thesis
- Objectivity--or as Daston frames it in this chapter, objectivity versus impartiality. Does impartiality overlap exactly with the concept of 'disinterestedness', so important in the eighteenth century and vanishing in the next? Daston doesn't say; perhaps she and Galison discuss this in the longer book.
- 'Epistemic virtues'--these came up fairly often in Berrey's Hellenistic Science at Court, which I found fascinating; they seem highly relevant to my project. Need to read more about the history of this term and its significant uses.
- Thucydides I.22--I knew that {akribeia}** came up in Thucydides, I think (thanks TLG!), but I hadn't thought about that fact in quite a while. I'm still trying to figure out where exactly Ancient Greek historical writing fits into my dissertation outline--a section on 'rhetorical uses of accuracy & precision' keeps not quite fitting in where I want it to--but maybe there's a closer link than I had realized between Greek historiography and Alexandrian textual criticism (the latter of which is what I had intended to read up on this morning). Maybe {akribeia} in writing history & Homer is what I need; maybe this is finally the connection that will turn my pages and pages of notes into a coherent whole...
- 'Big Science', to use Daston's term--absolutely fascinating the way she traced the origins of highly collaborative and highly methodical research projects in, say, nuclear physics to 19th century historiographical projects like Mommsen's Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. I've been reading up on 20th century science megaprojects (the Manhattan Project, the Apollo missions, et al.) for an idea that I had last week for a novel. I absolutely have not started to write the novel (well, except for a few paragraphs), and of course my dissertation takes priority, so it doesn't even matter if I see connections between the novel and what I'm reading for my PhD--but the synergy is exhilarating. I may start a new Scrivener file, just so I can take notes for the novel as well....
- Networks--fascinating also the way she stresses the importance of apprenticeship-like research seminar groups in establishing historical methodologies. This features connects both with a number of chapters in Values of Precision, which emphasized how standards are negotiated by networks (cf. especially M. Norton Wise's 'traveling numbers' concept), and with the image of a mathematical network described in Netz's 2002 chapter (and elsewhere in Netz's writing, I think). I'm sure this broader topic has connections with Steven Johnstone's A History of Trust in Ancient Greece, but at the moment I can't think what they are.
- Daston's conclusion--a fascinatingly negative take on objectivity as a whole--not just in its potential for facilitating distortion of history, or the posing of wrong-headed questions, but for its social effects. I don't know exactly the extent to which I agree with that negativity, but I love so much being forced to reevaluate. What a marvelous idea, this 'history of science'. How relevant. How important. How interesting. Someone should write a novel about a science historian time-traveling to 1940....
Currently reading: After Babel by George Steiner 📚
Language–and this is one of the crucial propositions in certain schools of modern semantics–is the most salient model of Heraclitean flux. It alters at every moment in perceived time. The sum of linguistic events is not only increased but qualified by each new event. If they occur in temporal sequence, no two statements are perfectly identical. Though homologous, they interact. When we think about language, the object of our reflection alters in the process (thus specialized or metalanguages may have considerable influence on the vulgate). In short: so far as we experience and “realize” them in linear progression, time and language are intimately related: they move and the arrow is never in the same place.
the existence & the naming of the infinite
Οἴονταί τινες, βασιλεῦ Γέλων, τοῦ ψάμμου τὸν ἀριθμὸν ἄπειρον εἶμεν τῷ πλήθει…. Ἐντί τινες δέ, οἳ αὐτὸν ἄπειρον μὲν εἶμεν οὐχ ὑπολαμβάνοντι, μηδένα μέντοι ταλικοῦτον κατωνομασμένον ὑπάρχειν ἀριθμόν, ὅστις ὑπερβάλλει τὸ πλῆθος αὐτοῦ–Archimedes' Arenarius, tr. Mendell: “Some people believe, King Gelon, that the number of sand is infinite in multitude….There are some who do not suppose that it is infinite, and yet that there is no number that has been named which is so large as to exceed its multitude.”
A nice chapter epigraph?
