Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci.

34 (2003) 647–659
www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa

Anachronism and retrospective explanation: in

defence of a present-centred history of science
Nick Tosh
University of Cambridge, Department of History and Philosphy of Science, Free School Lane,
Cambridge CB2 3RH, UK

Received 1 November 2002; received in revised form 10 March 2003

Abstract

This paper defends the right of historians to make use of their knowledge of the remote
consequences of past actions. In particular, it is argued that the disciplinary cohesion of the
history of science relies crucially upon our ability to target, for further investigation, those
past activities ancestral to modern science. The history of science is not limited to the study
of those activities but it is structured around them. In this sense, the discipline is inherently
‘present-centred’: its boundaries are determined, in part, by judgements inaccessible to the
historical actors. Present-centredness of this sort, it is urged, should not be regarded as a
problem; its methodological consequences are minimal.
 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Anachronism; Diachronic history; Present-centred history; Actors’ categories; Historical caus-
ation; Retrospective explanation

1. Philosophical manifesto

Historians’ interest in the actions of long-dead individuals cannot be confined to

the intentions of those individuals. Actions have effects. Some actions have important
effects, and some of those important effects will be unintentional. A discipline like
the history of science needs a way of defining (if only quite roughly) which past
actions fall within its domain. The observations so far suggest two obvious
approaches: selection by actor intentionality and selection by later effect. We should

E-mail address: njt26@hermes.cam.ac.uk (N. Tosh).

0039-3681/$ - see front matter  2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S0039-3681(03)00052-9
648 N. Tosh / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 34 (2003) 647–659

note immediately that these methods are not mutually exclusive—a discipline might
be interested in the causal history of a particular historical event or state of affairs,
while also being concerned with certain intentional activities. Nor are they straight-
forwardly interchangeable. There is no reason to assume that a set of past activities
grouped together by us on the basis of their later effects should have seemed in any
way related to the people who performed them. Conversely, actions which, when
performed, fell under the same intentional category might end up having radically
dissimilar effects on the world. Intentions and outcomes can coincide, but they do
not have to.

2. Cunningham on the history of science

Andrew Cunningham has argued that the history of science is (or should be) the
history of an intentional activity—doing science, in something very like the modern
sense—and that past actions that cannot legitimately be brought under such a descrip-
tion lie outside the scope of the discipline.1 In the language I have been using, this
is a strong ‘selection by actor intentionality’ thesis. Does it make sense? Cunningham
himself points out a rather disruptive consequence: the history of science should
begin its story sometime between 1780 and 1850, the span within which he places
the invention of the intentional activity we now call ‘science’. His point is not that
Newton’s work on gravity (say) should not be studied at all, but that it should not
be studied as part of the history of science. (The umbrella discipline might be some-
thing like ‘the history of natural philosophy’.)
Cunningham is very keen on thinking about human activities (e.g. ‘doing science’)
first and about abstract entities (‘science’) second, so let’s think about the human
activity of doing the history of science. The fact is that the sorts of people who are
interested in nineteenth-century optics are also likely to be interested in Newton’s
Opticks; people writing papers on Darwin will at least attend papers given by experts
on Linnaeus, and vice versa, and so on. Of course, Cunningham intends his argument
to be provocative. His claim is precisely that the history of science, as presently
constituted and practised, is a misconceived discipline. If we join him in insisting
that the borders of that discipline be determined purely by reference to actors’ inten-
tions, it would be difficult to disagree. The enormous range of subjects studied within
history of science departments (classical Chinese astronomy, Paracelsian medicine,
the Manhattan Project) would defy any attempt to subsume them under a category
of behaviour that was recognised—shared—by all the historical actors studied.
But need we join Cunningham? It seems to me that if we are willing to grant the
existence of historical causality, even of quite a weak sort, we need not. For then
we have access to ‘selection by later effect’. Modern science has a causal history,
and ‘the history of science’ could reasonably be structured around a causal backbone
of past activities which helped to bring it into being; for as Cunningham himself

