Annales School: School of history established by Lucien Febvre (1878-1956) and F. Braudel. Its roots were in the journal Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, Febvre's reconstituted version of a journal he had earlier formed with M. Bloch. Under Braudel's direction the Annales school promoted a new form of history, replacing the study of leaders with the lives of ordinary people and replacing examination of politics, diplomacy, and wars with inquiries into climate, demography, agriculture, commerce, technology, transportation, and communication, as well as social groups and mentalities. While aiming at a "total history," it also yielded dazzling micro-studies of villages and regions. Its international influence on historiography has been enormous. This approach views long term trends and considers events of everyday life, e.g., cooking, jokes, work, etc. as ways of illuminating these long-term trends.

Beaumont, William: An American military physician, originally from Connecticut, who exploited an accidental gastric fistula in his patient, Alexis St. Martin, to carry out experiments on the process of digestion. His 1833 book, "Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion" is a classic.

Close reading: Critical attention to details while reading. E.g., word choices, metaphor usages, rhetorical strategies.

Codex: A book. This was an innovation differing from scrolls, whereby individual sheets were bound together.

Cultural History: Historical analysis which focuses on the cultural settings within which events occurred.

Cushing, Harvey: American surgeon and bibliophile. Cushing developed neurosurgery as a special field, mostly at Harvard, and upon retirement from surgery, he moved to Yale to pursue his interests in medical history and book collecting.

Deconstruction: "This is the most important point to grasp about deconstruction. There is no language so vigilant or self-aware that it can effectively escape the conditions placed upon thought by its own prehistory and ruling metaphysics." Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. p. 22.

Discourse: Ways of talking about something.

Enlightenment: A period in Western history roughly from the mid 17^th Century to the mid 18^th Century that was characterized by a general belief that learning and human understanding could be used to solve all problems.

Episteme: "By épistémè, we mean, in fact, the total set of relations that unite, at a give period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems; the way in which each of these discursive formulations , the transitions to epistemologization, scientificity, and formalization are situated and operate; the distribution of these thresholds, which may coincide, be subordinated to one another, or be separated by shifts in time; the lateral relations that may exist between epistemological figures or sciences in so far as they belong to neighbouring, but distinct, discursive practices." M. Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, 1972, p. 191.

Epistemology: The philosophical aspect of how we know things. How do we determine a "fact"? What is knowledge?

Exegesis: Writing of an explanatory, supplementary, or commentary nature relating to a basic text.

Externalism: The historical approach that gives primary importance to events external to knowledge, e.g., the social, political, religious and cultural contexts in which science was done, as opposed to "internalism" which focuses on the scientific content of historical events.

Fulton, John F.: Physiologist, medical historian, and bibliophile at Yale (1930s-1960s).

Hagiography: Historical writing that emphasizes the good aspects and neglects the bad aspects of a topic. Usually applied to descriptions of biographies. Unalloyed hero-worship.

Heroic therapy: Medical therapies, mostly in the mid 19^th Century, that involved major physiological insults to the patient, e.g., violent purging, thermal treatments, massive blood letting, large doses of medicine.

Historiography: "In practice, historiography can have two meaning. It can simply mean (professional) writing about history, that is, accounts of events of the past as written by historians; but it can also mean theory or philosophy of history, that is, theoretical reflections on the nature of history [H₂: the analysis of historical actuality, that is, of historical research and its results]. In its latter meaning historiography is, therefore, a meta-discipline, whose object is H₂; purely descriptive history will not itself be historiography but it can be the object of historiographic analysis." Kragh, An Introduction to the Historiography of Science. 1987, p. 21

Idealism: A philosophical position attributed to Plato, in which the observable world is thought to be only an imperfect and indistinct representation of the "real world" which is composed of "ideal" entities.

Incunabula: Written materials dating from before the invention of the printing press.

Intellectual History: Historical approach that focuses on the ideas that are involved in historical events.

Internalism: The historical approach that gives primary importance to events involved in scientific knowledge itself, e.g., theories, instruments, methods, discoveries, and other scientific matters, as opposed to "externalism" which focuses on the social, political, religious and cultural events connected to science.

