Mcevoy 2007 Modernism, Postmodernism and The Historiography of Science

Modernism, postmodernism and the historiography of science
Author(s): John G. Mcevoy

Source: Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences , Vol. 37, No. 2 (March
2007), pp. 383-408
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hsps.2007.37.2.383
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JOHN G. MCEVOY*
IT IS A pleasure and a privilege to contribute to Russell McCormmach’s festschrift.

As a fellow toiler in the fields of 18th-century science, I have benefited greatly
from Russell’s editorial counsel, impeccable scholarship, narrative brilliance, and
generosity of spirit. While his lifelong research and monumental study (with Christa
Jungnickel) of the life and thought of Henry Cavendish have been particularly
relevant to my own research, it is the spirit of his incomparable Night thoughts
of a classical physicist that I wish to evoke in this essay, though in a more pro-
saic manner. This is the spirit of a robust contextualism, which views science in
relation to other cultural activities, especially literature, politics, and philosophy.
While Night thoughts portrayed the devastating impact on classical physics and
physicists of the turmoil and disorder of the modern world in the first decade of the
20th century, this essay explores the impact on the history of science of the cultural
upheavals associated with the transition from modernism to postmodernism later
in the century. It is predicated on the assumption that a reflexive awareness of past
and present practices of historians of science will facilitate the future development
of the “strange hybrid discipline” that concerns us.1
Since its inception in the 18th century, the discipline of the history of science has
occupied a contested intellectual terrain, shaped by philosophical and ideological forces
associated with the development and cultural entanglements of science itself. Reflecting
on the appropriation of the history of science by religious, scientific, philosophical,
and sociological ideologies and interests, I.B. Cohen wondered just what to make of
the “many faces of the history of science.” Should it be seen as a “font of examples
for philosophers, a scientific type of history, an archaeology of discovery, a branch of
*Department of Philosophy, Univesity of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221; John.

McEvoy@uc.edu.
1. See Jan Golinski, Making natural knowledge: Constructivism and the history of science
(Cambridge, 1998), 2.
Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, Vol. 37, Number 2, pps. 383–408. ISSN
0890-9997, electronic ISSN 1533-8355. © 2007 by the Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content
through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.
com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/hsps.2007.37.2.383
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384 JOHN G. MCEVOY
sociology, a variant of intellectual history—or what?”2 This essay will explore some
of the existing philosophical and cultural features of the discipline of the history of
science and indicate some of the ways it falls short of an adequate historiography.
During the second half of the 20th century, the historiography of the Chemical
Revolution passed through three distinct historiographical stages, each characterized
by a dominant interpretive strategy or style.3 The first phase was shaped by positivist
and Whig notions of science as a teleologically structured body of experimental
knowledge. The “postpositivist” identification of science with global and autono-
mous theorizing challenged and replaced this perspective in the 1960s and 1970s,
but it gave way in the 1980s and 1990s to the sociological view of science as a form
of practice shaped by the contingent constraints of specific agents acting in local
contexts. Having dealt extensively with the first two stages of this interpretive triad
elsewhere, I will concentrate in this essay on their relation to philosophical themes
associated with the wider cultural movement of modernism, and I will show how
the transition from modernism to postmodernism shaped the third, sociological
mode of interpretation.4 Since the relation between the sequence of interpretive
styles and strategies and the individual texts and authors they informed is highly
mediated, I will focus here on the general features of interpretive paradigms, refer-
ring the reader to existing and forthcoming studies for more detailed accounts of
the fit between paradigms and practitioners.
1. MODERNISM AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SCIENCE

Positivism
Positivist accounts of the history of science embodied philosophical principles

and assumptions associated with essentialism, historicism, and idealism.5 These
2. I. Bernard Cohen, “The many faces of the history of science: A font of examples
for philosophers, a scientific type of history, an archaeology of discovery, a branch of
sociology, a variant of intellectual or social history—or what?” C.F. Delzell, ed., The
future of history: Essays in the Vanderbilt University Centennial Symposium (Nashville,
1977), 65–110. Also J.R.R. Christie, “The development of the historiography of science,”
R.C. Olby, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie, and M.S. Hodge, eds., Companion to the history
of modern science (London, 1990), 4–22.
3. John G. McEvoy, “The Chemical Revolution in context,” The eighteenth century: Theory and
interpretation, 33 (1992), 198–216; idem, “In search of the Chemical Revolution: Interpretive
strategies in the history of chemistry,” Foundations of chemistry, 2 (2000), 47–73.
4. For a discussion of positivist and postpositivist interpretations of the chemical revolution
see John G. McEvoy, “Positivism, Whggism, and the Chemical Revolution: A study in
the historiography of science,” History of science, 35 (1997), 1–33; idem, “Postpositivist
interpretations of the chemical revolution, Canadian journal of history, 36 (2001), 453–
469. For reasons of space and convenience, I will ignore the Whig tradition in this essay,
referring only to its symbiotic cousin “positivism.”
5. This section outlines material covered fully in McEvoy, “Positivism” (ref. 4), which
places the positivist historiography in the wider movement of 19th-century historicism,
which included Hegel and Marx.
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POSTMODERNISM AND HISTORIOGRAPHY 385
assumptions grounded knowledge in the nature of things, posited an inherent logic

of history, and upheld the identity, or correspondence, of thought and things. The
assumption of an identity between the knowing subject and the known object
informed the positivist distinction between states of cognitive transparency, such
as truth, knowledge, illumination, objectivity, and rationality, enjoyed by the
“children of light,” and states of cognitive opacity, such as error, ignorance, preju-
dice, superstition, and darkness, in which reality was occluded or distorted by the
unreceptive minds of the “children of darkness.” The dialectic between cognitive
transparency and opacity played a central role in positivist accounts of the history
of science and the demarcation between science and nonscience. Emphasizing the
demarcation and “consensual” unity of science, positivist historians argued that
once astronomy and physics broke with prescientific modes of thought in the Sci-
entific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, scientists merely had to deploy
the unique scientific method to ensure cognitive progress in the other disciplines
of science. Positivist historians saw in the history of science a clear reflection of
the unique rationality of science and its progressive, Manichean struggle with the
forces of darkness and irrationality.
The principle of expressive causality, according to which nature, society,
and the mind are the visible manifestations, or expressions, of an invisible cause,
essence, or center of things, shaped the general positivist belief in an unfolding
logic, or telos, of history. Positivists reduced the specificity of a historical event to
that of a mere moment in a dynamic totality, unfolding according to the dictates of a
predetermined end. The unfolding essence, or subject, of history imparted continuity
to historical development and homogeneity to the developing parts, so that no one
aspect could outstrip or lag behind any of the other aspects of a society. Emphasiz-
ing the cognitive efficacy of individual agents and the eureka-moment notion of
discovery, positivist historians emphasized problems of chronology, priority, and
authorship as integral parts of the historicist problematic of periodization, with its
concern to delineate carefully and precisely the different stages in the unfolding
of past science towards present science.
According to the positivist model of the Chemical Revolution, deployed by
Herbert Butterfield, Harold Hartley, Douglas McKie, and James Partington, among
many others, modern chemistry arose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the fallacious
phlogiston theory. At the heart of this conflagration was the “genius” of Antoine
Lavoisier, who took up where Robert Boyle left off, and in a series of crucial experi-
ments on combustion and the calcination of metals, deployed the quantitative method
of inquiry to refute the phlogiston theory and to establish the central role of oxygen in
the workings of nature. Thus, chemistry broke with its nonscientific past and moved,
inexorably and methodically, towards the present state of scientific knowledge. Phlo-
gistians, like Joseph Priestley, failed to appreciate the new chemistry because their
minds were clouded by the intrusion of alien, metaphysical and religious, modes of
thought into their scientific inquiries. Lavoisier grounded chemistry in a uniform
experience and a unitary method of inquiry, which formed the basis of subsequent
progress in chemistry. This progress was linear, cumulative, and autonomous.
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386 JOHN G. MCEVOY
It marked the victory of the “children of light” over the “children of darkness.” The
scientific struggle between the agents of light and the agents of darkness had significant
moral and social implications. It was the responsibility of the positivist historian to
determine the crucial moments, pivotal discoveries, and individual contributions to
this struggle, and to apportion praise and blame accordingly.
Postpositivism
Postpositivist philosophers of science, including Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and