1
Cunningham (1988).
 N. Tosh / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 34 (2003) 647–659 649

points out—and it is hardly an Earth-shattering claim—‘[o]ur present world is the

outcome of the activities our ancestors were actually engaged in’. I have restricted
causation to fixing the ‘backbone’ of the history of science because there must be
more meat to the subject than that. To return to an example mentioned above, it is
likely that only certain aspects of Paracelsus’s work feature prominently on the causal
chains terminating (currently) on modern science. But all of it, arguably, is legitimate
material for the historian of science. The same could be said of ancient Chinese
astronomy,2 and Newtonian scriptural criticism. What all these past activities share
is some sort of cultural contiguity relationship to activities which are firmly on the
causal chains. In the case of Paracelsus and Newton, the contiguity relationship is
‘done by the same person’. In the case of Chinese astronomy, it is ‘somewhat similar
intentional activity’.
The history of science is certainly not limited to identifying and concatenating the
causally important activities: it is also concerned with studying and understanding
those activities. It is obvious that we will not understand a past activity unless we
understand its cultural context; and to understand the cultural context is, by defi-
nition, to know something about the culturally contiguous activities. Knowing about
Newton’s interest in theology helps us understand his interest in celestial dynamics;
knowing about Chinese astronomy helps us sharpen our knowledge of the Western
tradition by asking explicitly contrastive questions like ‘why were planetary models
not developed in China?’. None of this is to say that Newton’s theology and China’s
astronomy are not interesting subjects in their own right; that a historian could not
become entirely absorbed in the study of either, and ignore or even resent ‘present-
centred’3 accounts of what his research is really about. It is simply to sketch reasons
for seeing such research as part of the history of science (among other disciplines),
while fully accepting that a second-century Chinese imperial astronomer and a
twenty-first century cosmologist are in no sense ‘playing the same game’ (to use
Cunningham’s metaphor).
On this view, the history of science is quite openly a present-centred discipline.
The subjects it studies have, in aggregate, no cohesion from the historical actors’
points of view. There is nothing especially strange about this. The question ‘what
were the causes of the Second World War?’ invites the historian to consider a simi-
larly heterogeneous set of actions. The fact that these do not—barring, perhaps, cer-
tain actions by the Wehrmacht—fall under the intentional activity category ‘causing
the Second World War’ does not lead us to dispute the legitimacy of the question.
The lack of what we might call ‘actors’ cohesion’ should only worry us if we take
the phrase ‘the history of science’ absolutely literally, and insist that any activity
falling within its compass was science. We need not do so. Modern science is a

2
I am assuming that the European astronomical tradition was not strongly influenced by its Chinese
counterpart.
3
For the original use of this term, see Ashplant & Wilson (1988a,b). Cunningham (1988) takes it
directly from them. Closely related terms have a longer history: see, for example, J. L. Hexter’s essay
‘The historian and his day’, an entertaining bid to dissolve the disagreements between ‘present-minded’
and ‘history-minded’ historians (Hexter, 1961, pp. 1–13).
650 N. Tosh / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 34 (2003) 647–659

sufficiently important part of our life that asking about its casual history—not just
when it started, but where it came from, and how—is irresistible. The discipline that
has formed around such questions is what is commonly called the ‘history of
science’.
Why is Cunningham at such pains to draft a constitution for the history of science
that is not present-centred, when the discipline as it currently stands so obviously is?
Why does Cunningham regard this, in principle, as a problem? Like many interesting
questions, this one may come down to issues of historical causality—with Quentin
Skinner taking much of the credit. One thing which Skinner historically caused was
a sort of uneasy hostility towards the idea of historical causation, at least within
intellectual history, at least as practised in Cambridge. Skinner’s work therefore falls
within the scope of this essay; and though we are selecting it based on future effect,4
we can begin by studying it on its own terms.

