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This weekend the Cleveland Plain Dealer had a long article about the Western Reserve Historical Society’s systematic selling of collections to pay off debt.  Please go read the article right now.

While the current recession has hit museums, nonprofits and others especially hard and has them scrambling to survive, the society has long used its collection as a means to raise cash, something others find astounding.

The Western Reserve is not an accredited member of the American Association of Museums, unlike Ohio’s two other major history organizations, the Ohio Historical Society and the Cincinnati History Museum. Western Reserve had been a member for 20 plus years, but the membership lapsed in 1998.

Davis said the association is more appropriate for art and science museums and said they were members of a living history association.

But the AAM, established in 1906, represents 3,000 institutions that include, art, history, science, military and youth museums and others. It sets standards and best practices for museums, including for sales of museum collections, called de-accessions.

While many history museums routinely sell off collections that are duplicates or don’t meet their missions, accredited museums set aside the proceeds to buy new artifacts or care for the ones they have.

“It seems counterintuitive, whether art, history or science museum . . . that you’re going broke and you can’t sell,” said Ford Bell, American Association of Museums president. “The reason that policy exists is once they start to fund operations [by selling artifacts] the collections become assets and not collections.”

Bell said this standard has created and kept safe some of the greatest museums in the world, even though tough “awful economies of the past.”

At Western Reserve, the sale of many items such as guns, Indian artifacts and furniture have been kept private and quiet. The society refuses to say what is being sold or even how much the sales earn.

On the society’s tax forms that nonprofits must fill out, it reported $1.18 million in artifacts sold from October 2007 through June 2008. From October 2006 through September 2007, it reported asset sales of $2.1 million.

In the last several years, there have been a number of scandals in the art museum world about museums (the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, for instance) selling or proposing to sell off collections to address financial crises.  Critics wondered why museum people were so up in arms about the ethics of deaccessioning for profit.

The WRHS shows us some consequences of treating museum collections as assets, rather than, as is our mission and responsibility, objects held in trust for the public.  Lack of trust among donors, the public, and the profession.  Lack of accreditation.  The secrecy about their deaccessioning process, what items are chosen and how, what money was made from each item, only exacerbates the problem.  As a counterexample, see the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s deaccession database, which notes where each piece was sold and for what amount:  that’s radical transparency.

The museum community upholds ethics rules around collections deaccessioning not to be punitive or prudish, but to protect our collective cultural heritage and to keep museums as a third place, one that facilitates social encounters with historical objects and stories and is insulated from the market.  Our visitors and our donors deserve institutions that serve them.  This is a tough economy for everyone, but without our ethics we cease to be museums.

Beer at The Eagle, Cambridge, England

Michael Ruse has a piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Philosophers Rip Darwin, “ about academics who criticize Darwin/evolution, yet are ignorant of what they are criticizing. Ruse gives plenty of examples.

Here’s another:

Beer is often sold at football games. Beer has nothing to do with football and beer does not make the players better athletes. If someone said, “I don’t like beer,” would it be logical to respond, “Oh, you don’t like sports?” It is true that evolution is often included in science books, but that does not make it scientific by association.

That’s Kent Hovind, and you’ll find that and more to bring your lunch up in his “Open Letter to: Rush Limbaugh” (I guess he blogs from prison).

The Timecapsule section of the March issue of the APA’s Monitor on Psychology features an article on the involvement of psychologist Samuel Renshaw in the Second World War. Written by Nick Joyce(right), a graduate assistant at the Archives for the History of American Psychology (AHAP), the article details Renshaw’s efforts to improve aircraft and ship recognition among members of the American military. According to Joyce,

Renshaw taught officers to identify planes and vessels as a gestalt with a “perception of total form” in a fraction of a second. Data revealed that officers going through this training had dramatically improved recognition abilities. Upon completion of the program, officers could identify more types of planes and ships, with greater accuracy and with faster recognition times. The identification school’s graduates took the techniques to their commands and spread them. Over a million combined Navy and Army personnel learned Renshaw’s techniques.

The full article is available free online here.

If we ever wanted to get really serious about it, I doubt the notion of an “entente” between anthropological and natural philosophical cosmologies will wash as a way of understanding the historical roots of current historiographical concerns.  However, much like last summer’s series on the “Great Escape” from philosophy of science, this line of thinking will provide a useful heuristic that should prove of value in assembling a more coherent picture of the concerns that drove an important shift in historiographical style.  Recent posts here have discussed the “natural philosophy” end of this bargain—and we will return to that presently—but the next step should be to understand the appeal and application of anthropological cosmology to the history and historiography of science.

