Technoscientific approaches to deep time

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Highlights

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    Technology and theory are also indissolubly entangled in historical sciences.

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    To work with the fossil record, different technological devices are required.

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    These devices process, extract, and eventually present paleontological explananda.

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    Historical sciences should be analyzed against other technoscientific disciplines.

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that in order to understand the process behind the knowledge production in the historical sciences, we should change our theoretical focus slightly to consider the historical sciences as technoscientific disciplines. If we investigate the intertwinement of technology and theory, we can provide new insights into historical scientific knowledge production, preconditions, and aims. I will provide evidence for my claim by showing the central features of paleontological and paleobiological data practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In order to work with something that is imperfect and incomplete (the fossil record), paleontologists used different technological devices. These devices process, extract, correct, simulate, and eventually present paleontological explananda. Therefore, the appearance of anatomical features of non-manipulable fossilized organisms, phenomena such as mass-extinctions, or the life-like display of extinct specimens in a museum's hall, depend both on the correct use of technological devices and on the interplay between these devices and theories. Consequently, in order to capture its underlying epistemology, historical sciences should be analyzed and investigated against other technoscientific disciplines such as chemistry, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology, and not necessarily only against classical experimental sciences. This approach will help us understand how historical scientists can obtain their epistemic access to deep time.

Section snippets

Historical sciences and technology

In the first few decades of the twenty-first century, several philosophers and historians of science called to attention the difficulties scientists face in gaining epistemic access to the deep past. Derek Turner, for instance, defended scientific pessimism about historical science, according to which our knowledge of the past is limited: “the asymmetry of manipulability and the role asymmetry of background theories place historical investigators at a relative epistemic disadvantage” (Turner,

Technoscience

Although Bruno Latour coined and popularized the term technoscience in his Science in Action (1987), this term has assumed a variety of meanings over the past few decades. As historian of science and technology David F. Channell put it: “while some use the term techno-science to refer to a transformation of science into something that is closer to technology, others use the term to refer to changes in which technology is no longer simply focused on the artificial but provides and opens up a new

Paper technology

Paleontology is a historical and biological discipline. It depicts the biological growth and disappearance of life on earth over time. Naturalists have always been fascinated by the spectacular organisms that were fossilized because they showed a distant and inaccessible past, dominated by monstrous creatures. They listed and collected these curiosities during their travels and drew catalogs to share them with other naturalists. In the course of the seventeenth century, several naturalists

Twenty-first-century virtual paleontology

The technoscientific approach to paleontology, according to which technology plays an essential part in paleontological knowledge production, assumed a central role over the course of the twentieth century. In the first decades of the twentieth century, X-ray examinations of fossils paved the way for uncovering as-yet invisible anatomical characteristics of extinct organisms. This intervention was indispensable for presenting more detailed and complex morphological features of extinct

Towards a technoscientific history and philosophy of historical sciences

In this paper, I have stressed the importance of a technoscientific analysis of historical sciences. This is an analysis in which technology, practical knowledge, and theory are bound together in such a way that they can only be divided analytically. If we investigate the intertwinement between technology and theory, we can provide new insights into historical-sciences knowledge production, its preconditions, and its aims.21

Acknowledgment

Several colleagues and friends have helped me at various stages of this study. I would like to thank Michele Cardani, David Sepkoski, Adrian Currie, Janine Gondolf, Stefanie Cosgrove, Alfred Nordmann, the participants of the “2018 Summer Colloquium in Philosophy at the Technische Universität Darmstadt” and that of the “7th Sino-German Symposium in the Philosophy of Science and Technology” as well as the two reviewers. Especially, I would like to thank my son Jonathan Enea: I have already

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