So, this is what's been consuming all of my free time recently, a prospectus of the work:
The Forteans: Science, Pseudoscience, and the Making of the World Overview
This project will explore the idea that science can be understood as a form of communicative action through a case study of the Forteans. The Forteans were a loosely allied group of British and Americans united in their esteem for the author Charles Fort and their interest in scientific anomalies. Their researches, writings, and presentations both affirmed the power of science to define truth and prompted public contests over the meaning of science. The outcome of these battles helped to create science. But the results were never stable: those things defined outside of science continued to haunt the scientific imagination. This study will refine the model of science as communicative action by introducing a previous ignored but important group—the Forteans—by expanding the chronological and national focus from nineteenth-century Britain to twentieth-century Britain and America, and by introducing new categories of analysis. It will also help build bridges between the history of science and history, sociology, postcolonial studies, geography, and folklore. Finally, the resulting book will be aimed at a broad audience.
The Historical Problem: How Is Science Made
The development of constructivist histories of science since the 1970s has provided deep insights in the production of scientific knowledge (Golinski 1998), but their proliferation has also revealed a new set of pressing questions. Constructivist histories of science focus on the social context that makes science possible—although what exactly counts as context varies greatly. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump, for example, showed how politics during Britain’s tumultuous seventeenth century influenced scientific practices at the Royal Academy (Shapin and Schaffer 1985). Robert Kohler’s Lords of the Fly, while explicitly drawing on the work of Shapin, focused on the sociology of several interacting laboratories and the institutional structures in which they were embedded (Kohler 1994). Michael Lynch studied the way that language shaped work in a single laboratory (Lynch 1984). But whether the focus is on large-scale cultural currents or small-scale sociology, whether the focus is on the social organization of scientific work, the quotidian practices, or the language—whatever the exact categories of analysis—these constructivist histories agree in showing that scientific work is not the application of transcendental methods, nor the direct communion between humans and nature, but a social process shaped by the time and place in which it is done. Although there remains debate over the constructivist vision, it seems fair to say that this has been the dominant most productive mode of work in the history of science over the last three decades.
Immediately, though, these studies raise the question: How does science travel? If its creation relies on specific contexts—national ideologies, local practices, ways of speaking—how does science become universal, the results of Robert Boyle’s experiments on the air pump and T. H. Morgan’s research on fruit flies taught to high school students? An answer of sorts was implicit in even some of the earliest constructivist histories. In their seminal enthnography of Jonas Salk’s laboratory during the late 1970s, for instance, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar focused on the way in which writings about the natural world increasingly lost their hesitancy and became established facts (Latour and Woolgar 1979). Shapin argued that Boyle communicated his results in certain calculated ways—prolix and modest—to encourage its acceptance by others (Shapin 1984). Jan Golinski examined Antoine Lavoisier’s methods for spreading his ideas about chemistry (Golinski 1992). The problem with focusing on rhetorical strategies, though, is that one must assume how the public understood them, rather than demonstrate it—Boyle may have thought he was being persuasive, but was he? By the late 1980s, Latour offered a different way to account for the spread of scientific knowledge, along side Michel Callon and other advocates of what came to be called Actor-Network Theory. Latour argued that, in doing science, what scientists actually did was rebuild society in such a way that their theories worked—and the more of world that could be remade, the longer distances that science could travel; the sciences that spread best were those shepherded by people who could best enroll others and remake society (Latour 1987). This approach, however, foundered on the problem of power (Harding 2008: 36-48). Actor-Network theorists paid little attention to existing social structures, to social orders that might resist being remade or that might constrain the activities of scientists. This weakness is probably best captured in Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology in which he explains the France’s decision not to develop an extremely complicated transportation project by an insufficient love for the technology (Latour 1996). Clearly, a better explanation would look at entrenched powers and their interests, but, because Latour assumes that society is infinitely malleable, he forecloses that possibility without investigation.
Over the last decade or so, a more nuanced, more robust model for understanding the spread of scientific knowledge has emerged in the work of Jonathan Topham, James Secord, Thomas Gieryn and others. These studies set aside interest in the work practices of science and concentrate on the way scientific ideas are communicated—but they do not set aside an interest in practice, but rather extend it. The focus is not just on the practices by which scientists tried to make their arguments persuasive, but the practices by which the rest of the world read, interpreted, and used those ideas—and thus this method expands our understanding of the diversity of historical actors involved in the construction of scientific knowledge, investigating those usually excluded from histories of science by borrowing techniques from histories of reading and studies of audience reception (Secord 2004). Topham, for instance, studied the way that the Bridgewater Treatises were received (Topham 1998) and James Secord studied the reactions to Robert Chambers’s anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in Victorian England (Secord 2003). By reconstructing the many ways that the book was read, Secord could offer a new interpretation of science in the nineteenth-century. Previously, Darwin’s Origin of Species was seen as sparking a revolution in thought by prompting Victorians to consider that they were the product of material evolution. Secord shows that Chambers precipitated the crisis in faith, and that Darwin’s work resolved many of the tensions.