Simply following the citations from Schaffer’s “Natural Philosophy,” a good place to start is Barry Barnes’ and Steven Shapin’s essay review of Mary Douglas’ essay collection Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology, entitled “Where is the Edge of Objectivity?” and appearing in the British Journal for the History of Science 7 (1977): 61-6.  The work is notable for the clarity, simplicity, and explicitness with which it conveys some key points.

The essay review is mainly used as an opportunity to advertise the talking points of the Edinburgh School of sociology of science.  As such, what is taken to be important are certain features of Douglas’ work, rather than the work itself.  I’ll try and delineate a few such features.

1. Cosmology, defined as the cognitive resources at one’s disposal, is inevitable.  The attempt to escape a system of ideas simply resorts to other ideas.  Barnes and Shapin quoting Douglas: “People are living in the middle of their cosmology, down in amongst it; they are energetically manipulating it, evading its implications in their own lives if they can, but using it for hitting each other and forcing one another to conform to something they have in mind.”
2. Cosmology as a cognitive strategy is a way of maintaining social order, which helps us understand complicated foreign belief systems.  According to Barnes and Shapin, in Douglas’ early work, “Preliterate beliefs were social institutions bound into the practical operation of the community and intelligible only in terms of activity in the community.  Even conceptions of nature in such communities had to be made intelligible in terms of their social functions; one did not ask how well they reflected reality but how well they justified the social hierarchy or how far they discouraged deviant acts in the society.”
3. Purity and Danger.  Cosmology maintains social order by establishing sets of commonly-accepted intellectual boundaries that define appropriate behaviors; violations of these boundaries are perceived as pollutants that threaten individual sanctity, and through polluted individuals, society itself.
4. As an inevitable cognitive resource, cosmology should be deemed universally applicable.  “The dynamic feature of [Douglas'] thought has been the progressive extension of her working approach to knowledge, so that it is now held to apply to the beliefs of all societies.  In the 1970s she has formulated for herself the task of establishing the social roots of all cosmologies—’ours’ as well as ‘theirs’, ’scientific’ as well as ‘magical’, since she can no longer accept the grounds upon which she once believed that our thought was different.”

For Barnes and Shapin, these tenets define knowledge as “constitutively social”.  The analytical power of the insights is taken to endorse the Edinburgh School’s call for a “social epistemology”, which doubles as a criticism of the historiography of science.  According to Barnes and Shapin the historiography boasts “a wide range of perspectives and no lack of intellectual vitality,” but the historiography is fatally flawed in a way that Douglas’ work is not.  In the historiography of science

an individualistic epistemology is more or less taken for granted.  The individual scientist is assumed to contribute to the growth of genuine knowledge by rationally appraising his observations or experimental results.  His success is that of an individual rational mind in contact with reality through experiment or observation; the social context in which he operates is not considered an essential element in understanding his achievement.

This segues directly into the second key point, an attack on forms of analysis that purport to demarcate a rational core from unrational social context.  Within such analyses, “the social context is often considered to be a source of prejudices and biases, a source of disturbance of rational thought, a potential pollutant of the knowledge being produced.”  At best, this pollution might “accidentally contribute to the long-term benefit of science.”  In an analysis that accepted a social epistemology, “the social relationships within scientific communities and the institutional structures of the societies wherein science arose” would be as necessary for explaining the successes of scientific cultures as the cognitive processes employed.

The validity of the anti-demarcationist view is taken to be demonstrated by the applicability of anthropological or sociological analysis to scientific work.  If the demarcationist view is accordingly rejected, “Scientific knowledge would cease to have a privileged status.  It would become a set of collective representations just like those of ‘popular science’ or ‘common-sense’ or of some other esoteric sub-culture.”

This last provocative line was commonplace in varying forms in the 1970s and ’80s, and so we come to a critical point in the story.  The basic applicability of socio-epistemology and anthro-cosmology should not be controversial.  Scientific figures routinely trust in the validity of colleagues’ reports, in the reliability of ritually-performed standardized methods, and in the legitimacy of ideas inherited from predecessors.  Likewise, no scientific community can maintain its work unless this acceptance is well-enforced.  Nevertheless, the intellectual leveling implied by the phrase “cease to have a privileged status” would cause controversy to no end, partially because the phrase and ones similar to it were ill-formulated, partially because it was sometimes genuinely deployed to various radical conclusions.

For their part, Barnes and Shapin were eager to demonstrate their moderate credentials, not least by throwing Douglas and other anthropologists under the bus at the appropriate moment.