Kuhn, Thomas: Philosopher of Science and author of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" in which he proposed a model for how science changes. Inventor of "paradigm shift."

Machine City: Lower level of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale where many vending machines exist along with a lounge area.

Master Narrative: The notion that there exists one unique narrative history of things that is the goal of the historian to construct. This notion leads to the belief that there is one "true" historical account of particular events, themes, etc.

Material Culture: Term applied to concrete, material things (stuff) of life, e.g., tools, clothes, food, machines, weapons, manufactured goods, etc., as opposed to ideas, beliefs, social interactions, governmental actions, etc.

Mechanical philosophy: 17^th Century idea that the material world is made up of (invisible) particles, the actions of which can explain the macroscopic behavior of the world. These particles sometimes were envisioned to be miniature machines which follow the principles of macroscopic mechanics.

Metaphysics: A vague philosophic term, sometimes applied to the broad branch of thought that deals with the nature and structure of the world (ancient Greeks); sometimes applied more narrowly to philosophers who do not accept that empirical observation is the only way we can know about the world (logical empiricists).

Modernism: A vague term, depending on the context: e.g., modernism is applied to the 16^th century followers of the mechanical philosophy because they rejected the traditional reliance on scholastic authority; modernism in art refers to a particular period in the early 20^th century; modernism in other contexts encompasses all those who believe in empiricism and rationalism. Modernism is often used as a term of derision nowadays.

Natural Kinds: A belief deriving from Aristotle that the natural world can be organized into groups such that the members of the groups are related by "primary" qualities rather that irrelevant "secondary" qualities. Thus, "fruit" is a natural kind, with examples of oranges and apples, but "orange" is not a natural kind, with examples of oranges and tabby cats. This belief depends on a view of the world as having some sort of "real" structural principles, and that humans can perceive the principles of this order.

Normative: The prescription of rules (norms) for some activity. Thus, some observers of science articulate principles of "how science should be done" as contrasted with descriptions of principles of how science is actually done.

Ontology: That aspect of metaphysics (in the broad sense) that deals with the study of being or existence of a thing, in the abstract. Often distinguished from epistemology, which is the knowledge about a thing.

Paradigm: Kuhn wrote [Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 10] that a scientific work is a "paradigm" if it meets two criteria: its "achievement [is] sufficiently unprecedented to attract and enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity." and "it [is] sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve." Thus, paradigm is often used to mean a set of beliefs accepted by a group of scientists as a way to organize their theories, experimentation, and conception of the world.

Performativity: ???

Periods (Ancient; Medieval; early Modern; Modern; Contemporary): ???

Positivism: A. The philosophy of science known as positivism which was originally described by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857). He argued the humankind had gone through three great phases of searching for understanding: the theological (involving a search for God and spirituality), the metaphysical (the search for philosophical truths) and now the positive or scientific phase (involving the search for facts). This third phase involved scientific exploration and the objective collection and judgements of facts in order that humankind might arrive at 'positive' truth, as distinct from theological or metaphysical truths. Positivism argued that all sciences should depend upon the same foundation of the study of facts about the physical, material world. In that sense there were no important differences between biology, physics or chemistry - all would use the same methods for discovering positive truths about the real world - the so-called 'unity of science project'. Facts should just be collected and summarized through a process of induction.

B. Logical Positivism is a philosophical program that originated from "The Vienna Circle" emerging from discussions, beginning in 1907, between Otto Neurath, a sociologist, Hans Hahn, a mathematician, and Philip Frank, a physicist. Later members of "The Circle" included Moritz Schlick,. Herbert Feigl, Rudolf Carnap, Friedrich Waisman, Kurt Gödel, and Alfred Tarski. An intellectually related group developed in Berlin around Han Reichenbach, who preferred the term "logical empircism". Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein were loosely associated with the Vienna Circle. From these discussions emerged a strong version of the 'verification principle' according to which the significance of non-analytic sentences depends upon whether they can be tested, and utterances which are neither analytic nor empirically testable are meaningless. Different versions of this principle are distinguished by the strengths of their testability requirements.

