In this post, I discuss the historiography of knowledge. I analyze tensions within the field and attempt to understand why we should to care about the foundations of the field.
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History of Knowledge is here. The authorities are still checking the identity of the settler. Is it someone’s sibling or cousin? Is it someone’s baseborn or a love child? Maybe the new queen? The process seems to take some time.
Personally, I first encountered the history of knowledge as a field that studies those forms of knowledge that are not included in science and are not studied by the history of science. (See Daston 2017, 143.) This negative definition, however, does not tell us much about knowledge or about the field. Its main purpose is to underline the observation that “science” is a historical category and not everything that has been related to knowledge counts as a science. The story of science is not the story of knowledge. Knowledge is a much wider category.
The main problem with the idea that the historiography of knowledge studies the residue of historiography of science is that it misleads us about the origins of science. The present science has developed from practices that were not scientific in the current sense. Rather, it developed from other kinds of epistemological practices. Historiography of science should not be understood as a study of “sciences in the past” but rather as the study of the causal history of the present science (Virmajoki 2019). Some past epistemological practices belong the causal history and others do not, but this does not mean that there is some fundamental difference between the two sets of practices. The distinction between those practices that belong to the history of science and those that do not does not necessarily track any real historical distinction. To provide a silly analogy, some oats from a field end up as my nutrition, but those oats do not differ from the ones that do not. The only difference is in the causal paths of the different boxes of oats. The distinction between science and non-science does not cut through the history. Renn writes:
For many historians of science, science no longer seems distinguishable from other forms of cultural practices. [–] This insight has opened up many new perspectives on the study of the history of science, which is turning more and more into a history of knowledge. It thus includes not only academic practices, but also the production and reproduction of knowledge far removed from traditional academic settings, for instance, in artisanal and artistic practices, or even in family and household practices. (2015, 37–38.)
Given that even the mighty historiography of science is only a narrowly defined part (the causal story of the present science) of the totality of historiography of knowledge, the nature of the historiography of knowledge remains completely open. There is not even a negative definition.
I think we should pause here and take a step back. Why is it so important do define what the historiography of knowledge is about? I understand the underlying science policy issue that in order to gain institutional resources, a field such as the historiography of knowledge needs to create a creditable self-image. However, I am not sure whether there exists a real issue beyond this science policy maneuvering. Both the worries and hopes associated with history of knowledge as the field seem to repeat age-old problems of historical relevance, distinctiveness, scale, and scope.
Historians seem to be in great pains in answering whose and what knowledge should be studied as a part of the historiography of knowledge. Should the investigation focus on the dominant forms of knowledge in a historical context or should it focus also on marginalized forms of knowledge?[1] Perhaps the investigation should focus precisely on how such distinctions have been drawn? It is difficult to see how such questions could be answered at a general level, as if there was a God-given answer to what really counts as history of knowledge. All depends on the questions that are asked. If we want to understand what counted a the most valuable knowledge in the Medieval Europe or how that conceptions changed during the early modern period, the question itself suggests what kinds of knowledge need to be analyzed. Notice that the problem is not how to recognize knowledge of a group in a given context. If we are able to wonder whose and what knowledge to investigate, we have already identified knowledge.
Perhaps one could rise a deeper worry. How do we recognize knowledge from historical contexts, given that our conception of knowledge might differ from the conception of historical actors? This worry would make sense if the task of a subfield of historiography was to produce lists of items that fall under the category relevant to that subfield, such as knowledge. Not only would such historiography lack all the important insights but also go against one of the main lessons of the field: that categorizations and conceptions change, and we cannot expect that the best historiographical insights can be achieved through our present categories. History of science already taught us this. The best strategy for understanding science is not to search for sciences in the past but to understand how science developed from activities designed for other purposes.
Another worry is that knowledge is present in every human activity. For example, understanding a military operation in WW2 requires that the production and communication of knowledge, information and misinformation are investigated. In a sense, there is nothing new about the historiography of knowledge, as knowledge has been a part of historiographical studies all along.
I do not think that this worry is a serious one. Rather, I think that it gives an important clue to the prospects of historiography of knowledge. It becomes possible to say that the historiography of knowledge makes the history understandable by providing deeper insights into the nature of knowledge as a part of human activities than other areas of historiography. The knowledge and information are not the explanans but the explanandum, in other words, historiography of knowledge explains why and how some knowledge was produced, communicated and preserved and why it was given the status it had among the historical actors. In contrast, in military history, knowledge and information might explain why an operation proceeded in a way it did and other such things. In historiography of knowledge, knowledge is explained; in other areas of historiography, knowledge explains.
This is a very crude distinction and one that ultimately needs to be dropped. Even in the cases where historians are not directly explaining the production/communication/preservation of knowledge, knowledge might play so important part in a complete explanatory narrative that it becomes impossible to separate the history of knowledge from other aspects of history. For example, the history of WW2 can only be explained by detailed investigation on the Manhattan Project, the radar systems, the cryptanalysis of the Enigma etc. WW2 changed the world and we want to understand (among many other things) how it affected and was affected by the development of knowledge and science. Knowledge is not separable from a comprehensive narrative.