It may be [...] that, with the emphasis Professor Douglas has increasingly found necessary in order successfully to convey her social epistemology, certain aspects of the generation of knowledge have been neglected.  One need have no quibble with her characterization of beliefs and arguments as conventional in order to suspect her insistence that knowledge must always reflect an interest in social control….  ¶…natural scientists do often attempt to develop their work as a body of technical lore and competences, and nothing more, devaluing cosmology and metaphysics even as they use it….  ¶Professor Douglas neglects technique and the importance of an interest in predicting and controlling the behaviour of material entities, when discussing the generation of knowledge.  Social anthropologists in Britain have not been greatly interested in the empirical lore of their tribes: how to attach fish hooks to lines, how to make spear points.  But such lore must be considered in any general theory of knowledge.

Nevertheless, there was plenty of provocation left to keep things stirred up.  I think the term chutzpah is applicable to the tactic of applying a theory designed to analytically level different schemes of thought to dismiss those who refuse to accept the tenets of selfsame theory:

Professor Douglas’ own theories, probably correctly, indicate that [...] they are unlikely to gain ready acceptance among all historians of science.  Science is a highly valued body of knowledge.  Much depends upon its high credibility, upon its being perceived as an especially reliable, distinctive form of knowledge.  And, to an extent, the differentiated existence of the history of science, its interesting institutional position, and the structure of its internal system of authority depends upon this perception.  Those who benefit from an entity being perceived in this way are always under pressure to treat the entity as sacred and set-apart.  By doing this, by insisting that the entity is different in essence from less-valued things, logically distinct and bounded-off, they legitimate and justify their own position….  A social epistemology erodes currently dominant legitimations of science and undermines the presently accepted way of distinguishing its internal history from the study of external pollutions.  Thus it is liable to evoke hostility and sanction.

Here the meaning of the phrase “different in essence” becomes crucial.  Are philosophical efforts to describe scientific thought an effort to differentiate it in essence? to set it apart as sacred?  Or is this just another humble appeal for the acceptance of the applicability of anthro-cosmology?  How one parses the phrase makes all the difference in determining just who one is accusing of illegitimately exempting their work from legitimate question.  The phrase “all historians of science” indicates we might be dealing with a few recalcitrant souls, but the blanket condemnation of the historiography as founded on the sand of an “individualistic” epistemology suggests otherwise.  The question seems to hinge on the intellectual viability of the historiography circa 1977.

Where Schaffer’s attack on scholars’ general approach to the problem of natural philosophy strikes me as intellectually exuberant, in this piece one can more palpably feel the professional tensions, which, according to popular lore, had begun to permeate the history of science.  More discussion forthcoming.

Went to Bozeman today and visited the Museum of the Rockies. Here Patrick poses with the left foot of Big Mike, a bronze replica of a Tyrannosaurus rex that greets visitors to the museum.

More pictures here.

From the podcast of Ockham’s Razor (A[ustralian]BC Radio National):

Emeritus Professor Anthony Larkum from Sydney University talks about what launched Charles Darwin into a scientific career at Cambridge and how he was given the opportunity to go on the HMS Beagle.

Larkum is the author of A Natural Calling: Life, Letters and Diaries of Charles Darwin and William Darwin Fox. Listen to the podcast here or download the mp3.

The caption for this photo, taken in Sydney, Australia:

“For all the heathen fools who trust science over mythology. Y’know, the same science that gives us technology like, um, DVDs. (Shhh!! Don’t spoil his fun!)”

The sign reads:

“FREE DVD
Creation Seminar
Dr. Kent Hovind
Topics: Dinosaurs, the Flood,
the Age of the Earth,
Lies in the Textbooks,
Evolution, Carbon-Dating”

Patrick and I took a walk with a Winter Nature Walk checklist looking for various things. We walked from our house to a city nature trail and back around through another neighborhood – a big circle. Part of our walk was through a field with lots of trash in it, and Patrick said: “There’s garbage everywhere. That’s unhealthy for the Earth and it makes the Earth mad.”

See more pictures here.

Download seasonal nature walk checklists here. And thanks to the Go Explore Nature blog for the idea.

“Evolution Matters” is “three lectures by Harvard and MIT researchers, which explore issues in evolution from the perspective of the medical sciences.” From the HMNH website:

The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma
Lecture by Marc Kirschner
Thursday, March 11, 7:00 PM

Dr. Marc Kirschner, Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, will discuss his evolutionary theory of how rare and random mutation in organisms can lead to exquisite changes of form and function. Free and open to the public, Harvard Museum of Natural History, 24 Oxford Street. Part of the Evolution Matters lecture series.

