I make a large claim for the intellectual and institutional centrality of the history of science as critical reason. The reality on the ground, of course, does not always exhibit this. I trace the vicissitudes of my own way of thought in relation to developments in the field, leading to an interest, first, in relating intellectual history (with its philosophical orientation) to mainstream (evidence based) history, and second, to finding a place for the human sciences in the history of science. The latter area, which involves questioning the nature of science as knowledge, leads to an engagement with notions of being human. It is an interest which potentially makes the history of science a boundless field, and it is necessary to comment on the questions, both intellectual and practical, that this raises. I welcome a notion of the history of science as a family of activities, and I relate this to practices which seek models of good history rather than explicit methods.

It does not admit of doubt: the history of science has pivotal intellectual significance and influences inquiry across the sciences and humanities alike. If, as a matter of social fact, the history of science does not have this standing and impact, something is wrong. The reason for the grand claim is as simple as its elaboration is difficult. The reason is essentially the one Herbert Butterfield stated in The Origins of Modern Science over sixty years ago: after Christianity, it is science which gives western culture its distinctive character, and it is science, or the rationality of which it is the expression, which underwrites any claim that western culture may have to authority on the global scale. World history must link science and the “the rise of the West.” Butterfield was instrumental in the establishment of the history of science as an institutionalized presence in Cambridge University and (in the 1960s) Regius Professor of History in that institution. He was also, earlier (1931), the author of the notion of “Whig history,” the notion which specialist historians of science have so often borrowed in order to signal that the history they write is superior to the history scientists write because they do not tell stories about the past inevitably leading to the sunny present. The claim about the importance of western science may sound banal, perhaps tendentious, and, at this level of generality, vacuous. Yet, the pursuit of the history of science relies on such an argument, albeit expressed in pursuits which break down the statement into much more specific claims. Even if there is scepticism about, or ethical questioning of, the western “special path,” its vaunted rationality and the material politics and technology which is intrinsic to it, this too can take the form of specific questions in the history of science.

“The history of science” is a family name for a host of different practices. This, I think, is both a social fact and inherent to any reasonable conception of the field. There is an almost boundless history of varied views about what “science” (as both knowledge and practice) is, where it has developed, and how its relation to other human activities is to be understood. If I began by associating science with the West, this was only by temporarily putting aside the question of science and, if not “science,” activity which we certainly wish to compare and contrast with science, in India, China, Babylon, and Islamic civilization (Needham Reference Needham1969; Lloyd Reference Lloyd2009; Cohen Reference Cohen2010). There is the matter of the relation of science to all the other forms of understanding around the world, many of which, whether they be Indian mathematics or Amazonian taxonomy, appear to concern themselves with the same interests and subject matter as western science. No one would doubt that the study of each of these areas requires special expertise and research practice. Who would want to say that such studies have no relation to the history of science? Inevitably, then, “the history of science” is a term of convenience denoting a field with problematic scope. This, further, is not only because of the world-wide historical record but because of the conceptual question, “what is science?” which the history of science must address as a condition of fulfilling its intellectual purposes.

As a consequence of all this, any attempt to claim that this or that practice constitutes the field of the history of science or defines it as a discipline is a minor matter of ephemeral academic politics. That this may have large consequences in people's lives and careers is another matter. Moreover, I do not imply that the business of judging whether any particular style of work or research program achieves scholarly standards is insignificant, though it does follow that it can be no part of such judgment to hold that there is one ideal of practice.

The history and contemporary variety of activity in the history of science will be one of the things the field will take an interest in. In what follows in this paper, I neither can nor wish to claim special privileges: history of science has other priorities for other people. All the same, there must be occasions on which it is appropriate to state and defend a larger vision. Without that, the field is simply a cluster of contingently related specialist disciplines, each of which is fun, and a career, for those who like that kind of thing. It is the larger vision which sustains the claim for history of science to occupy a central intellectual position which I stated at the start of this paper.

