How Now?

Yesterday, I set myself the task of reading Donald Kelley's "Intellectual History in a Global Age" a fine assessment of the tension between inside and out. And, more to the point, a bit of banner-waving for the linguistic turn. There were two moments that most intrigued me. To Kelley's mind, Ian Hacking, one of history of scien ce's most beloved philosophers of science, offers a lucid, cogent description of the inside-out problem in the following quote:

"External history is a matter of politics, economics, the funding of institutes, the circulation of journals, and all the social circumstances that are external to knowledge itself. Internal history is the history of individual items of knowledge, conjectures, experiments, refutations, perhaps. [...] We have no good account of the relationship between external and internal history." Hacking, "How Should we Do the History of Statistics?" The Foucault Effect, ed. Graham Burchell et al. (Chicago, 1991), 191.

Then, Kelley goes on to rescue Hacking's cliff-hanger:

"The one accessible place where internalist and externalist concerns seem to interact is language, which is internalized in individuals but which is also the object of science and which can be analyzed in terms both of both [sic] maker's knowledge and of social construction. [...] In these days of the linguistic and textualist turns one should substitute 'writing' for 'ideas,' 'sentiments' and 'thinking'; for it is in the effort of writing in particular that the subject -- philosopher, scientist, literary artist -- ventures out into the surrounding cultural space and perhaps historical notice. The author's thought is already a cultural construction, no doubt, but communication and dialogue gives it external form subject to interpretation and criticism." Kelley, "Intellectual History in a Global Age," Journal of the History of Ideas 66.2 (2005): 155-165, 164.

The questions that these snippets prompted in me might seem far too obvious. The first was, Where are pictures, even cultural practices writ large, in this schema? I think they, too, can be subject to the same sorts of analyses that Kelley applies to language. And the second was more of an observation, inspired by Kelley's upholding of language as the site of internal and external interaction. I began to think about how the dialectic that defines knowledge is the required interaction of the internal with the external, how the internal shapes the external and vice versa. Additionally, I'm wondering if it would be fair to say that ideas become knowledge once they move from one person to another. And if knowledge is social, it can't be made without individuals contributing to the circulation of ideas, generating new ideas to be swept into the tide. There will always be something necessarily cultural - or, at the very least, external to the thinker her/himself -- in the material with which each thinker works. But there is something mystifying about how each person synthesizes this social matter, and synthesizes it so differently.

I'm thinking about this on a pretty local level -- especially as I'm confronted with what strange alchemy writing is. I imagine there are multiple arguments that might be made for how peer-reviewed neuroscience papers suffer a different fate, and are much more social because they are subject to a stricter set of professional rules. Perhaps there are some practices that lean more towards the external end of the spectrum than the internal. And vice versa. My point is that I don't think we have entirely thrown out all that is internal. The reason why historians of science still have jobs is that we assess the manifold ways in which science - and knowledge, writ large - has come into being. This means we have a responsibility to both external and internal approaches. It means that we have to grapple with how thinkers secure the agency to build on each other's thoughts, and, just as important, we have to understand the institutional and cultural codes that define and refine their thinking. It's not just that new ideas change the way people think. They change social interaction. And what's more, social interaction changes the way people think, and the ideas they come up with, the ideas they distribute to one another. Whether we see this in pictures, turns of phrase, or other kinds of cultural practices (the organizing of information, etc.), the interaction of the external and internal is constantly at play. And it would be regrettable if we didn't think about this wondrous circuitry even harder. I think we have moved beyond the question of what material we might want to use in order to make this clear. Rather, the question that does linger is Hacking's: How can we best illuminate this exchange of inside-out, this mutually dependent shaping of knowledge?