Evolution of Brain Aging and Cognitive Decline
Lecture by Bruce Yankner
Thursday, March 25, 6:00 PM

During the last century, treatments for the diseases of youth and middle-age adults have helped raise life expectancy. However, neurocognitive decline has emerged as one of the greatest health threats of old age, with nearly 50% of adults over the age of 85 afflicted by Alzheimer’s disease. Meeting this challenge demands a greater understanding of the processes underlying normal and pathological brain aging. Dr. Bruce Yankner, Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, will discuss how evolutionary studies are unexpectedly revealing new insights into age-related cognitive decline, suggesting that it may have appeared recently in the primate lineage. Free and open to the public, Harvard Museum of Natural History, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge. Part of the Evolution Matters lecture series.

The Evolutionary and Genetic Basis of Human Reproduction
Lecture by David Page
Thursday, April 15, 6:00 PM

Dr. David Page, Director of the Whitehead Institute and Professor of Biology at MIT, studies sex chromosomes and the critical role they play in human reproduction, with special focus on the evolution of the Y chromosome. His laboratory is currently seeking to unravel the genetic mechanisms responsible for a range of sexual disorders, from failed sperm production to sex reversal to Turner Syndrome. Free and open to the public at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge.  Part of the Evolution Matters lecture series.

The first day of the new history track at the conference of the Eastern Psychological Association conference (in Brooklyn, NY) was a big hit. The highlight of the day was the session by EPA Historian Wade Pickren on the life and career of psychologist and anthropologist Otto Klineberg. Klineberg is best known for his “radical” assertion in the 1930s that races do not differ in intelligence. Most of Klineberg’s academic career was at Columbia University in New York City, though he traveled widely.

There were also two paper sessions, and invited speaker Suzanne Ouelette spoke on the career of African-American psychologist Robert White.

Saturday, “yours truly” will be giving a paper on the history of evolutionary thought in American psychology. There will also be a symposium on women and leadership in psychology, a symposium on the history of psychology in New York City, and a paper session. In addition, Alexandra Rutherford will be giving an address on B. F. Skinner.

Chris Donohue’s post, “Malinowski and the Problem of Culture” has just cleared the 1,000 visitor mark.  Our all-time champion remains Thony C’s pre-Renaissance Mathematicus “Newton’s Prism Experiments” which now has 2,098.  My most popular post?  Robert Hooke, an early entry in the old Hump-Day History series, which weighs in at 502.

This blog’s curious fixation with all things Schaffer has not gone unnoticed at the University of Cambridge.  Thanks to Vanessa Heggie for sending along news that he is currently in the process of delivering this term’s Tarner Lectures there, which he has entitled “‘When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears’: Histories of Astronomy and Empire”.  Podcasts of these are being made available in mp3 format, and the first two are already up:

http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/index.php?pageid=243

Happy listening!

The just released February 2010 issue of the History of the Human Sciences is devoted to the “Neuroscience, Power, and Culture.” This special issue is an outgrowth of a workshop, “Our Brains, Our Selves?”, that was held at Harvard University in the spring of 2008. Speaking of the articles included in this issue, Guest Editor Scott Vrecko (left), asserts that,

a recognition of the socio-cultural embeddedness of neuroscience is only a starting point for analyses. From there, the investigations move on to demonstrate, through the use of a range of methods, case studies and analytic perspectives, the concrete ways that neuroscience and knowledge politics play out in specific spheres, and in relation to particular issues, understandings and social forms.

Titles, authors, and abstracts of the articles that comprise this issue follow below.

“Neuroscience, power, and culture: An introduction,” by Scott Vrecko. The abstract reads:

In line with their vast expansion over the last few decades, the brain sciences – including neurobiology, psychopharmacology, biological psychiatry, and brain imaging – are becoming increasingly prominent in a variety of cultural formations, from self-help guides and the arts to advertising and public health programmes. This article, which introduces the special issue of History of the Human Science on ‘Neuroscience, Power and Culture’, considers the ways that social and historical research can, through empirical investigations grounded in the observation of what is actually happening and has already happened in the sciences of mind and brain, complement speculative discussions of the possible social implications of neuroscience that now appear regularly in the media and in philosophical bioethics. It suggests that the neurosciences are best understood in terms of their lineage within the ‘psy’-disciplines, and that, accordingly, our analyses of them will be strengthened by drawing on existing literatures on the history and politics of psychology – particularly those that analyze formations of knowledge, power and subjectivity associated with the discipline and its practical applications. Additionally, it argues against taking today’s neuroscientific facts and brain-targetting technologies as starting points for analysis, and for greater recognition of the ways that these are shaped by historical, cultural and political-economic forces.