Thomas Kuhn, challenged the empiricist sensibilities of positivism with a theoreticist
conception of the nature of science and its historical development.6 Rejecting the
epistemological distinction between observation statements, grounded in experience,
and theoretical statements, based on conjecture, postpositivists identified knowledge
with theory. Emphasizing global rather than local theories, they replaced the positiv-
ist view of the epistemological efficacy of individual subjects and their moments of
discovery with the theoreticist notion of “epistemology without a knowing subject”
and the structuralist idea of history as a “process without a subject.” Theoreticism
rendered unintelligible the essentialist view of knowledge as inscribed in the nature
of things and the historicist notion of a logic, or telos, of history. In place of the
positivist vision of the unity, linearity, and homogeneity of a single, absolute his-
torical time, postpositivism advanced the idea of a succession of distinct epochal
times, each with its own unity, linearity, and homogeneity. The resulting historicized
models of science replaced the formalist view of scientific theories as static sets of
abstract propositions—championed by the Logical Positivists—with a more dynamic
emphasis on the role of “guiding assumptions” in the formation and development of
scientific theorizing. But the emphasis these models placed on the conceptual unity
and structure of scientific doctrines discouraged the formation of an adequate sense
of the specific historical context and sequential development of scientific thought.
Postpositivist historians of chemistry, such as Jerry Gough, W.R. Albury,
Arthur Donovan, Larry Holmes, and Charlton Perrin shifted the interpretive focus
of the Chemical Revolution from the domain of empirical foundations and experi-
mental methodology to the realm of theoretical doctrines and research traditions.
They replaced the positivist view of Lavoisier as the experimental “founder” of
modern chemistry with a focus on Lavoisier the theoretical innovator, who chal-
lenged tradition with new theories of acidity, heat, the gaseous state, and chemical
composition. Breaking with the positivist historiography of crucial experiments,
postpositivist historians rejected the idea that the Chemical Revolution was the result
of Lavoisier’s “eureka experience,” and saw it instead as an extended conceptual
process, which started before Lavoisier appeared on the scientific scene and was
completed only after he left it. Assimilating the history of science to the history of
6. McEvoy, “Postpositivist” (ref. 4) for a fuller discussion of the material covered in this
section.
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ideas, postpositivist scholars explored a variety of links between the conceptual

upheavals of the Chemical Revolution and 18th-century theories of knowledge, mat-
ter, language, and composition. Emphasizing the transcultural cognitive autonomy
of science, postpositivist scholars developed “internalist” accounts of the Chemical
Revolution, which upheld its causal independence of the socioeconomic conditions
of 18th-century Europe. Cognitive autonomy, not contextual dependence, was the
order of the day for positivists and postpostitivists alike.
Modernism
Connecting positivism and postpositivism to modernism is not without its dif-

ficulties. The literature on modernism and postmodernism is vast and varied, but
despite the obvious centrality of science and its interpretation for “the narrative con-
struction of ‘modernity,’” little scholarly attention has been paid to the significance
of the history and philosophy of science for an understanding of modernism and
postmodernism.7 Connections are also obscured by the complexities and ambiguities
associated with the vocabulary of modernism and postmodernism, which acquires
different connotations from the perspective of art, architecture, science, social theory,
history, and philosophy. Thus, while some commentators focus on the “high mod-
ernism” that flourished in art and literature between the World Wars, others use the
terminology of modernism to characterize the upheavals that took place in philoso-
phy and culture in the 16th and 17th centuries. There is also disagreement over the
meaning of “modernism”; while some scholars equate it with the “Enlightenment
promotion of rationality and freedom,” others relate it to the less-confident hope for
aesthetic redemption or ironic affirmation of modern life associated with Nietzsche.8
Similarly, while some commentators view postmodernism as a disguised, degener-
ate, and ephemeral version of modernism serving conservative political functions,
others view it as an epochal break with the modern world.9
7. Joseph Rouse, “Philosophy of science and the persistent narratives of modernity,”

Studies in history and philosophy of science, 22 (1991), 141–162, on 143. See also Peter
Galison, “History, philosophy, and the central metaphor,” Science in context, 2 (1988),
197–212. This essay integrates the views of Rouse and Galison into a broader discussion
of modernity as a philosophical movement.
8. Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a philosophical problem: On the dissatisfactions of European
high culture (Oxford, 1991), 115–121. Pippin’s view of a single philosophical thread running
through diverse expressions of modernism shapes the account of modernism given in this
essay. Also Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, “Introduction: Subjectivity and modernity’s
other,” in Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, eds., Modernity and identity (Oxford, 1992),
1–30 for an account of the distinction between “high modernism” and “low modernism.”
9. Alex Callinicos, Against postmodernism: A Marxist critique (New York, 1989), 1–8; Andreas
Huyssen, “Critical theory and modernity: Introduction,” New German critique, 26 (1982), 3–
11; David Couzens Hoy, “Splitting the difference: Habermas’s critique of Derrida,” Maurizio P.
d’Entrèves and S. Benhabib, eds., Habermas and the unfinished project of modernity:
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388 JOHN G. MCEVOY
It is impossible here to do justice to the complexities and ambiguities associ-

ated with modernism and postmodernism, and no attempt will be made to discuss
the dynamic “aporias” that impelled them. With an eye on the development of the
philosophy and sociology of science over the last 200 years, the term “modernism”
will be used in this essay to identify and characterize the philosophical and cultural
sensibilities ushered in by the socioeconomic transition from feudalism to capitalism
and usually associated with the principles and practices of the Enlightenment. The
term “postmodernism” will be used to characterize the challenge to the philosophi-
cal sensibilities of modernism associated with the rise of poststructuralism and the
“failed revolt” of May 1968 in Paris.10 A full appreciation of the cognitive force,
cultural significance, and historiographical implications of modernism requires a
consideration of its emergence from the premodern world.
If, as Frederic Jameson argued, postmodernism is “the cultural logic of late
capitalism,” then modernism may be regarded as the cultural matrix of earlier,
commercial and industrial, capitalism.11 The emergence of capitalism involved a
“long drawn-out transition from feudalism,” in which the modern institutions and
cultures of individuality and autonomy replaced the premodern world of communal
integration and the unity of being.12 In feudalism, the economic, social, political,
and personal realms of life were integrated parts of a hierarchical unity, in which the
individual was constituted by a web of relations to nature, society, and God. In the
feudal estate, the personal and social identities of the individual were inseparable,
and the economic activity of the production and distribution of wealth embodied
the hierarchical social relations of the system, which were simultaneously politi-
cal and personal. With the rise of capitalism, this system of mutually constitutive
parts gave way to a society based on clear-cut distinctions between the economic,
Critical essays on the “Philosophical discourse of modernity” (Cambridge, 1996), 124–146.

Pippin (ref. 8), 156–164 suggests that modernism and postmodernism constitute different
responses—opposition and acquiescence—to the shared experience of the meaninglessness
of the modern world. What modernists experienced as loss, postmodernists viewed as mere
change. While the modernist hero “transfigures the world,” the postmodern “spectator”
builds up “a storehouse of memories” (Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” in Paul
Rabinow, ed., The Foucault reader (New York, 1984), 32–50, on 40–41).
10. Lawrence Cahoone, “Introduction,” Lawrence Cahoone, ed., From modernism to
postmodernism: An anthology (Oxford, 2003), 1–13, on 2–8; Charles Lemert, “General social
theory, irony, postmodernism,” Steven Seidman and David Wagner, eds., Postmodernism
and social theory (Oxford, 1992), 17–46; Callinicos (ref. 9), 82, 144–145, 164–171.
11. Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism,” New left
review, 146 (1984), 53–93, on 77–80; Jean Baudrillard, “From symbolic exchange and
death,” Cahoone (ref. 10), 421–434.
12. Mikuláš Teich, “Afterword,” in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, The Enlightenment
in national context (Cambridge, 1981), 215–217, on 216. See also Stephen Greenblatt,
“Towards a politics of culture,” H. Aram Veeser, ed., The new historicism (New York,
1989), 1–14, on 4–8; David Ingram, Habermas and the dialectic of reason (London, 1987),
22–28; Pippin (ref. 8), 4–5.
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social, and political realms.13 The interconnected world of feudalism disintegrated

