Abstract
The historical variation of scientific knowledge has lent itself to the development of historical epistemology, which attempts to historicize the origin and establishment of knowledge claims. The questions I address in this paper revolve around the historicity of the objects of those claims: How and why do new scientific objects appear? What exactly comes into being in such cases? Do scientific objects evolve over time and in what ways? I put forward and defend two theses: First, the ontology of science is so rich and variegated that there are no universally valid answers to these questions. Second, we need a pluralist account of scientific objects, a pluralist metaphysics that can do justice to their rich diversity and their various modes of being and becoming. I then focus on hidden objects, which are supposed to be part of the permanent furniture of the universe, and I discuss their birth and historicity: They emerge when various phenomena coalesce as manifestations of a single hidden cause and their representations change over time. Finally, I examine the conditions under which an evolving representation may still refer to the same object and I illustrate my argument drawing upon the early history of electrons.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Let me note a caveat here. The historicity of knowledge should not be conflated with the relativity of knowledge. The former does not preclude, I think, the possibility of trans-historical evaluation of past knowledge, as implied by the latter. For instance, some scholars have admitted that epistemic “standards change in myriad ways” (Buchwald and Franklin 2005, p. 2), while distancing themselves from the “tendency to regard science as purely local and contextual” (ibid., p. 1). At any rate, this is a complex issue that goes well beyond the scope of this paper.
This question has been raised in Bruno Latour’s provocative essay “Do scientific objects have a history?” (Latour 1996). The way I tackle it, however, is very different from Latour’s.
These questions are mostly about the surface features of the historicity of scientific objects. This is not to deny that these features are products of deeper and culturally situated processes.
Note that although these components have to be distinguished for analytical purposes, in practice they are often entangled. The individuation of objects in observational contexts and their identification in experimental situations is made possible by certain aspects of their representation. For a clarification of this point I am indebted to Ursula Klein. Cf. Arabatzis (2008).
See Klein and Lefèvre (2007).
Cf. Galison (2004).
Cf. Latour (2008).
The reader may be struck here by a prima facie paradox: the possible historicity of a non-historical entity! The paradox dissolves if, as I will argue below, we distinguish a representation from the thing it stands for. There is nothing paradoxical about a historically developing representation that attributes a non-historical character to its referent.
Cf. Hacking (2002, p. 11).
Cf. Daston (2008). The time-scale of observation is the crucial parameter here, since changing objects are more difficult to identify than stable objects. The difficulties are particularly acute when an object changes very rapidly. In those cases its identification depends on sophisticated instrumentation. See Canales (2009).
I am aware, of course, that it is not possible to do justice to the abundance of scientific objects within the confines of an article. My only excuse for the programmatic character of this paper is that it is part of a long-term project where various philosophical issues in the historiography of science will be explored in detail.
Cf. Hacking (1983); Rheinberger (1997). It is not always possible to know whether a laboratory phenomenon does (not) occur ‘in the wild’. One needs to know whether the laboratory conditions that give rise to the phenomenon in question are encountered in nature. Some phenomena that were first produced in the laboratory were later observed in a natural setting. The magnetic splitting of spectral lines, for instance, was first created in Zeeman’s laboratory and then observed in the sun (del Toro Iniesta 1996). The important point, for my purposes, is that certain phenomena are brought about as a result of human intervention, which may, of course, reproduce natural processes outside of the laboratory.
I prefer the term “hidden entities”, rather than “unobservable entities”, because it fends off questions about the precise boundary between what can and cannot be observed (see Sect. 1 above). What is hidden, at a certain stage of technological development, may come to light as a result of progress in instrumentation. For more discussion of this point, I refer the interested reader to Arabatzis (2011).
Cf. though the qualification in fn. 14 above.
Cf. Cartwright (1989, pp. 191ff).
Cf. Giere (2006).
Cf., for instance, Latour’s claim that “objects and knowledge of objects are similarly thrown into the same Heraclitean flux” (Latour 2008, p. 86).
For a detailed argument see Arabatzis (2006).
I take it, as cogently argued by Putnam (1962), that “observation sentences” can contain theoretical terms referring to hidden entities.
See Arabatzis (2006).
See Chang (2008).
Cf. Rheinberger (2005, pp. 408–409).
Langevin (1904, p. 156).
The previous passage is adapted from Arabatzis (2009b).
See Arabatzis (2006).
References
Arabatzis, T. (2003). Towards a historical ontology? Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 34, 431–442.
Arabatzis, T. (2006). Representing electrons: A biographical approach to theoretical entities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Arabatzis, T. (2008). Experimenting on (and with) hidden entities: The inextricability of representation and intervention. In U. Feest, G. Hon, H.-J. Rheinberger, J. Schickore, & F. Steinle (Eds.), Generating experimental knowledge (pp. 7–17). MPIWG preprint 340.
Arabatzis, T. (2009a). Cathode rays. In F. Weinert, K. Hentschel, & D. Greenberger (Eds.), Compendium of quantum physics: Concepts, experiments, history and philosophy (pp. 89–92). Dordrecht: Springer.