3. Skinner on the history of ideas

It is now more than thirty years since Quentin Skinner launched his famous pol-
emic against the systematic attribution to past writers of intentions they could not
possibly have had. Skinner thought that this sort of mistake was rife in his own
discipline—the history of political thought—and strung together a long, brutal series
of incriminating quotes to make his point. The reader feels as though he is watching
the demolition of a scandal-ridden intellectual aristocracy, and, faced with paragraphs
like the following one, cannot help but enjoy it:

The first part of [T. D. Weldon’s] book on States and Morals sets out the various
‘definitions of the State’ which political theorists all ‘either formulate or take for
granted.’ It is thus established that ‘all theories of the State fall. . . into two main
groups. Some define it as a kind of organism, others as a kind of machine.’ Armed
with this discovery, Weldon then turns ‘to examine the leading theories about the
state which have been put forward.’ But here we find that even ‘those writers
who are generally regarded as the leading theorists in the subject’ let us down
rather badly, for very few of them manage to expound either of the two theories
without ‘inconsistencies or even contradictions.’ Hegel, indeed, turns out to be
the sole theorist ‘completely faithful’ to one of the two stipulated models which,
we are reminded, it is the ‘primary purpose’ of each theorist to expound. A less
confident writer might well have wondered at this point whether his initial charac-
terization of what all these theorists ought to be doing can possibly have been
correct. But Weldon’s only comment is that it seems ‘rather odd that, after more

4
I will be focussing almost entirely on Skinner (1969), the most influential of his methodological
papers in general, and the only one to be cited by Cunningham.
 N. Tosh / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 34 (2003) 647–659 651

than two thousand years of concentrated thought’ they are still in such com-
plete confusion.5

Skinner’s treatment of such (apparently) outrageous examples of anachronistic

judgement is often extremely funny, and it is striking how much the rhetorical power
of his paper depends on that fact. By the time Skinner gets started on his theoretical
section—Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin and Elizabeth Anscombe are among the few
authors quoted approvingly in the entire paper—the reader is so much in awe of
Skinner’s power to humiliate the opposition that dissent seems exceedingly unwise.
Nevertheless, Skinner-the-philosopher is on occasion not quite so impressive a figure
as Skinner the trial lawyer, and it is worth pointing out some of the weak spots.
Skinner is hostile to any diachronic construal of the history of ideas. For him, to
practise the subject is to seek a kind of vicarious cultural immersion in a narrowly
defined portion of the past: only through a thorough grasp of the social and linguistic
contexts of a particular text’s production can the intentions of its author (and the
meaning of his words) be understood. Skinner thinks this sort of bilingualism6 is an
essential prerequisite for professional competence. Given that, one can understand
his scepticism about the possibility of tracing the history of an idea through time:
if becoming historically bilingual is a challenge, then mastering all the social and
linguistic contexts over a span of several centuries is surely out of the question. Any
historian attempting to reconstruct the genealogy of an idea will be forced to rely
on his own set of categories and his own concerns, and the product of his labour
will be nothing more than ‘a pack of tricks we play on the dead’.7 This intuition is
what stokes Skinner’s wrath against many particular writers—Weldon, for instance,
is history’s version of the blinkered British tourist, insisting that past ages are all
talking to him, badly, in his own language—but he never elevates it to an explicit
logical principle. There are obvious reasons not to. A particularly diligent historian
might become fluent right across a multiple-century span. Or a number of historians,
each competent in Skinner’s sense, might team up to construct a continuous time-
line of expertise long enough to accommodate the diachronic history in question.
The point is that cultural sensitivity—whether in history, anthropology or tourism—
is a matter of degree. If you want to understand the culture you are studying, then
more is better (though there is hardly a well-defined threshold above which under-
standing is achieved and below which it is not). Good diachronic history requires a
high degree of cultural sensitivity across a wide range of cultures. Therefore good
diachronic history is hard to write. This, I take it, is the most one could conclude
from Skinner’s sorry parade of examples. Rhetorically, however, those examples are
vital—they prepare the reader to accept a much more ambitious theoretical argument.
In broad outline, that argument is as follows: no matter how thorough your under-
standing of the past, you can’t write the diachronic history of an idea because ideas

