The Thesis
I’ve officially begun work on my thesis.
The idea springs from what I first began to consider in an earlier post. Narratology and other literary methods can be used to study science insofar as the objective of science is to generate narratives about the universe’s natural history. My goal is to understand science as the latest innovation in the long history of
not my thesis - source: http://flickr.com/photos/partsnpieces/
mythmaking. Or, more accurately, the latest innovations are the new and changing criteria that scientists use to make decisions about what can be included in their narratives.
The thesis will be a study of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which is the place I first saw (without realizing it) science conceptualized as mythmaking. In McCarthy, “all is telling” (The Crossing) and we see an importance placed upon story telling that parallels what a quick wikipedia browsing told me Walter Fisher’s work argues for. In a conversation with Douglas Wagner, McCarthy said “our reality comes out of the narratives we create, not out of the experiences themselves” (Rick Wallch, Myth Legend Dust, p 145). In Blood Meridian science is one method among others for constructing these narratives, a successful one, but by no means a sacrosanct haven of absolute truth.
I came to think about science and McCarthy in this way when four people got stuck together in my head. One of course was McCarthy, but he came last to the party. The first was Greg Myers. His book Writing Biology is fantastic. I picked it up because it was on UCLA’s old lit/sci reading list. Published in 1991, the book studies scientific texts through a literary/rhetorical lens to determine how “facts” are actually the products of argument and not just things out there to be discovered. One of my favorite quotes from the book “One can’t say . . . that the nineteenth-century public believed in phrenology for cultural reasons, whereas we believe in neuroendocrinology because it is true” (20). Myers’s work of course is a direct decendant of the work of another of the people in my head, T.S. Kuhn. Kuhn got me thinking about science as myth in general but, as I’ve written about that before, I won’ t here. While thinking about myth I went to the library and grabbed a book called Kenneth Burke on Myth by Laurence Coupe. As I understand it, Burke’s myth is a mechanism (he calls it a “tool”) that fosters interaction and social productivity. “[Myths] are our basic psychological tools for working together. . . . A myth that works well is as real as food, tools, and shelter are. . . . They are not ‘illusions,’ since they perform a very real and necessary social function in the organization of the mind (Coupe 9). Cannot the scientific enterprise be understood in this fashion, as a tool that creates cooperation consensus of opinion?
Myers got me thinking of science as a social construction; Kuhn got me thinking about it as myth; Burke got me thinking about myth as a tool for social creation and cooperation. At this point I needed only a literary framework from which to hang together my conception of science. I found that framework, luckily enough, in my favorite novel. In a sort of chicken and egg scenario, I don’t know whether Blood Meridian planted this conception in my mind years ago, or if I was just able to read my new understanding into the book. Whatever the case, like a post-revolutionary scientist I now can’t help but see the novel in this paradigm.
Another 7045 Link*
In Rhetoric of Science we’re reading Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, which is a work denouncing notions of fixed, quantifiable/scaleable intelligence, especially such notions as are used to make essentialist/biodeterminist blanket statements about certain populations/races. Because it is recent and because it is a Gladwell piece, I had to post this article on genius from the New Yorker which relates in a tangential way.
EDIT: Here’s another related post, this from an evolutionary psychologist. The struggle to get away from the moralist fallacy in academia – something I’ve actually witnessed this semester in one of my courses.
Bad Science Writing
*See comments for an expansion on this too brief complaint.
An article that made it to the front page of reddit.com today is guilty of a number of all too common sins against science writing.
1) Misused terminology: It’s title: “Scientists Discover Fish in Act of Evolution in Africa’s Greatest Lake” misrepresents evolution as something that happens in discrete “acts.” What scientists are seeing is speciation.
2) Sensationalism: The article begins, “In what could be a first in the world…” Speciation has, in fact been observed quite a few times, though this is of course very important research.
3) Oversimplification: FTA:”Evolutionary science typically holds that new species are born when populations become isolated from one another, forcing them to adapt differently.” The author ends the article with this sentence. He doesn’t explain clearly to the lay reader whether this research upholds or contradicts the “typical” understanding. He doesn’t mention the debates over sympatric speciation, nor does he explain in any detail the mechanism by which vision is potentially giving rise to new species.
What makes this aggravating is that the actual article in Nature is very nicely written and concise. I can understand it and I’m no scientist. But most people don’t have access to expensive journals like Nature, and depend for their science news on summaries, like the one above, printed in the popular press. (After all it was the bad article that made it to the front page of reddit.) And we know the problems associated with a misinformed popluace in control of science education and funding.
