The Group Construction of Scientific Knowledge: Gentlemen-Specialists and the Devonian Controversy

Abstract

Several years ago Sir Peter Medawar urged analysts of science to study in detail “what scientists do” in the course of their research. As a distinguished practicing scientist, Medawar himself was well aware that what scientists say about their activity can never be taken at face value. Instead he urged that “only unstudied evidence will do — and that means listening at a keyhole.”1 In fact, however, the few analysts of science who have followed this prescriptive suggestion effectively have preferred to establish themselves as participant observers on the inner side of the keyhole, to penetrate into the laboratory itself and to watch the activities of scientists from the perspective of the ethnographer or anthropologist.² Valuable and provocative as such studies are, however, I think their authors have underestimated the extent to which historical studies can also contribute to a better understanding of scientific practice.³ Clearly it is desirable in any case that we should trace how the practice of research has changed over the longue durée of the history of science, in conjunction with changing social and cognitive circumstances. But quite apart from that, there are also ways in which much more ’finegrained’ historical studies may give us better access than research on modern science can, to the “unstudied evidence” that Medawar saw was needed; and they may avoid the observational or interpretative &#x2019distance’ that was implied in his metaphor of the keyhole.