This is the first in our series of interviews with current historians and philosophers of science. In these interviews, our guests are asked to reflect on the current status of the field, how we might be able to contribute to contemporary debates, what their own research interests are, and how these interests inform their worldview. In this interview with Paul Ziche, we focus on the role of interdisciplinarity, expertise, artificial divisions, and trust in contemporary society.
Paul Ziche (PZ): Hello, I’m Paul Ziche. I have multiple roles, as most academics do. I’m a professor for the History of Modern Philosophy at the Department for Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. I am also the director of our Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and Humanities. In my study career, I started studying physics quite some time ago. I didn’t quite finish this study – I did finish the more exciting bits such as mathematics and theoretical physics; but switched to philosophy and the history of philosophy. Part of the motivation for this switch was the hugely liberating experience when I discovered that this allowed me to include most of what I found interesting into my working life. So, obviously, the natural sciences, mathematics, and philosophy, but also old books, history and art, art history, films… That’s what got me going in philosophy and that’s what I also like about history – you’re automatically beyond today’s disciplinary subdivisions.
At that time at Munich, you didn’t have ‘curricula’ when studying philosophy. Basically, you did what you found interesting, which in a way was great even if I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone as a way to organize a curriculum. After doing my PhD at Munich I then moved to Jena University as an assistant professor in the history of science and started doing all sorts of 1900s stuff there. I was working in the house of Ernst Haeckel, the Darwinist zoologist and prominent protagonist of a scientific worldview. Today, the Institute for the History of Medicine, Science and Technology resides in his house, together with a museum devoted to Haeckel. In those old days the history of science was an extremely open field, basically no one had studied the history of science as a specialist field, you could move into history of science from philosophy, medicine, physics, history, and many other directions. As a discipline, it started to professionalize (at least in Germany) precisely at this time. To some extent, that professionalization is an ambiguous development. It led to great results, to enormous progress in methodological self-awareness and to strong institutions, but it also streamlined career paths, ways of thinking, sources you read, styles of doing things…
Maura Burke (MB): It’s quite an interdisciplinary route that you’ve walked. I’m sure it must be nice now to step into the role of directing the Descartes Center, which captures a bit of that interdisciplinary spirit still since it is composed of so many people with so many approaches.
PZ: In a way, that’s the first sentence I’m always telling people about the Descartes Center: It’s great because we have precisely this kind of openness. In the Centre, we have colleagues doing history of ancient philosophy, there are historians, philosophers of physics, logicians, experts in medical ethics, to name only a few, and so many people and fields in between. However, this means that we aren’t always perceived as a professional centre for a certain form of doing history or philosophy of science. That’s a continuous kind of balancing act, but I’m very much in favor of this kind of openness. That’s my second sentence about our Centre: It’s great that we are not a research institute with a very clear-cut line of topics or direction of research.
One task then is to discover what might be shared topics that interest at least a number of our diverse group of people working here – and then try to make something of it, to present these topics and questions in a way that shows their importance for the university as a whole (and may, where relevant, also reach beyond the university)! It’s really a process of finding out what we are doing, and what are interesting points of overlap in our activities in reflecting upon the sciences.
MB: To look at your specific work at the moment, if you had a two sentence elevator pitch for what your current research is, you as an individual, what would that be?
PZ: Basically it’s two topics. One is exploiting the fact that our conceptual framework of ‘talking about science’ is so surprisingly recent, barely more than 200 years old, which in historical terms is very young indeed. This means that we simply cannot take this framework as settled, and this gives us opportunities to explore forms of openness within the sciences. My standard example of this is that only around 1800 did ‘innovation’ became a key characteristic and virtue of being a successful scientist – and the word ‘scientist’ didn’t even exist at that moment! The link between scientific innovation, and creativity, the idea of being a genius and a scientist – this link only comes about in this very context. I still find this a surprising result. To understand how it came about, why science became to be so rigorously demarcated, how this openness coagulated into today’s understanding of science, that’s one of the processes I find interesting at the moment. I’m also always interested in surprising forms of cooperation – people doing things together who, officially, shouldn’t have any kind of contact at all – and how to understand that. My paradigm example here is the collaboration of parapsychologists and formal logicians in the 1920s, and you may also add modern artists into that mix.
MB: As the times have changed, which attitudes within your field have changed?
