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Knowledges and their Histories

Major changes

At a few moments in the past, humans have lived through major changes in their knowledge systems, thanks in particular to new technologies:

• the invention of writing, for instance, in Mesopotamia, China and elsewhere;
• the invention of printing, especially block printing in East Asia and printing with moveable type in the West;
• [...] the rise of computers, especially PCs, and the rise of the Internet.

Francis Bacon and the reform of knowledge

In his book The Advancement of Learning (1605), [...] the philosopher, lawyer and politician Francis Bacon expounded a plan for the reform of knowledge, an ancestor of what we now call ‘science policy’.

He argued that reform would be assisted by a history of the different branches of learning, discussing

• what was studied when and where (in what ‘seats and places of learning’);
• how knowledge travelled, ‘for the sciences migrate, just like peoples’;
• how it flourished, decayed, or was lost;
• and [...] what Bacon called the ‘diverse administrations and managings’ of learning, not only in Europe but ‘throughout the world’.

<aside> 🎯 Bacon’s plan was first put into practice by a number of eighteenth-century German scholars, writing what they called historia literaria (in the sense of a history of learning rather than a history of literature) [...].

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Progress, development, evolution

In the nineteenth century, there was a movement to historicize knowledge in the sense of emphasizing its development or evolution, often viewed as ‘progress’.

Not only the human world but also the world of nature was now presented as subject to systematic change.

• This was the common message of
  • Charles Lyell’s Elements of Geology (1838) distinguished different periods in the history of the earth
    • The philosopher-sociologist Auguste Comte was interested in the history as well as in the classification of the different disciplines and tried to persuade the French minister of education to establish a chair in the history of science (he failed).
      • In the early twentieth century, the history of science that Comte had advocated was introduced in some universities, especially in the USA.
  • Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1858) was organized around the idea of evolution via natural selection.
    • Karl Marx argued that what people know and what they think is the result of their position in society, their social class.

The sociology of knowledge

German-speaking scholars established what they called the ‘sociology of knowledge’ (Wissensoziologie), concerned with

• who knows what
• the uses of different kinds of knowledge in different societies, in the past as well as in the present.

The history of the natural sciences has been taken as a model for other histories:

• the history of the social or ‘human’ sciences
• the history of the humanities
• the history of knowledge in general. [...]

The history of the book

The history of the book has developed in the last few decades from an economic history of the book trade to a social history of reading and a cultural history of the spread of information.

The history of science

It has been driven by three challenges:

• One challenge is a consequence of the awareness that ‘science’ in the modern sense of the term is a nineteenth-century concept, so that to use the term about knowledge-seeking activities in earlier periods encourages what historians hate most, anachronism.
• The second challenge has come from the rise of academic interest in popular culture, including the practical knowledges of artisans and healers.
• The third and most fundamental challenge has come from the rise of global history and the consequent need to discuss the intellectual achievements of non-Western cultures. These achievements may not fit the model of Western ‘science’, but they remain contributions to knowledge. [...]

The epistemological turn