Transcript of Simon Schaffer on 'Leviathan and the Air-Pump: 40 years later' (Part 1)
Welcome to The HPS Podcast, where we discuss all things history, philosophy, and social studies of science. I'm your host for today, Samara Greenwood.
This episode is the first of two in which I talk to the celebrated professor of history of science, Simon Schaffer, about the famous HPS publication, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, which Simon co-wrote with another esteemed HPS scholar, Steven Shapin, in the early 1980s. The book went on to become one of the most well-known across both HPS and STS, or Science and Technology Studies.
As Leviathan and the Air Pump has been mentioned previously by a number of our guests on the Podcast, we thought it would be great to dedicate a whole episode - which has now turned into two episodes - in which we examine the production and reception of this important book, especially as next year marks 40 years since its first release.
In today's episode, Simon discusses his own academic story, introduces us to the book's main themes and aims, and muses - at my prompting - on why this particular publication became so well known.
As you will find, Simon is also a highly experienced and delightful scholarly communicator. So please enjoy listening to a master at work and remember to tune in again next week for the equally entertaining second half.
____________________
Samara Greenwood: Hello, and welcome to the HPS Podcast, Simon. Thank you so much for joining me.
I'd like to begin with one of our favourite questions, which is how did you first find your way to HPS?
Simon Schaffer: I started as a natural sciences student at Cambridge in the early 1970s. Cambridge has a very idiosyncratic attitude to teaching in the sciences. One of its idiosyncrasies is that there is only a general natural sciences course for undergrads. It was then possible, it still is, to take a minor option in history and philosophy of science in your second, your middle year, and you can do it full time in your final, your third year, and that's what I did.
Otherwise, I was mainly doing physics and mathematics. By the end of my undergraduate degree in 1975, almost half my teaching had been in history and philosophy of science. I took a master's at Harvard in 1975, '76. I went back to Cambridge in '76 and wrote a PhD on Isaac Newton and Newtonian cosmology. I was lucky enough to get a job teaching in history of science at Imperial College in London in the early eighties. By then, I suppose I counted as a professional historian of science.
[00:02:59]
Samara Greenwood: What drew you in about history of science, away from the natural sciences?
Simon Schaffer: I wanted to tell that little piece of autobiography because the institution, and in many ways the content of the work, was not drawing away from the natural sciences. Because the program was taught within the natural sciences course, because of who was teaching it, because of what we were to read and write about, because of the questions that seemed urgent and pressing in the curriculum, I don't think there was a very strongly marked contrast between what kinds of issues historians of philosophy of science would ask, and the more general questions that, in a certain sense, any scientist would ask about what they were pursuing, why they were pursuing it and where the principal concerns of their field had actually come from. So, I don't think that boundary was very heavily marked.
It was obvious, and the career I've just described is a good example, that if you committed yourself to working in this field, you were very unlikely to get any kind of position within a specialist science. But it was very clear, at least at that moment, that these were enterprises that were not just in conversation with the sciences but were very much part of them institutionally and in some respects intellectually. So, at Imperial College all my students were science and engineering students. It was absolutely clear that my function as teacher was to help make sense of the inquiry, the research, indeed the teaching that they were pursuing.
[00:04:55]
Samara Greenwood: Were you a historian's historian by that stage? Were you interested in making it clear to scientists or was it more about history of science for the history?
Simon Schaffer: A very significant number of historians of science, for example, were not themselves trained as historians at all. I wasn't. Because of the absurd overspecialisation of the British school system, I didn't study any history after the age of 14, and from then on, I was a scientist. I was a science student, I was a scientist, I was an historian of science. The reason I'm emphasising it is because it's an extremely interesting example of how boundaries get built and how specialisations get defined – and how it's perfectly possible to ask questions and be fascinated by problems that from the outside seem obviously to belong to one field but are being pursued in another.
This is a great example, right? It turned out some of the major questions that I got excited by were historical questions, but I wasn't trained as an historian. These were questions that emerged from within the sciences and from within certain kinds of attitude to the sciences. Two examples suggest themselves.
One is the extraordinary significance of trying to understand the pathway by which an apparently self-evident problem becomes a problem and self-evident for any particular field. That turned out to be an interestingly genealogical or ancestral question. If we could understand how it came to pass that this seems an obvious area of inquiry, then we would probably understand better why it is an object of inquiry, and why it has this very interesting feature that you don't even have to worry about why you're asking this question, it's obvious that you should. We could call that the history of obviousness. Another question that absolutely absorbed me, and this is going to be important later on in the conversation, was how it came to pass that experimentation occupied the role that it did. In the end, the question becomes, how important is the equipment? Was it possible to understand, for example, a particular scientific project, a particular experimental enterprise, a particular discipline even, not so much in terms of a series of principles, but in terms of what we might call its furniture. Remember, this is the 1970s and early 80s. I'm of the generation that still used logarithms. This was one of the many moments in the sciences when the scale of hardware was dramatically changing. What counted as hardware was changing too. In retrospect, I don't think this was obvious at the time, but in retrospect, it was absolutely obvious that, for example, the hardware of computation was playing and then going to play this extraordinary role. Obviously, the question that suggested itself was, are these devices going to go on being counted as assistants or minor forms of toolkit? Or are they going to dominate scientific inquiry? If so, how will things change? I got very interested in the furniture, and I got particularly interested in who made the furniture, who made the instrument, and how it was decided that they were working or not. I was always very interested in instruments that break and instruments that get fixed. I was very interested in how a group of people gathered round an instrument.