My own special interest, which is, it must be admitted, rather on the margins of institutionalized history of science, is in the history of the human sciences. As I will explain later in this paper, I think the study of the human sciences ought to occupy a more central position, and in particular it ought to do so if history of science is indeed to act as critical reason. The reason is simple (if debates about the issues most certainly are not): it is the area of the human sciences – the history of study of human nature, mind, language, and culture – which has, repeatedly, raised questions about critical reason as they concern human self-understanding and hence concern the possibilities for human action.

I want to come down off my high horse – though the view from up there is important for orientation. I have practiced a kind of intellectual history (which I will clarify because in some quarters it may appear rather passé), and I have of course responded to local conditions of work. This needs describing if I am to say why and how I do the history of science.

Let me first float a hypothesis – though I am not clear how the claim would translate into objective social research – and say that the relatively small scale of activity and the diverse institutional location of historians of science in the United Kingdom, where I have worked, has been a benefit. Conditions fostered tolerant diversity. By contrast, the larger size of the history of science community in North America made possible a more unified academic discipline – more “professional” judged by certain academic standards, it may be, but not necessarily more intellectually innovative. I also think that there have been advantages in the cultural and geographical location of the United Kingdom “between” Europe and North America and “between” the theoretical and philosophical self-consciousness of the continental European tradition of academic culture and “Anglo-Saxon” (as the French like to say) empiricism. I personally enjoyed a position in a history department (at Lancaster University) in which, if I may parody a little, I was thought a “wild theorist” at home and a “vulgar empiricist” abroad.

I now live in Moscow (for personal and not academic reasons), and it is interesting to bring the Soviet case into such comparisons of academic style. (There is a sociological study of the Moscow Institute for the History of Science and Technology in Mongili Reference Mongili1998.) The Soviet state claimed authority on the basis of unique scientific objectivity, founded by Marx, in knowledge of the social and historical world. The history of science therefore logically included as part of its remit, its subject matter, the critical reason (in theory) at the basis of the authority of the state. Moreover, if Marxism were “scientific,” then a Marxist state operating according to scientific principles should have a distinctive capacity to produce scientific results in general. The history of science therefore needed to demonstrate the special and outstanding contribution of Russian science, and it needed to be combined with a scientific methodology (a “science of science”) for the successful production of scientific results. These principles existed, however, in a political system which required conformity to the central decision-making bodies of the Communist Party. This, first, imposed from above a degree of conformity, at least in public, on practice. It fostered a culture devoted to either historical “fact-collecting” and the celebration of anniversaries, on the one hand, or to abstract discussion of methodologies on the other. What it did not foster was openly critical intellectual history, and it was possible for unsympathetic western observers to perceive ideology rather than independent academic contributions. (For the positive assessment of Russian science, see the work of Loren Graham, especially 1987.) But history of science did matter. This was all the more the case because, for many individual Soviet philosophers and scientists, including a number working in the history of science, a commitment to the objectivity of “real” science was at the heart of a sense of personal dignity and purpose in difficult conditions. Indeed, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Moscow Institute for the History of Science and Technology (one of the vast number of research institutes of the Academy of Sciences) provided a home for innovative critical thinking. Since the political changes, beginning in the late 1980s, the history of science in Russia has fallen on hard times, in my view as one consequence of the general failure of the Academy of Sciences to adapt to new circumstances. Awareness of the Russian case brings home just how diverse a field we are dealing with and just how much the history of the history of science has been bound up with much larger issues concerning the fate of reason. And, in a larger discussion, it would become necessary to show how parallel questions about ideology might be raised in relation to the history of science in other countries.

