A Conclusion and a Warning

My question at the beginning of this volume was: Why did British experts in aerodynamics resist the circulatory theory of lift when their German coun­terparts embraced it and developed it into a useful and predictive theory? My answer has been: Because the British placed aerodynamics in the hands of mathematical physicists while the Germans placed it in the hands of math­ematically sophisticated engineers. More specifically, my answer points to a divergence between the culture of mathematical physics developed out of the Cambridge Tripos tradition and the culture of technical mechanics devel­oped in the German technical colleges.

This abbreviated version of my argument and my conclusion is correct, but a condensed formulation of this kind carries with it certain dangers. It may invite, and may seem to permit, assimilation into a familiar, broader narrative, which destroys its real significance. Thus it may appear that the “moral” of the story is that (at least for a time) certain social prejudices en­couraged resistance to a novel scientific theory and led to scientific evidence being ignored or overridden by social interests and cultural inertia. Accord­ing to this stereotype the story came to an end when “rational factors” or “epistemic factors” eventually overcame “social factors” and science was able to continue on its way—a little sadder and wiser, perhaps, but still securely on the path of progress.

Is there really any danger of the episode that I have described in so much detail being trivialized in this way? I fear there is.100 In one form or another, the narrative framework I have just sketched is widely accepted. It has nu­merous defenders in the academic world who confidently recommend it for its alleged realism and rectitude. It is deemed realistic because no one who adopts this view need deny that science is a complicated business. Scientists are, after all, human. Sometimes the personality or the metaphysical beliefs of a scientist may imprint themselves on a historical episode. Sometimes politi­cal interests and ideologies will intervene to complicate the development of a subject and perhaps even distort and corrupt a line of scientific inquiry. What worldly person would ever want to deny that this can happen? But who could approve of these things or, after sober reflection, think that they represent the full story of scientific progress? The intrusions of extra-scientific interests must therefore be exposed as deviations from an ideal that is characteristic of science at its rational, impersonal, and objective best. As well as personal and social contingencies (the argument goes on), it is vital to acknowledge that there are rational principles that, ultimately, stand outside the historical process and outside society. These represent the normative standards that sci­ence must embody if it is to achieve its goal. Fortunately the norms of rational thinking are realized with sufficient frequency that science manages to do its proper job. The norms ensure that the Voice of Reason and the Voice of Nature are heard. With due effort, and a degree of good fortune, this is how science actually works. The rest (the deviations and failings) merely provide a human-interest story of which, perhaps, too much has been made.101

Doesn’t the episode I have described fit into this stereotype? The dispute over the circulation theory ended because the evidence had become too strong to resist. Isn’t that really all there was to it? The British experts were initially too impressed by the great name of Rayleigh, and their resistance to the circulation theory was not a credit to their rationality. Eventually, though none too soon, they came round. Ultimately, therefore, evidence and reason triumphed over prejudice, tradition, and inertia. Reality stubbornly thwarted vested interests, and rationality subverted conventional habits and complacent expectations. Knowledge triumphed over Society. Isn’t this how my story ends?

The answer is no. This is not the story, and it is not how the story ends. Such a framework does not do justice to even half of the story I have told. In reality the end of the story is of a piece with its beginning and its middle. There was continuity both in the particular parameters of the episode I have described as well as in the general epistemological principles that ran through it. The supporters of the circulation theory never provided an adequate ac­count of the origin of circulation, and the critics never deduced the aero­dynamics of a wing from Stokes’ equations. Nor were there any qualitative differences in the relations linking knowledge to society and to the mate­rial world at the end of the story compared with the beginning of the story. There were changes of many kinds throughout the course of the episode, but they were not changes in the fundamentals of cognition or the modes of its expression. Fundamental social processes were operating in the same, principled way before, during, and after the episode described, and they are operating in the same way today. Society was not an intruder that was even­tually dispelled or an alien force that had to be subordinated to the norms of rationality or the voice of nature. There was no Manichean struggle between the Social and the Rational.

Trivializing versions of how the story ends may appeal to propagandists who want to spin simple moral tales, but to the historian and sociologist such tales indicate that the complexities of the episode are being edited out and its structure distorted. This danger is amplified if only a summary version of the story is retained in the memory. To offset this tendency I want to make explicit the methodological framework in which the story should be located, and I want to defend this framework against trivializing objections and mis­guided alternatives. Such is the function of the discussions in the final chap­ter. The aim is to keep the details of the story alive and its structure intact while, at the same time, reflecting on its broader significance.102