Making Up Mind: The Early Sociology of Invention

Abstract

Making Up Mind: The Early Sociology of Invention DAVID MCGEE As an aside in a 1988 response to some rather odd attacks by Mi­ chael Fores over the emergence of the engineering sciences, Edwin T. Layton offered an unusual defense of a common historical prac­ tice. The practice in question was the use of the terms “empiric” and “scientific” to characterize the premodern and modern eras in technology. The thrust of Layton’s defense was that these terms had become a “conventional shorthand” for referring to complex change, comparable to the use of the term “neolithic” when referring to the millennia of prehistory. There was no danger in using such terms, according to Layton, because they are only labels and therefore do not necessarily carry the “metaphysical freight” that so worried Fores.1 Layton is probably correct in saying that the terms “empiric” and “scientific” have become little more than labels. Nevertheless, labels have a history, and it is one troublesome episode in that history that I examine in this article. Inquiry shows that much of our current usage of these two terms has its origins in an extremely problematic “sociology of invention”—to use the phrase of S. C. Gilfillan—which first emerged during the 1920s and 1930s and then enjoyed a revival in the 1950s and 1960s.2 The most prominent member of this school was sociologist William Fielding Ogburn, most famous for his theory Dr. McGee received his Ph.D. from the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto in 1994 for his dissertation on design in naval architecture, “Floating Bodies, Naval Science: Science, Design, and the Captain Controversy, 1860-1870.” He currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). He would like to acknowledge the financial assistance of the SSHRC, which made this article possible, and to thank Bert Hall and Ian Hacking for their comments and support. 'Edwin T. Layton, “Science as a Form of Action: The Role of the Engineering Sciences,” Technology and Culture 29 (1988): 89. Fores’s attack is in the same volume: Michael Fores, “Transformations and the Myth of ‘Engineering Science’: Magic in a White Coat,” Technology and Culture 29 (1988): 62-81. Fores lists those who have pre­ sented the emergence of modern technology as an empiric/science split: see p. 77. 2S. Colum Gilfillan, The Sociology ofInvention (Cambridge, Mass., 1935).© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3604-0002$01.00 773 774 David McGee of “cultural lag.”3 Perhaps the most influential member in the history of technology was Abbott Payson Usher, who introduced the gestalt theory of design in his 1929 A History ofMechanical Inventions. Other members of the school include Gilfillan himself, journalist and histo­ rian Waldemar Kaempffert, sociologist L. L. Bernard, and chemical engineer Joseph Rossman.4 Together these men articulated a set of ideas that have had a powerful influence on thinking about the emer­ gence of the engineering sciences, the evolution of technology, and the nature of design. Nevertheless, it was a set of ideas driven by seemingly unavoidable contradictions, all of them having to do, I argue, with making up the characteristics of mind to suit explanatory schemas. On the metahistorical level, Ogburn and others argued that inven­ tion was determined by culture, which seemed to require the invoca­ tion of a universally primitive, mechanical, habit-ridden mind of the sort that could be dictated to by outside forces. But a mechanical mind raised a question: if humans were essentially automatons, how could they ever invent anything new? The question could be an­ swered only by invoking a second kind of mind, one endowed with some degree of creativity, thereby negating the original premises about the universality of human nature as well as the argument for cultural determinism. The sociology of invention was also concerned to offer a historical explanation for the technological supremacy of the West, where the starting place was again a universally primitive mind whose unconscious “empiricism,” habit-ridden “conservatism,” and fear of change acted to retard progress. This explained the lim­ ited achievements of...