The implicit assumption, sometimes explicitly discussed, of the History and Philosophy of Science department at Cambridge University, where I studied for four years, 1966–70, was that this field should be, and actually was, central to a transformation of the understanding of reason which mattered for all areas of intellectual and academic life. It appeared self-evident to me then and later that I was highly privileged to learn in this setting. The atmosphere is conveyed in the story which Gerd Buchdahl, when head of department, himself told, that when Kuhn published his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), he, Buchdahl, did not sleep for a week. Mary Hesse was then refining her exacting, but extremely liberating, studies of the theoretical content of observation statements and of the place of metaphor in science. Robert M. Young, importantly for my own interests, was opening an approach to the history of biology and psychology as the working out of the consequences of dualism in an untenable seventeenth-century scientific world-view. (Young left Cambridge in 1976 in disgust at local politics and the position in this of the Wellcome Trust; he lived in London as part of a radical science collective, publishing and practicing Kleinian oriented psychotherapy. The therapeutic work continues, still very much informed by the earlier intellectual analysis of knowledge of human nature [see Young Reference Young2000]). Joseph Needham had begun his magnificent project to uncover Chinese science and technology and place it in a cross-cultural perspective. Geoffrey Lloyd was beginning a long career demonstrating the variety of Ancient Greek science and medicine (subsequently enlarged by the study of China) and the complexity and depth of questions concerning the cultural identity of “science.” All agreed that the demonstration and analysis of theoretical and metaphysical assumptions at the basis of modern science, and hence at the basis of rationality in the modern world, mattered. These scholars, and of course they were not alone, took it for granted that intellectual debate constitutes human values, and that has always seemed to me to be the proper stance of an academic institution. The elevated hopes for History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) were not, it scarcely needs saying, unique to Cambridge: Kuhn was at the center of work in the other Cambridge and then at Princeton, for example, and in Moscow the Institute for the History of Science and Technology in the 1960s was something of a center for innovative questioning of science as Marxist praxis. At the same time, then dimly known in the English-speaking world, Canguilhem and the early Foucault were analyzing in new ways the conditions of scientificity in the bio-medical sciences.

Looking back in the light of later activity, the highly intellectualized and philosophical character of this background in the history of science is apparent. There has subsequently been a large shift towards the study of cultural and material embodiments of intellectual practices – in quantification, instrumentation, non-verbal representation, technology, public display, biography, institutional structures, individual psychological character, and so on. Historians of science have also researched a vast amount of historical detail which was unknown to or ignored by earlier scholars. Without gainsaying the value of any of this, I have retained an interest in intellectual history; it remains my preferred academic reading (perhaps in part because I left the study of natural science because I was interested in patterns of thought rather than particular detail), while recognizing that it has been called upon to justify itself both as history and as philosophy by sometimes quite sceptical critics in both these areas. All along, like many other people, I have taken it for granted that meta-level discussion about these matters, which often takes the form of debate about the historiography of the field, is intrinsic to the history of science. Doing intellectual history, I would ideally like my own work to be its own justification. But I have to recognize that there are scholars who think the focus of the history of science should lie elsewhere; and there are of course shifts of practice within the field which express and encourage the micro-politics of academic power and status. But if I were forced to defend intellectual history I would turn both to the argument that thought is practice and to a driving principle of HPS, that all action, including science, is action in the light of a given view of the world. Also, I tend to believe that it is not necessary to justify an approach or methods once you choose it, except if you challenge an opponent's approach or methods. The discourse of self-justification is open to infinite regress, and any one particular justification, however ritualized, has social and political import. We debate ways of life.

One strand of argument woven into HPS, as it was then practiced and taught in Cambridge, was to have far-reaching consequences for the history of science as it subsequently developed; indeed, I suppose it was the beginning of the shift of attention towards science as cultural and material practice. Demonstrating theoretical, and indeed metaphysical, content in all fields of science led in historical work, as a matter of fact, to contextualism. I deliberately use this abstract term, as debate about what constitutes a properly historical statement about science and about how to understand “context” both fitted out history of science with its subject matter and legitimated its claim to illuminate intellectual culture. Logical positivism's failure as a theory of knowledge, and also the failure of contemporary alternatives (then much less well known in the Anglophone world) under the names of phenomenology and of Marxist realism, to provide a coherent account of the meaning of scientific statements opened up Pandora's Box. Out of it flew fledgling descriptions of the meaning of scientific statements in historical and social terms. The turn to history of science for examples with which to debate the philosophy of science inevitably led on to argument about the social character of science. I regard my research as an extended attempt to continue to practice intellectual history of science while exploring what it might actually mean to undertake contextual argument.

