Abstract
Carl Becker's classic 1931 address ``Everyman his own historian''holds lessons for historians of science today. Like the professional historians he spoke to, we are content to displaythe Ivory-Tower Syndrome, writing scholarly treatises only forone another, disdaining both the general reader and our naturalreadership, scientists. Following his rhetoric, I argue thatscientists are well aware of their own historicity, and wouldbe interested in lively and balanced histories of science. It isironic that the very professionalism that ought to equip us towrite such histories has imposed on us a powerful taboo that rendersus unable to do so.
We who count ourselves sophisticated in describing the effects ofsocial forces upon past scientists have been remarkably unconsciousof the ways our own practices are being shaped by our need (and perhapsmore importantly, the needs of our teachers' teachers) to distinguish ourselves from scientists who write history. Our fear of presentism ingeneral and Whig history in particular is really a taboo, that is, anexcessive avoidance enforced by social pressure. It succeeds at makingour work distinct from histories written by scientists, but at the awful cost of blotting out the great fact of scientific progress.Scientists may be misguided in expecting us to celebrate great men,but they are right to demand from historians an analysis of the processof testing and improvement that is central to science. If progress in general is a problematic term, we could label the process ``emendation.''
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ashplant, T.G. and Wilson, A. 1988. “Present-Centered History and the Problem of Historical Knowledge.” The Historical Journal 31: 253–275.
Biagioli, M. 1996. “From Relativism to contingentism.” In: The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, eds. P. Galison and D.J. Stump, pp. 189–206 Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Becker, C.L. 1935. “Everyman his Own Historian.” Everyman his Own Historian: Essays on History and Politics, pp. 233–255. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Bliss, M. 1991. “Privatizing the Mind: The Sundering of Canadian History, the Sundering of Canada.” Journal of Canadian Studies 26: 5–17.
Broad, W. and Wade, N. 1982. Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Brush, S.G. 1995. “Scientists as Historians.” Osiris 10: 215–231.
Butterfield, H. 1931. The Whig Interpretation of History. London: G. Bell.
Carr, E.H. 1961. What Is History? London: Macmillan.
Choudhry, A. 1997. “Donald Griffin and Animal Minds: The Taboo of Animal Consciousness in the Making.” Unpublished paper for ZOO 498Y, University of Toronto.
Coleman, W. 1985. “The Cognitive Basis of the Discipline.” Isis 76: 49–70.
Danto, A.C. 1985. Narration and Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press.
Desmond, A. and Moore, J. 1992. Darwin. New York: Warner Books.
Drake, S. 1978. Galileo at Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Forman, P. 1991. “Independence, Not Transcendence, for the Historian of Science.” Isis 82: 71–86.
Gerson, E.M. 1983. “Scientific Work and Social Worlds.” Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization 4: 356–377.
Gould, S.J. 1996. Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. New York: Harmony Books.
Graham, L. 1981. “Why Can't History Dance Contemporary Ballet? or Whig History and the Evils of Contemporary Dance.” Science, Technology & Human Values 6: 3–6.
Hall, A.R. 1983. “On Whiggism.” History of Science 21: 45–59.
Hardcastle, G. 1991. “Presentism and the Indeterminacy of Translation.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 22: 321–345.
Harrison, E. 1987. “Whigs, Prigs and Historians of Science.” Nature 329: 213–214.
Hessen, B. 1931. “The Social and Economic roots of Newton's Principia.” In: Science at the Crossroads. London: Kniga.
Himmelfarb, G. 1987. “History and the Idea of Progress.” In: The New History and the Old. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press.
Hingham, J. 1965. History: The Development of Historical Studies in the United States. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Hull, D. 1979. “In Defense of Presentism.” History and Theory 18: 1–15.
Kitcher, P. 1993. The Advancement of Science. New York: Oxford University Press.
Krieger, L. 1977. Ranke: The Meaning of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kuhn, T.S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Laudan, L. 1977. Progress and its Problems: Toward a Theory of Scientific Growth. Berkeley: University of California Press.
——1990a. “The History of Science and the Philosophy of Science.” In: Companion to the History of Modern Science, eds. R.C. Olby, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie and M.J.S. Hodge, pp. 47–59. London: Routledge.
——1990b. Science and Relativism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levere, T.H. 1999. “Introduction.” In: Essays on Galileo and the History and Philosophy of Science, pp. xi–xviii. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
MacIntyre, A. 1977. “Epistemological Crisis, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science.” The Monist 60: 453–472.
Mayr, E. 1990. “When Is Historiography Whiggish?” Journal of the History of Ideas 51: 301–309.
Moore, J. 1996. “Metabiological Reflections on Charles Darwin.”In: Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography, eds. M. Shortland and R. Yeo, pp. 267–281. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Novick, P. 1988. That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pickering, A. 1995. The Mangle of Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pickstone, J.V. 1995. “Past and Present Knowledges in the Practice of the History of Science.” History of Science 33: 203–224.
Rouse, J. 1990. “The Narrative Reconstruction of Science.” Inquiry 33: 179–196.
Ruse, M. 1996. From Monad to Man. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Russell, C. 1984. “Whigs and Professionals.” Nature 308: 777–778.
Searle, J.R. 1990. “Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion, and Cognitive Science.” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13: 585–642.
Smith, J.M. 1991. “Forward.” In: The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today, Helena Cronin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. ix–x.
Sobel, D. 1995. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. New York: Penguin Books.
Sulloway, F.J. 1992. Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Thackray, A. 1972. “On Discipline Building: The Paradoxes of George Sarton.” Isis 63: 473–495.
——1975. “Reflections on Half a Century of the History of Science Society: I. Five Phases of Prehistory, Depicted from Diverse Documents.” Isis 65: 445–453.
——1980a. “The Pre-History of an Academic Discipline: The Study of the History of Science in the United States, 1891–1941.” Minerva 18: 448–473.
——1980b. “History of Science.” In: A Guide to the Culture of Science, Technology, and Medicine, ed. Paul T. Durbin, pp. 3–69. New York: The Free Press.
Winsor, M.P. 1991. Reading the Shape of Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wilson, A. and Ashplant, T.G. 1988. “Whig History and Present-Centered History.” The Historical Journal 31: 1–16.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Winsor, M.P. The Practitioner of Science: Everyone her Own Historian. Journal of the History of Biology 34, 229–245 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010398900038
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010398900038