The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
K. MertonThematic
Analysis in Science: Notes on Holton’s Concept
Science,
New Series, 188 (4186)
Content
The Method of Thematic Analysis
Parallels in the History and the Sociology of
Science
HHC: Index
added.
The generation now at work in the philosophy, history, and sociology of science has witnessed the resurgence, convergence, and often the collision of ideas about the cognitive and social structure of the scientific enterprise. Some of these ideas have spread rapidlyy beyond their original disciplinary boundaries, at times in that extravagant form which leads masters to disown disciples. Polanyi’s “scientific community” and “tacit knowledge,” Popper’s “falsificationism” and “third world,” Kuhn’s “paradigms, disciplinary matrices, and normal science,” Lakatos’s “research programmes,” Campbell’s “evolutionary epistemology,” Elkana’s “images of science,” and even Merton’s “normative structure of science” and “reward-system of science” are a few of the familiar tags for these ideas (which threaten to deteriorate into little more than vogue words and vogue concepts)
(1, 2).While these ideas were being hotly
debated, Gerald Holton was quietly developing his concept of “thematic analysis”
as both perspective and tool for the historiography of science, a concept that
has begun to attract wide notice only since the appearance of his recent book,
Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (3). In the article that precedes this one he
has gone on to work out a problematics for the understanding of science and
scientists. Naturally, that
requires him to compress much into little. In proposing the eightfold way to such
understanding, he adopts a to me altogether congenial attitude of what can be
described as disciplined eclecticism (as distinct from “mere” or motley
eclecticism). From that attitude,
particularly appropriate for composite humanistic-and-scientific disciplines
such as the history and sociology of science, the various perspectives appear
supplementary rather than antithetical, with each perspective having its own
problematics, its own set of basic questions and derivative
puzzles.
But it is the ninth way, the way of
thematic analysis, that concerns us here.
In Holton’s implied definition, this way of interpretation assumes
underlying elements in the concepts, methods, propositions, and hypotheses
advanced in scientific work. These
elements function as themes that motivate or constrain the individual scientist
in his cognitive formulations and consolidate or polarize the cognitive
judgments appearing in the community of scientists. Although public expositions of scientific
work rightly focus on reproducible phenomena and analytical propositions, it is
the themata that help shape their form and content.
The ninth way, then, is Holton’s
distinctive effort to deal with tacit knowledge (partly in the insufficiently
appreciated sense given that concept by Polanyi). The themata of scientific knowledge are
tacit cognitive imageries and preferences for or commitments to certain kinds of
concepts, certain kinds of methods, certain kinds of evidence, and certain forms
of solutions to deep questions and engaging puzzles. Implicit in Holton’s own investigations
of themata is the notion that they are unevenly accessible to observation. So to say, not all tacit knowledge is
equally tacit. As Holton puts it,
in one symptomatic footnote, “Not all themata appear in so many
words.”
After some years of inquiry, Holton
has come to a provisional conclusion about the distributions of themata in
scientific knowledge. Some
scientists, especially the pathbreakers, have their distinctive configurations
of themes. These configurations, I
take it, make up much of the styles of thought that characterize many scientists
and uniquely identify scientists of utmost consequence (as in the celebrated
episode of Johann Bernoulli’s instantly recognizing the source of Newton’s
anonymous solutions to two bruited mathematical problems as “ex ungue leonem”).
In Holton’s account of the
persistence or recurrence of themata, we also note that some of them are shared
by sets of scientists, both contemporaneous and successive. In suggesting that many themata are
formed by scientists even before they have decided to become scientists (4),
Holton advances his most distinctive and daring idea - one that seems to
require new procedures of investigation if it is to be looked into
systematically.
Although individual scientists have
their distinctive configurations of themata, they nevertheless share some themes
with other scientists. Such
composites of individuality and communality are not at all peculiar to the
domain of science; they are found in patterns of human behavior generally. Both in the special case of science and
in the more general case, similarities and differences in themata may help
explain the sense of congeniality or incommensurability of ideas experienced by
people in interaction.
Having proposed thematic analysis as
the ninth way to an understanding of the scientific enterprise, Holton confronts
the question of how one goes about discovering themata in what he calls the
“events,” the phenomena that make up the changing substance of the
sciences.