and its parts were reorganized into formally contained realms of distinct activi-
ties, including science, religion, art, politics, and economics. The organic unity of
nature, society, and the self in feudalism gave way to a mechanistic conjunction of
autonomous realms, in which each of these elements were independently constituted
by internal principles of identity and regulation.
The cognitive and cultural counterpart to this socioeconomic process of simulta-
neous dissolution and autonomization involved the 17th-century split between rational
man and mechanical nature, scientific explanation and hermeneutical understanding,
as well as the emergence of the Enlightenment notion of the self-defining subject.14
Self-assertion and self-definition were the guiding principles of modernity, account-
ing for its focus on the present and its superiority to the past.15 Medieval and early-
Renaissance thought defined the self in relation to the cosmic order and equated reason
with the eternal verities held in common by the human and the divine mind. The real
task of knowledge on this view was the construction of metaphysical systems based
on intrinsic, a priori links between man, nature, and society.
The Enlightenment mind rejected the idea of an intrinsic link between the self
and the cosmos: the knowing mind encounters the world as a set of de facto con-
tingent correlations.16 Thus, Kant criticized 18th-century empiricist and rationalist
philosophers for their lingering appeal to empirical and metaphysical foundations for
13. The classic discussion of the connection between the rise of capitalism and the
dissolution of feudalism can be found in Marx’s “On the Jewish question” and The German
ideology. For a clear and concise discussion of these connections see Robert L. Heilbroner,
The nature and logic of capitalism (London, 1986), 89–95. See also McEvoy, “Context”
(ref. 3), 205–211.
14. Fred D. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy, “Introduction: The crisis of understanding,”
F.D. Dallmayr and T.A. McCarthy, eds., Understanding and social inquiry (London, 1977),
1–15, on 1–3; John G. McEvoy, “Understanding the Copernican Revolution: Essay review
of Hans Blumenberg, The genesis of the Copernican world,” Teaching philosophy, 12
(1989), 145–160, on 155–160. Also McEvoy, “Context” (ref. 3), 208–211.
15. Pippin (ref. 8), 1–8; John G. McEvoy, “The Enlightenment and the Chemical
Revolution,” R.S. Woolhouse, ed., Metaphysics and the philosophy of science in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Essays in honour of Gerd Buchdahl (Dordrecht,
1988), 307–325, on 309–311; Foucault (ref. 13), 39–42; Richard Rorty, “Habermas
and Lyotard on postmodernity,” Richard J. Bernstein, ed., Habermas and modernity
(Cambridge, 1985), 161–175, on 170–171; Robert Wallace, “Introduction to Blumenberg,”
New German critique, 32 (1984), 93–108, on 93–99.
16. For a discussion of Renaissance and Enlightenment mentalities see Michel Foucault,
The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences (New York, 1973), 3–214; Brian
Vickers, “Analogy versus identity: The rejection of occult symbolism,” Brian Vickers, ed.,
Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984), 95–164; Keith M.
Baker, From natural philosophy to social mathematics (Chicago, 1975), 109–128; Ernst
Cassirer, The philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston, 1955), 3–36; Charles Taylor, Hegel
(Cambridge, 1975), 3–11.
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390 JOHN G. MCEVOY
knowledge; he developed his transcendental philosophy as a “way of demonstrating

the autonomy, the self-grounding authority of modern thought and therewith modern
culture.”17 The desire to purge Kant’s “critical” philosophy of its own dogmatic
residues shaped the philosophical contours of 19th-century German Idealism, which
culminated in Hegel’s notion of “self-positing spirit.” While Enlightenment think-
ers from Descartes to Kant identified modernity with the principle of subjectivity,
an all-consuming activity of self-knowledge, self-discovery, and self-production,
Hegel’s doctrine of “absolute spirit” moved beyond the level of isolated subjects
to an autonomous domain of objective reason.18
In a similar vein, Max Weber identified the spirit of modernity with the differ-
entiation of the traditional unified worldview of religion and metaphysics into the
autonomous cultural- and value-spheres of science (truth), morality (normativity),
and art (taste), a process that Jurgen Habermas sought to complete in the 20th
century, when he insisted upon the irreducibility of “the objective, subjective, and
the intersubjective dimensions of rationality.”19 The same logic of purification and
autonomization fostered 20th-century aesthetic modernism, which called for “the
differentiation of the purely aesthetic from other realms of human endeavor, such as
ethics, politics, religion, or economics.”20 As Habermas noted, modernism consisted
in “the relentless development of the objectivating sciences, of the universalistic
foundations of morality and law, and of autonomous art, all in accord with their own
immanent logic.”21 Sundering the unified cosmos of the premoderns into distinct
spheres of cognition and action, defined, validated, and regulated by their own inner
logics, modernism populated reality with an array of distinctions and dualisms, such
as those between subject and object, society and nature, human and nonhuman, real-
ity and language, knowledge and faith, and science and nonscience. The secularized
world of modernism made the autonomous individual the subject of knowledge, the
source of values, the possessor of rights, and the focus of utility.22
17. Pippin (ref. 8), 120 and 45–61; Foucault (ref. 9), 32–42.
18. Pippin (ref. 8), 51–79 and 120–122. Also Fred Dallmayr, “The discourse of modernity:
Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Habermas,” in P. d’Entrèves and S. Benhabib (ref. 9),
59–96, on 59–74.
19. Peter Dews, Logics of disintegration: Poststructuralist thought and the claims of critical
theory (Cambridge, 1987), 103. Also Ingram (ref. 12), 148–151; Rorty (ref. 15).
20. Martin Jay, “From modernism to postmodernism,” T.C.W. Blanning, ed., The Oxford
illustrated history of modern Europe (Oxford, 1996), 255–278, on 260, and 259–262; Terry
Eagleton, “Capitalism, modernism, and postmodernism,” New left review, 152 (1985), 60–
73, on 66–67; Jurgen Habermas, “Modernity versus postmodernity,” New German critique,
2 (1981), 3–14, on 9–11.
21. Jurgen Habermas, “Modernity: An unfinished project,” in d’Entrèves and Benhabib
(ref. 9), 38–58, on 45.
22. Richard Wolin, “Modernism vs. postmodernism,” Telos, 62 (1984–84), 9–29, on 9–10.
Also F.R. Ankersmit, “History and postmodernism,” History and theory, 28 (1989), 137–
153; Greenblatt (ref. 11), 8; Jameson (ref. 11), 61; Ingram (ref. 12), 80; Bruno Latour, We
have never been modern (Cambridge, 1993), 1–48.
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The modernist philosophy of autonomy involved an analytical conception of

formal reason, a representational theory of thought and language, and a secular
and progressivist view of history. These accounts of reason, language, and history
shaped the development of positivist and postpositivist philosophies of science and
provided the critical foil for the emergence of postmodernist sensibilities associated
with the sociology of scientific knowledge. The transition from feudal unity and
integration to capitalist autonomy and differentiation gave modernism its critical,
normative, and formal orientation. Starting with the attack on scholasticism, religious
authority, and feudal power, modernism upheld the self-sufficiency of reason and
grounded knowledge in rational processes independent of accepted tradition, dogma,
or authority and oriented to the instrumental service of humanity. Bereft of specific
metaphysical and empirical content, modernist reason was formal and procedural,
concerned with abstract forms of knowledge and methods of inquiry.23
The emergence of a sense of epistemological autonomy coincided with a
shift in the activity of the knowing mind, in which the associative and analogical
understanding of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance gave way to analytic reason.
Instead of “drawing things together” in a web of resemblances, the modern mind
discriminated between things by “establishing their identities” and, thereby, their
“differences” from other things.24 Although modernism extended the boundaries of
new identities, it viewed the forms of identity as circumscribed and fixed, positing
“centered” subjects or closed structures, compelled by inner norms or principles.25
The logic of identity and difference buttressed the modernist notion of autonomous
spheres of thought and action, operating according to their own inner logics and
within strict disciplinary limits and institutional boundaries.26 These analytical
and formal sensibilities shaped positivist and postpositivist accounts of the unity,
autonomy, and internal development of science.
Rejecting traditional sources of legitimation and justification, modernism had
“to create its own normativity out of itself.”27 But autonomy threatened heteronomy,
as modernism sought to impose its self-generated principles and values on the
refractory world around it. Propounding universal principles, rather than local
traditions and arbitrary conventions, the autonomous spheres of modernism did
not “simply coexist uncompetitively.” Criticism and denunciation were the order
of the day. The modernist urge to extend the boundaries and stretch the limits of
rationality generated “an endless series of reductionist and antireductionist moves,”
in which the reductionists tried “to make everything scientific, or political (Lenin),
23. Pippin (ref. 8), 51–61 and 115–116; Rouse (ref. 7), 146.
24. Foucault (ref. 16), 55 and 17–77; Ingram (ref. 12), 22–28; Vickers (ref. 16).
25. Douglas Kellner, “Popular culture and the construction of postmodern identities,” Lash
and Friedman (ref. 8), 141–175, on 141–143.
26. David Ingram, “Blumenberg and the philosophical grounds of history,” History and
theory, 29 (1990), 1–15, on 13–14.
27. Jurgen Habermas, The philosophical discourse of modernity: Twelve lectures (Cambridge,
1987), 7. See also Callinicos (ref. 9), 29–38.
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392 JOHN G. MCEVOY
or aesthetic (Baudelaire, Nietzsche)” and the antireductionists showed what such