Arabatzis, T. (2009b). Electrons. In F. Weinert, K. Hentschel, & D. Greenberger (Eds.), Compendium of quantum physics: Concepts, experiments, history and philosophy (pp. 195–199). Dordrecht: Springer.
Arabatzis, T. (2011). Hidden entities and experimental practice: Renewing the dialogue between history and philosophy of science. In S. Mauskopf & T. M. Schmaltz (Eds.), Integrating history and philosophy of science: Problems and prospects (pp. 125–139). Dordrecht: Springer.
Bensaude-Vincent, B., & Newman, W. R. (2007). Introduction: The artificial and the natural: State of the problem. In B. Bensaude-Vincent & W. R. Newman (Eds.), The artificial and the natural: An evolving polarity (pp. 1–19). Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.
Bloor, D. (2005). Toward a sociology of epistemic things. Perspectives on Science, 13, 285–312.
Buchwald, J., & Franklin, A. (2005). Introduction: Beyond disunity and historicism. In J. Buchwald & A. Franklin (Eds.), Wrong for the right reasons. Archimedes (Vol. 11, pp. 1–16). Dordrecht: Springer.
Canales, J. (2009). A tenth of a second: A history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cartwright, N. (1989). Nature’s capacities and their measurement. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Chang, H. (2008). The persistence of epistemic objects through scientific change. Paper presented at the international conference What (good) is historical epistemology?, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
Daston, L. (Ed.). (2000). Biographies of scientific objects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Daston, L. (2008). On scientific observation. Isis, 99, 97–110.
Daston, L., & Galison, P. (2007). Objectivity. New York: Zone Books.
del Toro Iniesta, J. C. (1996). On the discovery of the Zeeman effect on the sun and in the laboratory. Vistas in Astronomy, 40, 241–256.
Galison, P. (1997). Image and logic: A material culture of microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Galison, P. (2004). Specific theory. Critical Inquiry, 30, 379–383.
Giere, R. (2006). Scientific perspectivism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hacking, I. (1983). Representing and intervening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hacking, I. (1992). The self-vindication of the laboratory sciences. In A. Pickering (Ed.), Science as practice and culture (pp. 29–64). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hacking, I. (2002). Historical ontology. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Kaiser, D. (2006). Whose mass is it anyway? Particle cosmology and the objects of theory. Social Studies of Science, 36, 533–564.
Klein, U., & Lefèvre, W. (2007). Materials in eighteenth-century science: A historical ontology. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.
Langevin, P. (1904). The relations of physics of electrons to other branches of science. In H. J. Rogers (Ed.), International congress of arts and science: Physics and chemistry (Vol. 7, pp. 121–156). London & New York: University Alliance.
Latour, B. (1996). Do scientific objects have a history? Pasteur and Whitehead in a bath of lactic acid. Common Knowledge, 5, 76–91.
Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (2008). A textbook case revisited—knowledge as a mode of existence. In E. J. Hackett, O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch, & J. Wajcman (Eds.), The handbook of science and technology studies (pp. 83–112). Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.
Maxwell, G. (1962). The ontological status of theoretical entities. In H. Feigl & G. Maxwell (Eds.), Scientific explanation, space and time. Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science (Vol. 3, pp. 3–27). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Messeri, L. R. (2010). The problem with Pluto: Conflicting cosmologies and the classification of planets. Social Studies of Science, 40, 187–214.
Putnam, H. (1962). What theories are not. (Rep. in idem, Mathematics, matter and method. Philosophical papers (Vol. 1, pp. 215–227). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Rheinberger, H.-J. (1997). Toward a history of epistemic things: Synthesizing proteins in the test tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rheinberger, H.-J. (2005). A reply to David Bloor: “Toward a sociology of epistemic things”. Perspectives on Science, 13, 406–410.
Rheinberger, H.-J. (2010). An epistemology of the concrete: Twentieth-century histories of life. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Staley, R. (2008). Einstein’s generation: The origins of the relativity revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Steinle, F. (2002). Experiments in history and philosophy of science. Perspectives on Science, 10, 408–432.
Thomson, J. J. (1897). Cathode rays. Philosophical magazine, 5th series, 44, 293–316.
Van Fraassen, B. C. (1980). The scientific image. New York: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at a conference on historical epistemology at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, at the Vienna Circle Institute, and at the Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques in Paris. I am indebted to the audiences for perceptive questions. I am particularly grateful to Uljana Feest, Gérard Jorland, Ursula Klein, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Thomas Sturm and two anonymous referees for their constructive comments and suggestions. I am deeply thankful to the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, where part of the work for this paper was carried out. Finally, I would like to thank the University of Athens for supporting my work with a research grant and the State Scholarships Foundation for funding my research through the IKYDA program.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Arabatzis, T. On the Historicity of Scientific Objects. Erkenn 75, 377–390 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9344-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9344-5