Serious problems in the historiography of knowledge start when the relevance and the meaningfulness of some historiographical period are not clear, but the history-of-knowledge perspective is added in the hope of gaining relevance. Pointing out that in any given context, in a court for example, different forms of knowledge were present and that the knowledge and power were intertwined in a certain way does not seem like a big breakthrough. Given that a court can have many different interests from economic to cultural to religious and given that all human activities involve knowledge, it is not exactly a surprise that the many forms of knowledge and power have complex dynamics. Surely, such things can be studied for their own sake, but they do not indicate that history-of-knowledge framework carries any further relevance to the studies. For example, when Mulsow notes that “historians are also known for their tendency to rummage in little-known and out-of-the-way places. And not without reason: it is in just such places that the unexpected and less typical dynamics of knowledge can sometimes be found” (2018, 180) the reader wonders what implications those unexpected and less typical dynamics have for our understanding about history and knowledge (see a related post here). Again, it is not exactly a surprise that less typical things are found in less typical environments, and it should be explained why the less typical dynamics of knowledge are relevant to our understanding of history and knowledge.
It seems that there are some unresolved tensions in historiography that come visible in the discussions about the nature of historiography of knowledge.
First, historiography often emphasize the importance of the study of limited historical contexts and timespans as a result of “ideological” and methodological considerations. The “ideological” considerations relate to the role of historiography. The idea is that historical situations deserve to be studied in their own terms and for their own sake. Moreover, the sources limit what can be concluded and it is not advisable to build grand narratives. The connection of grand narratives to concrete evidence is just too obscure.
Secondly, historians are often curious about the possibility of applying new perspective on historiographical situations – perspectives that sometimes stem from metahistoriographical categories such as history of knowledge.
Thirdly, there are hopes that detailed historiographical studies could reveal something beyond the subjects they explicitly focus on. For example, Mulsow argues that “the innovative aspect of a history of knowledge [–] in the global context it is the uncovering of ‘knowledge paths’ which cross-cultural borders, carrying theoretical knowledge embedded in transfers of material goods, local practices, and affective connotations (2018, 173), and Daston suggests that “In some cases, what begins as a comparative study of apparently diverse cultural knowledge systems may end as the discovery of a common culture” (Mulsow 2018 [sic], 178).
The tendency to focus on detailed historical situations and “paths” that people and object have taken and the pressure to conclude something beyond the details are not easily reconciled. The debate on the nature and prospects of the category of history of knowledge can perhaps be understood as a response to this tension. It seems that the metahistorical categories are adapted and intended as apparatuses that transform a particular and unique conclusion into a generalizable viewpoint. “It is our conviction, however, that the generative capacity of the history of knowledge also needs to be developed. We look upon this as the ability to create new questions, perspectives, frameworks, methods, themes, and concepts that are not part of existing discourses or practices” Östling and Heidenbald (2020) write.
The improvement of the “generative capacity” is a respectable goal. However, a possible problem is that the frameworks thus developed become superficial and are mechanically applied to historical cases. For example, Mulsow (2018) discussed how the history of knowledge could utilize the conceptual apparatus of epistemic vices and virtues. Virtue epistemology is a complex field and nuanced field (see here). It could be useful in the history of knowledge. However, there is the risk that the complexities of the framework are missed, and historiographical studies only point out (the trivial fact) that sometimes historical actors act in an epistemically valuable way and sometimes in an inferior way, hiding the trivialities in virtue-epistemology-jargon. This would teach us nothing.
Another example comes from the history of historiography of science. Kuhn´s theory of paradigms and revolutions with its emphasis on the social and cultural dimensions of science seemed to have all the ingredients for a new framework to be applied in historiography. What happened? Superficial paradigm-jargon obtained a life of its own while professional historiography of science moved away from the macrohistorical perspective (see Virmajoki 2019, 5.2). In 1992, Steve Fuller observed that Kuhn’s Structure was the last book written from such perspective. Later, the inevitable chattering of historiography of science and questions of the foundations of the entire field became acute (see Renn cited above).
I am somewhat afraid that the same will happen to the historiography of knowledge. The problem is not the shattering itself. The problem is that the link between the study of unique historical situations/paths and more general viewpoints is thought to be achievable through metahistoriographical categories such as history of knowledge. Once these categories shatter, the hope of the connection will also shatter.
However, there is hope even without hope. Historiography has made the past understandable despite the constant debates on the frameworks and the specialization of its subfields. The historiography of science has shattered but despite this shattering (or because of this) we know more about science than before. Of course, not all the pieces fit together; but an interconnected web of studies can provide a perspective or an explanatory narrative on the development of science, and different webs can provide complementary or competing perspectives. It is difficult to tell how such epistemic processes work or even whether they are driven by something more than contingencies. But one thing is for sure: the connections between historiographical narratives go beyond subdisciplinary boundaries and this means that the connecting nodes are not the foundational assumptions of a subfield or a metahistorical category.
Historiography of knowledge does not need a foundational justification for its investigations. Neither does it gain anything from such justification. Some historiographical studies and conclusion drive us forward while others are completely sterile. Which of these groups a historiographical study belongs to does not usually depend on whether the foundational questions of its historiographical subfield are resolved.
In reference to Ballad of a Thin Man, Bob Dylan once said
“This is a song I wrote a while back in response to people who ask me questions all the time. You just get tired of that every once in a while. You just don’t want to answer no more questions. I figure a person’s life speaks for itself, right?”.[2]
References
Daston, L. (2017). “The history of science and the history of knowledge”. KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 1 (1).
Mulsow, Martin (2018). “History of Knowledge”. In Debating New Approaches to History (ed. Burke, Peter and Tamm, Marek.)
Renn, J. (2015). “From the History of Science to the History of Knowledge – and Back”. Centaurus 57.
Virmajoki, Veli (2019). Cementing Science.
Östling, J., & Heidenblad, D. L. (2020). “Fulfilling the Promise of the History of Knowledge: Key Approaches for the 2020s”. Journal for the History of Knowledge 1 (1).
[1] See Daston commenting on Mulsow (2018).