I. Bernard Cohen
I. Bernard Cohen was the first American to earn a Ph.D. in the history of science (Harvard, 1947) and spent his career at Harvard as Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Science. He was the pioneer who established the field as a serious academic discipline, training a generation of historians including Basalla. His methodological commitments — careful attention to textual evidence, resistance to presentist readings of past science, insistence on understanding scientific work in its historical context — shaped Basalla's own approach. Cohen's work on Newton, on the Copernican and Keplerian revolutions, and on the nature of scientific revolutions established the historiographical framework against which Basalla developed his distinctively anti-revolutionary account of technological change.
In the AI Story
Cohen's influence on Basalla is visible in the methodological discipline of The Evolution of Technology. The book's refusal to organize its account around celebrated individuals, its patience with the accumulated weight of case material, and its willingness to contradict commonsense narratives when evidence requires — all reflect the Harvard history-of-science training Cohen provided. Cohen's own work on revolutions in science was more accommodating to the concept of revolutionary change than Basalla's framework would become, but the methodological framework Basalla used to dismantle technological revolution was the one Cohen had taught him to apply with rigor.
Key Ideas
Cohen pioneered the history of science as academic discipline.
His methodological rigor shaped Basalla's anti-heroic approach.
His own position on scientific revolutions differed from Basalla's mature framework, but the tools were the same.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Harvard University Press, 1985)
- I. Bernard Cohen, The Newtonian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1980)