“The birth of the neuromolecular gaze,” by Joelle M. Abi-Rached and Nikolas Rose. The abstract reads:

The aim of this article is (1) to investigate the ‘neurosciences’ as an object of study for historical and genealogical approaches and (2) to characterize what we identify as a particular ‘style of thought’ that consolidated with the birth of this new thought community and that we term the ‘neuromolecular gaze’. This article argues that while there is a long history of research on the brain, the neurosciences formed in the 1960s, in a socio-historical context characterized by political change, faith in scientific and technological progress, and the rise of a molecular gaze in the life sciences. They flourished in part because these epistemological and technological developments were accompanied by multiple projects of institution-building. An array of stakeholders was mobilized around the belief that breakthroughs in understanding the brain were not only crucial, they were possible by means of collaborative efforts, cross-disciplinary approaches and the use of a predominantly reductionist neuromolecular method. The first part of the article considers some of the different approaches that have been adopted to writing the history of the brain sciences. After a brief outline of our own approach, the second part of the article uses this in a preliminary exploration of the birth of the neurosciences in three contexts. We conclude by arguing that the 1960s constitute an important ‘break’ in the long path of the history of the brain sciences that needs further analysis. We believe this epistemological shift we term the ‘neuromolecular gaze’ will shape the future intellectual development and social role of the neurosciences.

“The persistence of the subjective in neuropsychopharmacology: Observations of contemporary hallucinogen research,” by Nicolas Langlitz. The abstract reads:

The elimination of subjectivity through brain research and the replacement of so-called ‘folk psychology’ by a neuroscientifically enlightened worldview and self-conception has been both hoped for and feared. But this cultural revolution is still pending. Based on nine months of fieldwork on the revival of hallucinogen research since the ‘Decade of the Brain,’ this paper examines how subjective experience appears as epistemic object and practical problem in a psychopharmacological laboratory. In the quest for neural correlates of (drug-induced altered states of) consciousness, introspective accounts of test subjects play a crucial role in neuroimaging studies. Firsthand knowledge of the drugs’ flamboyant effects provides researchers with a personal knowledge not communicated in scientific publications, but key to the conduct of their experiments. In many cases, the ‘psychedelic experience’ draws scientists into the field and continues to inspire their self-image and way of life. By exploring these domains the paper points to a persistence of the subjective in contemporary neuropsychopharmacology.

“Profitable failure: antidepressant drugs and the triumph of flawed experiments,” by Linsey McGoey.

Drawing on an analysis of Irving Kirsch and colleagues’ controversial 2008 article in PLoS [Public Library of Science] Medicine on the efficacy of SSRI antidepressant drugs such as Prozac, I examine flaws within the methodologies of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that have made it difficult for regulators, clinicians and patients to determine the therapeutic value of this class of drug. I then argue, drawing analogies to work by Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Power, that it is the very limitations of RCTs — their inadequacies in producing reliable evidence of clinical effects — that help to strengthen assumptions of their superiority as methodological tools. Finally, I suggest that the case of RCTs helps to explore the question of why failure is often useful in consolidating the authority of those who have presided over that failure, and why systems widely recognized to be ineffective tend to assume greater authority at the very moment when people speak of their malfunction.

“‘Screen and intervene’: Governing risky brains,” by Nikolas Rose.

This article argues that a new diagram is emerging in the criminal justice system as it encounters developments in the neurosciences. This does not take the form that concerns many ‘neuroethicists’ — it does not entail a challenge to doctrines of free will and the notion of the autonomous legal subject — but is developing around the themes of susceptibility, risk, pre-emption and precaution. I term this diagram ‘screen and intervene’ and in this article I attempt to trace out this new configuration and consider some of the consequences.

“Taking care of one’s brain: How manipulating the brain changes people’s selves,” by Jonna Brenninkmeijer. The abstract reads:

The increasing attention to the brain in science and the media, and people’s continuing quest for a better life, have resulted in a successful self-help industry for brain enhancement. Apart from brain books, foods and games, there are several devices on the market that people can use to stimulate their brains and become happier, healthier or more successful. People can, for example, switch their brain state into relaxation or concentration with a light-and-sound machine, they can train their brainwaves to cure their Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or solve their sleeping problems with a neurofeedback device, or they can influence the firing of their neurons with electric or magnetic stimulation to overcome their depression and anxieties. Working on your self with a brain device can be seen as a contemporary form of Michel Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’. Foucault described how since antiquity people had used techniques such as reading manuscripts, listening to teachers, or saying prayers to ‘act on their selves’ and control their own thoughts and behaviours. Different techniques, Foucault stated, are based on different precepts and constitute different selves. I follow Foucault by stating that using a brain device for self-improvement indeed constitutes a new self. Drawing on interviews with users of brain devices and observations of the practices in brain clinics, I analyse how a new self takes shape in the use of brain devices; not a monistic (neuroscientific) self, but a ‘layered’ self of all kinds of entities that exchange and control each other continuously.