5
Skinner (1969), p. 14.
6
This is not a metaphor used by Skinner.
7
Skinner (1969), p. 14.
652 N. Tosh / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 34 (2003) 647–659

are not diachronic. Even if the same word—‘progress’, perhaps—is on people’s lips
for centuries, what they meant by it, what they intended it to convey, is a function
of cultural context. If cultures change (and they do), then meanings change, and the
only thing holding the ‘history’ of an ‘idea’ together is the historian. There is clearly
a parallel with (or rather, a precedent for) Cunningham’s argument here: histories
which rely for their cohesion on the historian’s vantage point are not legitimate kinds
of history. The motivation for that view was not very obvious in Cunningham’s
paper. At the risk of begging all Skinner’s questions, we might guess that since
Skinner’s paper gave ‘birth’ to that ‘idea’,8 his motivation ought to be more promi-
nently on display. As, indeed, it is. Skinner thinks history should be like anthro-
pology. He points out, for example, that the danger of shoe-horning an alien argument
into one’s own system of categories ‘arises pre-eminently in social anthropology’,
the vigilance of which he praises, but also ‘in the history of ideas, in which a similar
self-consciousness seems damagingly absent’.9 Furthermore, the formulation Skinner
finally offers as the point of studying the history of ideas would serve just as well
for anthropology: ‘it is a commonplace . . . that our own society places unrecognized
constraints upon our imaginations. It deserves, then, to become a commonplace that
the historical study of the ideas of other societies should be undertaken as the indis-
pensable and irreplaceable means of placing limits on those constraints’.10 The
‘other’ is revealing: based on his choice of examples throughout the paper, Skinner
means, or at least includes, the historical study of our society. But for him, the past
is by definition ‘other’, and whether the Other is historical or anthropological, its
responsible investigation demands the same sort of methodology.
If history is like anthropology, then good history must be like good anthropology.
Good anthropology, nowadays, emphasises the actors’-eye view. Certainly one does
not commit the sin of ethnocentrism and judge an alien society by the standards of
one’s own. (Skinner rages memorably at the corresponding error in the history of
ideas: ‘Sometimes even the pretence that this is history is laid aside, and the writers
of the past are simply praised or blamed according to how far they may seem to
have aspired to the condition of being ourselves’.11) Arguably one does not attempt
to use familiar sociological or even psychological categories.12 It is fair to say that
in general, methodologies or explanations in which the anthropologist occupies a
privileged position, in which the knowledge of his culture is assumed to be in some
way superior to the knowledge of the culture studied, are frowned upon. They are

8
I am, of course, using the ‘birth’ metaphor extremely loosely. What Skinner really did was popularise
a philosophy of history that had been current in the English speaking world at least since Collingwood,
who famously regarded all (good) history as the rethinking of past thoughts: ‘You are thinking historically
. . . when you say about anything, “I see what the person who made this (wrote this, used this, designed
this &c.) was thinking”. Until you can say that, you may be trying to think historically but you are not
succeeding’ (Collingwood, 1978, p. 110).
9
Skinner (1969), p. 27.
10
Skinner (1969), p. 53.
11
Skinner (1969), p. 11.
12
Clifford Geertz’s essay on ‘thick description’ is one classic account of how anthropologists might
approach an alien culture (Geertz, 1973, pp. 3–30).
 N. Tosh / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 34 (2003) 647–659 653