The main examples of knowledge the Circle urged philosophers to study came from the exact sciences, which it supposed were models of properly conducted inquiry whose epistemic standards should be extended to the social sciences. This, along with its demanding formalisms, helped make Vienna Circle philosophy unpopular among academics who considered their work more humane. So did the Circle's crusade against 'metaphysics', its derogatory term for discourse which purports to make substantive claims but which is susceptible neither to rigorous empirical testing nor to formally rigorous explication. It offended intellectuals to have words they lived by (and made a living from) condemned as metaphysics.

C. Positivism: an epithet applied to someone's argument which you cannot rebut on rational grounds.

Post-colonial: ???

Post-modernism: ???

Post-structuralism: ???

Rationalism: Two very different meanings: 1) Medieval: true beliefs about the world can be reached through the process of mental reasoning. 2) Modern: beliefs should be justified by (good and sufficient) reasons, held by some to require empirical confirmation.

Realism: Belief that there is, in fact, a real world that is independent of our existence and our minds.

Reductionism: Belief that properties and behavior of complex objects and events are the summation (not necessarily a simple linear summing up) of the properties and behaviors of the component parts of the complex objects and events. A typical case involves the belief that complex biological phenomenon can be fully explained in terms of the chemical behavior of the biological system, which in turn can be explained in terms of the physics of the chemical systems. This approach does not allow for so-called "emergent" properties that might originate from the fact of the complex organization, itself.

Relativism: The first clear statement of relativism comes with the Sophist Protagoras, as quoted by Plato, "The way things appear to me, in that way they exist for me; and the way things appears to you, in that way they exist for you" (Theaetetus 152a). There is no separate or objective truth apart from how each individual happens to see things. Consequently, Protagoras says that there is no such thing as falsehood. Unfortunately, this would make Protagoras's own profession meaningless, since his business is to teach people how to persuade others of their own beliefs. It would be strange to tell others that what they believe is true but that they should accept what you say nevertheless. So Protagoras qualified his doctrine: while whatever anyone believes is true, things that some people believe may be better than what others believe.

Plato thought that such a qualification reveals the inconsistency of the whole doctrine. His basic argument against relativism is called the "Turning the Tables" (Peritropé, "turning around") argument, and it goes something like this: "If the way things appear to me, in that way they exist for me, and the way things appears to you, in that way they exist for you, then it appears to me that your whole doctrine is false." Since anything that appears to me is true, then it must be true that Protagoras is wrong. Relativism thus has the strange logical property of not being able to deny the truth of its own contradiction.

It is characteristic of all forms of relativism that they wish to preserve for themselves the very principles that they seek to deny to others. Thus, relativism basically presents itself as a true doctrine, which means that it will logically exclude its opposites (absolutism or objectivism), but what it actually says is that no doctrines can logically exclude their opposites. It wants for itself the very thing (objectivity) that it denies exists. Logically this is called "self-referential inconsistency," which means that you are inconsistent when it comes to considering what you are actually doing yourself. More familiarly, that is called wanting to "have your cake and eat it too." Someone who advocates relativism, then, may just have a problem recognizing how their doctrine applies to themselves.

Modern relativists in philosophy, of course, can hardly fail at some point to have this brought to their attention. Some modern relativists in philosophy (e.g. Richard Rorty) try to pursue Protagoras's own strategy that their views are "better" rather than "true." Rorty sees this as a kind of Pragmatism (really just a kind of relativism), which is not concerned with what is true but just with what "works."