[00:09:17]
Samara Greenwood: That's a really good segue into today's topic, which is the classic HPS book, Leviathan and the Air Pump, which you and Steven Shapin published together almost 40 years ago now. Next year is the anniversary. How would you describe the book to someone who hasn’t come across it before?
Simon Schaffer: The book offers, above all, I would say, a case study. It takes a particular set of exchanges that took place in England from the late 1650s through the mid 1660s, the period that political historians call the Restoration. So, the end of the English Civil Wars and the beginning of the restored monarchy.
The protagonists of these debates are a wealthy, noble, Anglo Irish natural philosopher, chemist, naturalist – Robert Boyle – and a much older philosopher and political thinker – Thomas Hobbes. Both of these people are extraordinarily celebrated, and their works have been very thoroughly studied by historians and philosophers and indeed scientists. The controversy between them, however, when we started to put the book together, had not been given very much, and in some cases, had not been given any attention. For various reasons, it seemed as if the debate itself, and the issues that it raised at the time, and some of the implications of those issues now, for us, all seemed worth developing.
Two features of that seem worth stressing right now. One is that the purported topic that motivated their debate was the appearance of a work authored by Robert Boyle, which described a series of experiments that he and his collaborators had performed with a new-fangled instrument called an air pump, that Boyle and his principal partner, Robert Hooke, had designed in the late 1650s. They had derived a series of consequences from those experiments about the properties of the air – and in particular – what it is in the air that produces not only its pressure, but its elasticity, its spring.
Boyle was interested in those questions partly as a natural philosopher of matter, but also because of his medical interests. Since he and his colleagues in Oxford reckoned that there are properties in the air, there are principles in the air which are responsible for animal life and that there must be some kind of relationship then between the physical properties of the air and the vital principles that keep animals and humans alive.
Hobbes read the book, disliked it intensely, and wrote a dialogue on the nature of the air, which he had published. It attacked fairly systematically not only Boyle's conclusions, but also Boyle's experiments, and in fact the methods and principles that Boyle, as Hobbes saw it, was using in these debates. That was the tight focus of our case. It took us longer to write the book than the events that it in fact described. The focus of the case is quite tight chronologically, geographically, and indeed socially. What we also wanted to do was to explore what we took to be some of the more significant issues that the debate raised. Issues, for example, about obligation. Why am I supposed to grant belief to a particular experimental claim or to any claim in general? What are the relations of trust on which the reliability of a report relies? What is at stake in grounding what counts as philosophy in the workings of a machine? How are experiments organised at that point so that their results are trustworthy?
It turned out that it was very important at that point that these events should be witnessed, that there should be, as it were, others in the room who could testify to not only the event, but how the event should be described. It was important to Boyle, who was very explicit about this, that the description of the experiment should be written in a very particular way, so that even if one was not in the room, one could behave like a witness. We called that virtual witnessing. It was important that the devices, the machines, the instruments, should be functioning reliably and properly. This set up a series of puzzles and problems that Hobbes and Boyle and their circle began to debate extremely intensely. Those were the immediate concerns of the book.
I should mention also – it's an autobiographical point – but at the beginning, in the early '80s, '81, the idea was that it would be an article.
[00:15:25]
Samara Greenwood: Oh, right!
Simon Schaffer: Soon after Steve and I met in 1980 we agreed that this would be a very interesting and enjoyable article to write together. Steve was by far the senior and more expert scholar and figure. I was extremely flattered and encouraged that he thought that I could take part. It was going to be an article based on this case that would draw out some of its implications. Pretty quickly, it became clear that this would be rather a long article. By '83, it was clear that it would be something like a book.
[00:16:06]
Samara Greenwood: What do you feel your main aims were for the book?
Simon Schaffer: I think there were three aims in view. One was, I'm sorry about the jargon, naturalistic and empirical. In other words, we wanted to tell a story about an episode of controversy and debate, of argument and inquiry, that we found profoundly consequential and interesting – and we wanted to see if it was possible to treat this as an example of an approach to telling this story about the past of inquiry and practice in a particular way. Certainly, one aim was, as I've already said, the case study approach. This is reasoning from cases. The second aim that we had in view was to explore a number of quite complicated and difficult, almost ethical or moral categories that seemed to be at stake in the episode that we were talking about. Like obligation, trust, belief, authority, confidence, collectivity; the production of authority that's grounded not on an individual, but on a group, how that group acquires legitimacy. Then also, under the second point, to link those categories to problems of knowledge. How do we know? What is it that we know? How can we spell that out? These were quite general problems that seemed to be at stake in the particular case that we were examining. No doubt, the third end that we had in view – over the last four decades this has perhaps become more and more and more obvious – is that we wanted to both provide an example of, and explore some of, the more important claims that were starting to be made by particular approaches to the past of the sciences.