PZ: It’s really difficult for me to answer this because I’m not so much active in the field of history and philosophy of science any longer; quite a lot of what I’ve been doing recently is more traditional history of philosophy. So my answer is probably more rather a kind of wish list I have. Firstly, we need more cooperation between different disciplines: think of the more technical aspects of modern epistemology, the colleagues studying the disruptive influence of technologies in society, the historian informing us about the unsettledness of the concepts used in these practices, the sociologist, the media scientist studying material practices of representing science. A good example is the notion of virtues, which is something that comes up in rather diverse fields. We have virtue ethics in philosophy; we have virtue epistemology for the theoretical philosophers, we have value-related issues referring to trust in science or in the scientists. All of them are aware that they work with these same concepts, but more can be done to integrate their projects. HPS seems to be perfectly located as a place for bringing these fields in interaction.
MB: I guess my follow up question would be, how do we facilitate this?
PZ: That’s indeed one of the big tasks for an interdisciplinary centre in the field of HPS. Probably a good strategy is to start from small scale to medium scale events devoted to a particular topic, which is to some extent outside of everyone’s comfort zone, but to which everyone can contribute. Then just simply see what happens, where does this get us? I do find it important to identify topics where there isn’t ‘the expert’. So it’s not, ‘Okay, we do virtue ethics, and you talk about virtues in epistemology, so you’re hijacking our concepts,’ or ‘Please come to our meeting’. We rather need some kind of setting in which everyone is slightly out of focus. Let’s think about a concrete example. Say we look at a rhetorical analysis of a sequence of papers in Nature in February 2024, from the research papers to the editorial summary to the columns or the adverts included in this issue. Are there clear shifts in vocabulary or terminology? How do these texts construct different reading publics? In which terms do they talk about he epistemic status of the scientific insights that are discussed? What kind of diagrams are included? Et cetera. These questions might attract the philosopher, but also the scientist, but also someone from literature studies, from linguistics, communication studies, media studies, and again: et cetera. That’s the kind of example one might think about. Another example concerns a phrase that is used a lot in Utrecht at the moment, namely that we need a ‘cultural change’ in how we work as academics in a university, more specifically: a ‘cultural change’ leading towards practicing ‘Open Science’. But what is implied in conceiving of this process as a ‘cultural’ change. And how do you orchestrate a cultural change? It’s clear that such a change needs to operate on multiple levels. It’s also clear that a culture is not something that can be institutionalized in a top-down way. So how do you do that? Here, we can learn from cultural historians, anthropologists studying foreign cultures, the study of education: et cetera, and none of these fields can monopolize such a study.
MB: Would it be fair to say that you want to concern yourself more with particular details, local relationships, smaller interventions than attaching yourself to a big concept?
PZ: In a way, yes. This is interesting because in my own research, I’m constantly working against thinking with big label terms: the Enlightenment isn’t simply ‘the’ Enlightenment, but a highly complex, diverse, sometimes extremely violent and oppressive, sometimes extremely liberating and democratic process, and the same holds for, e.g. ’the’ Romantics, and also for ‘science’ etc. This is also something that I strongly support it in terms of academic politics and of improving a working situation at university. Things become more manageable and also more controllable once you step back from the big, overarching concepts. Put differently: one of my guiding terms that informs a lot of what I’m doing is ‘concreteness’. ‘Concreteness’ cannot mean to only add ever more detail; concreteness is about grasping phenomena in their complexity, in a way that makes them understandable in their own terms. That’s probably a very typically historian thing to say.
MB: There seems to be a popular narrative in the media that we’re living in unprecedented times. As someone who can step into the broader historical perspective, in what sense is this unprecedented?
PZ: Of course, you probably should never ask a historian, ‘Is it really unprecedented?’ because the typical historian’s reaction will be, ‘If you look carefully, you do find that in fact it is not’. But that’s not really interesting. One thing that strikes me in thinking about this question is that a lot of the classic topics in the history and philosophy of science are coming up again today in an even more politicized role than ever before, which is slightly strange thing to say. We had the infamous science wars; quite some time ago we had Foucault and his particular way of dealing with the interaction between knowledge and institutions wielding, or aiming at, power. Still, these issues seem to be even more politicized today. That’s a hugely interesting process; to compare these earlier, strongly politicized forms of dealing with the phenomena of science with today’s situation. One thing that can clearly be seen is that a good deal of the previously ‘liberating ideas’, such as awareness of sociological constraints, diversity issues, the inclusion of neglected groups into how we look at science, aren’t seen as liberating any longer. Instead they are seen as a threat to some kind of societal or epistemological stability, and that’s a genuinely threatening development! That probably is, indeed, unprecedented. In this sense, we could say that many of the classic HPS topics are getting more and more important. This is also true outside of the sciences themselves, or outside of academia: we have all sorts of problems with trust in science, think of vaccination debates and climate deniers, but we also have many other forms of losing trust in information and knowledge and critical thinking in general. That may also be interesting for the HPS person, as we do have a tradition of investigating these processes, and that could really be important in today’s situation.