The Method of Thematic
Analysis
In dealing with that question, Holton
never lapses into the high-sounding phrase “the methodology of thematic analysis.” Nor shall I replace his plain words with showy ones. Instead, the question of method puts me in mind of a maxim prized by the first president of the History of Science Society (who happened to be one of my teachers). L. J. Henderson liked to remind his more attentive students that “it’s a good thing to know what you are doing.”The author is University Professor at
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For some decades now, I have
transmitted this bit of earthy wisdom to other generations of students in
slightly modified form: “In general, it’s a good thing to know what you
are doing - and why you are doing it.” The qualifier “in general” is designed,
of course, to warn against the danger of that premature faultfinding which
stifles ideas that need to be played with before being subjected to systematic
and rigorous examination. There is
a place, as Max Delbrück and Dickinson Richards have severally reminded us, for
“the principle of limited sloppiness.”
What, then, does Holton do when he
does thematic analysis? How does he
identify themata so that we, the beneficiaries of his concept, can in turn
proceed to discover and understand other themata?
Having studied his book, Thematic
Origins of Scientific Thought, and his paper on the role of preconceptions
in the work of Millikan and Ehrenhaft (5), I must report my strong impression
that Holton identifies themata inductively. In saying this, I realize that in
some quarters these days the very term “induction” is in ill repute, as in other
quarters is the term “deduction” and even, one gathers, the Peirce-Hanson notion
of “abduction.” Nevertheless, it
appears that this early phase in exploring the potentialities of thematic
analysis (just as with current explorations of its distant conceptual cousins,
Kuhn’s “paradigms and disciplinary matrices,” Lakatos’s “research programmes,”
and, to go no further, Elkana’s “images of science”) requires case-by-case
analysis in order to obtain a working list of themata: of thematic concepts,
thematic methods, and thematic hypotheses or propositions.
To the best of my knowledge the list
of themata in the physical sciences has not yet been assembled in any one place,
but Holton estimates them to number fewer than 100, including doublets and
occasional triplets. A next step
would therefore be to convert a list of themata into a classification; for
whatever its limitations, the ancient device of classification serves to convert
the tacit empiricism of lists into the analytical rationalism of categories.
Inductively assembled lists of
themata in scientific thought seem ready to be transformed into classifications
and related propositions designed to help us understand what Holton has dealt
with as event-structures and event-sequences in the development of
science.
Much more than specialized (and
often learned and provincial) historians of science have yet acknowledged in
print and much more than we specialized (and often unlearned and provincial)
sociologists of science have apparently considered, parallel lines of inquiry
are being pursued in the two disciplines. The practice of thematic analysis
provides a case in point.
For several decades, sociologists
and political scientists have engaged in systematic “content analysis,” as
Lasswell called it, of communications in general and of propaganda in particular
(6). A procedure of thematic
analysis was developed to identify implicit as well as explicit themes in order
to infer states of mind of the communicator and to interpret responses to the
communication (7). A mode of
structural analysis served to investigate “the interrelations of various
themes.”
Plainly, Holton was aware of this
sort of parallelism when he proposed “a discipline that may be called thematic
analysis of science, by analogy with thematic analyses that have for so long
been used to great advantage in scholarship outside science” (3, p. 57; 8). By advancing the thematic
analysis of far more enduring and, one would like to think, more consequential
cognitive materials than short-run propaganda, Holton has been bringing alive in
the history of science what has become almost dormant in the sociology of public
opinion: the content analysis of documents to identify tacit themes and thematic
structures.
This case only illustrates the
growing need for a special breed of scholar brought about by increasing
specialization: the hybrid who, though more deeply committed to one discipline
than to others, also manages to become thoroughly schooled in neighboring
disciplines and to keep in reasonable touch with what is going on there. I have no doubt, for example, that my
colleagues in sociology have much to learn from the kind of thematic analysis
being advanced by Holton.
I can here only touch upon a few
other parallels in the problematics identified by Holton and also found in the
sociology of science, that domain once infinitely remote from the history of
science and now, plainly, within hailing distance.
