Ways of Knowing

John V. Pickstone’s Ways of Knowing (2001) offers a framework for understanding how science, technology, and medicine work across five centuries of Western history. Rather than telling the story as a single march of progress, Pickstone identifies five recurring modes — natural history, analysis, experimentalism, technoscience, and world-readings — each with its own logic and history. None of these modes permanently replaces the others. At any given moment in history, all of them are in play; what changes is which mode dominates and which is subordinated.

The Framework

Origin and Method

Pickstone opens the book by diagnosing a problem: the history of science, technology, and medicine has been written as three separate stories, when in fact they are aspects of a single process of knowledge production whose coherence only becomes visible when examined at the scale of centuries.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) His typology was first published in article form in 1993 and developed over the following decade, finally appearing in comprehensive form in Ways of Knowing (2001). The method is Weberian: each “way of knowing” is an ideal type, not a description of any single historical instance.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) An ideal type in Max Weber’s sense is an analytic construct that highlights the characteristic features of a phenomenon — like “bureaucracy” — without claiming that any real case perfectly matches it. A research project is not simply “analytical” or “experimental”; it may be chiefly analytical while incorporating elements of natural history and experiment. Pickstone calls this “nesting.”(Pickstone, John V., 2001)

The four key features of his approach are: a long timescale (three centuries), breadth of scope (science, technology, and medicine treated together), dissection into constituent modes, and attention to knowledge as a form of work with characteristic sites, routines, and practitioners.(Pickstone, John V., 2001)

The Five Modes

Natural history is the oldest mode: describing, classifying, and tracking the biography of things — animals, plants, patients, machines, or artefacts — over time.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) Its two dimensions are the taxonomic (what kinds of things exist?) and the biographical (how does this particular thing develop over time?). Medical case histories are the biographical form; Linnaean classification is the taxonomic. Pickstone stresses that natural history never disappears, even in the most technically sophisticated sciences: molecular biologists still need data on specimens, clinicians still need patient histories, and experimental physicists need informal knowledge about which materials and conditions work.(Pickstone, John V., 2001)

Analysis seeks order by dissection — reducing objects to their elements or tracing the flow of an element through a system.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) Lavoisier’s chemical elements, Bichat’s bodily tissues, thermodynamics’ energy flows: all are instances of creating a new “element” with which to re-describe a previously opaque domain. The analytical sciences were primarily constructed around 1800 by teachers of technical professionals — engineers and doctors — in French professional schools, teaching hospitals, and the reformed universities of Germany.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) Analysis is, Pickstone argues, the most underappreciated way of knowing: it is central to most scientific and clinical work but is often invisible precisely because it is so foundational.

Experimentalism builds on analysis: once elements are identified, they can be synthesized into controlled novel phenomena.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) Claude Bernard defined the characteristic method in the 1860s — the controlled experiment that isolates a single variable by keeping everything else constant.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) Pasteur’s swan-necked flask experiments are Pickstone’s canonical example: by controlling access of dust to broths, Pasteur demonstrated microbial causation of fermentation and generated practical inventions — pasteurization, canning — from a controlled experimental model.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) Experimentalism was institutionalized chiefly in research-oriented universities from the mid-nineteenth century onward, first prominently in German universities, then spreading to Britain and North America.

Technoscience refers to knowledge production that is simultaneously commodity production, occurring in interlocking academic-industrial-governmental networks.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) Pickstone dates the distinctively synthetic form of this mode to around 1870, when electrical industries and dyestuff/pharmaceutical companies began to establish research laboratories tied to universities and state agencies.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) The twentieth century was defined by the expansion of these complexes: the military-industrial complex, the medico-industrial complex, CERN, the pharmaceutical industry.(Pickstone, John V., 2001)

World-readings (or hermeneutics) is the frame within which all the other modes operate.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) It covers the moral, theological, aesthetic, and philosophical meanings people attach to nature, disease, and scientific knowledge itself. In the Renaissance, hermeneutic readings were dominant: natural history prepared the way for natural philosophy, anatomical dissection illustrated classical texts, and the body was read as a reflection of divine design.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) After the seventeenth century’s partial “disenchantment” of nature — which Pickstone insists was a displacement, not a replacement(Pickstone, John V., 2001) — world-readings did not disappear but relocated: into literature, Romanticism, natural theology, and, in our own time, advertising, consumer culture, and environmental ethics.(Pickstone, John V., 2001)

