13.0130 economics, sociology & the history of our science

Humanist Discussion Group (humanist@kcl.ac.uk)
Sat, 7 Aug 1999 08:58:29 +0100 (BST)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 130.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

Date: Sat, 07 Aug 1999 09:05:15 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: economics, sociology and the history of our science

Not long ago a friend of mine suggested that in thinking about humanities
computing it would be useful to consider possible commonalities in the
formation of other new fields. With that in mind, the following seems
particularly relevant. It is a brief passage from James Gleick, Chaos:
Making a new Science (Penguin, 1987, pp. 181-2), concerning the work of
Mitchell Feigenbaum, who had the liberty of thinking and working as his
developing intuition led him, into the interstices between mathematics and
physics -- and great difficulty in getting his work recognised and
published. Why this was so, according to Gleick, is what interests me.

This is what Gleick writes:

"Modern economics relies heavily on the efficient market theory. Knowledge
is assumed to flow freely from place to place. The people making important
decisions are supposed to have access to more or less the same body of
information. Of course, pockets of ignorance or inside information remain
here and there, but on the whole, once knowledge is public, economists
assume that it is known everywhere. Historians of science often take for
granted an efficient market theory of their own. When a discovery is made,
when an idea is expressed, it is assumed to become the common property of
the scientific world. Each new discovery and each new insight builds on the
last. Science rises like a building, brick by brick. Intellectual
chronicles can be, for all practical purposes, linear.

"That view of science works best when a well-defined discipline awaits the
resolution of a well-defined problem.... But the history of ideas is not
always so neat. As non-linear science arose in odd corners of different
disciplines, the flow of ideas failed to follow the standard logic of
historians. The emergence of chaos as an entity unto itself was a story not
only of new theories and new discoveries, but also of the belated
understanding of old ideas. Many pieces of the puzzle had been seen long
before... and then forgotten. Many new pieces were understood at first only
by a few insiders. A mathematical discovery was understood by
mathematicians, a physics discovery by physicists, a meteorological
discovery by no one. The way ideas spread became as important as the way
they had originated.

"Each scientist had a private constellation of intellectual parents. Each
had his own picture of the landscape of ideas, and each picture was limited
in its own way.... Scientists were biased by the customs of their
disciplines or by the accidental paths of their own educations.... No
committee of scientists pushed history into a new channel -- a handful of
individuals did it, with individual perceptions and individual goals."

If the demography of computing humanists were available, I think one would
see a highly disparate collection of students and scholars from various
fields, technologists and technicians, administrators and combinations of
these. One of our principal tasks, to which Humanist is dedicated, is to
learn to speak a common language, see the common ground in which these
areas overlap. One of the things that happens in our
blind-men-and-the-elephant story, is that some of us frequently seize on
the technological tusk and insist that whatever doesn't feel like that
isn't part of our elephant. But, as in the development of chaos as a field
of study, our story is "a story not only of new theories and new
discoveries, but also of the belated understanding of old ideas" -- perhaps
even primarily "the [belated] understanding of old ideas". (I bracket the
"belated" because I am not at all sure thinking about what excites us as
"belated" really is very helpful.) The point for us, it seems to me, is not
the newness or antiquity of the gizmo but what we understand when we apply
it -- and THAT is exciting and new, no matter how old the tool, how old the
question in whatever field with which we begin.

Of course that's only a half-truth -- I underplay the importance of new
tools to underscore the importance of what they're for, or more accurately,
what they are: prosthetic devices for the mind (a not entirely charming
metaphor, but one that makes a good point).

I note with pleasure the sentence, "No committee of scientists pushed
history into a new channel -- a handful of individuals did it, with
individual perceptions and individual goals." But they did come together,
and that's what we've got to work on some more.

Comments?

Yours,
WM

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Humanist Discussion Group
Information at <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
=========================================================================