What is the Content of This Book? A Plea for Developing History of Science and History of Text Conjointly

Abstract

Based on two examples (one taken from thirteenth-century China and the other from eighteenth-century Europe), this paper discusses why various forms of collaboration between history of science and history of text might prove profitable. Texts are not a historical, transparent forms conveying meanings whose history we would write. Scientific texts as such appear to have taken various forms within space and time, designed as they were through an interaction with local conditions of text production of all kinds. Elaborating a description of these various forms of texts would provide methodological tools to read them, since they can by no means be read without the mediation of a method. Here, the achievements of a history of text would benefit history of science in that it would provide a better grasp of the textual contexts for the production of scientific writing, and it would give a better awareness of the various ways in which texts were meant to mean. On the other hand, the history of scientific text could become a systematic concern in history of science as such: scientists design their texts at the same time as they design concepts and results. This represents a constitutive part of their activity, and the study of the production of texts would bring materials to understand how scientists benefit from the cultural and textual contexts within which they work. It would give us a grasp of how they construct the symbolic tools with which they perform their activities and communicate their results, which in the end are texts. In all these respects, a history of scientific text could then become a specific domain of the history of text.

This paper was written for the workshop “History of science, History of text”, during my stay at the Wissenschaftskolleg, in Berlin. I gratefully acknowledge the help of the Wissenschaftskolleg, the Otto und Martha Fischbeck Stiftung and the Einstein Forum. It is a pleasure to thank all my colleagues at the Wissenschaftskolleg during this year for the interest they expressed in this project and for the help they gave me in defining it. I am glad to take this opportunity to thank my colleagues Huang Yilong, who helped me to prepare this text, and Fu Daiwie, who invited me to publish it, in a different shape in Philosophy and the History of Science, a Taiwanese journal. I owe many thanks to the publisher and the editors of the journal for allowing me to reproduce it in this volume. I am grateful to Chris Fraser and Jeremy Gray for their revision of the English. Needless to say, I am responsible for all the remaining mistakes. The reader can find in (Chemla 1995a) other arguments to support the thesis defended here.