When things don't talk: knowledge and belief in the inter-war humanism of Charles Singer (1876–1960)

Abstract

The science historian Charles Singer might seem to have shared with positivists a widely held commitment to observation as the foundation of knowledge. Yet in fact Singer's historiography was peculiarly unconcerned with instruments, models and other artefacts. Such tools might have been expected to present crucial empirical evidence for the historical arguments and ideal material for the didactics which pioneers such as Singer associated with their mission of a ‘scientific humanism’. In their hands, physical things did not translate into epistemic things. This was deliberate. Yet while the configuration of science history which would distance it from material objects seems to speak of a shift from the visual to texts, the ocular technologies deployed in Singer's histories rather point to a co-existence of different kinds of visuality in that period's scholarship. As the academic and the museological aspects of science history pulled apart, the visuality of the museum came to be complemented by texts that vitally relied on images. The function of such images was to create proximity with the cognitive desires around whose traffic these histories became paper theatres of knowing. In bypassing material theatres and crafting realities that he understood to be empirically undemonstrable, Singer purposefully developed a non-authoritarian approach to the legacy of the scientific enterprise. He presented the story of understanding nature not as entailing obedience to its established results, but instead as embodying an attitude of continuing enquiry.