There were a number of reasons around 1970 for attention to “context” in the history of science. Firstly, critique of the positivist theory of knowledge, and especially demonstration of the theoretical content of observation statements, exposed science as historically formed practice – even if that practice was something as large as the “mechanization of the world picture” (in Dijksterhuis’ phrase [1968]). Secondly, the institutionalization of HPS as a distinct teaching and research area inevitably led people to contrast what was written as a result with the then standard stories, often written by scientists themselves and based on an implicit realist epistemology, about the progressive discovery of the facts and laws of the natural world. It was relatively easy for writers in HPS to display scholarly superiority by criticizing the ignorance of many existing studies in the history of science. A vivid instance for me as a student was the contrast between Walter Pagel's studies of Paracelsus and Harvey (1958 and 1967), written by a scholar who had clearly read Paracelsus and Harvey and knew something of the debates to which their writings actually contributed, and clichés about Paracelsus as a quack or Harvey as a hero of the new scientific world-view. Thirdly, at the same time, also in Cambridge, intellectual history, in the form of the history of political ideas, underwent a sea-change. John Dunn (Reference Dunn1968) and Quentin Skinner (Reference Skinner1969) argued that meaningful statements about a text, as a logical condition of their meaningfulness, must describe what is stated in terms of the speech act in which author and reader were participants. As I, and I think many other historians of science, interpreted this, it required attention to context to understand what any statement meant. This equipped contextualism with a rigorous language. A parallel historical view (for which Pagel was one model) of how to interpret scientific texts was also developing at this time in the group which Jerry Ravetz brought together in Leeds, which included J. E. McGuire, Piyo M. Rattansi, Charles B. Schmitt, and Charles Webster, who had great influence in setting standards which aspiring researchers saw as obviously more scholarly than what had come before. Fourthly, political radicalism at the time encouraged contextual argument in order to expose the theoretical and hence evaluative, that is, ideological, structure of claims about the world, natural and human alike. In the work of my PhD supervisor at Cambridge, Robert Young, a developing radicalism grew out of and merged with an emphatic claim about the need for contextual scholarship (1966; 1969; 1973). This had considerable influence. One result was the Radical Science Journal and, later, the journal Science Is Culture (note the marked political difference in emphasis between “science is culture” and “science as culture”).

Influenced by a special mixture of Durkheimian social anthropology, Hesse, and Kuhn in the early 1970s, Barry Barnes and David Bloor articulated a new sociology of scientific knowledge. Together with Steven Shapin and others, they integrated the sociology of knowledge (SSK) into the history of science, establishing the “Edinburgh strong program.” The outraged response of some philosophers and scientists who thought the life of reason was itself questioned (very wrongly, since Barnes and Bloor were intensely serious about establishing a scientific sociology of science), helped to polarize those who did against those who did not elaborate contextual understanding. Controversy certainly helped place the history of science at the center of things, though in many settings subsumed under the catch-all heading of “science studies.” The arguments of the Edinburgh group, and of other sociologists of science, I have always thought, have been of great interest and importance in pushing the history of science into the position that it should occupy as the critical historical conscience of reason.