There is the problem, included in
Ho1ton’s inventory of the eightfold way, of the time-trajectory of shareable
scientific knowledge, involving “antecedents, parallels, continuities, and
discontinuities.” In this
connection, I refer only to a case study of “premature” and “postmature”
discovery being conducted jointly by a biologist (Joshua Lederberg), a historian
(Yehuda El-kana), and two sociologists of science (Harriet Zuckerman and R. K.
Merton) which is designed to identify social and cognitive processes underlying
continuities and discontinuities in scientific knowledge
(9).
There is the related problem of
understanding the role of “failure” as well as “success” in science. Holton’s proposed line of inquiry
intersects rather than parallels sociological investigations by Glaser and Rubin
(10) of types of failure
experienced by scientists at various stages of their careers. It also intersects philosophical
investigations of “imperfect rationality”; for example, by the philosopher of
science Watkins, who aptly begins an essay on the problem by remarking that
“historians are not much concerned with also-rans and drop-outs. They have a bias toward success” (11). But historians and
sociologists alike increasingly recognize that the unwitting preoccupation with
success must be offset by a focus on the phenomenon of failure. That is just another shift in foci of
inquiry needed to advance our understanding of the complex interactions between
the behavior of scientists and the development of scientific knowledge in the
context of the historically changing normative structure and social organization
of science and the environing society and culture. Historians and sociologists must both
examine the various sorts of “failure”: intelligent errors and unintelligent
ones, noetically induced and organizationally induced foci of interest and blind
spots in inquiry, promising leads abandoned and garden-paths long explored,
scientific contributions ignored or neglected by contemporaries and, to draw the
sampling to a close, they must examine not only cases of serendipity gained but
of serendipity lost (12)
(as with the many instances of the antibiotic effects of penicillin
having been witnessed but not discovered).
When Holton distinguishes “private
science” from “public science,” the terminology suggests a distinction parallel
to one drawn in the sociology of science. But the similarity turns out to be merely
homonymous, with the terms
336
alike only in appearance, not in
meaning. Nevertheless, the seeming
parallel is instructive, signaling current efforts by both historians and
sociologists to identify types of scientific work and of scientists rather than
implying, by their silence on the matter, that these are all much of a kind.
For Holton “private science” refers
to the deeply personal aspects of science-in-the-making, to those aspects of the
“nascent moment” of discovery which, by convention, ordinarily remain unreported
in the “public science” recorded in scientific journals and monographs. For the sociologists Cotgrove and Box,
empirically investigating types of scientific identities, “private scientists”
are those who “attach importance to [the norms] of disinterestedness and
organized scepticism [but] do not seek [though they sometimes obtain]
recognition and confirmation from the scientific community” (13). Principally at work in
industrial research laboratories, they typically set little store by
publication, as Derek Price (14)
has long noted in distinguishing the ways of science from those of
technology. In contrast, “public
scientists,” found chiefly in academia, act in accord with the norm that calls
for them to communicate the results of their research beyond the immediate
organization or locale, this practice being reinforced by their finding major
reward in the recognition and use of their published work by peers in the larger
scientific community.
It is not difficult to compile a short list of other subjects and problems that have been turning up in both the history and the sociology of science: models of the growth of scientific knowledge; taboos on certain forms of knowledge dubbed dangerous (by laymen or by scientists themselves); bases of problem-finding and problem-selection; the dynamics and cognitive consequences of conflict in science (with special reference to orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and, if it be allowed, polydoxy); the reciprocal transfer of analogies and models from one to another domain of scientific inquiry [as exemplified in Keynes’s remark (15) that “the Principle of the Survival of the Fittest could be regarded as one vast generalization of the Ricardian economics”]; independent multiple discovery and scientists’ efforts to establish their priority as phenomena providing strategic research sites for investigating a variety of problems in the development of scientific knowledge
(16).Along with such parallels in
problematics are parallels in what qualify as themes in the two disciplines.
Two cases in point must serve.