Relativism turns up in many guises. Generally, we can distinguish cognitive relativism, which is about all kinds of knowledge, from moral relativism, which is just about matters of value. Protagoras's principle is one of cognitive relativism. This gives rise to the most conspicuous paradoxes, but despite that there are several important forms of cognitive relativism today: historicism is the idea that truth is relative to a given moment in history and that truth actually changes as history does. This derives from G.W.F. Hegel, although Hegel himself thought there was an absolute truth, which would come at the "end of history" -- where he happened to be himself, curiously. This kind of historicism was taken up by Karl Marx, who thought that every kind of intellectual structure -- religion, philosophy, ethics, art, etc. -- was determined by the economic system, the "mode of production," of a particular historical period. A claim to truth about anything in any area could therefore be simply dismissed once its economic basis was identified: labeling something "bourgeois ideology" means that we don't have to address its content. Like Hegel, however, Marx did think there was an absolute truth at the "end of history," when the economic basis of society permanently becomes communism. Modern Marxists, who don't seem to have noticed the miserable and terrible failure of every attempt to bring about Marx's communism, can hardly do without their absolutizing "end of history"; but modern Hegelians (e.g. Robert Solomon) can create a more complete relativism by removing Hegel's idea that there is an "end" to history. Unfortunately, that creates for them the typical relativistic paradox, for their own theory of history no longer has any basis for its claim to be true for all of history. Hegel didn't make that kind of mistake.

Another modern kind of cognitive relativism is linguistic relativism, that truth is created by the grammar and semantic system of particular language. This idea in philosophy comes from Ludwig Wittgenstein. On this view the world really has no structure of its own, but that structure is entirely imposed by the structure of language. Learning a different language thus means in effect creating a new world, where absolutely everything can be completely different from the world as we know it. Wittgenstein called the rules established by a particular language a "game" that we play as we speak the language. As we "play" a "language game," we indulge in a certain "form of life."

Relativism applied to value -- that truths of right and wrong, good and evil, and the beautiful and the ugly, are relative -- is usually called moral relativism. This is inherently a more plausible theory than a general cognitive relativism, for people disagree much more about matters of value than they do about matters of fact. Nevertheless, moral relativism suffers from the same kinds of self-referential paradoxes as cognitive relativism, even if we divorce it from cognitive relativism and place it in a world of objective factual truths. We can see this happen in the most important modern form of moral relativism: cultural relativism.

Cultural relativism is based on the undoubted truth that human cultures are very different from each other and often embody very different values. If Italians and Arabs value female chastity and Tahitians and Californians don't, it is hard to see how we are going to decide between these alternatives, especially if we are Californians. Today the anthropological empirical evidence that cultures are different is usually regarded as the strongest support for cultural relativism, and so for moral relativism. However, recent discoveries of flaws in much of the original anthropological research (by Mead, Boaz et. al.) suggests that ideological presuppositions confounded these studies. Even if we accept that cultures can have some very different values, this still doesn't prove cultural relativism: for while cultural relativism must say that all values are relative to a particular culture, a cultural absolutism merely needs to deny that, saying that not all values are relative to a particular culture, i.e. that some values are cultural universals.

The deepest problem with cultural relativism and its anthropological vindication comes when we consider what it is supposed to be. As a methodological principle for anthropology, we might even say that cultural relativism is unobjectionable: anthropologists are basically supposed to describe what a culture is like, and it really doesn't fit in with that purpose to spend any time judging the culture or trying to change it. More importantly, cultural relativism, as many anthropologists end up talking about it, gets raised from a methodological principle for a scientific discipline into a moral principle that is supposed to apply to everyone: That since all values are specific to a given culture, then nobody has the right to impose the values from their culture on to any other culture or to tell any culture that their traditional values should be different. However, with such a moral principle, we have the familiar problem of self-referential consistency: for as a moral value from what culture does cultural relativism come? If we want to establish a moral principle to respect the values of other cultures, we cannot do so on the basis of cultural relativism; for our own principle would then mean that we cannot respect all the values of other cultures. As a practical matter, then, it is meaningless to try and save cultural relativism by erasing the moral content that is usually claimed for it.

Renaissance: A. The humanistic revival of classical art, architecture, literature, and learning that originated in Italy in the 14th century and later spread throughout Europe. B. The period of this revival, roughly the 14th through the 16th century, marking the transition from medieval to modern times.

Romanticism: An artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by a heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual's expression of emotion and imagination, departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and conventions.