attempts left out.28 In this competitive, expansionist cauldron, modernism generated
“logocentric, transcendental totalizing meta-narratives that anticipated all questions
and provided predetermined answers.”29 The resulting reductionist models of sci-
entific knowledge, shared by positivists and postpositivists alike, emphasized the
unity of its theoretical structure, the universality of its concepts and methods, and
the necessity of its instantiations. The modernist problematic of legitimation also
issued in the famous distinction between the context of discovery and the context
of justification, which positivist and postpositivist scholars used to distinguish the
historian’s task of describing how scientific discoveries were, in fact, made from
the more important job of the philosopher, who developed abstract models of
knowledge for “the criticism as well as the reform of what exists.”30
Modernist dualisms of subject and object, mind and body, inner and outer
assimilated knowledge and language to the category of “representation.” Upholding
Descartes’ view of the dualism of mind and body and Locke’s concept of knowledge
as a “mental process,” modernism replaced the premodern “hylomorphic conception
of knowledge,” which involved “the subject’s becoming identical with the object,”
with the concept of knowledge as the possession by the mind of “accurate representa-
tions of an object.” While ancient and medieval thought had only a tenuous hold on
the distinction between inner “mental states” and the “external world,” 17th-century
philosophers took it seriously enough “to pose the problem of the veil of ideas,” the
problem that made epistemology central to modern philosophy.31 As nature became
an “object,” human beings became “subjects,” the source of all truth and meaning.32
The problematic of representation is also evident in the change in linguistic sensibili-
ties that accompanied the transition from the Renaissance to the Classical episteme.
For philosophers of the Renaissance, language resided in the world as a system of
signs enmeshed in the resemblances and similitude of things. The Classical episteme,
which provided the underpinnings for the Enlightenment mind, severed this intimate
link between words and things. The interpretation of the language of nature gave
way to the representation of nature in the language of men.33 Modernism dissolved
the premodern “fusion of semantic and causal relations,” which ascribed to names
28. Rorty (ref. 15), 167–168. See also Latour (ref. 22), 13–48.
29. Pauline Marie Rosenau, Postmodernism and the social sciences: Insights, inroads, and
intrusions (Princeton, 1992), 6.
30. Ibid., 3–11; Foucault (ref. 9), 45–46; Carl Matheson, “Brown’s rationality,” Social
epistemology, 6 (1992), 35–43; John G. McEvoy, “A revolutionary philosophy of science:
Paul K. Feyerabend and the degeneration of critical rationalism into skeptical fallibilism,”
Philosophy of science, 47 (1975), 49–66, on 51.
31. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the mirror of nature (Princeton, 1979), 45–51 and 17–
69; Vickers (ref. 16), 95–115.
32. Rosenau (ref. 29), 49–50.
33. Baker (ref. 16), 109–128; Foucault (ref. 16), 17–63; Owen Hannaway, The chemists
and the word: The didactic origins of chemistry (Baltimore, 1975), 62–72.
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the ability “to possess the power of things to which they refer.”34 By separating the
causal from the rational, the descriptive from the normative, modernism tied ratio-
nality to referentiality, viewing justification, or legitimation, as a referential relation
between ideas, or statements, and the world they seek to represent. In this manner,
modernism bequeathed to positivist and postpositivist philosophers of science the
problematic of realism.
Modernism’s self-legitimating break with the past made time an integral
component of reality and produced a tensile sense of history as simultaneously
revolutionary and teleological. Looking forward to a future that would shatter
the past, modernists maintained that events “took place not only in history but
through history.”35 Inherently dynamic and revolutionary, modernism conquered
space with time, making it “a locus through which to get from A to B, rather than
a place to live in.”36 Valorizing the novelty of the future, modernism interpreted
the passage of time not as a cycle, decadence, or a falling, but as an abolition of
the past. Modernists saw themselves as separated from the past not by “a certain
number of centuries,” but by revolutions, breaks, and ruptures “so radical that
nothing of the past survived in them.”37 The modernist identity was inextricably
linked to the notion of time as the sure arrow of progress that separated them from
the premoderns. But the modernist sense of future novelty collided with the logo-
centric requirements of self-legitimation and produced “teleological narratives”
of progressive emergence and justification, according to which history unfolds in
“homogeneous, empty time.” The resulting historiography of the victors celebrated
a single revolutionary break with the past, which required no more revolutions “to
fulfill the promise of the new.”38 The historicist notion of the unity and homogeneity
of modern time shaped the positivists’ historiography of science and influenced in
a more ambiguous way the historical sensibilities of postpositivism.
Modernism and the philosophy of science
Philosophical modernism provided a dynamic template for the development

of positivist and postpositivist philosophies and historiographies of science. Not-
withstanding their considerable semantic, epistemological, and methodological
differences, positivist and postpositivist philosophers of science used modernist
narratives of legitimation to link scientific practices and results to rationality,
progress, or truth.39 Positivists and postpositivists formulated “grand narratives”
34. Ingram (ref. 12), 24 and 19–31; Rorty (ref. 31), 9.

35. Brook Thomas, “The new historicism and other old-fashioned topics,” A. Veeser (ref. 12),
182–203, on 188.
36. Lash and Friedman (ref. 8), 10. See also Perry Anderson, “Modernity and revolution,”
New left review, 144 (1984), 96–133; Callinicos (ref. 9), 29–32; Wallace (ref. 15), 100.
37. Latour (ref. 21), 68. See also Callinicos (ref. 9), 29–32.
38. Thomas (ref. 35), 189–193.
39. Galison (ref. 7) and Rouse (ref. 7).
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394 JOHN G. MCEVOY
of the hierarchical unity of the different cognitive levels—observation, theory,

method, and instrumentation—of science grounded in general theories of mean-
ing, knowledge, and language. More specifically, the modernist philosophy of
autonomy and separation shaped the positivist view of the unity of science and
the demarcation of science from nonscience. Modernism’s self-legitimating search
for universal principles linked the unity of science to the deployment of a single,
universal method, language, or theoretical structure, grounded in a shared domain
of unitary experience. Viewing metaphysics as the successor of theology, positiv-
ism demarcated between science and metaphysics in a way that emphasized the
practical usefulness of the former and the scholastic uselessness of the latter.
The positivist preoccupation with the unity and demarcation of science further
harmonized with the modernist vision of the formation of autonomous spheres of
thought and action developing within strict disciplinary boundaries, according
to their own inner logics. But there was a tension in the narrative of modernity
between the celebration of “the epistemic autonomy of increasingly specialized
domains of knowledge . . . and their unification by formal procedures of reasoning
and justification.” While the positivists “subordinated the claims of disciplinary
autonomy within the sciences to formal method and the unity of science,” the post-
positivists emphasized “the autonomy of disciplines and research programs within
disciplines.”40 Theoreticism substituted the autonomy of reason for the autonomy
of the subject. While positivists and postpositivists alike upheld the arationality
assumption, which emphasized the social autonomy of reason by restricting the
sociology of knowledge to the explanation of beliefs that could not be explained in
terms of their rational merits, theoreticism also maintained an absolute distinction
between thought and reality, thereby rendering unintelligible positivist attempts
to ground thought in experience, or language in the world.
The postpositivist turn against the formal unity of science was incomplete.
Although the historical school of postpositivists rejected the abstract, formal, static
models of explanation and justification developed by the Logical Positivists, they
still distinguished between the abstract, generalizable content of theories and their
specific historical contexts. They also envisioned universal structures, or patterns,
for the internal development of science, as is evident in Kuhn’s “timeless cycle
of epochs: normal science, crisis science, revolutionary science, and the return to
normal science.”41 If the positivist doctrines of empirical certainty and eureka dis-
coveries in science represented classical modernism’s attempt to ground knowledge
in the “self-certainty of subjectivity,” then postpositivism’s notion of “knowledge
without a knowing subject” marks “late” modernism’s fallibilistic construal of the
rationality, universality, and autonomy of scientific thought and action.42
40. Ibid., 148 and 156–160

41. Galison (ref. 7), 207.
42. David Couzens Hoy, “Splitting the difference: Habermas’s critique of Derrida,” in
d”Entrèves and Benhabib (ref. 9), 124–146, on 126.
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Epistemological and semantic differences between positivism’s vision of a