The first is the historical and
sociological theme that the stock of scientific knowledge accumulates
selectively. In emphasizing the
selective character of scientific growth, sociologists (17) long since rejected the
earlier image of a royal road to knowledge along which science inexorably
advances in unilinear fashion. More
recently, even this moderate image of progress in science has been declared
unacceptable. Evidently stimulated
by idiosyncratic readings of the work of Kuhn, Popper, and Lakatos, some
sociologists have adopted an acutely relativistic position. From that standpoint, it is enough to
adopt the model in which scientific knowledge accumulates selectively to qualify
one as a vulgar positivist, committed to a belief in the growth of that
knowledge as a “cumulative and one-dimensional process” (18). Relativists of this sort judge
historians and sociologists guilty of perpetrating an ethnocentric and
tempocentric “Whig interpretation of history” (19) when they so much as hint
that, despite many vicissitudes, scientific knowledge does accumulate: that
today’s astronomers may actually have a more solid, more sweeping, and more
exacting knowledge of the sun, moon, planets, and stars than did Aristarchos of
Samos or even Ptolemy, or that today’s demographers just might have a deeper and
broader understanding of the dynamics of population change than, say, the
17th-century William Petty or even the early-l9th-century Thomas
Malthus.
Donald Campbell has noted that some
recent work in the philosophy of science “portrays science as a self-deceiving
system incapable of distinguishing truth from tribal myths” (20). When historical relativism
reaches this point, perhaps we should come full circle. Perhaps the half-century-old taboo on
Whiggery in historiography has moved too far beyond the original purpose of
countering the celebrative presentism which regards the historical past only in
terms of how it led to the historical present. Perhaps the time has come for an
anti-anti-Whig orientation to history.
At any rate, it is comforting to
have Holton’s mode of thematic analysis reject the untenable relativism that is
currently being substituted for an untenable progressivism. As he observes, the themata in a
scientific work are not, after all, “its chief reality.” New themata may expand the scientific
imagination or contract it. But
they do not erase the knowledge that went before to provide a wholly clean slate
on which scientists then proceed to write their new stories. Old themata are occasionally abandoned.
But, Holton notes, “there
undoubtedly has been on the whole a progressive change to a more inclusive, more
powerful grasp on natural phenomena.”
Finally, Holton observes in the
history of science a characteristic that some of us have observed in the
sociology of science: the discipline exhibits a self-exemplifying character
(2, pp. ix, 352-356, 554). The behavior of the discipline and of its
practitioners exemplifies ideas and findings about the behavior of sciences and
scientists that have been developed in the discipline itself. Thus, Holton notes that the “search for
answers in the history of science is itself imbued with themata.” Belief in the value of thematic analysis
can itself be interpreted as a case of thematic predilection. Holton is saying in effect that if we do
not perceive the basic themata in a scientific work, we cannot understand well
enough what makes it important, the reasons for its distinctive reception, and,
not least, what is “sacred” enough in it to withstand disappointing delays in
confirmation or to survive seeming disconfirmation. One could scarcely ask for a more apt
instance of a self-exemplifying cognitive theme.
1. M. Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty: Reflections and
Rejoinders (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1951), chap. 4 (first published
1942); The Tacit Dimension
(Routledge & Kegan Paul,
London, 1967); K. R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery
(Basic Books, New York, 1959)
[first published 1935];
Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Clarendon, Oxford, 1972);
T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, enlarged
ed. 2, 1970); in Criticisms
and the Growth of Knowledge, I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave, Eds.
(Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, 1970), pp. 231-278; in The Structure of Scientific Theories,
F. Suppe, Ed. (Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1974), pp. 457-482; I.
Lakatos, Proc. Aristotelian Soc.
69, 149 (1968-1969); in
Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave,
Eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, New York,
1970), pp. 91-195; in Boston
Studies in the Philosophy of Science, R. Buck and R. S. Cohen, Eds.
(Reidel, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1971),
pp. 91-136; D. T. Campbell, in A Handbook of Method in Cultural Anthropology,
R. Naroll and R. Cohen, Eds. (Natural History Press, Garden City, N.Y.,
1970), pp. 51-85; in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, P. A. Schilpp, Ed.
(Open Court, LaSalle, Ill., 1974), pp. 413-463; Inquiry 2, 152 (1959);
Y. Elkana, The Discovery of the Conservation of Energy
(Hutchinson, London, 1973); in The
Interaction
337
between Science and Philosophy,
Y. Elkana, Ed. (Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1974), pp. 243-279; in Methodological and Historical Essays in the Natural and Social Sciences, R. S. Cohen and M. W. Wartofsky, Eds. (Reidel, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1974), pp. 277-305.2. R. K. Merton, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1973).