‘unreflexive’. The methodological advantages of importing such an attitude into his-

tory are obvious, and to the extent that ‘cultural history’ is now a firmly established
genre in both the history of ideas and the history of science, Skinner has won his
battle (and Cunningham has at least partially won his). However, there is an
important and obvious asymmetry between history and anthropology: time has an
intrinsic direction; geographical or cultural separation does not. Even the most hard-
line methodological relativist on anthropological questions would be hard pressed to
deny the historian the privilege of retrospection: to put it crudely, in history we
know what happened afterwards, and the actors don’t. The arrow of time makes
our knowledge intrinsically superior to that of the actors in at least one sense, and it
is a superiority which is thoroughly immune from any possible symmetry argument.13
Let us accept for the sake of argument (it could certainly be disputed) that anthro-
pological accounts which rely for their cohesion on the anthropologist’s special van-
tage point are not legitimate kinds of anthropology. It is now clear that the corre-
sponding historiographical thesis, which I attributed to both Skinner and
Cunningham, by no means follows from it: and what stops us moving straight from
one to the other is the arrow of time.
The directionality of time is intimately linked with causation. If Skinner’s project
is to turn the history of ideas into anthropology, then one might expect him to try
very hard to problematise it—and, indeed, he does. His target is not causation in
general, but the idea of intellectual influence (that influence is, for our purposes, a
form of causation is clear from its temporal asymmetry: a later writer cannot influ-
ence an earlier one). Even here, Skinner does not deny the existence of such causal
relationships, but rather attempts to make their attribution in practice seem too
fraught with epistemic difficulties to be of much use to historians. Success for Skin-
ner on this front would not make the vantage points of the historian and the anthro-
pologist logically equivalent, but it might convince us that the difference in vantage
points should remain just that, and should not be allowed to support a difference
in method.
In fact, Skinner’s attack on the ‘influence model’ is seriously inadequate if, as his
presentation suggests, it is supposed to be taken as a philosophical argument. Sup-
ported by the usual barrage of examples, his theoretical contribution is a ‘not very
stringent’ set of ‘necessary conditions’ which must, according to Skinner, be satisfied
before a doctrine found in writer B may legitimately be explained by referring to
the influence of writer A. Firstly, there must ‘be a genuine similarity between the
doctrines of A and B’. Secondly, it must be the case that ‘B could not have found
the relevant doctrine in any writer other than A’; and thirdly, ‘the probability of the
similarity being random should be very low’.14 The most that could be said of these
three ‘conditions’ is that if ‘very low’ is interpreted as ‘zero’, then they are jointly
sufficient for the attribution of influence. None of them is even close to necessary.

13
‘Someone said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they
did”. Precisely, and they are that which we know’ (Eliot, 1975, p. 40).
14
Skinner (1969), p. 26.
654 N. Tosh / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 34 (2003) 647–659

B might have read A’s work, hated it, and set out to attack it (influence but no
doctrinal similarity). B might have wavered at the bookseller between A’s book and
a similar work by C; either one might have prompted him to write his masterpiece,
but he happened to choose A. And whether the probability of the similarity (or more
generally, the evidence of influence) being random must be ‘very low’ depends on
what a statistician would call the ‘prior’ probability that A influenced B: the inherent
plausibility of the claim before any specific evidence is in.
A charitable interpretation of the situation is that Skinner was seduced by a
vocabulary of philosophical rigour and then fell victim to his own choice of jargon.
He didn’t need to talk about ‘necessary conditions’ (let alone ‘not very stringent’
ones), nor about probability and randomness. What Skinner does well is point out
specific historiographical misdemeanours in the work of his colleagues, and this does
not typically require great philosophical sophistication (it requires historical knowl-
edge, cultural sensitivity, literary flair . . .).15 A clear danger with the notion of
‘influence’, for example, is that a historian might assume that two classic works
were causally linked in the past merely because they are associated in his mind, with
his ideas about one influencing his ideas about the other.16 One must indeed be wary
of ‘the capacity of the observer to foreshorten the past by filling it with his own
reminiscences’.17 In this context, and once stripped of their analytic packaging, Skin-
ner’s ‘conditions’ make some sense. We violate their spirit whenever our interest in
the doctrine of B, and our keen sense of its importance, lead us to hallucinate an
ancestor in A on the basis of a few ‘scattered or quite incidental remarks’.18 Such
an error is certainly possible. But even here, there is an important caveat: the ances-
tral role of A’s ‘doctrine’ is not a hallucination just by virtue of being scattered and
incidental. A’s intentions (or lack thereof) can make us put ‘doctrine’ in inverted
commas—maybe A never meant to advance that doctrine—but they cannot immunise
A against paternity attribution. If we are tempted to see a ‘doctrine’ in A’s scattered
remarks, then maybe B was too, regardless of what A thought he was doing. There
is, as always, a logical gap between intentions and outcomes.
It would be legitimate to study A because of his influence on B—an example of
‘selection by later effect’. It would not be legitimate (it would be a serious
anachronism) to confuse retrospective significance with actor’s intentions, and give
an account of what A meant that was coloured by our sense of which bits turned
out to be important. Skinner made the latter point with great eloquence and force—
so much eloquence and force, in fact, that his paper seemed to be casting doubt on
the former, too. If this is the impression the reader gets, then it is a treacherous one
(even if the author intended it). Skinner alerted us to the subtle anachronisms that

