Responsiveness, restraint and range: Conflict over the epistemic personae of naval officers in Dutch 19th-century Arctic science

Abstract

In the second half of the 19th century, naval officers were relegated to marginal roles in environmental science. This boundary work helped shape the scientific community today, where academic credentials are a prerequisite. The international boom of Arctic exploration and science in the second half of the 19th century provides an excellent case study for this important chapter in the history of science’s social organization, positioned in between the inclusion of officers in science around 1850 to the dominance of academics by 1900. The Dutch Arctic expeditions of 1878-1884 are especially fruitful as they allow for comparison between two simultaneous expeditions, the Willem Barents (officer-led) and Varna (academic). Following the lead of authors such as Azadeh Achbari, Katharine Anderson, Helen Rozwadowski and Michael Reidy, this thesis studies the epistemic work of naval officers on its own terms. These authors have dislodged our historically inherited, hierarchical understanding of environmental-scientific work which assumed a separation between a practical and theoretical-academic sphere and showed that this separation is actually impossible to make. However, this thesis argues that to understand why and how historical actors engaged in boundary work, it is important to keep differences in focus as well, no matter if they were a priori “real” or rhetorically constructed. To conceptualize these differences, this thesis adapts the historiographical tool of the scientific persona into the epistemic persona to render it applicable to non-academics too. The definition of the epistemic persona follows Herman Paul and Gadi Algazi: a meso-level regulative ideal, or “what it takes to be” a scientist or knowledge worker. Another analytical lens used is Lynn Nyhart’s dichotomy of Wissenschaft and Kunde. The thesis identifies three aspects that shaped, in various ways, the epistemic personae of the officers involved: responsiveness, restraint, and (disciplinary) range. It shows how, in the Dutch Arctic expeditions and beyond, these played vital roles in the conflict between academics and naval officers, the value judgements that were passed on the scientific merits of officer-produced knowledge, and the contestation of the very definition of science. Range refers to the encyclopaedic, “interdisciplinary” nature of the officers’ epistemic project, which was inherently tied up with the overall goals of the navy. It conflicted with the developing research practice in academic spheres, where the quest for unifying laws through extensive observations of one phenomenon took centre stage. Closely tied to this conflict was a conflict of the personal ethos of the fieldworker: different strategies developed to overcome the complexity and uncertainty of scientific fieldwork. Responsiveness and restraint are epistemic virtues that dealt with this problem in opposite ways. While restraint aligned with dominant objectivity standards, responsiveness was firmly rooted in the independent, experience-oriented epistemic practice of the naval officers and central to their epistemic project. Next to historiographical debates on the role of 19th century naval officers in the history of environmental-, Arctic- and expedition science, this thesis contributes to the ongoing re-evaluation of practical expertise and experiential knowledge in the history of science and highlights the historiographical usefulness of concepts such as “the field” versus “the lab”, the theoretical-practical dichotomy, and the epistemic persona and epistemic virtues as applied to actors beyond the usual (academic) protagonists. Especially the exploration of responsiveness reveals new aspects of the dynamic between academics and practice-oriented non-academics in the history of science.