The Long Debate about Scientific Progress: Statesmen of Science 1750-1950

And now for something completely new to this blog, though not to me.  The first in a series of articles about debates about scientific progress in the two hundred years between 1750 and 1950.

If you come to my blog to read about food history, please don’t think I won’t continue to post on that. I will.  Posts on scientific progress will appear only occasionally.  Perhaps you might even find them of interest.

To me, the issue of scientific progress is absorbingly interesting because I think the idea that science (or much better, the sciences) progress remains the best reason for taking them seriously. Yes, sometimes, quite frequently in fact, the sciences get things wrong.  Sometimes they get stuck. Few, if any human activities, though, have so consistently shown improvement.

What does that mean?  Progress toward what, by whom, and to what effect?

Well, that’s what this blog introduces. It’s based on research I carried out many years ago. I never published it because by the 1990s even to I carried out this research about thirty years ago before some of you reading the blog were even born even mention the word ‘progress’ in Science Studies was to reveal oneself as hopelessly naïve. 

Now, though, different groups are taking up the question of progress, so here goes.

Statesmen of  Science 1750-1950

From at least the mid eighteenth to the mid twentieth century, a small subgroup of scientists (and to a lesser extent sympathizers with science) stepped forward to lay out what science was and why it was valuable. I think of them as “statesmen of science.” 

If you prefer statesperson, go ahead though not one of the dozen or so on my list was a woman. Meriam Webster defines statesman as “one actively engaged in conducting the business of a government or in shaping its policies” and says that the word was first introduced in 1592.  It comes from the French l’homme d’etat.  It has overtones of wise, respected, and acting in the public good.

These statesmen conducted the business of science, frequently being movers and shakers in institutionalizing science as well as in arguing for its importance. They included the group around Turgot, d’Alembert and the French Encyclopedie; the French physicists and astronomers at the end of the 18^th century including Laplace and Bailly; Adam Smith and John Playfair in the Scottish Enlightenment; the anatomist Georges Cuvier; the philosopher Auguste Comte; the polymath William Whewell; the physicist Hermann Helmholtz and the physiologist Emi duBois Reymond; the biologist Marcellin Berthelot: to some extent the physicists Ernst Mach and Pierre Duhem; the crystallographer J. D. Bernal; and (in spirit) the chemist James Conant. Some of these men were triumphant about the successes of the sciences; others harbored doubts that they attempted to work through in their analyses.

These statesmen of science were not popularizers, that is, they were not the precursors of Carl Sagan, Stephen J. Gould, and Neil de Grasse Tyson. They did have precursors as from at least the seventeenth century on, plenty of popularizers busied themselves explaining complex scientific theories in simple terms, an important and difficult task.

However explaining the content of science is very different from understanding how science works and why it’s a good thing. But isn’t it obvious how science works? you might ask.  No it’s not.  Like other human activities, including social life, politics, the economy, religion and warfare, science is complex and changes over time.  

Every generation or so in the time period I am considering, a statesmen of science took it on himself to offer a new account (a philosophy) of the structure and value of science.  Thus they formed a tradition, each aware of his predecessors’ and contemporaries’ analyses of science, each responding with vigor, correcting what he thought was wrong, and proposing new ways of thinking about the sciences.

The Statesmen of Science on Progress

Throughout these two hundred years, the statesmen were of one mind that the sciences were worthy of attention because they made progress, producing more and better knowledge (which is, after all, what science, scientia in Latin, means).

By the time the statesmen of science used the term progress, it had come to have a clear directional meaning, of movement toward a goal, of later periods being closer to that goal than earlier ones. The traditional meaning of progress as simple movement, as

as in ‘the monarch went on a progress around his kingdom’ was becoming archaic.

Progress was thus by then an intrinsically historical concept, comparing the present with the past.  To demonstrate that the sciences had progressed, the statesmen of science had no option but to turn to history to support their claims. Each new account of science was accompanied by a long and well researched history of science, and spawned many others that took one or another of the accounts of science as a given. By the early twentieth century, over 1000 histories of the sciences had appeared.*

Both the philosophies and the histories ranged widely. They addressed what the purposes of the sciences were, how the sciences should be classified, the methods used by scientists, how science should be organized, the moral character of the scientist, how the sciences were related to religion, politics, and the economy, what European sciences owed to the sciences in the Middle East, India, and China, who were the most important scientists, and which were the major turning points in the growth of the sciences.

Beyond their agreement about progress, the statesmen’s accounts of science disagreed about almost everything.  Was the purpose of scientific knowledge the satisfaction of a sense of wonder or a way of dealing with practical problems? Was progress a steady forward march and if, as it was quickly established, it was not, how to account for mis-steps?  Should mathematics be counted as a science?  or geology, for example? And why?  Did science proceed by analysis, synthesis, induction or hypothesis?  What counted as an observation?   What weight should be given to experiments? Was science the work of geniuses or of teams of patient observers with a coordinator to lead them? Did religion and science work hand in hand or not? And which kind of religion? What form of government was most conducive to science?  What was the role of universities or (later) corporations?

The Purposes of the Debate about Scientific Progress

Such debate was both understandable and healthy.  After all, the sciences were changing as they wrote. New fields were being studied, new methods were being tried, and new techniques of investigation were being introduced. All this was occurring in a context of experiments with scientific organization (societies, journals, university departments). Moreover the patrons of science that they wanted to persuade were also changing. Just as important, the statesmen had deep disagreements about the nature of science, just as scientists had deep disagreements about the nature of the world.

In short, along with the growth of science, a growth that was always marked with disputes and disagreements,  there was a meta level tradition of analysis of science, equally marked by disputes and disagreements. It was not incidental or unimportant but an utterly crucial part of the growth of science. 

It helped scientists understand and improve what they were doing.

It was key to persuading potential patrons, whether monarchs, democratic governments, or corporations that it was worth spending good money on science rather than on rhetoric (speechwriters and campaign managers) or on nitty gritty investments in machinery, infrastructure or something else.

It was a response to those who distrusted science, a constant tdrumbeat from 1750 when Jean Jacques Rousseau shot to fame with a prize winning essay that equated the ages of science and the ages of destruction, through the Kulturkampf (battles between science and the Catholic Church) in the mid nineteenth century, through the 1960s when Theodore Roszak criticized technoscience in The Making of A Counter Culture, to the present, even though in Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in the United States (Harvard, 2020), Andrew Jewett traces distrust in the sciences only to the 1920s, at least in the United States. 

These statesmen of science were crucial to the evolving understanding of the sciences both among scientists themselves and in the wider public. They were widely read and impacted the development of science both in its reasoning and in its institutionalization. The question of what science was and why it should be taken seriously was not settled then as it is still not settled now.  The sciences are evolving and so should the analyses of science.

Once every month or so, I’ll blog about how one or another of these statesmen of science saw the structure, history, and progress of science. It’s a wild ride, I tell you now.

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• See Rachel Laudan, “Histories of the Sciences and their Uses: A Review to 1913.” History of Science 31 (1993) for a review of this literature.

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