Lastly, once contextual arguments were on the table, the comparison of what historians of science had started to do with what professionally trained historians had been doing all along was inevitable. Many of us without a training in history felt we had a lot to learn. The result was for historians of science to take on board the standards of evidentiary discourse commonplace in history – but not in earlier history of science and not always in writing by those who thought of history of science as basically a source of case studies for either philosophical or sociological argument. In spite of the educational divide between “the sciences” and “the arts” in the English-language world, a few history departments even embraced the new history of science. This happened at Lancaster University, where I taught from 1971 to 1998, and where I worked with Robert Fox, John Brooke, Peter Harman, Jan Golinski, and Stephen Pumfrey, and also with Brian Wynne, a sociological exponent of the Edinburgh school. In a history department, I learned “on the hoof” that there was a difference between quasi-philosophical commentary and evidence-based historical writing. Bringing the two together, the philosophy and the history, became a long-term project which still interests me, and it is the methodological import of three academic histories – of forensic psychiatry, nervous organization, and the psychology of volition (Smith Reference Smith1981; Smith Reference Smith1992; Smith Reference Smith2013a).

Once contextual argument became the norm, historians of science acquired a professional standard which differentiated them from other writers about science. Argument about whether a scientific (or medical) training is necessary to do research in the history of science (or medicine) appears to me to be a red-herring. It is a position advanced by scientists (or physicians) who take their own interests for granted and assume historians serve those interests. Whatever the difficulties in practice (and of course they may be considerable), there is no reason in principle why a historian should not acquire the expertise necessary to understand technical or specialist matters. There is nothing in principle different from the need for historians to acquire the skills appropriate to set out to examine their chosen area. The late Victorian historian Frederick Maitland, for example, acquired his high reputation precisely because he was master of the extremely esoteric knowledge of law necessary to understand English documents after the Norman Conquest. All the same, because of the technical nature of science's subject matter, as a matter of fact historians often do not and do not want to devote themselves to acquiring a particular scientific expertise, and they do therefore study one thing rather than another.

The new standard in history of science called into question both the relations between historians and philosophers, pulling apart the history and philosophy of science and the relations between historians and scientists. Contextual argument changed the social structure and academic relations of the field. Many philosophers of science thought that the new history of science forfeited its proper calling. Historians of science reciprocated and dismissed philosophy of science for writing about ideal, not historically real, knowledge. Historians of science lampooned scientists for myth-making or ignorance about the facts of the past; scientists accused historians of not studying science at all any more. Mainstream historians, trained in “the arts,” still threw up their hands and disclaimed any competence to talk about “science.” Radicals accused the new historians of science of carving out a new profession to create protected careers for themselves, and narrow-minded historians of science showed that radicals ignored historical detail. All this – I return to the main theme of the paper – made less and less visible the claim for the supreme value of the history of science as reason's critical reflection on itself. It became more and more likely that historians of science would get on with narrowly focused studies, putting into practice the standards of their by now institutionally distinct field, without saying to a wider audience why such studies mattered. I do not agree with the view that this requires historians of science to return to address scientists, or the public for modern science, as their primary audience. To my mind that prejudges what the history of science is all about. I think my own writing in recent years has more to say to people interested in the humanities.

All along, there were times when history of science mattered a good deal in the wider intellectual context and, indeed, did have some influence. I may mention only the place of history of science in arbitrating debate about the sociology of scientific knowledge. Could it in fact be shown, in detail, that social actions produce knowledge, and, if so, could it be said that the objects scientists study are social objects, a claim that seems to go against the raison d'être of natural science objectively to study “nature”? Epistemological argument appeared to reach a complex stalemate, and Hans Joas, for one, referred to “the shoreless sea of epistemological controversies” (Joas [Reference Joas and Meyer1980] 1997, 151; also, “Introduction,” Tauber Reference Tauber1997, 1–49). Historical work, which increasingly focused on science as practice, examining cognitive, material and experimental practices alike, therefore appeared to be a constructive alternative. This is illustrated by Joas himself, a social philosopher, who made his comment in the context of historical work mainly on George H. Mead. Another area where the history of science clearly has had, and continues to have, great significance is in debate on science and religion. The use of history to demonstrate the complexity and variety of relations between “science” (in many forms) and “religion” (also in many forms) has been intellectually and rhetorically decisive in demolishing “the warfare thesis” (whatever real enough conflicts take place in particular settings). Not least, the history of science has been in a position to inform public as well as specialist debate on this topic. Contemporary western publics appear endlessly receptive to debate about science and religion (and hence, in part, the fascination with Darwin), and in this area historians of science have found outlets for their work in publications, the media, and museums.