The Coexistence Thesis

The most important theoretical contribution of the framework is its insistence that new ways of knowing displace but do not replace older ones.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) This distinguishes Pickstone sharply from Foucault (whose epistemes succeed each other) and from Kuhn’s more extreme readings (in which paradigm shifts break decisively with the past). Pickstone prefers a “coexistence model” in which paradigms or modes run alongside each other with different histories and in different power relations.(Pickstone, John V., 2001)

So while the early nineteenth century can be characterized as an “age of analysis,” this does not mean natural history was declining or that nobody was doing experiments. It means analysis was the new, exciting, dominant mode — but other modes persisted, in tension and interaction with the dominant one.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) This pluralism applies to any historical period. In Victorian Britain, the analytical pathological anatomy of teaching hospitals coexisted with biographical bedside medicine, and both coexisted with herbal craft traditions and natural-theological natural history.(Pickstone, John V., 2001)

The framework’s “longue durée” emphasis also challenges Whiggish histories of medicine that treat each new analytical or experimental innovation as progress over a superseded prior state.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) The history of science, technology, and medicine is one of “complex cumulation and simultaneous variety, contested over time.” Power relations between modes — which is dominant, which is subordinated, which is dismissed as “mere stamp-collecting”(Pickstone, John V., 2001) — are not settled by logic but by institutional context, patronage, professional self-interest, and political circumstance.

Ways of Knowing as Ways of Working

Pickstone insists that ways of knowing are also modes of labor.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) This is not just a rhetorical point. It directs attention to the sites, tools, routines, and social relations through which knowledge is produced — the hospital wards of post-Revolutionary Paris where young surgeons dissected hundreds of paupers, the university laboratories where German physiology professors could pursue research without the interruptions of consulting practice, the industrial research laboratories where pharmaceutical companies systematically produced novelties for commercial exploitation.

Parallel to the three main ways of knowing, Pickstone proposes three ways of making: craft, rationalised production, and systematic invention.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) These map onto natural history, analysis, and experimentalism respectively. The Industrial Revolution rationalised production as analysis rationalised knowledge: both involved decomposing a complex process into simpler elements and reconstructing it more efficiently.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) Systematic invention in industrial laboratories — Edison’s “invention factory,” the German dyestuffs laboratories — paralleled experimental synthesis in universities: both created novelties from known elements.

Implications for Herbal and Eclectic Medicine

Pickstone’s framework illuminates a persistent question in the history of alternative medicine: why do herbal, eclectic, and physiomedical traditions remain active despite the dominance of analytical and experimental medicine? His answer: natural-historical ways of knowing do not disappear. They are displaced, subordinated, sometimes dismissed — but the work of the herbalist (knowing patient biography, knowing the natural history of plants, making craft preparations) answers to a genuine epistemic demand that analysis and experiment cannot fully satisfy.(Pickstone, John V., 2001)

Pickstone notes that nineteenth-century reform movements periodically reasserted natural-historical and biographical approaches against analytical orthodoxy: Thomas Sydenham’s empiricism, the social medicine movement, the new public health of the 1980s, and contemporary alternative healing are all expressions of the same mode’s persistence.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) The coexistence thesis predicts that this will continue: wherever complexity, singularity, and long-term observation are required — managing a chronic illness, maintaining an ecosystem, caring for a specific patient — natural history asserts itself.(Pickstone, John V., 2001)

Critique of Progressivism in Science Funding

One of the book’s more polemical threads concerns the practical consequences of misidentifying “science” with experimentalism alone. In British research funding, Pickstone argues, clinical and engineering investigation — which is typically analytical — has been systematically undervalued because funding committees equate science with laboratory experiment.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) Similarly, social sciences and economics are excluded from “science” partly because of this narrow English restriction of the term.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) And the double-helix discovery — often celebrated as the triumph of experimental biology — was achieved not by experiment but by the synthesis of multiple analytical results: X-ray crystallography and organic chemistry of the DNA bases.(Pickstone, John V., 2001)

See Also

• natural-historical-analysis
• analytical-science
• experimentalism
• technoscience
• world-readings
• coexistence-of-knowledge-modes
• john-pickstone
• biographical-medicine
• paris-school-medicine

Sources