consistency between theories.