7045 links
Here are a number of links pertaining to topics that relate to topics discussed in my rhetoric of science class today.
The UCMP’s wonderful introduction to the history of Evolutionary thought.
The Great Exhibition of 1851 – some color plates and other small bits of info.
Birds – An article on the ornithologist, John Gould’s silent disagreement with Darwin “When Darwin returned from the Beagle voyage, he recruited Gould to identify his bird specimens and to provide the bird illustrations for the Zoology of the voyage. It was Gould who identified Darwin’s Galapagos finches as separate species. . . . But his books nonetheless offer clear if unpolemical evidence of his dissent from Darwin, and his contemporaries had no trouble recognizing it.”
This happened just recently, and made me (again) want to move to England.
Science-Making/Myth-Making
A quote from the beginning of Kuhn’s Structure:
The more carefully [historians of science] study, say, Aristotelian dynamics, . . . the more certain they feel that those once current views of nature were, as a whole, neither less scientific nor more the product of human idiosyncrasy than those current today. If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge. If on the other hand, they are to be called science, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible with the ones we hold today. Given these alternatives, the historian must choose the latter. (2)
I want to question some things here. First of all, are there indeed two alternatives presented? Can we really not understand the process of science-making to be equivalent to mythmaking? Must they be mutually exclusive? I would suggest that calling the beliefs myths or calling them science is merely a matter of appellation. Science seeks to order and explain the world; Myth seeks to order and explain the world. Kuhn here avoids an association with myth to get away from all those associations of falsity and mysticism. Myth is distastefully premodern. But I’d argue that science could very well be understood as our current presiding structure for making myth, one that, like most myths, has a specific set of guidelines about what can be included in the story. A creation story that involves a Big Bang, gravity, and contracting clouds of gas and matter is only different from one involving gods and abiogenesis in the criteria the mythmakers used to judge the appropriateness of the included elements.
When scientists and historians “choose the latter,” they are making a move to distance themselves from those myths not based on empirical evidence. Scientists try to be comfortable with gaps in their knowledge where previous mythmakers would manifest a place-holder. These two differences – the exclusion of anything not empircally derived and an acceptance for the gaps that exclusion leaves – are the only two major differences between science and a supposedly earlier practice of mythmaking. Science is a descendent of Myth – or perhaps not a descendent [which implies the death of the antecedent parent] but the newest variation on Myth. Science is the newest mechanism by which we formulate our explanatory narratives.
Viva la revolucion
For English 7045 my professor and thesis panelist Dr. Marty Patton suggests the maintenance of what she calls a dialectical journal. The title suggests that Hegel or Marxism will come into play somewhere, but instead it is simply a journal in which the written page is divided vertically – on the left you have a quote from the work you’re reading and on the right you unpack that quote, and potentially incorporate other insights and research. I write very little by hand nowadays, so I’ll be keeping this journal electronically. Posts will show up here.
Like this one on T.S. Kuhn’s _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_. One of the most influential academic works of the latter half of the twentieth century, _Structure_ reimagines the history of science, restructuring a linear accumulation of knowledge into a series of paradigms that arise through argumentation. Newton for instance establishes a paradigm with his _Principia_, a new set of ideas, a framework, a model of thought under which scientists continue to work until too many anomalies/difficulties accrue and a suitable replacement paradigm can be settled upon through scientific argument. This process of replacing paradigms is what constitutes a scientific revolution. [Obviously this is an incredibly condensed simplification. Wikipedia does a pretty good job with it, but anyone in Lit/Sci studies should of course actually read Kuhn].
The areas investigated by normal science are, of course, miniscule; the enterprise now under discussion has drastically restricted vision. But those restrictions, born from confidence in a paradigm, turn out to be essential to the development of science. By focusing attention on a small range of relatively esoteric problems, the paradigm forces scientists to investigate some part of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable. (24)
“Normal science” is a specific type of activity for Kuhn. He has a complex definition involving three functions, but broadly it involves “mopping up” – answering the large number of questions that a paradigm shift creates. The paradigm is to confidence what a large government grant is to funding. With the mental support provided by the paradigm’s framework, the scientist can confidently pursue his study of how protein folding works to seemingly absurd detail. But as we see with DNA folding such investigations carry the potential for what I’d call new sub-paradigms.
This is a worthwhile article from the BBC. I don’t think it requires any commentary from me.
Perhaps one of the most surprising things in Garwood’s book is her revelation that flat earth theory is a relatively modern phenomenon.