τὰ δʼ ὑπεναντίως εἰρημένα οὕτω σκοπεῖν ὥσπερ οἱ ἐν τοῖς λόγοις ἔλεγχοι εἰ τὸ αὐτὸ καὶ πρὸς τὸ αὐτὸ καὶ ὡσαύτως, ὥστε καὶ αὐτὸν ἢ πρὸς ἃ αὐτὸς λέγει ἢ ὃ ἂν φρόνιμος ὑποθῆται–Aristotle, Poetics 1461b16-18, tr. Butcher: “Things that sound contradictory should be examined by the same rules as in dialectical refutation whether the same thing is meant, in the same relation, and in the same sense. We should therefore solve the question by reference to what the poet says himself, or to what is tacitly assumed by a person of intelligence.”
Learned today that GE Lessing (modern discoverer of Archimedes' Cattle Problem) serendipitously relates to underlying questions about faith, proof, and miracles in my thesis. On the one hand, great! more to read! OTOH, oh dear, more to read….
Technical Language and Hellenistic ἐξήγησις
In the last week, I have binged nearly 50 episodes of Tea with BVP, and something about the way that BVP himself uses the words 'exercise', 'activity', and 'task' set off some thoughts; a few of those thoughts began crystallizing when I reread my manifesto-like post on teaching historical languages. I included a footnote at the end of my twelve points, specifying that I was using the word 'acquire' (and indeed 'learn') the way that Krashen et al. do, to form a mental representation of a language, i.e. implicit knowledge of the language, rather than to gain explicit knowledge about the language. I reckon I could rephrase that footnote a bit more clearly. Still, what I got across--I hope--was that I was using the words 'acquire' and 'learn' in their technical sense, not the way that they usually are.
And that is what BVP does when it comes to 'exercise', 'activity', and 'task': he restricts the usage of those terms, beyond the normal English usage. The distinction between 'exercise' and 'activity' is not randomly created, because it draws on connotations and associations of the two words; that said, there are many contexts in which the two would function synonymously, or in which either would be an 'accurate' choice of word. In BVP's usage, however, the semantic range of 'exercise' and 'activity' does not overlap, not at all, because an 'activity' is a use of the language that involves communication, whereas an 'exercise' is a use of the language that does not involve communication. Nor do 'activity' and 'task' overlap in BVP's usage. A 'task' is a use of the language that involves communication to some purpose apart from the usage or acquisition of the language.
While intuition and connotations make it fairly easy to remember the distinctions BVP makes with these three words, they are not obvious ones. These three specific definitions are not accessible to English speakers, even native English speakers, unless they come into some kind of contact with second language acquisition researchers or foreign language teachers.
Even then, most contact with those who use these three ordinary words in the technical sense is unlikely to result in more English speakers acquiring these technical definitions, because these are all perfectly normal words. I doubt that any of the hosts of Tea with BVP entirely restricts their usage of these words to the above definitions. There's no way that they've all stopped using the many other definitions of the word 'exercise'; there's no way they don't talk about 'activity' unless they mean 'communicative use of the target language'; there's no way that they've given up the regular meanings of the word 'task'. Which means that even becoming drinking buddies with BVP isn't enough to acquire his technical definitions of any of these words. You'd have to come into contact with him (or anyone else who uses these words in their technical sense) within a relevant context, in order to acquire their technical meanings for yourself. In other words, we might tentatively define 'technical language' as 'the use of language with restricted definitions, within a restricted context'.
What does any of this have to do with my dissertation? Well, I've been thinking about the Greek word ἐξήγησις lately. I've been wondering whether ἐξήγησις counts as a genre of ancient Greek writing. In that sense, one might ask whether ἐξήγησις is a 'technical' word, or has a 'technical definition'. My impression--for which I should eventually come up with some concrete, presentable evidence--is that ἐξήγησις does have a restricted meaning. Sure, we gloss it as 'explanation', but when the word ἐξήγησις is used of an explanation, it comes with some pretty specific conventions and expectations.