My own interest has been in a different area, though again the implication is that the history, even if not quite the history of natural science which leads the professional field, matters. As everyone knows (though practice has not given this the attention I think it deserves), in the English-speaking world the word “science” denotes “natural science,” or knowledge and practice (as in management science) which follows, or claims to follow, the example of the natural sciences. This is a modern, principally twentieth-century, usage. In earlier English, the word, like its cognates in other European languages, denotes rationally and systematically articulated knowledge with a claim to be demonstrated truth. Thus, for modern English-speakers, theology cannot be a science; for continental Europeans, theology can make a claim to be a science discipline (and it is so described in some institutions). Consequences follow. Historians of science have overwhelmingly focused on natural science and, in this regard following Comtean positivist philosophy, taken up the narrative of extending the physical sciences, and their objective methods, into the biological and human sciences. The narrative is logically implicated in the meaning of “science” in modern English. The plot, by now elaborated in many “thick” descriptions, recounts causal knowledge overcoming vitalism and teleology in biology (hence, again, the pivotal importance of Darwin) and then reaching its climax in the neurosciences, as – it is claimed – knowledge of evolved brain functions overcomes mind-body dualism. For half a century or so, historians of science have had much to do to research this story, and, for example in the area of the post-1945 brain sciences, there is still much to occupy them.

I suggest that this is a narrow view of the history of science and jeopardizes its claim to be of general significance to critical reason. Searching for historical arguments to support this viewpoint has, over the last two decades, given me direction. (As a matter of practice, I do not have a grand theory which I seek to justify; for me, historical work and philosophical thought about its implications develop together, the one provoking the other and vice versa.) Though there have been people who promote a fully naturalistic understanding of philosophical, aesthetic, religious, ethical, political, and personal life, they have not succeeded in the past nor now in the present in creating agreement that natural science encompasses all possible forms of knowledge. The history of science therefore needs to say at least something about the relations between forms of knowledge. Moreover, in the light of continental European usage, there is reason to extend the history of science to domains where there has been a search for disciplined and systematic knowledge as “science” even if not in the form of “natural science.” The history of science, I want to argue, should have a great interest in relations between different forms of knowledge in “the sciences,” and this will include history of the conventional positivist plot about the advance of the natural sciences. This interest in different forms of knowledge is indeed inescapable in the history of the human sciences, including psychology, in which I have worked. I refer sometimes, accurately if awkwardly, to the history of psychologies, in the plural, such has been the diversity of views. The conventional plot cannot do historical justice to this.