15
Kenneth Minogue takes a similar view of Skinner’s analytical apparatus: ‘There is some excess
baggage in the hold, but fortunately he mostly works from his cabin bag’ (Minogue, p. 193).
16
There is a hint here of Hume’s general critique of causation. (One would not like to call it an
influence. . .)
17
Skinner (1969), p. 27.
18
Skinner (1969), p. 7. This sort of mistake is associated with what Skinner terms the ‘mythology
of doctrines’.
 N. Tosh / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 34 (2003) 647–659 655

loom when we pursue the genealogy of a doctrine in certain tricky cases. He failed
to show that such anachronisms are inevitable, because he failed seriously to under-
mine the idea of influence in general. It would be hard, for example, to square
Skinner’s insistence that the influence model can ‘very rarely be made to work, and
that when it can be, there is scarcely ever any point in doing so’,19 with such com-
monplaces as, say, ‘many medieval natural philosophers were influenced by Aristot-
le’. Some claims are so uncontroversial that one would not usually speak of them
as instantiating a particular model. But their existence should dissuade us from
fashioning general sceptical claims out of the practical hurdles encountered in diffi-
cult research problems.
So causation, time’s arrow, and the historian’s privileged vantage point all survive
Skinner’s paper. History might have a lot to learn from anthropology, but it cannot
just be the same subject with smaller dates. Historians don’t simply immerse them-
selves in past cultures: they also join them up into diachronic stories, do so using
causal glue, and sometimes put the crucial joints at points that would not have
seemed very significant to the historical actors. This is so obviously an integral part
of the practice of history that it would take an exceptionally convincing argument
to persuade us of its illegitimacy; indeed it would have to be an unprecedentedly
convincing argument, since even the most impregnable of philosophy’s sceptical
positions have no track record of methodological take-up (we are all still practising
induction, aren’t we, and there have been perfectly good sceptical critiques of that
way of thinking since the mid eighteenth century). Measured on such a demanding
scale, Skinner’s attempt to kick up dust should barely make us blink.

4. Back to the history of science

Cunningham, of course, did more than blink: we have already seen that he shut
his eyes to any method of constituting the history of science not expressible in terms
of actors’ categories. At one level this is a thoroughly Skinnerian move—a tribute
to the rhetorical brilliance, and lasting influence, of Skinner’s paper.20 On the other
hand, one might say, it breaks Skinner’s golden rule by attributing to historians of
science intentions they cannot possibly have had (given the discipline they have
constructed), and then criticising them for failing to live up to them. I argued in
Section 2 that historians of science must and do allow retrospective significance

19
Skinner (1969), p. 25 n. 106. Skinner presents this as a softening of his previous view, in which
he ‘stressed too much the impossibility of making the model work, rather than its sheer elusiveness’
(my emphasis).
20
Cunningham (1988) acknowledges Skinner’s influence on p. 367 n. 1. His debt to Skinner’s argu-
ments, and to Skinner’s way of phrasing them, is obvious throughout the paper.
656 N. Tosh / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 34 (2003) 647–659