That's just a hunch, that ἐξήγησις has a restricted meaning from the obvious one. It will take time to research and argue properly. It's pretty easy to answer the question of whether that postulated restricted definition is linked to a restricted context: yes. If we plug it into Logeion, we see that ἐξηγέομαι is a perfectly nice, normal Greek word--the 1,911th most common in the corpus--used with a variety of related meanings across a wide range of eras, places, and genres (the top listed authors are Galen, Epictetus, Herodotus, Andocides, and Aeschylus). ἐξήγησις, on the other hand? Only the 4, 578th most common word in the corpus, and with a list of top authors far more concentrated in time and genre: Polybius, Galen, Diogenes Laertius, Pausanias, and Flavius Josephus. And indeed, following from that restricted context is an extremely short list of glosses in the LSJ--'statement, narrative', or 'explanation, interpretation'.
There's more work to do another time, and more to be said about why I care that ἐξήγησις acts like a technical word (the short version is that I'm a little obsessed with Hipparchus). For now, though, I feel comfortable suggesting that there's a there there, when it comes to ἐξήγησις as a genre with conventions and expectations worth exploring further.
'Objectivity and Impartiality: Epistemic Virtues in the Humanities', Lorraine Daston (2015)
A lifetime of unfinished projects has taught me one good thing: how to start enthusiastically. Four days after arriving in St Andrews for my master's degree, I sat down in the library with Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Encyclopedia and began making my way through its five hundred and thirty-four pages.* (This process was hindered by authors Briggs and Calder's alphabetical arrangement of their fifty subjects and my determination to read through the biographies in more or less chronological order; needless to say, the plans of Briggs and Calder were foiled by my compulsive tendencies.) An account of the lives and passions of fifty classicists was exactly what I needed to orient myself in the discipline, and the understanding I gained of the history of classics has proved highly useful since; I am thankful for the coincidence that I found that book on that day.
I wasn't looking for a history of how some of those very classicists shaped contemporary views of objectivity when I searched the Durham library website this morning for "Ancient Greek textual criticism", but I have once again found exactly what I was looking for by not looking for it. Daston and Galison's Objectivity was cited frequently in some of the early chapters of Values of Precision, enough that I thought I might want to get around to reading it someday; after running across Daston's chapter in the unenticingly named The Making of the Humanities, Volume III today, I am eager to track down a copy. More importantly, I am newly affirmed in the importance of my new discipline, which appears to be something called 'history of science'.
In St Andrews, my nearly-new discipline was Classics--Ancient Greek literature, specifically. I'd squeezed a classical lit major out of my final three semesters at UNC-Chapel Hill (not at all recommended, but pleasant times were nevertheless had). Classical Scholarship had helped me see what kind of research could be done in Classics and what kind of training you needed to do it. Similarly, Lorraine Gaston's chapter of The Making of the Humanities is exactly the kind of thing I want to read, and exactly the kind of thing I think--even after millennia of historical research--needs writing. I am surprised to find myself technically occupying the Ancient History side of the Durham department, rather than the Classics side; it is nice to be reassured that I am possibly in the right spot after all. That would mean that I need to learn how to become a historian, however, which sounds like a lot of work at the moment.
Key concepts that I need to keep tracing from Daston 2015:
The soundtrack for today's work has been 1940's instrumentals: if I can't let myself work on the fiction project, I can at least listen to the characters' music and pretend that I'm working in a coffee shop, rather than my sister's childhood bedroom.
*Thank goodness my 879,453-word journal has a search function. I finished Classical Scholarship four days later, in case you were wondering. In case you weren't--well, all I'll say is that future generations were grateful for Samuel Pepys.
**I systematically use braces {} to denote a word which has been transliterated. You should, too, because a) it reduces ambiguity; b) nobody is using braces for anything else; c) braces are a standard feature of keyboards, whereas italicizing can be a pain; d) it reduces the ugliness of transliterated words like {'istorih}; and e) I wouldn't have to keep writing this footnote.