unitary experience for science and postpositivism’s insistence on theoretical plural-
ism in science surfaced in their divergent articulations of the modernist problematic
of realism. While the “naïve realism” of positivism restricted the ontological and
epistemological significance of science to its observational terms and statements,
the main thrust of postpositivism was in the direction of “critical realism,” which
anchored the ontology and epistemology of science to its theoretical terms and
principles. The antirealist themes of instrumentalism (associated with a minority
of positivists) and idealism (in Kuhn’s writings, for example) should be viewed as
minor deviations from the modernist problematic of realism. While instrumentalism
reiterated premodern concerns with “saving the phenomena,” idealism prefigured
postmodernist themes associated with sociological constructivism. The modernist
problematic of truth and reference issued in an array of “depth models,” such as
those of essence and appearance, latent and manifest, signifier and signified, self
and other, which were the ineluctable targets of postmodernist deconstructions
predicated on the claim that “there is no reality which is not itself already image,
spectacle, simulacrum, gratuitous fiction.”43
Modernism’s valorization of time as simultaneously revolutionary and teleo-
logical shaped the positivist view of a single Scientific Revolution, followed by
the synchronized, homogeneous, and continuous development of the different dis-
ciplines of science along the same line of historical progress. Registering classical
modernism’s attempt to ground knowledge in the “self-certainty of subjectivity,” the
positivist historiography of science located the motive force of this development in
the eureka-discoveries, crucial experiments, and creative insights of individual men
of genius at one with nature. Although the postpositivist doctrine of “knowledge
without a knowing subject” replaced the positivist vision of the unity, linearity,
and homogeneity of a single, absolute historical time with the idea of a succession
of distinct epochal times, each with its own unity, linearity, and homogeneity, it
still upheld modernism’s valorization of time, emphasizing the growth of knowl-
edge, the link between rationality and progress, and the developmental nature of
paradigms, programs, and traditions. As Feuerbach said of Hegel, positivists and
postpositivists alike focused on “exclusive time,” rather than “tolerant space,”
recognizing “only subordination and succession,” the “monarchical” subsump-
tion of the past under the aegis of the present.44 Replacing modernist metaphors of
temporal progress with postmodernist images of spatial dispersion, sociologists of
scientific knowledge called for more contextualized accounts of the places of the
production and proliferation of scientific knowledge.
43. Eagleton (ref. 20), 62. See also Jameson (ref. 11), 58–62; Lash and Friedman (ref. 8),
23–25.
44. Zawar Hanfi, ed., The fiery brook: Selected writings of Ludwig Feuerbach. Trans. with
an introduction by Zawar Hanfi (New York, 1972), 54.
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396 JOHN G. MCEVOY
2. POSTMODERNISM AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SCIENCE

Naturalism and the sociology of knowledge
Opposition to postpositivism soon emerged among sociologists of scientific

knowledge and sociologically inclined historians of science, who replaced idealist
notions of the unity and autonomy of scientific thought with an awareness of the
particularity and materiality of scientific practices. In 1982, John Christie and Jan
Golinski proposed a new historiography for 17th- and 18th-century chemistry, in
which they criticized “the old internalism” because it identified science with “the
processes and products of the intellect” and emphasized “the influence thereon
of activities such as speculative natural philosophy, matter-theory, epistemology,
methodology, and natural theology.” Highlighting “the problematic nature of the
relationship between such factors and the practice of chemistry,” they sought “to
investigate the conditions of perpetuation of chemical practice and discourse.”
Focusing on chemistry as a “historical practice,” they argued that factors falling on
both sides of the divide between “the old internal/external dichotomy” constituted
18th-century chemistry as a “didactic discipline.”45
The burgeoning program of the sociology of scientific knowledge shaped
Christie and Golinski’s new historiographical proposal, which replaced norma-
tive distinctions between internal and external, rational and arational, beliefs with
causal accounts of the social origins of all beliefs, rational and arational, scientific
and nonscientific. These developments had a profound influence on the discipline
of the history of science, generating numerous studies that denigrated positivism,
rejected “philosophical appropriations of history,” and articulated contextualist
models of the relation between science and society.
Practitioners of the sociology of scientific knowledge rejected the normative
distinction between internal, rational beliefs and external, arational beliefs in the
name of “naturalism,” which explained the formation of scientific beliefs with-
out assessing their epistemic significance, or validity. According to the Strong
Programme, developed by David Bloor, a scientifically adequate sociology of
scientific knowledge should focus on the social causes of scientific beliefs, and
posit the same kinds of causes for all beliefs—including those of the sociologists
of knowledge—whatever their epistemic status. Philosophers of science were
quick to criticize the Strong Programme, arguing that the claim that “all beliefs
45. J.R.R. Christie and Jan V. Golinski, “The spreading of the word: New directions in
the historiography of chemistry, 1600–1800,” History of science, 20 (1982), 235–266, on
235–237. For an account of the internal-external distinction from the perspective of the
social history of science see Roy MacLeod, “Changing perspectives in the social history of
science,” I. Speigel-Resing and D. de Solla Price, eds., Science, technology, and society:
A cross-disciplinary perspective (London, 1977), 149–195. For an overview and critical
assessment of the numerous forms of the internal-external distinction see Steven Shapin,
“Discipline and bounding: The history and sociology of science as seen through the
externalism-internalism debate,” History of science, 30 (1992), 333–369.
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are socially caused, rather than well-founded,” implies that the beliefs of the
sociologist of scientific knowledge “have no relevant rational credentials and hence
no special claims to acceptability.”46 Pressing their point, philosophers of science
concerned with the rationality of science treated all sociologists of knowledge as
“constructivists,” accusing them of reducing science to a cultural artifact, with no
cognitive relation to, or input from, the external world.
While some sociologists of knowledge, like Michael Mulkay and Karen Knorr-
Cetina for example, embraced this label enthusiastically, others associated with the
Edinburgh School insisted on a materialist ontology, empiricist methodology, and
realist epistemology for science. Indeed, sociologists of scientific knowledge did
not champion a relativistic view of science, so much as sidestep, or dissolve, the
normative issue of relativism. They insisted that “all forms of knowledge should
be understood in the same manner,” not that they be “judged as equally valid.”47
Unlike the philosophical relativist, who denied the differential credibility of beliefs,
“the aim of the relativist sociology of knowledge is not to ignore or deny such
variation, but to explain it.”48 Philosophers and sociologists of science talked past
each other at this point, with the former clinging to the modernist problematic of
normativity and the latter succumbing to postmodernist suspicions of “narratives
of the legitimation of knowledge.”
Postmodernism
In his seminal study The postmodern condition, Jean-Francois Lyotard defined

“postmodern as incredulity toward [the] metanarratives” of modernism, which
deployed such “grand narratives” as the dialectic of Spirit, the emancipation of
humanity, and the progress of science to unify and legitimate the separate sciences
and their separate practices. Loosening the all-embracing grip of philosophy’s
grand narratives, postmodernism identified science as a particular “language
game,” incapable of legitimating, or being legitimated by, any other language game.
Lyotard insisted that the autonomous disciplines of science are the sole sources of
46. Larry Laudan, Progress and its problems: Toward a theory of scientific growth (Berkeley,
1977), 201 and chapt. 7; David Bloor, Knowledge and social imagery, 2nd edn. (Chicago,
1991), 3–16; Ernan McMullin, “The rational and the social in the history of science,” J.R.
Brown, ed., Scientific rationality: The sociological turn (Dordrecht, 1994), 127–164.
47. Michael Mulkay, Science and the sociology of knowledge (London, 1979), 61. Also
Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay, “Introduction: Emerging principles in the social
study of science,” idem, eds., Science observed: Perspectives in the social studies of
science (London, 1983), 1–17, on 1–5; David Bloor, “Anti-Latour,” Studies in history and
philosophy of science, 30 (1999), 81–112; Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and John Henry,
Scientific knowledge: A sociological analysis (Chicago, 1996), chapt.1 and 200–202.
48. Bloor (ref. 47), 102; Golinski (ref. 1), xi.
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398 JOHN G. MCEVOY
their own limited, local, and provisional forms of legitimation.49 Postmodernism

projected an image of science that was radically different from those developed by
positivism and postpositivism. Fundamentally opposed to essentialism, historicism,
realism, and the associated problematic of reference and rationality, this image
conveyed a sense of “the fragmentary, heterogeneous, and plural character” of
thought, language, reality, and the self.50 Encouraging pluralism, relativism, and
antirealism in the philosophy of science, postmodernism—reflexively attuned to
its postmodern identity—encompassed a plurality of philosophical arguments and
strategies to uphold a nominalist image of science and its fragmented historical
identity. Postmodernism was “a time of nominalism in a variety of senses (from
culture to philosophical thought.)”51
Postmodernism as a coherent philosophical and cultural movement emerged
in the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, though it reached
maturity only in the reactionary atmosphere of Reagan-era economics and cold war
strategy. Birthed by the frustrated revolutionary aspirations of French left-wing
intellectuals in 1968, postmodernism framed the liberation struggles of gender
and racial minorities in Europe and North America in the 1970s and early 1980s,
only to be coopted in the 1980s by the interests of a resurgent cultural and political
establishment in Britain and the United States. Postmodernism was intensely politi-
cal, and the divergent political contexts in which it flourished issued in significant
variations in its nominalist premises and naturalist strategies.52 In its revolution-
ary and oppositional formulation, associated with French poststructuralism and
feminism, the incredulity towards metanarratives expressed the desire to escape
from all totalizing systems of thought and action and the association of order and
autonomy with configurations of violence inherent in the will to power. Giving
shape to the reactionary mode of postmodernism, which valued “consensus and
community,” rather than escape and revolution, Richard Rorty responded to “avant-
garde” escapism with an antinormative emphasis on the “brute contingencies that
unite us all” and the defense of a program of social engineering “in which society
as a whole asserts itself without bothering to ground itself.”53
49. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984), The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge

(Minneapolis, 1984), xxiv, 31–47, and 60–71. See also Rosenau (ref. 29), 5–6; Martin
Kildruff and Ajay Mehra, “Postmodernism and organizational research,” Academy of
management review, 22 (1997), 453–481, on 456–462.
50. Callinicos (ref. 9), 2. See also Ingram (ref. 12), 22.
51. Frederic Jameson, “Marxism and postmodernism,” New left review, 176 (1989), 31–46,
on 36. See Richard Bernstein, The new constellation: The ethical-political horizons
of modernity/postmodernity (Cambridge, 1992), 225 for an account of the reflexive
nominalism that portrays postmodernism itself as a “juxtaposition rather than an integrated
cluster of changing elements that resist reduction to a common denominator.”
52. Steven Seidman, “Postmodern social theory as narrative with moral intent,” Steven
Seidman and David G. Wagner, eds., Postmodernism and social theory (Oxford, 1992),
47–81, on 48–53; Lemert (ref. 10), 29–31; Cahoone (ref. 10), 4–7 and 221–223.
53. Rorty (ref. 15), 175 and 174–175; Rorty (ref. 31), 62–63; Pippin (ref. 8), 158–164.
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Thus, the postmodernist movement split into two broad countervailing cur-
rents of thought, one emanating from Continental philosophy and associated with
a skeptical view of knowledge and adherence to the slogan “anything goes,” and
the other, more “indigenous to Anglo-North American culture,” prepared to affirm
one set of beliefs over another, but in a fallible, tentative, and relativistic manner.54
While sociological naturalism eschewed epistemological evaluation of any sort,
its antinormative orientation was closer to the affirmative relativization of knowl-
edge to context and circumstances than to the skeptical obliteration of knowledge
entirely. Nevertheless, many of the analytical categories—concerning the nature
of science and its relation to society—deployed by sociological naturalists came
from the skeptical cauldron of Continental philosophy. The mingling of the previ-
ously distinct traditions of analytical Anglo-American philosophy and speculative
Continental philosophy is a characteristic feature of postmodernist sociology of
scientific knowledge.
Although postmodernism slipped its early political moorings, drifting from
leftist opposition to centrist and conservative support for the political establishment,
its initial oppositional formation left a lasting impression on the basic contours of
its philosophical sensibilities and orientation. Postmodernism’s original break with
the modernist problematic of legitimation occurred with the perception of French
left-wing intellectuals, such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jean
Baudrillard, that the French Communist Party refused to live up to its revolutionary
ideals when it failed to support the student revolution in Paris in May 1968.55 View-
ing the “official left” as a “double and pseudo-rival of the Gaullist regime,” these
thinkers concluded that trying to replace one system with another system would
end up with a system that resembled the one that was replaced.56 Rejecting both the
Gaullist state and its Communist pseudo-rival, the “disillusioned children of 1968”
refused to have anything to do with the totalizing logics of capitalism, communism,
or any of the other metanarratives of modernism. Turning their back on class struggle
and the global patterns of legitimation associated with it, they looked elsewhere,
to the struggles of local communities and minorities, for the revolutionary spirit of
1968. But they used these local struggles and the ideas they spawned not to over-
throw modernism and replace it with a new system, but to rethink or reform it from
the inside, to “deconstruct” or go beyond it, to struggle “against and within it.”57
Deconstructing the modernist problematic of legitimation, postmodernism involved
“an inverted millenarianism,” in which “premonitions of the future, catastrophic
54. Rosenau (ref. 29), 14–20; Kildruff and Mehra (ref. 49), 456–458. Also Jurgen Habermas,
“Neoconservative culture criticism in the United States and West Germany: An intellectual
movement in two political cultures,” R.J. Bernstein, ed., Habermas and modernity
(Cambridge, 1985), 78–94.
55. Seidman (ref. 52), 49–50; Lemert (ref. 10), 29–31; Peter Starr, Logics of failed revolts:
French theory after May ’68 (Stanford, 1995), 27–29.
56. Starr (ref. 55), 27–28 and 22; Callinicos (ref. 9), 4–5.
57. Lemert (ref. 10), 31–32.
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400 JOHN G. MCEVOY
or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of
ideology, art, or social class),” and of course, “the end of history.”58
Postmodernists linked the predilection for totalizing and systematizing thought
and practice to the “rational demands for unity, purity, universality, and ultimacy”
inherent in the modernist problematic of autonomy and legitimation.59 Postmod-
ernists rejected modernism’s privileging of reason (over emotions) because of the
dominating, oppressive, and totalitarian consequences of its claim to universalism.
They opposed the modernist idea of a unique and determining scientific method,
and the associated program for unification and the reconciliation of opposing
viewpoints, with the idea of a multiplicity of conflicting scenarios and outlooks.
While “skeptical” postmodernists replaced the global order of modernism with a
sense of the fragmentation, disintegration, and meaninglessness of life, in which the
absence of truth left only play, farce, parody, or pleasure, “affirmative” postmod-
ernists adopted more localized, less dogmatic modes of legitimation, contextually
ranking values and building domain-specific models of rationality.60 In this manner,
postmodernism called for the “deconstruction” of the rational distinctions between
true and false, subject and object, knowledge and power, reality and appearance,
past and present, and “all the other modernist dichotomies.”61
Postmodernism replaced the modernist notion of the self-defining, autonomous
subject, and the associated idea of pre-existent essences and structures determining
individual events and actions, with a view of the role of local agents and specific
practices in the temporary formation of fleeting meanings, values, and knowl-
edge-claims. Questioning the “generally accepted relation between author, text,
and reader,” postmodernists rejected the associated ideas of authorial intent and
objective textual content, and emphasized the power of the reader “to define and
create textual meaning.”62 The relativization of truth and meaning to contexts and
circumstances involved replacing representational and realist models of language
and thought with antirealist views of a language-laden reality and relativist doctrines
of the role of rhetoric and persuasion in the constitution of scientific knowledge.
Detaching science from the representational function and universalizing aspirations
of theory, postmodernism pointed to the role of concrete practices and implicit
skills in the construction of local and regional forms of knowledge. Replacing unity
with diversity, totalization with fragmentation, and autonomy with dependence,
postmodernism insisted that, embedded in local contexts of control and domination,
science is neither value-free nor necessarily progressive.
Suspicious of the historian’s claim to know and represent the past, postmod-
ernists questioned the distinction between past and present; they fragmented the
58. Jameson (ref. 11), 53; Rosenau (ref. 29), 65.

59. Ingram (ref. 12), 77.
60. In her very useful analysis of postmodernism, Rosenau (ref. 29) uses the terms “skeptical
postmodernism” and “affirmative postmodernism” deployed in this essay.
61. Lemert (ref. 10), 32.
62. Rosenau (ref. 29), 20–21.
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homogeneous, evolving linear time of modernism into a procession of fleeting

moments in which nothing is entirely present or absent. Time and space are rela-
tive, the temporary constructions of fleeting and fragmentary moments. Escaping
the legitimating tyranny of modern time and the restrictions of space associated
with it, postmodernism instituted the reign of “pastiche,” in which an ontology of
“undifferentiated immediacy,” the “singularity of singular events,” is described
without reference to underlying meanings, originary sources, or intended goals,
thereby replacing the critical orientation of modernism with a “flat and affirmative
universe of discourse.”63 Eliminating the enduring norms, identities, and memories
of modernism, postmodernism replaced the “thematics of time and temporality”
with a spatialized “field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm.”64
Eschewing the dynamism of time for the stasis of space, sociologists of scientific
knowledge inscribed knowledge, power, and identity “in place and not in time”;
they focused on the dispersed (physical and social) sites and networks of knowledge
production and dissemination, rather than on its historical development.65 The denial
of temporality, of the diachronic course of history, registered nominalist sensibilities,
naturalist inclinations, and antirealist tendencies, which regulated the sociology of
scientific knowledge and had a profound impact on the historiography of science.
The sociology of scientific knowledge
Sociologists of scientific knowledge used a variety of postmodernist philo-

sophical strategies to break with idealism, essentialism, and historicism, and to
develop a disciplinary identity fractured by the philosophical tensions between
modernism and postmodernism. Rejecting “the idealist tendency to refer directly
to concepts as ‘scientific,’ ‘symbolic,’ ‘ideological,’ and so on,” sociologists of
scientific knowledge insisted that the conflict between ideas is really a confronta-
tion between the people who hold them.66 While the Edinburgh School replaced
theoreticism with materialist accounts of the causal role of local, social interests
in the development of knowledge, ethnomethodologists focused on the situated
practices of individual agents in particular contexts, and constructivists like Bruno
Latour developed the voluntarist thesis that science is the rhetorical mobilization
of allies who have lost the will for further dissent.67 Denying that abstract theories
63. Richard Wolin, “Modernism vs postmodernism,” Telos, 62 (1984–85), 9–29, on 18.