MB: I think HPS could play a very critical role in conversations between people who are non-experts in certain fields and people who are experts and I think people with an HPS background could be quite well equipped to mediate these conversations.
PZ: Yes, certainly, see the examples I already gave for typical questions that involve practitioners from very diverse fields. But we may take that a step further and start with an analysis of what your question states. The role of the ‘expert’ is interesting here. It’s in some sense much easier to think yourself to be an expert today than it was 50 years ago. To some extent that has to do with the accessibility of information, but it also has to do with a changing attitude as to what it means to be an expert. One thing that we have been learning is that clearly people within academia are just human beings, and they are just like everyone else, driven by desires, rewards, social constraints, and what not. All of a sudden it becomes an intriguing question to ask how then to defend the status of ‘academically produced knowledge’. That was a classic science wars issue, but the important difference is that we have a changing attitude towards trust everywhere, not just between ‘science’ and ‘not-science’. Questioning trust could be viewed as part of the classical image of science – organized skepticism – but there’s a difference between genuine skepticism or a genuine critical attitude and just rejecting trust in, for instance, science. Of course, it’s part of science to always be looking for ways of doing things differently. But how can we phrase, and analyze, the problem of having to combine a trust in science’s ability to come up with innovative solutions (which always implies taking risks, making mistakes along the way, encountering dead ends) with a trust in the reliability of science’s results? Are these two forms of trust? Can we integrate them into one? We also see that quite some of these topics are taken up in social epistemology – what my colleagues next door are doing.
We do have a tradition, in HPS, of thinking about the ‘public image of science’, and it seems to be a very important thing to both consider and convey an image of science that is realistic. This implies that we need to be correcting images that are out there, but we also have to understand how these images came about and what their function in society is. Take an example: In Utrecht, we have the intriguing project of science murals. These murals are beautiful images that are explicitly intended to convey a positive image of science, however it’s done in terms of individual discoveries with precisely dated discoveries. These images can certainly contribute to make science more at home in the city, and to foster a positive attitude with respect to science. However, when we visited some of them in the course of one of our colloquia, we raised all sorts of critical questions: Shouldn’t we emphasize the importance of teamwork, shouldn’t we emphasize that a discovery is never done on just one certain day? Both attitudes with respect to science have their specific relevance – so: what kind of image do we want to convey at the end of the day?
It’s also an established topic that the academic community makes itself vulnerable by claiming to have authoritative, fully authoritative knowledge, even though we know perfectly well that scientific knowledge can never be fully authoritative. Still, in many contests we insist on this fully authoritative image. Should we correct that? How do we change this image? One strategy I have already been hinting at: namely the idea that creativity, innovation, risk taking, being adventurous – these things are part of what it means to be scientific for us today. There’s an interesting mismatch in the perception of science. On the one hand, the paradigm of a genius today is not Rembrandt, but Einstein. On the other hand, there’s this feeling that if our science is not 100% certain, then that’s already sufficient for a certain form of skepticism or science denialism. Those are really conflicting attitudes. What can we do in order to correct that? We should show, explicitly, that it’s important that science is a risk-taking endeavor! But that does not mean that it’s not trustworthy! We should try to arrive at an image of science as trustworthy precisely because it’s risk-taking.
MB: Well, we’ve covered a lot of interesting but also quite heavy topics, so let’s end with something fun. What are your suggestions for books, articles, archives – anything that’s particularly interesting to you?
PZ: I sort of feel guilty if I single out one specific book or text or author, but, one case study that I love a lot at this moment, is the book by Deborah Coen on Vienna in The Age of Uncertainty, which is a cultural history of science study in Vienna around 1900, a period where people dealt with uncertainty in many contexts: uncertainty in economics, meteorology, thermodynamics, statistical physics… The book tells the story about a family working on these topics, and they represent culture in a yet broader sense – they all go to a beautiful country house at one of the Austrian lakes in the summer, with piano music played in the background by none other than Johannes Brahms. It’s a hugely intriguing panorama of all sorts of dimensions of culture in a very specific setting. That’s the kind of case study I really like.
Something that I find intriguing at the moment – it’s not an official archive, but a kind of resource for asking all sorts of questions about universities: how does a university or an institution make use of photography? I’ve been walking through university buildings and looking at photographs, or at the role of photography on the websites of universities. These are informally compiled archives of self-representation that can teach us a lot. You can ask similar questions within a company; you can do it within a government institution. It’s a fun and interesting practice that one can readily do by just making use of already available information; and we may view that as a rather precise illustration of the problem of generating an image of science.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Any external links have been added by the editor and are not direct references of the interviewee.