I refer to different “forms of understanding.” By this I mean that there have been different views of what constitutes understanding in different fields of knowledge. This was debated, for example, in late nineteenth-century Germany by Dilthey and other philosophers, trying to make clear the relations between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften. The history of science was, and is, dominated by the assumption that the form of understanding represented in the twentieth century by the triumph of biochemistry and molecular biology, explaining in terms of material, mechanistic relations, constitutes the path of science. Even within the framework of this dominant assumption, though, there are questions about whether other competing forms of understanding exist, for example, in field theories, quantum physics, energetics, chaos theory, and so on. As for the human sciences, it is clear that there has been, and still is, a range of much debated alternatives, under names like the interpretive sciences, structuralism, post-structuralism, and historicism. A historian, as historian, must not ignore the historical record of forms of understanding which are not those which fit into the conventional plot of the advancing “edge of objectivity” (in C. C. Gillispie's fine phrase) of the natural sciences. I see, though, that because certain forms of understanding have not been part of natural science, for many historians of science they are simply not part of their business. In response, I would say that for historians of medicine, psychology, the social sciences, anthropology, linguistics – indeed the whole of what we may conveniently call the human sciences – they are part of the story. The history of the human sciences should accommodate, to take a large and challenging example, Vico's claim to have laid the basis for la scienza nuova, which was specifically not Descartes’ science and which proposed to build science on knowledge of the historical creation, through language, of the human world. Or, to take another example, there is a history in the eighteenth century of the creation of “society,” as opposed to the state, wealth, the laws, or specific kinds of social order (such as “polite society”) as an object of scientific study; intellectual discussion of this properly belonged to “moral philosophy” rather than “natural philosophy.” Or we can take a case from the history of psychology. During the last part of the nineteenth century when, in the once standard account, experimental and hence scientific psychology developed, there were, as a historical matter of fact, different claims to establish psychology as science. Some of these claims questioned the appropriateness of the natural science model, as mention of Brentano's Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt ([Reference Brentano, Rancurello, Terrell and McAlister1874] 1973), James Ward's Encyclopædia Britannica entry on ‘Psychology’ (1886), and Lazarus and Steinthal's journal, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Jahoda Reference Jahoda2007, 53–56), illustrates. In addition, the historian will also want to say something about the long-standing public identity of psychology (Thomson Reference Thomson2006). All these topics I tried to deal with, in practice, in a wide-ranging book on the history of the human sciences and in a book, chastened and more focused, but still wide in scope, on the history of psychology (Smith Reference Smith1997; Smith Reference Smith2013b).

I think the historian of science should engage with “science” (and with “scientific medicine”) as a problematic category. Much contemporary social and cultural history of science (and medicine) does do this. It is precisely this engagement, I suggest, which, in principle if not always in fact, makes the history of science central to so much else.

Much innovative thought has come from practices, whether originating in contextual history, the sociology of scientific knowledge, cultural history, or wherever, describing the social content of what scientists think and do. I tried to contribute with a history of the metaphor of inhibition in accounts of mind and brain (Smith Reference Smith1992). When I turned to the history of psychology and the human sciences, I faced a cluster of questions concerning what I have called “reflexivity” (yet another family name, I now think, and very possibly used in too many different ways to have much value [Smith 2005]), that is, the reflective nature of reason, its self-shaping capacity to reflect on its own nature. As many scholars, from Hegel to Collingwood to Hacking, have noted, the process of human reflection changes its object, the manner of being human. Taking concrete examples from medical science, the history of multiple personality disorder and autism, Hacking described the phenomenon as “looping” (1995a; 1995b). Importantly for what I am trying to say now, if reflection changes the object of reflection, then knowledge, science, requires (logically requires) historical knowledge of reflective, mental and psychological states. The implications are very wide. In psychology and social science, at least, it follows that the history of science encompasses the historical creation of the objects studied by psychologists and social scientists. This is undoubtedly a controversial position because it threatens the status of psychologists and physicians as the discoverers of objective, trans-historical truths about the human condition. But at the very least, it does bring the history of science into the center of debate about the relations of “natural kinds” and “human kinds,” a debate that is shared with philosophy, social anthropology, and the sociology of scientific knowledge. Hacking (Reference Hacking2002), referring to “historical ontology,” has suggested one way to study this, with examples of phenomena (like child abuse) which show a “looping” effect at work. Another approach, taken up by the social psychologist and historian of psychology Kurt Danziger (Reference Danziger1997; Reference Danziger2008), is to trace the historical origins of psychological concepts like personality, motivation, and memory. Daston (Reference Daston2000) has evocatively referred to “the biography of scientific objects.”

As Daston's phrase suggests, the reflexive issue may have a significant place in the history of science in general and not just in the history of the human sciences. (I tried to give a personal, though philosophical, response to these kinds of questions in Smith Reference Smith2007.) It is, after all, the fact that knowledge changes the physical world which, more than anything, bolsters its contemporary authority, and that change, through drugs, surgery, prostheses, and genetic engineering, in addition to science-based technology, for example, communications, in all aspects of life, is now transforming long-standing assumptions about what it is to be human. Perhaps we may refer to technology as “material looping” (though this is not Hacking's position). If so, the prospects for the history of science enlarge yet again.