(‘selection by later effect’) to help determine the scope of their subject, and Skinner’s
famous arguments, it turns out, do nothing to undermine that judgement.21
Much of what Cunningham says need not be disputed. His claim that ‘natural
philosophy’ was a very different intentional activity from modern science is almost
bound to be right: given the enormous difference in cultural context, it would be
extraordinary if it wasn’t. He may also be right to emphasise natural philosophy’s
inherent theism,22 and to place the ‘invention’ of modern secular science in the nine-
teenth century. These are all positive claims about the past. My dispute with Cun-
ningham concerns his normative claim about the present—about how the history of
science should police its borders. I will not rehearse the argument from Section 2,
but one crucial point is worth repeating: the selection criteria we adopt when defining
a discipline need not affect how the selected material is then investigated. A past
person, practice, or institution, occupying a particular causal role with respect to the
present and selected for study on that basis, might then be investigated by a cultural
historian with an aversion to all categories bar the actors’. Present-centred selection
does not necessarily lead to present-centred methodology. That it has frequently done
so in the history of political thought, and in the history of science, may well be true:
here Skinner has a point against, say, Weldon, and Cunningham might have had a
point against someone had he not been too polite to cite any actual examples. But
it is a point which is best confined to attacks on particular authors; it should not be
elevated to a philosophical principle. We can say, for example, that a biography of
Newton which focussed entirely on his mathematical and astronomical work, and
which attempted to write his biblical and alchemical investigations out of history,
would be a bad biography of Newton. A redraft which stressed the theological motiv-
ation behind all his work, its coherence (probably) in his own eyes, and the absence
of contemporary categories to capture the bits we would call ‘science’, would be a
better one. But no matter how ‘good’ the biography, two counterfactuals remain
true: if Newton had never done any mathematics, historians of science would not
be (endlessly) writing and rewriting his biography; and if he had never opened a
Bible, or touched an alembic, we still would.

5. History of science as history of ideas?

What is one to make of statements like this?
[A]lmost all the material with which the history of science discipline has been
concerned comes from a tiny geographical area . . . The only thing that is unusual

21
It is not clear whether Skinner would even want them to. Since ‘Meaning and understanding’, he
has insisted that ‘the decisions we have to make about what to study must be our own decisions’, and
that ‘we can scarcely hope to write satisfactory history if we are content merely to endorse [the judgements
of the historical actors]. This would be to leave us, for example, with a history of seventeenth century
ethics in which Spinoza is totally ignored, a history of nineteenth century logical theory in which Frege
is barely mentioned, and so on’ (Skinner, 1988, pp. 100–101). These brief remarks, however, are not
well integrated into his overall philosophy, and one can understand why Cunningham—working from
Skinner’s 1969 paper—might regard him as a crucial ally.
22
For a recent defence of this thesis, see Cunningham (2001).
 N. Tosh / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 34 (2003) 647–659 657

about the countries in this area, apart from the fact that they are where we live,
is that it was these countries which rose to world-domination during the nineteenth
century, through the formation of overseas empires. It was only this historical
accident [my emphasis] that has meant that what began as their own native cul-
ture—by that time including that recent invention, science—has now become
world-culture.23