At the point that we were working, indeed right through my training, right through Steve's training, it was taken for granted in our field by most practitioners – certainly by many of the leaders of the field – that it was possible to distinguish very clearly between what were called factors which were 'internal to the sciences', and factors which were what were called 'external to the sciences'.
When we looked at the case that we were trying to make sense of, it seemed very clear that great map – that distinction, that boundary – wasn't doing any useful work. What we found, and I insist on the point we found, was that those distinctions were part of the story. In other words, rather than assuming them as a map in which we would explore this debate, we found that this debate was actually arguing about what counts as inside the conduct of the sciences and what counts as outside. Rather than being. as it might be said, 'internalist' or 'externalist', we were setting out to understand better how that map itself emerged, and why.
[00:19:58]
Samara Greenwood: Fabulous. That's just excellent.
So, since its publication, Leviathan and the Air Pump has become one of the most well-known publications in HPS. What do you think made it stand out so much from others?
Simon Schaffer: I think there are two possible answers to that. One is, I have absolutely no idea, because the worst person to ask about a work's repute and development is its author. Meaning is in the hands of future users and presumably the best people to ask about the reputation of this book are the people who read it, not the people who wrote it.
That would be a silly answer, but not entirely silly, since part of the concern of the book was: how is it that an intervention made by a group of people changes what it means when it's treated by others? This was after all one of Robert Boyle's principal concerns. He devoted an immense amount of work trying to make sure not only that the results of his experiments travelled without being distorted, but that they were, to use his phrase, 'standing records' that could be used by others in a reliable way. He was very, very concerned with the question you just asked. That's one answer. The second answer is, I think there were a number of features of the extremely limited, highly bounded communities in which the book initially travelled that made this book resonate with some contemporary concerns.
It was about technology, it was about material culture, it was about instrumentation. Some people even understood, or thought, that the book's principal hero was the air pump, was the machine. This was a conjuncture – it's important to emphasise – in which the instrumental, technological, material, equipment-based dimensions of the sciences were becoming more and more intensely and dramatically significant. I think organising the story around a device, its production, its function, its treatment, and its manipulation, resonated a lot. Secondly, this was a work that drew on, explicitly and implicitly, a number of fields - a number of intellectual and technical resources that were, as it were, at right angles to the ordinary organisation of disciplines. There was a lot of boundary infringement going on. This was a work which drew on resources from social anthropology certainly, and massively from sociology, from the sociology of knowledge – from the sociology of scientific knowledge in particular. From historical geography, from various versions of ethnography, as well as the more recognisable resources of history, of certain kinds of philosophy - I would of course mention the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein, the philosophical arguments of the eminent physical chemist Michael Polanyi around tacit knowledge, the social theory that came from critical theory, and so on.
In other words, it was infringing certain apparently self-evident disciplinary boundaries. It was wearing some of its methodological affiliations on its sleeve. This was a moment when - we still live in this moment in all sorts of ways - the notion of transdisciplinary, cross disciplinary, interdisciplinary approaches was quite potent and several people took the book to be an example. They often took the book to be an example of that in order to criticise it. 'No, this is not a book that obeys the proper rules of the game. This is a book that keeps on playing different games at different moments, right?' The very notion of the game was absolutely fundamental for the book, partly because of its Wittgensteinian inspiration, partly because of the attention that the book pays right through to rules and boundaries and following rules.
One of the epigraphs of the book is taken from García Márquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude, in which one of the characters simply can't work out why there's any point playing a game if you've already agreed on the rules. We deliberately chose that passage to illustrate one of the lines that we were taking – we were going not only to describe a particular game, but we were going to ask how people ever manage to share rules together so that they can play one.
I think those two features, the attention to - to be fancy about it - material culture, and the simultaneous use of a number of very different intellectual and practical resources I think may have either been appealing, it was certainly noteworthy.
[00:25:47]
Samara Greenwood: That was really lovely to hear you express some of those things. Thank you so much. That's a fantastic spot to finish up.
Remember to tune in again next week for the equally entertaining second half.
_________________
Thank you for listening to season four of the HPS Podcast. If you're interested in the detail of today's conversation, you can access the transcript on our website at hpsunimelb.org. Stay connected with us on social media, including Blue Sky for updates, extras, and further discussion. We would also like to thank the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne for their ongoing support. And thank you for joining us in the wonderful world of HPS.
We look forward to having you back again next time.
Transcript production by Christine Polowyj
Comments