From a message sent to me via Flickr:

UK photography competition with Galapagos prize

I wanted to contact you to see if I could mention a UK
photography competition on here, that is open to all UK
secondary schools (aged 11-19, so perfect for the members of
this group who are in the UK) and it is based around
Darwin’s studies and resources for UK schools.

The prize of the competition is a trip to the Galapagos
Islands to develop their photography; the competition website is
www.survivalrivals.org/competition/about.

The most recent Time Capsule section of the APA’s Monitor on Psychology features an article on the work of early female psychologist Helen Thompson Woolley. Authored by Katharine S. Milar, of Earlham College, the article begins with the now often reproduced quote from Thompson Woolley circa 1910, which reads:

“There is perhaps no field aspiring to be scientific where flagrant personal bias, logic martyred in the cause of supporting a prejudice, unfounded assertions, and even sentimental rot and drivel, have run riot to such an extent as here.”

Milar then goes on to detail Thompson Woolley’s efforts to disprove, through her psychological research, what were at the time accepted gender differences in mental abilities.

The article can be read online here.

This has apparently been up for a while, but it’s just rattled down to my desk through the pneumatic tubes.  So, if, like me, you haven’t been aware of it, check out the History of Science in Latin America and the Carribean (HOSLAC) from the University of New Hampshire.  Once you land, go to the archive/database, then launch the Virtual Archive, at which point you’ll be brought to a slick Flash application, which tours you through a series of artifacts, topics, and resources.  The reading of “science” is broad: you’ll also find much on ancient and recent Latin American cultures, exploration, technology, medicine, and agriculture.  All in all, very nicely done.

http://www.hoslac.org/

University of Toronto historian of psychiatry Edward Shorter has written a fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal on the history of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The article comes in the wake of controversy over the forthcoming 5th edition of the book, which is used by psychiatrists and many psychologists to diagnose the particular kinds of disorders from which their  patients and clients suffer.

Shorter declares at the start of the article that “Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications.” In the 1950s, the diagnostics terms used by psychiatrists were often the same as those used colloquially by their patients — “a case of the nerves,” or “nervous breakdown.” Now, Shorter says, “A patient with the same symptoms today might be told he has “social anxiety disorder” or “seasonal affective disorder.” The increased specificity is spurious. There is little risk of misdiagnosis, because the new disorders all respond to the same drugs, so in terms of treatment, the differentiation is meaningless.”

Shorter reviews the well-known story of Robert Spitzer who, unhappy with the psychhoanalytic connotations of many of the diagnostic terms used as late as the 1970s, replaced them in the 3rd edition of the DSM with new terms, that presumably focused strictly on symptoms rather than on presumed unconscious conflicts advanced by  the Freudians. Thus “depressive neurosis” was converted to “major depression,” which was distinguished form “bipolar disorder” and so on. Many compromises were made with the still-powerful Freudian establishment, however, and the result was a mishmash of syndromes and disorders about whose reality there was little more consensus than there had been about their predecessors.

In addition, as new and lucrative psychopharmaceuticals began to proliferate, so did new conditions, generating a demand for more drugs, and so on. As Shorter puts it:

In the late 1980s, the Prozac-type agents began to hit the market, the “SSRIs,” or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, such as Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa and Lexapro. They were supposedly effective by increasing the amount of serotonin available to the brain.

The SSRIs are effective for certain indications, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and for some patients with anxiety. But many people believe they’re not often effective for serious depression, even though they fit wonderfully with the heterogeneous concept of “major depression.” So, hand in hand, these antidepressants and major depression marched off together into the sunset. These were drugs that don’t work for diseases that don’t exist, as it were.

The draft of the new edition does little to solve these problems.

DSM-V accelerates the trend of making variants on the spectrum of everyday behavior into diseases: turning grief into depression, apprehension into anxiety, and boyishness into hyperactivity.

If there were specific treatments for these various niches, you could argue this is good diagnostics. But, as with other forms of anxiety-depression, the SSRIs are thought good for everything.