All this addresses the question, why study history of science. But it exacerbates the difficulty of stating how. The pressing issue, it seems to me, of the kind of view of history of science I am putting forward is that the field loses any claim to specificity as a discipline and becomes unbounded. A shifting and ill-defined identity does not worry me. (I must concede, though, that this at least in part reflects my current position, retired and without institutional affiliation.) As I have emphasized, the history of science is a cluster of activities, and I do not see why what goes on under the patronage of the name should not vary, grow, and shrink in response to changing local opportunities and circumstances. History of science, if well researched and well argued, will find a number of places in the academy and in public life where it can make an intellectual contribution. I think variety fosters innovation and exposes activity to a number of demanding standards. It suggests that it is more valuable, in addressing the question how, to cite models of good practice than to demand meta-level statements about methods, and to my mind this is all to the good. Students, it follows, work as apprentices not disciples of a method. (This indeed reflects the characteristic way of working of the humanities in the United Kingdom, at least until bureaucratic assessment procedures tried to impose measurable method-based standards.) My own research has not consciously applied methods (I do not write “case studies”), though I can see that methods are implicit in the practices. In so far as I have made them explicit, it has been to defend a continuing interest in writing intellectual history.

The problem with all this is obvious. The consequence of multiple identities in the history of science is that the field ceases to have, and indeed cannot have, one target audience, the audience of natural scientists (or physicians) with their large funds and institutional power. The history of science acquires audiences which differ with the topic in hand. This has the hopeful promise of opening access to many diverse audiences; but it carries with it the danger, given the realities of specialization, of finding itself with no audience at all (or, at best, small and marginal audiences). Others, including the Council of the British Society for the History of Science, have given this much attention. Abstract argument about the boundlessness of “the whole,” or even just writing very wide-ranging books, may well not communicate much about the value of the history of science. This communication, whether to intellectual peers in other disciplines or to other audiences, requires the identification of a specific problem or subject matter. The success of biography well illustrates this: I think in my own field of recent lives of Eysenck, Henry Head, Jung, and Pavlov (Buchanan Reference Buchanan2010; Jacyna Reference Jacyna2008; Shamdasani Reference Shamdasani2003; Shamdasani Reference Shamdasani2005; Todes Reference Todes2002; Todes forthcoming). The ability of historians of science to communicate to wider audiences, including audiences of natural scientists (or physicians), depends not only on having concrete arguments to make or stories to tell but on saying what other audiences want to hear. It is not clear that other audiences do always want to hear what historians of science have to say: they may not want either the meticulous and qualified detail or an argument or plot which does not speak to their own interests. All disciplines within the university, when they seek to enlarge their audience, are in this position, and repeated attempts to restructure on inter-disciplinary lines address it. Historians of science, though, have a special difficulty in engaging with scientists (or doctors) who “know” that they are advancing knowledge or humanity's well-being and imagine that history's significance can come only, if indirectly, from supporting the same enterprise. But if historians of science go too far in responding to what they imagine audiences want to hear, they may end up losing the critical importance of what they had to say in the first place. This is perhaps the occupation's equivalent of the danger to the anthropologist of “going native.”

I have put forward a picture of the history of science as a cluster of activities which occupy, potentially if not always in practice, a central intellectual and institutional position. The subject belongs everywhere and nowhere. This naturally makes the field institutionally and financially vulnerable to being squeezed by disciplines which can more easily claim a unified research program, commercial offshoots, or public “impact.” The task is to translate a nebulous ideal of critical reason into disciplined scholarship. For me, that has meant seeking ways to write cogent intellectual history (which requires a conception of the social nature of reasoning) and to rethink the place in history of the sciences of being human.