64. Jameson (ref. 11), 64–65.
65. Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin, “The places of knowledge: A methodological summary,”
Science in context, 4 (1991), 3–21, on 12.
66. Barry Barnes, “On the conventional character of knowledge and cognition,” Knorr-
Cetina and Mulkay (ref. 47), 19–51, on 49.
67. Bloor (ref. 46), 33–73; Barry Barnes, “Natural rationality: A neglected concept in
the social sciences,” Philosophy of the social sciences, 6 (1976), 115–125, on 116–117;
Michael Lynch, Scientific practice and ordinary action: Ethnomethodology and the social
studies of science (Cambridge, 1993), 1–38; Bruno Latour, Science in action: How to
follow scientists and engineers through society (Cambridge, 1987), 61–62.
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402 JOHN G. MCEVOY
and formal methods have inherent significance, sociologists of scientific knowledge

treated them as instruments in the material, rhetorical, and political struggles of
individual scientists operating in local communities.
The Edinburgh School classified theoreticism as a species of essential-
ism, which treats scientific objects, such as electrons, protons, and neutrons, as
“essentially identical entities,” with essential properties “manifested identically”
in every particle.68 On this view, concepts and theories acquire inherent meaning
and rules of usage, which determine their future use and application, by picking
out and characterizing specific kinds of objects and their essential properties.
Denying the reality of universals and the efficacy of rules, the Edinburgh School
adopted a Wittgensteinian form of nominalism, which based the use of words and
the meaning of concepts on the “resemblances,” rather than the identical features,
of individual things, and left their future use and application open-ended and
uncertain. Postmodernist developments in the Continental philosophies of structur-
alism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics reinforced and further articulated these
nominalist tendencies, as can be seen in the deconstructionist themes associated
with poststructuralism, ethnomethodology, and reception theory.
These developments replaced any notion of predetermined meaning or truth,
whether in the form of synchronic structures, transcendental egos, totalizing texts,
authorial intentions, or interpretive traditions, with the dispersed and chaotic collec-
tion of the material and discursive practices of individual agents in local contexts.69
While the Edinburgh School and the Bath relativists used nominalist arguments
to relativize scientific knowledge to social circumstances, “constructivists” and
ethnomethodologists, like Latour, Woolgar, and Knorr-Cetina, deployed them to
defend antirealist theories of meaning, which denied the existence of extra-discursive
objects and maintained that the “facts” of science are “social constructs.”70 When
practitioners of science studies replaced representational models of science-as-
knowledge with constructivist models of science-as-practice, they embraced “a
trademark of ‘postmodern’ thought,” which questioned the distinction between
subject and object inherent in the realist-antirealist debate.71
68. Barnes, Bloor, and Henry (ref. 47), 85. See also ibid., 54–59, 62–73.
69. For accessible accounts of these developments see Gary Gutting, French philosophy
in the 20th century (Cambridge, 2001), 249–257, 324–327, 388–390; Terry Eagleton,
Literary theory: An introduction (Minneapolis, 1983), 54–90, 127–150.
70. Barnes, Bloor, and Henry (ref. 47); Harry Collins, “An empirical relativist programme
in the sociology of scientific knowledge,” in Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay (ref. 47), 85–113;
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts
(Princeton, 1979); Karin Knorr-Cetina, “The ethnographic study of scientific work:
Towards a constructivist interpretation of science,” Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay (ref. 47),
115–139.
71. Andrew Pickering, “From science as knowledge to science as practice,” idem, ed.,
Science as practice and culture (Chicago, 1992), 1–26, on 8.
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Sociologists of scientific knowledge distanced themselves from any historicist

notion of a logic, or intrinsic dynamic, of history. They questioned the postpositiv-
ist view of the determining role of “guiding assumptions,” or “global theories,” in
the development of science by appealing to Wittgensteinian and poststructuralist
notions of the underdetermination of actions by rules; Kuhnian ideas of the role
of concrete exemplars and tacit knowledge in the development of science; ethno-
methodological views of the cognitive efficacy of individual agents and situated
logics; Foucauldian concerns with the microphysics of the knowledge-power
nexus; and deconstructionist assaults on the totalizing texts of structuralism. They
opposed theoreticism with nominalist arguments against the generalizing function
of theories and for a “tinkering” view of experiments and the constitutive role of
scientific instruments in the production of facts.72
Denying any intrinsic relation between different kinds of social interests and
different kinds of knowledge, the Edinburgh School defended the “social use”
model of science, according to which connections between science and society
are “historically contingent” outcomes of how local agents use available cognitive
resources to further their social interests.73 Viewing science as a social construct,
sociologists of scientific knowledge shifted the locus of science from the contexts
of the discovery and justification of scientific theories and facts to the context of
their dissemination and reception in the scientific community. They located the
core of science in its texts, instruments, and institutions, which they viewed not as
means for the communication and transmission of prior knowledge, but as discursive
devices involved in the simultaneous formation of knowledge and the community
of knowers.74 These philosophical arguments and strategies issued in a finitistic
view of knowledge, according to which the application of concepts is a matter
of innovative judgment at the local level, which is not determined by theoretical
principles, linguistic rules, past usage, or social interests.
The intermingling of modernist and postmodernist themes in the sociol-
ogy of scientific knowledge produced discordant images of the nature of so-
ciety and its relation to science.75 Adopting the modernist distinction between
subject and object, society and nature, and the associated representational
model of science-as-knowledge, the Edinburgh School used the “ostensive”
72. John G. McEvoy (ref. 3), 198–216.

73. Barnes (ref. 67), 47–51; Bloor (ref. 46), 163–173; Steven Shapin, “Social uses of
science,” G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, eds., The ferment of knowledge: Studies in the
historiography of eighteenth-century science (Cambridge, 1980), 93–139.
74. Jan V. Golinski, “Language, discourse, and science,” Olby, Cantor, Christie, and Hodge
(ref. 2), 110–123 for a good discussion of the distinction between language and discourse
in the various analytical frameworks that shaped the sociology of scientific knowledge.
75. For a classic confrontation between the forces of modernism and postmodernism see
Bloor (ref. 47); idem, “Reply to Bruno Latour,” Studies in history and philosophy of science,
30 (1999), 131–136; Bruno Latour, “For David Bloor . . . and beyond: A reply to David
Bloor’s ‘Anti-Latour’,” Studies in history and philosophy of science, 30 (1999), 113–129.
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404 JOHN G. MCEVOY
model of society to explain agents’ theoretical beliefs about the world in terms of
their preexisting social interests.76 Rejecting the modernist problematic, a range
of theorists, including Latour, Pinch, and Knorr-Cetina, integrated constructivist
views of science-as-practice into a “performance” model of society, according
to which society is “something achieved in practice by all actors,” scientific as
well as social.77 Foucault, in turn, pursued a third way which, instead of identi-
fying knowledge with power or delineating the social determination of science,
“articulated” discursive practices on nondiscursive practices.78 Steven Shapin and
Simon Schaffer blended these models of science and society in their influential
account of 17th- and 18th-century natural philosophy, according to which sci-
ence sustained itself by “cultivating,” rather then constructing or representing,
social interests.79 These interpretive strategies had a significant influence on social
historians of the Chemical Revolution.
The nominalist tendencies of postmodernism encouraged historians of sci-
ence to emphasize the “specificity” of 18th-century natural philosophy and the
fragmented nature of the Enlightenment and the Chemical Revolution. Drawing
on deconstructionist and Foucauldian notions of discourse and its practices, Wilda
Anderson and Jan Golinski analyzed the role of rhetorical and discursive devices
in the simultaneous production of knowledge and the community of knowers
in the Chemical Revolution.80 Viewed in these terms, the texts of the Chemical
Revolution did not represent preexisting truths or meaning so much as marshal
resources to recruit, persuade, and control their readers. In a similar vein, Bernadette
Bensuade-Vincent, Lissa Roberts, and Simon Schaffer showed how the instruments
of the Chemical Revolution—Lavoisier’s balance and calorimeter and Priestley’s
eudiometer—not only measured nature, but also disciplined a community of users
and mediated with the wider culture. Like Christie and Golinski, these and other
commentators focused on the nature and identity of chemical practices in the 18th
century. Postmodernism shaped a variety of historiographical strategies designed
to contextualize the Chemical Revolution by focusing on the rhetorical forms and
discursive functions of its texts and instruments in relation to the social and insti-
tutional contexts in which they were deployed.
76. For a discussion of the “ostensive” and “performance” models of society discussed
here see Shirley S. Strum and Bruno Latour, “Redefining the social link: From baboons to
humans,” Social science information, 26 (1987), 783–802.
77. Ibid, 785.
78. Michel Foucault, The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language (New
York, 1972), 162–165.
79. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and
the experimental life (Princeton, 1985), 339–340.
80. McEvoy, “Search” (ref. 3), 58–60 for references and further discussion of the issues
considered here. See also William Clarke, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, “Introduction,”
idem, eds., The sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago, 1999), 3–31.
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3. CONCLUSION: BEYOND MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM
As Bruno Latour noted, “history did not really count” for the moderns and
postmoderns.81 Instead of grasping the Chemical Revolution as a product of history,
a specific mode of temporality, modernist and postmodernist historians of chemistry
viewed it as a scientific discovery, a moment of rationality, or a matrix of practices
and interests that happened to have occurred in the past. They subsumed history
under the disciplinary interests and categories of science, philosophy, or sociology,
and they failed to develop an adequate account of the moments of continuity and
discontinuity in scientific change. While positivist and postpositivist historians
encompassed scientific change within an overarching identity, or series of identi-
ties, postmodernist historians lost sight of the pattern of historical change in a
bewildering array of local actors and specific situations. If postpositivist historians
transformed the rising curve of historical development, envisioned by the positivist
historiography, into a horizontal series of discrete and immobile line-segments,
postmodernist historians shattered it into “a thousand points of light,” each moving
according to its own devices. But the dispersing thrust of postmodernism did not
move beyond the modernist framework of progressive development, merely using
anachronistic references to confuse and shock the “‘modernist’ avant-gardes.” Mod-
ernist temporality, with its image of history as “an ordered front of entities sharing
the same contemporary time,” could not do justice to the dynamic autonomy and
irreducibility of historical events, “which pertain to all sorts of times and possess
all sorts of ontological statuses.”82 An adequate account of scientific and historical
change requires a just recognition of the complexity of historical events and the
temporality that informs them.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault used the notion
of complexity to characterize the specificity and autonomy of history.83 While they
opposed the essentialist and historicist view of the unity, linearity, and homogeneity
of a single, absolute historical time, they also rejected the pluralistic orientation of
the Annales authors, who affirmed “the existence of different temporal strata and
rhythms—the political, the economic, the geographical—without attempting to
establish any systematic link between them.”84 Accordingly, Althusser viewed a
social formation as a “decentered totality,” in which each instance, level, or practice
possesses its own autonomy and causal efficacy within a system of causal efficacies.
This system does not determine the content or mode of temporality of its levels, but
their “locus of effectivity,” their complex relations of cause and effect, dominance
and subordination, order and arrangement. Like the postmoderns, the Althusserean
81. Latour (ref. 22), 81.