Shorter concludes that:

What the discipline badly needs is close attention to patients and their individual symptoms, in order to carve out the real diseases from the vast pool of symptoms that DSM keeps reshuffling into different “disorders.” This kind of careful attention to what patients actually have is called “psychopathology,” and its absence distinguishes American psychiatry from the European tradition.

The “wallbreaking” for the new home of the Archives for the History of American Psychology (AHAP) took place last Friday, February 26th. AHAP will move to its new location in August once renovations are complete.

According to the University of Akron’s news item on the wallbreaking,

The phase of the project currently under way, which will be completed by August, includes renovation of the first floor and lower level of the building. This renovation will feature a covered colonnade along College Street, masonry repairs on the exterior, new windows to admit daylight, along with a gallery to display objects from the AHAP collection. Other elements include a reading room, offices, administrative space, and space for handling new acquisitions. Subsequent renovations will occur in stages, as funding becomes available.

“We are pleased to add to the landscape of The University and the city of Akron this incredibly rich cultural resource,” says Dr. David Baker, AHAP director and interim provost.

Roadway Express Inc. donated the 70,000-square foot building to the University in 2005, which formerly housed the company’s records. The new building will provide expanded space for AHAP’s growing collections which are fast exceeding available space in AHAP’s current home in the basement of UA’s Polsky Building.

Before pictures of the Roadway Building, which will AHAP’s new home, can bee seen on AHAP’s Flickr page here. Additional images from the “wallbreaking” will be added to AHAP’s Flickr page soon.

It is also significant that,

Under Baker’s leadership, the psychology archives has experienced some impressive milestones, including being the first archive in the nation accepted into the prestigious Smithsonian Institution Affiliations program in 2002

Among those who attended the wallbreaking were: Dr. David Baker, Director of the archives and Interim Provost at the University of Akron; prominent historian of psychology Dr. Ludy T. Benjamin Jr., who is also one of the Archives’ donors; Dr. Nicholas Cummings, another prominent donor; Suzanne Morgan, chair of the Margaret Clark Morgan Foundation, one of AHAP’s largest donors; and Aaron Glavis of the Smithsonian Institution.

Located at the University of Akron, Ohio, AHAP is dedicated to preserving psychology’s history by collecting, cataloguing, and making available items of importance to psychology development.

Some of the previous AHP posts on AHAP canbe found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Simon Schaffer’s “Natural Philosophy” in Ferment of Knowledge (1980) is an exhilarating piece by a 25-year-old scholar.  When I first looked at it on this blog, I gave my post the title “Schaffer Busts Out the Hickory”, suggesting that he had taken a wooden bat to the extant literature on the topic.  In view of the scholarship of today’s grande entente cordiale, it was really refreshing to see a vigorous and pointed critique directed against other historians’ work.  Sure, it was a tad violent, but it was in the service of progress!  “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven” and all that.

Anyway, partially a part of the growing rebuke against viewing 18th-century science as an outgrowth of a grand tradition of “Newtonianism”, partially a rebuke against attempts to define natural philosophy in terms of what makes it distinct from science (e.g., Kuhn’s definition of “pre-paradigmatic science”), the piece ultimately moves beyond criticism and becomes a messily-articulated, but powerful and original discussion of how one might begin to construct a positively-defined historiography of natural philosophy.

Schaffer identified two possible proposals for constructively analyzing the history of natural philosophical systems:

[S]ome historians [cite: Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin] have used the ideas of Mary Douglas, Robin Horton, and other cultural anthropologies as clues to unravel the cosmologies of natural philosophers, while Michel Foucault has constructed an ‘archaeology of knowledge’ with which to analyse the structure of natural philosophy as a set of discourses.  These contrasting approaches derive from two opposed epistemologies.  (86)

With that out there, let’s pause for a second.  At this point it is important to remember Schaffer’s predilection for seeing natural philosophy in terms of the fully fleshed-out “system”, or what Cantor was referring to when speaking about seeing natural philosophy as “a holistic venture aimed at accounting for the economy of Nature”.  Today we might be more inclined to think of “cosmology” in the simple terms of, say, Ptolemaic vs. Copernican versions.  In the eighteenth century—and in the historiographical heyday of the “eighteenth century problem”—”cosmology” was readily understood as a deployment of natural philosophical ideas to account for the appearance, stability, and (increasingly) the history of a whole range of earthly and astronomical phenomena.  Writing about cosmology could easily mean worrying about what (for example) electrical forces, the nature of comets, living matter, and the role of the soul in thought all had to do with each other.