Scholasticism: The dominant western Christian theological and philosophical school of the Middle Ages, based on the authority of the Latin Fathers and of Aristotle and his commentators.

Scholium (Pl. Scholia): An explanatory note or text. Usually in Latin or Greek writings.

Scientific Revolution: ???

Sectarianism: ???

Social Constructionism: ???

Social History: ???

"Strong Programme": "The sociologist is concerned with knowledge, including scientific knowledge, purely as a natural phenomenon. The appropriate definition of knowledge will therefore be rather different from that of either the layman or the philosopher. Instead of defining it as true belief--or perhaps, justified true belief-- knowledge for the sociologist is whatever people take to be knowledge. It consists of those beliefs which people confidently hold to and live by. In particular the sociologist will be concerned with beliefs which are taken for granted or institutionalized, or invested with authority by groups of people. Of course knowledge must be distinguished from mere belief. This can be done by reserving the word 'knowledge' for what is collectively endorsed, leaving the individual and idiosyncratic to count as mere belief. [...] "The approaches that have just been sketched suggest that the sociology of scientific knowledge should adhere to the following four tenets. In this way it will embody the same values which are taken for granted in other scientific disciplines. These are:

1. It would be causal, that is, concerned with the conditions which bring about belief or states of knowledge. Naturally there will be other types of causes apart from social ones which will cooperate in bringing about belief.

2. It would be impartial with respect to truth and falsity, rationality or irrationality, success or failure. Both sides of these dichotomies will require explanation.

3. It would be symmetrical in its style of explanation. The same types of cause would explain say, true and false beliefs.

4. It would be reflexive. In principle its patterns of explanation would have to be applicable to sociology itself. Like the requirement of symmetry this is a response to the need to seek for general explanations. It is an obvious requirement of principle because otherwise sociology would be a standing refutation of its own theories.

"These four tenets, of causality, impartiality, symmetry and reflexivity, define what will be called the strong programme in the sociology of knowledge. They are by no means new, but represent an amalgam of the more optimistic and scientistic strains to be found in Durkheim (1938), Mannheim (1936) and Znaniecki (1965)." David Bloor, The Strong Programme in Sociology of Knowledge.

Structuralism: A method of analyzing phenomena, as in anthropology, linguistics, psychology, or literature, chiefly characterized by contrasting the elemental structures of the phenomena in a system of binary opposition.

STS: Science-technology-studies. Closely related to SSS (social studies of science). Generally applied to the study of science and technology from the point of view of the discipline of Sociology.

Trope: Initially a term from the late middle ages to refer to interpolations in liturgical texts. Now this is lit-crit jargon meaning the use of a word or expression in a different sense from that which properly belongs to it; the use of a word or expression as changed from the original signification to another, for the sake of giving life or emphasis to an idea; quite simply, a figure of speech. Tropes are chiefly of four kinds: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony.

Theory: When applied to historical studies, this is an undefined term.

Unity of Science: A philosophical program which grew out of the Vienna Circle and the Logical Empiricists in the 1930s-1950s. This program hypothesized that there is a fundamental unity in all scientific work and that the sciences can be arranged so that with the appropriate language, all science can be fit into the same scheme. The underlying assumption is that more 'complex' science, with the right language, definitions, and correspondences, can be "reduced" to more basic science. Physics is taken as the most fundamental science, so that if this reduction is possible, only physics requires a basic philosophical analysis.

Vitalism: A belief that matter cannot be alive without the addition of some non-material "vital principle."

Whig Interpretation of History (Whiggism): "... the tendency in many historians to write on the side of the Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which it the ratification if not the glorification of the present." (Butterfield, 1931, p. v).

Wissenschaft: German word for science, learning, knowledge or scholarship. In some contexts loaded with connotations beyond its simple denotation.

Zeitgeist: Literally "the ghost of the time." The notion that a given idea or belief was "in the air", widely held, or somehow appropriate for the time period.

Performativity:
Periods (Ancient; Medieval; early Modern; Modern; Contemporary)
Post-colonialPost-modernism
Post-structuralism
Scientific Revolution:
Sectarianism
Social Constructionism
Social History