82. Ibid., 72–74.
83. Louis Althusser, Reading “Capital” (London, 19680); Michel Foucault (ref. 78). Also
McEvoy, “Search” (ref. 3), 61–63.
84. Dews (ref. 19), 112.
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406 JOHN G. MCEVOY
historian recognizes that a historical assembly is not “an ordered front of entities.”
But whereas the postmoderns constructed collages of explicitly anachronistic and
contemporary entities, the job of the historian is to portray “polytemporal” as-
semblies of diverse modes of temporality—the new, old, progressive, regressive,
cyclical, or stagnant—no one of which is more outdated or contemporary than any
other one. The past is never truly finished, and the historian is enjoined to develop a
balanced sense of the specificity, relative autonomy, and dynamic interrelatedness
of the diverse modes of temporality that make up a historical assembly in which
the living past is an integral part of the present.85
Larry Holmes criticized existing accounts of the Chemical Revolution because
they failed to do justice to “the complexity of the event.”86 Instead of focusing on
a “group of subproblems,” such as the discovery of oxygen, the reform of the no-
menclature, or the discursive deployment of the balance as the “defining thread” of
the Chemical Revolution, Holmes showed how “the various thematic strands that
historians have isolated as crucial factors were interwoven” in the dynamic unfold-
ing of Lavoisier’s career. Insisting that the Chemical Revolution was a “complex
multidimensional episode,” an unfolding network of theoretical, experimental,
discursive, institutional, cultural, and social strands, he called for the integration
of “scholarly essays that highlight specific topics” into “a story that must someday
be told on a grander scale.”87
The historian of the “grander scale” must show how the Chemical Revolution
was a complex, multidimensional system, constituted by patterns of interaction
between numerous elements and levels, with diverse modes of temporality. Many
of these elements and levels have already been identified and characterized in the
scholarly literature; they include empirical objects, theoretical strategies, experi-
mental practices, epistemological principles, linguistic conventions, pedagogical
and professional organizations, and social, cultural, and economic institutions,
values, and regularities.88
The historian of the “grander scale” must first characterize the internal con-
tent of the elements and levels in a way that recognizes their relative autonomy
and modes of temporality. The pattern of interaction between these elements and
levels, each with its own historicity, must then be spelled out not by reducing the
content or form of any one or more of them to one or more of the remainder, but
by placing them in a relational complex structured by the systemic requirements
of a “decentered totality.” On this model, the familiar issues of the Chemical
85. Latour (ref. 22), 74.

86. Frederic Lawrence Holmes, Eighteenth-century chemistry as an investigative exercise
(Berkeley, 1989), 114.
87. Ibid., 114.
88. John G. McEvoy, “Continuity and discontinuity in the Chemical Revolution,” in A.
Donovan, ed., The Chemical Revolution: Essays in Reinterpretation, Osiris, 2nd series,
volume 4 (Philadelphia, 1988), 195–231; Jonathan Simon, “The Chemical Revolution and
Pharmacy,” Ambix, 44 (1998), 1–13.
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Revolution, such as the discovery of oxygen, the phlogiston-oxygen debate, the

deployment of the balance, the reform of the nomenclature, and the definition of a
chemical element, will be referred, in the specific modes of their temporality and
connectedness, to the field of history, which is irreducible to “the law of an alien
development,” whether scientific, philosophical, or sociological.89
As a complex system, or system of systems, the Chemical Revolution was
neither a dispersed collection of disparate events, nor a linear sequence of defining
moments, but a dynamic pattern of “multiple existences,” with a definite shape
and duration. It is the task of the historian of the Chemical Revolution to iden-
tify this pattern and determine its duration. This task accords nicely with Russell
McCormmach’s editorial vision for Historical studies in the physical sciences: to
“gain a basis for a comprehensive social and intellectual mapping over time and
place of the family of physical disciplines.”90
89. Foucault (ref. 78), 127. See also McEvoy, “Search” (ref. 3), 64–68.
90. Quoted in Lewis Pyenson, Three graces (Lafayette, LA, 2005), 27 and 20–27.
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408 JOHN G. MCEVOY
JOHN G. MCEVOY
ABSTRACT
Since its inception in the 18th century, the discipline of the history of science has
served a motley collection of extrinsic disciplinary interests, philosophical ideas,
and cultural movements. This paper examines the historiographical implications
of modernism and postmodernism and shows how they influenced positivist,
postpositivist, and sociological interpretations of the Chemical Revolution. It also
shows how these interpretations served the disciplinary interests of science, phi-
losophy, and sociology, respectively, and it points toward a model of the history
of science as history.
KEY WORDS: Modernism, postmodernism, positivism, postpositivism, constructivism,

historiography, Chemical Revolution
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Mcevoy 2007 Modernism, Postmodernism and The Historiography of Science

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Modernism, postmodernism and the historiography of science

Author(s): John G. Mcevoy

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IT IS A pleasure and a privilege to contribute to Russell McCormmach’s festschrift.

*Department of Philosophy, Univesity of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221; John.

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1. MODERNISM AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SCIENCE

Positivist accounts of the history of science embodied philosophical principles

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assumptions grounded knowledge in the nature of things, posited an inherent logic

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Postpositivist philosophers of science, including Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and

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ideas, postpositivist scholars explored a variety of links between the conceptual

Connecting positivism and postpositivism to modernism is not without its dif-

7. Joseph Rouse, “Philosophy of science and the persistent narratives of modernity,”

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It is impossible here to do justice to the complexities and ambiguities associ-

Critical essays on the “Philosophical discourse of modernity” (Cambridge, 1996), 124–146.

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social, and political realms.13 The interconnected world of feudalism disintegrated

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knowledge; he developed his transcendental philosophy as a “way of demonstrating

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The modernist philosophy of autonomy involved an analytical conception of

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or aesthetic (Baudelaire, Nietzsche)” and the antireductionists showed what such

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Modernism and the philosophy of science

Philosophical modernism provided a dynamic template for the development

34. Ingram (ref. 12), 24 and 19–31; Rorty (ref. 31), 9.

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of the hierarchical unity of the different cognitive levels—observation, theory,

40. Ibid., 148 and 156–160

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Epistemological and semantic differences between positivism’s vision of a

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2. POSTMODERNISM AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SCIENCE

Opposition to postpositivism soon emerged among sociologists of scientiﬁc

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In his seminal study The postmodern condition, Jean-Francois Lyotard deﬁned

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their own limited, local, and provisional forms of legitimation.49 Postmodernism

49. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984), The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge

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