Ms Garwood says it is an “historic fallacy” that everyone from ancient times to the Dark Ages believed the earth to be flat, and were only disabused of this “mad idea” once Christopher Columbus successfully sailed to America without “falling off the edge of the world”.
In fact, people have known since at least the 4th century BC that the earth is round, and the pseudo-scientific conviction that we actually live on a disc didn’t emerge until Victorian times. [my emphasis]
From the Dickens Journal
Here’s a relevant excerpt from an informal set of writings done for a seminar on Dickens.
I’ve decided that the thing to do with these pages is try to make them work for me. To that end I’ll proceed through my planned summer reading and do what I can to apply that to Dickens (and vice versa).
So I’ll begin where my reading begins: Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump. I haven’t actually cracked into this book yet, but it is one of those inescapable works about which you know a great deal before you pick it up. Everyone uses it. The concept I’m interested in presently is “virtual witnessing.” Shapin and Schaffer elaborate this “literary technology” as it was developed in the work and conversations between Boyle and Hobbes over the development of the air-pump. “The technology of virtual witnessing involves the production in a reader’s mind of such an image of an experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either direct witness or replication. Through virtual witnessing the multiplication of witnesses could be, in principle, unlimited. It was therefore the most powerful technology for constituting matters of fact.” [http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/VirtualWitnessDiscussion/TheVirtualWitness.html] The implications for non-scientific literature are many, including the construction of reliable narrators, epistemological questions of fact and the importance of truth, and so on.
I immediately begin to think of Sketches by Boz here. To begin with, what is Dickens’s initial reason for cataloging his city? What does the “sketch” do and is it anything like virtual witnessing? I turned to David Seed’s article “Touring the Metropolis: The Shifting Subjects in Dickens’s London Sketches.” Seed quotes Carol Bernstein: “the urban sketch is at once the locus of memory and the attempt to fix objects and events in the memory” (157). Seed goes on to say “Dickens resituated exploration nearer to the reader’s familiar territory and engaged in a kind of local tourism that ironically implies both the proximity to the reader of the places visited and the unfamiliarity of those places” (157). It seems to me that the Sketches’ project, then, is quite anthropological. Dickens’s artistic defamiliarization is in part a product of a need for objectivity. To highlight the reader’s “unfamiliarity” the sketch mimics the practices of virtual witnessing. The writing witness must be modest and disinterested if he or she is to be believed by the virtual witness. This means language that posits and suggests but does not declare or command. More from Seed: “the sketch implies a distinction between the writer and the human figures he describes.” Seed quotes Audrey Jaffe: Organization and identity are external matters; characters are caught within structures the cannot perceive from outside” (156). We see in the sketch a reflective and thoughtful observer who is careful never to get so close to his subjects as to blur their division (and thereby blur accurate perception).
Furthermore, factual and scientific knowledge after Boyle is never the product of a single mind, but is instead socially constructed and agreed upon. (This is not to say that facts do not have an identifiable point of origin. Rather it is to say that ideas do not become facts until the social group voluntarily agrees to them (after virtual witnessing or actual replication of experiment/observation.)) Along this line it is certainly noteworthy that Dickens uses “we” in place of “I” throughout Sketches, and also that he generally provides the reader with the specifics of his route through the city, as Seed observes, making the trip repeatable by the reader (158). The present tense of all of ‘our’ observations places us always at the moment of discovery, standing alongside the witness as he writes. The sketch serves the literate populace, allowing them to ’see’ all of London without actually visiting the sites documented. Dickens would fail to connect with his audience if his rhetoric were built purely on Aristotelian pathos or epideictic prose. Instead he is our friendly guide, a Virgil clinical enough to be believed but comical enough to be liked.
Another interesting item in Seed:
Dickens [writing in The Uncommercial Traveller] predicts the impossibility of future ages being able to infer the grotesque contradictions within Victorian society: “If this mud could petrify at this moment, and could lie here concealed for ten thousand years, I wonder whether the race of men then to be our successors on the earth could . . . deduce such an astounding inference as the existence of a polished state of society that bore with the public savagery of neglected children in the streets of its capital city. (162)
Seed then points out that this is an interesting use of palaeontology, a use of “Victorian science against its own age,” (163) which nicely contrasts the modern with the savage. To accurately perceive his surroundings one has to imagine reporting to a virtual witness ten thousand years outside of those surroundings, to think about what details it would be necessary for the firsthand witness to record in order to best communicate an environment. Dickens’s work fills the gap between the petrified mud and the future student of history.