At one level, the correct response here is obvious: people suspicious of historical
causation are obliged to see historical accidents everywhere. But how this pans out
in the specific case of the history of science is rather interesting, and merits a slightly
more nuanced discussion. I should begin by back-pedalling a little. I have, so far,
been shifting between the history of science and the history of ideas without much
comment. I might even be accused of treating the former as a subset of the latter,
and of running an argument which, while ostensibly about the history of science,
has in fact no special applicability to it. For could one not, on my view, write a
present-centred history of, say, capitalism, picking out the historical episodes which
(whatever the actors thought about them) turned out to contribute to its development?
If I have done this, then my defence is, firstly, that it wasn’t a cheat because it made
my job more difficult, and secondly, that Cunningham started it: ‘it is the business
of the practising scientist’, he writes, ‘to produce products of a certain kind: laws,
statements, judgements, findings, conclusions, theories, knowledge, truths, things to
believe about the world “out there”’.24 Cunningham’s scientific ‘products’ are all
ideas or statements of ideas. It is therefore an incomplete list, and one might want
to catalogue the residue: institutions, instruments, drugs, weapons . . . ways to inter-
vene in the world ‘out there’. Science may be ‘a human activity, wholly a human
activity, and nothing but a human activity’,25 but the products of that activity can
have a material existence and an agency in the world that transcend the boundaries
of the scientists’ culture. But if, for Cunningham, the history of science is literally
just the history of certain ideas, and has nothing to do with the history of technology,
then passages like the one quoted at the start of this section begin to become compre-
hensible.
But the history of science has a great deal to do with the history of technology,
and the historical correlation between the nations wielding science and the nations
building empires is no ‘accident’. It is, in fact, a correlation that would have to be
explained—causally explained—within any diachronic, causal, history of science.
Once the history of science is seen to extend beyond the history of ideas, the range
of relevant ‘actors’ increases enormously: in addition to humans, we now have tele-
scopes and planets, microscopes and microbes, cathode ray tubes and electrons. This
brings us to perhaps the most important difference between Cunningham’s topic, the
history of science, and Skinner’s, the history of (mainly political) ideas. Skinner

23
Cunningham & Williams (1993), p. 431.
24
Cunningham (1988), p. 370.
25
Cunningham (1988), p. 370.
658 N. Tosh / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 34 (2003) 647–659

could confine his attention to the interactions of human beings. Cunningham should
be considering, in addition, the interactions of humans with things, and of things
with things. In a causal history of astronomy, the interaction between the planet
Uranus and the Herschels’ telescope is of some importance.
Now, we describe human interactions using political science (among other things),
but the claims of any particular political theory are explicitly socially contingent:
this recognition is itself part of the discipline. A modern geopolitical theory stressing
the tensions between global capital mobility and networked consumer protest, say,
has not even a prima facie applicability to the seventeenth century. (The point, of
course, is not that people hadn’t thought of the theory, but that the events of their
century were, in principle, not describable under it.) In the history of political
thought, then, there is an extremely obvious kind of anachronism to be avoided. The
interactions of things with things, on the other hand, we describe using natural scien-
tific theories. Natural scientific theories are, prima facie, tenseless—not because they
always existed, not because they are non-social entities, and not even because they
are true—but because, once invented, their internal grammars do not stipulate the
centuries to which they may be applied. If you buy a natural scientific theory, you
buy it tenselessly; and if you exclude certain centuries, or certain societies, then you
aren’t buying it at all.26 I have already defended present-centred selection criteria
for the history of science; now, we have a way in which its methodology can be
present-centred too (note that the arguments are independent)—a historian might
want to use modern scientific ideas to explain past events. This is fairly uncontro-
versial in cases like asteroid impacts, solar eclipses, and forensic archaeology. It
becomes controversial, somehow, in the history of science. This is a massive debate
and I cannot possibly do justice to it here.27 All I will note is that the use of modern
natural scientific theories in historical explanations cannot be ruled anachronistic in
the same way as the use of modern social and political theories can, and that their
dismissal in general would commit the historian to scepticism not just about the truth
of such theories, but about their empirical adequacy.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Editors, Marina Frasca Spada and Nick Jardine, for much
valuable advice.

26
Political economy and ‘hard’ natural sciences are arguably extreme, and even uninteresting, examples.
But between those straightforward poles lies a problematic spectrum: the retrospective application of
‘soft’ sciences, particularly those bordering on psychology or sociology, can sometimes raise tricky metho-
dological issues. I discuss the special case of retrospective psychoanalytic explanations in Tosh (2002).
27
But Nicholas Jardine can: ‘All too often recent historians of science have abandoned common sense
in their flight from presentism’ (Jardine, 2003).
 N. Tosh / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 34 (2003) 647–659 659

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