Scientific Societies and the Professionalization of Knowledge: A Long-Term History Based on Three Case Studies

Abstract

Historians of science and knowledge traditionally identified a ‘professionalization of science’ process – the gradual emergence of a dichotomy between the hobbyist amateur and the scientific professional - somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century. While this narrative has received extensive criticism for its essentialism, teleology, and universality, it nonetheless continues to inform much historical work. This thesis introduces a new approach to professionalization. It abandons the essentialism, teleology and universalism that are usually associated with amateurism and professionalism, but it upholds amateurism and professionalism’s significance to historical experience. Thus, instead of treating amateurism and professionalism in a traditional sense, they are reconceived of as time-and-place-bound actors’ categories and as such as genuine elements of the social fabric. More specifically, professionalism in knowledge cultures is viewed as one guise of epistemic hierarchy, the set of hierarchical social relations that dictates the evaluation of knowledge on the basis of the social standing of its source rather than its intrinsic validity. The aim of this article is to reconstruct epistemic hierarchy in a specific, local context. It consists of three case studies that, taken together, trace the evolution of epistemic hierarchy in the particular setting of the Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen, a scientific society in Middelburg, the Netherlands. For each case, the epistemic hierarchy in which an individual ZG-member operated, is studied. These members are, respectively, lawyer and historian Samuel de Wind (1793-1859), physician Johannes Cornelis de Man (1818-1909), and the teacher and amateur malacologist Cornelis Brakman (1879-1955). A surprising image emerges from the case studies, one with two main characteristics. First, professionalism did not materialize until later than the traditional narrative suggests, namely in the early twentieth century. Second, this emergence of professionalism signified an increase in the rigidity of epistemic hierarchy. Although both these findings apply primarily to the case of the Genootschap, the article ends by suggesting that they may have a wider relevance.