Meanwhile, in a mainly unrelated development, 20th-century anthropological theory had taken to analyzing more generically-defined “cosmologies”.  For a key influence, one might look to anthropologist Mary Douglas’ Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970), which had less to do with stars, planets, and comets, but everything to do with what aspects of the universe one personally understood to be relevant or significant, and the nature of its significance to moral and social order.  For example: why do the “Bog Irish” feel it is important to abstain from meat on Fridays when the Church doesn’t emphasize it?  (Related side note: to this day Shapin writes and teaches about the history of dietetics.)

Now, in “Natural Philosophy” Schaffer took a critical but highly sympathetic eye toward both anthropological and archaeological modes of analysis, seeing them as specifically suited to, and naturally gravitating toward, what we are calling the “problem of natural philosophy”.  He observed, “Though these approaches claim to be exhaustive with respect to the history of science—in the sense that they claim to be applicable to all periods and to all social formations—once again, significantly, eighteenth-century natural philosophy figures as the main exemplar” (86).

Schaffer was wary of the anthropological approach, as advocated by Edinburgh Schoolers Barnes and Shapin.  They departed from the intellectual history tradition where “the basic categories are the concept and the tradition [...; instead] for these anthropological and sociological historians the fundamental categories become the individual subject and the cosmology.”  Healthily, this moved them away from seeing history exclusively in terms of its relationship to great tradition-setters like Newton, and focused them on particularized, personalized sets of individual and shared beliefs.  But for Schaffer this didn’t go far enough: “It is precisely these two categories [subject and cosmology...] which Foucault has criticized most forcefully in his attack upon traditional historiography” (88).

Schaffer saw it as important that Foucault built on the 1930s-era analysis of Gaston Bachelard, whose analysis of natural philosophy emphasized—and criticized—some of the strange-but-consistent features of natural philosophical systems as “psychological complexes” or “obsessions” (see The Psychoanalysis of Fire, 1938).  Schaffer disapproved of Bachelard’s philosophically-retrospective psychologizing and judgment of past concerns, but approved heartily of the analytical gains Bachelard made by drawing attention to this key feature of natural philosophical thought.  It had a “positive historical impact [...]: it provides a coherent method for the analysis of a different, quite distinct grammar of science which needs to be considered as fully demarcated from science itself” (76).

For Schaffer (at least in 1980), the personalized anthropological approach seemed to allow the individual philosopher the freedom to construct any cosmology they wished.  (I actually don’t think this was a fair appraisal).  On the other hand, within a discursive analysis, the constituent knowledge of natural philosophical systems “is produced and organized by specifically impersonal structures” (91).  These were ripe for historical analysis.  Traditional histories might suggest a need for the free-minded philosopher to adjust their thought to politico-religious constraints, but within archaeologies one had to determine what features of systems rendered that thought coherent in the first place:

Where [Charles] Gillispie [in Edge of Objectivity, 1966] has insisted that ‘the permeation of culture by science must be a problem in accommodation rather than a study in validity’, Foucault insists that validity itself is a matter of the policing of discourse, of cultural formation.  For a statement to be ‘in the domain of the true’ it must conform in multiple ways to a system which distributes the right to state anything and what is to be stated.  (90)

For Schaffer, all this could go toward achieving insights as simple as what role it made sense for fire to take within different cosmological systems.  Further, this discursive framework of coherence need not be confined to the work of natural philosophers; its analysis can spill over into parts of culture without any artificial historiographical concern for genre boundaries.

Looking into the body of his 1980s work, it seems as though Schaffer ultimately reached his own entente cordiale between the British-anthropological and French-archaeological perspectives.  Schaffer’s key analytical contribution to the historiography has to be the connections he was able to draw between the content of natural philosophical systems, possible challenges that content entailed for religious and political authority, and, crucially, by extension, the moral-political assumptions underlying the very practices involved in doing natural philosophy (from the perspective of proponent and critic alike).  This last insight’s focus on the vices and virtues of the practice of natural philosophy clearly owes a lot to the anthropological framework.

As I have noted with reference to the later Schaffer-Latour Wine Summit, it is possible for the achievement of entente to result in the neglect of important methodological and historiographical points.  In the case of the anthropological-natural philosophical cosmological entente, pertinent tensions included the asserted universality of the anthropological approach to all areas and aspects of the history science (and life for that matter), as well as the related issue of the anthropological cosmology’s indifference to the importance of the explicit system-building “grammar” particular to natural philosophical cosmology.  We will address these tensions in the next post.