ABSTRACT
Why is the historiography of science important? In part, claims about the proper method for writing the history of science are simultaneously claims about the relations between the producers and the consumers of scientific knowledge as well as the relationship between historians of science and their object of study. Different historiographic perspectives yield divergent conceptions of ‘science’ as well as distinctive forms of historical inquiry. In the historian’s workshop, the scholar produces both a historical work and a map of knowledge delineating the boundaries separating the topic at hand, the investigator, and the work of other researchers. However, the historian of science, like the scientist, also engages in another demarcation: the identification of the scientific and the natural. Establishing and maintaining such a demarcation is of more than academic interest. As a major resource for the legitimization of existing social orders, science differs from other forms of knowledge because of its public professions of truthfulness and universality. Take the case of the electron. Measuring an electron’s charge in a Berkeley laboratory or a laboratory in the Balkans should produce identical results. How historians of science account for that identity is one of the great historiographic changes of this century. If an earlier generation of scholarship assumed the electron’s charge a ‘natural’ consequence of the particle’s existence as well as the genius of the discoverer, a more recent generation has seen the discovery, identification, and persistence of the charge as the upshot of a complex array of institutions and practices ranging from the organization of work in Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory to the design and development of imperial telegraphy and contemporary electric power systems. In other words, for the historian of science the electron’s existence is a necessary, yet insufficient cause for the discovery of its charge. No longer is the history of science the story of individual researchers confronting a ‘nature’ that must be persuaded to reveal its secrets. Instead, the new historiography has made the identification of the natural and its boundaries one of the prime areas of inquiry. What has taken place is nothing less than a redrawing of the boundaries separating the natural and the artificial.
