Lorraine Daston
Science Studies and the History of Science

The current relation between science studies and the history of science brings to mind the opening scenes of A Midsummer Night's Dream (or, minus the fairies, the high school comedy of your choice): Helena loves Demetrius, who used to love Helena, but now loves Hermia, who loves Lysander. A perfervid atmosphere of adolescence hangs over the play: rash promises, suicide threats, hyperbolic but sincere pledges of love and enmity, and, above all, the breathless sense of everything being constantly up for grabs.
Transposed from the enchanted wood of Oberon and Titania to the disenchanted groves of academe, it is science studies that fancies itself in the role of the spurned Helena, once courted but now rejected by the history of science. Sheila Jasanoff, speaking qua president of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, recently complained of a “somewhat one-sided love affair” with the history of science and a certain “jitteriness about being caught out in risqué company [that] marks the hiring practices of our major history of science departments.” While her society has awarded some of its highest prizes to historians of science, those ungrateful Demetriuses were off flirting with the discipline of history, which in turn was in hot pursuit of cultural anthropology. What fools these mortals be. Yet there was a time when Helena was wooed by Demetrius, and the history of science once was smitten by science studies. The story of infatuation and subsequent estrangement follows, I suspect, a more general pattern in the relation between disciplines and interdisciplinary clusters that address the same subject matter—in this case, science and technology. My aim in this essay is to trace that pattern.

Lorraine Daston is the director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. At the Max Planck Institute she has organized research projects on the history of demonstration and proof, the varieties of scientific experience, the moral authority of nature, the common languages of art and science, and the history of scientific observation. Edited volumes resulting from these projects include Biographies of Scientific Objects (2000), The Moral Authority of Nature (2004) (coedited with Fernando Vidal), and Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (2004). Her books include Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988) and, with Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (1998), both of which were awarded the Pfizer Prize of the History of Science Society. Objectivity, coauthored with Peter Galison, was published in 2007. She is currently working on a book about the link between moral and natural orders.

© 2009 by The University of Chicago.