3. G. Holton, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1973).
4. Holton puts his suggestion in these words: “Elementary
particle physics is… shot through and through with themes that may well have, as
many themes seem to me to have, their origins in a part of the imagination that
was formed prior to the conscious decision of the researcher to become a
scientist” [Science 188, 328 (1975)].
5.
G. Holton, in Proc. Varenna Course on The History of Recent Physics, C. Weiner, Ed. (Il Nuovo Cimento, Bologna, Italy, in press).6. H. D. Lasswell, Psychiatry 1, 197
(1938);
and N. Leites, Language of Politics: Studies in Quantitative Semantics (Stewart, New York, 1949). See also B. Berelson, Content Analysis in Communication Research (Free Press, New York, 1952); M. W. Riley and C. S. Stoll, in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, D. L. Sills, Ed. (Macmillan and Free Press, New York, 1968), vol. 3, pp. 371-377.
7. P. F. Lazarsfeld and R. K. Merton, Trans. N.Y.
Acad. Sc Ser. 2 6, 58 (1943); for a specific thematic analysis as
preliminary to the investigation of response to propaganda, see R. K. Merton,
with assistance of M. Fiske and A. Curtis, Mass Persuasion (Greenwood,
Stamford, Conn., 1971, reprint of 1946 ed..), chap. 3.
8. Holton goes on to specify parallel usage of the term
“thematic analysis” in the preceding article (p. 328); a term “familiar from
somewhat related uses in anthropology, art criticism, musicology, and other
fields.”
9. H. A. Zuckerman, “Cognitive and social processes in
scientific discovery: recombination in bacteria as a prototypical case,” paper
presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, August
1974.
10. B. G. Glaser, Science 143, 1012 (1964);
Organizational Scientists: Their Professional Careers (Bobbs-Merrill,
Indianapolis, 1964); L. Rubin, “Reactions to negative tenure decisions in
chemistry and sociology,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American
Sociological Association, August 1974.
11. J. Watkins, in Explanation in the Behavioural
Sciences, R. Borger and F. Cioffi, Eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, New York,
1970), pp. 167-217.
12, B. Barber and R. C. Fox, Am. I. Soc. 64, 128
(1958).
13,
14. D. J. de S. Price, Technol. Cult, 6, 553
(1965); in Factors in the Transfer of Technology, W. H. Gruber and D.
R. Marquis, Eds. (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1969), pp.
91-104.
15. J. M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, vol. 9 of
Collected Writings (St. Martin’s, London, 1972), p.
276.
16, A number of these problems are examined in
(2).17. Some sociologists - P. A. Sorokin, for example -
acquired a certain notoriety for questioning the doctrine of unfailing,
unilinear progress at a time when it was a doctrine widely held. For an effort to identify quantitative
variations in the development of science, see P. A. Sorokin and R. K. Merton, in
P. A. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (American Book, New York,
1937), vol. 2, pp. 125-480,
439-474; for an archeologist’s penetrating analysis of “knowledge as
a social construction” and the selective accumulation of scientific knowledge,
see V. G. Childe, Society and Knowledge (Allen & Unwin, London,
1956).
18. P. Weingart, in Social Processes of Scientific Development, R. Whitley, Ed. (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1974), pp.
45-68.19. The classical diagnosis of the “whig fallacy” was
provided by H, Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (G. Bell,
London, 1931). Thoroughly in
control of his idea, Butterfield does not allow it to deteriorate into a
dedicated relativism that denies the selective accumulation of transcultural
“objective knowledge”; see his course of lectures, The Origins of Modern
Science, 1300-1800 (G. Bell, London, 1949). J. Agassi may have provided a prophylaxis
against the whig fallacy in his “principle of historical reconstruction: apply
no hindsight” [Inquiry
14, 154
(1971)].
20. D. T. Campbell, “Objectivity and the social locus of scientific knowledge,” presidential address to the Division of Social and Personality Psychology of the American Psychological Association,
21. This work was supported by NSF grant GS-33359X to the Program in the Sociology of Science at
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