These works also build on earlier constructivist (and Actor-Network) accounts in emphasizing that the definition of science is not self-evident but actively negotiated. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Steven Shapin, Barry Barnes, and Roger Cooter showed that phrenology became a pseudoscience not because its practices were inherently unscientific but because various social groups had vested interests in the truth or falsity of phrenology and it was these debates—as much as empirical evidence—which shaped phrenology’s fate (Shapin 1975; Shapin and Barnes 1976; Cooter 1984). Sociologist of science Thomas Gieryn developed these ideas in his Cultural Boundaries of Science, which argued that science was not created in the laboratory but in the public arena—again shifting attention to the communicative practices of scientists (Gieryn 1999). The definition of science resulted from public contests over the meaning of the word, as when John Tyndall differentiated science from religion and mechanics in Victorian England (Gieryn 1999: 37-64), or when eugenics, once an accepted part of science, became reinterpreted as pseudoscience (Marks 2009: 129-161). These communicative practices, though, have far-reaching effects—helping to construct not only science but society, as well, just as Latour had suggested. This is true especially in the years after World War II, when practices and ideas called science were given a great deal of deference and power (Bensaude-Vincent 2009). Defining what counts as science also defines who has the authority to speak for nature, who has access to the machinery of knowledge-making, who is an insider, and who is an outsider. But these more recent investigations have been sensitive to already existing power structures and their ability to constrain debate—the networks created by scientists are not infinitely malleable (Galison 1997: 803-844). For example, in Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, Joshua Buhs examines attempts by cryptozoologists to establish themselves as legitimate scientists; he explains their failure by their relative lack of power—cryptozoologists were tightly tied to the working class and so were often not as convincing as their middle-class antagonists (Buhs 2009).
There are some problems with this model of science as communicative practice. Most notably, it is based largely on studies of Great Britain in the nineteenth-century (Topham 2009). Britain in this era, though, cannot be taken as representative. Victorian and Edwardian Britain had several competing areas of cultural power in addition to science, and so those who resisted science or offered alternative interpretations had social and cultural power not always available to those living in different circumstances (Turner 1978). At the same time, science was particularly potent in nineteenth-century England, the cult of Isaac Newton—among other factors—granting science an authority it might have lacked in other times and other places (Dobbs 2000). As well, there were dedicated attempts to proselytize science in Britian which may not have exact equivalents elsewhere and elsewhen (Shapin and Barnes 1977). Second, there is a great body of work on how so-called how the line between science and pseudoscience was contructed (Winter 1998)—and, in other contexts, the complicated relationship between occult forms of knowledge and science (Harrington 1996; Owen 2004; Saler 2006; Sharp 2006; Monroe 2008)—but far less attention has been paid to those forms of knowledge that are defined as pseudoscience after they have been cast out of science proper. What happens to that knowledge? What happens to the networks of people that communicate it? Do they maintain some kind of cultural power? How is that power sustained, and what are the consequences of it?
These, though, are not crippling problems, but questions that can be addressed. What is needed, first, are additional case studies that extend beyond nineteenth-century Britain and test the results of the earlier studies against different spatial and temporal contexts. Second, the problem of what happens to knowledge after it is excluded from science can be answered by turning to work in sociology, post-colonial studies, geography, and folklore. Responding by calls to “provincialize the West” (Chakrabarty 2000), a number of scholars have shown that that modernity is “haunted” (Gordon 2008)—that excluded people and forms of knowledge, including pseudoscience—do not disappear but circulate through the First World (Pile 2006), sometimes causing social change and sometimes structuring responses to scientific artifacts such as cameras, telegraphs, and cathode rays (Sconce 2000; Dixon 2007). Folklorists have also done a great deal to understand how people reinvent official knowledge to make sense of their place in the world. One way to consider pseudoscience from this perspective is to see it as a legend—which in the technical parlance of folklore means “a proposition for belief,” something that may not be true, but that may be, as well (Fine 1992: 2; D¾gh 2001: 6-7). These legends, then, can be seen as potential knowledge that may, at some time, be remapped into science. For example, meteors were considered popular delusions throughout much of the nineteenth century before being written back into science (Westrum 1978); most scientists considered the idea of using rockets to fly into space a fantasy during the early part of the twentieth-century, even as fans of science fiction relished the idea (Pendle 2005; Siddiqi 2008); and alchemical ideas structured the response of some physicists to radioactivity (Morrison 2007). All of which shows that viewing science as communicative practice is an important way for understanding the creation and travel of science, yet its insights still can be improved and deepened through further research. A study of the Forteans will address these problems.
The Forteans: Expanding the Model of Science as Communicative Practice
The Forteans were a loosely allied group of British and Americans taken by the work of Charles Fort. Fort himself had been an author who in the fifteen or so years after World War I spent a great deal of time in the libraries of New York and London reading through old newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals looking for what he called “damned facts”—events that were reported as true but could not be explained by science, such as red rain, falls of frogs, and strange lights in the sky. Fort compiled these into four books, which gained something of a cult following among the literary set, thanks in large part to the support of Theodore Dreiser, Fort’s friend and advocate. In 1931, the author Tiffany Thayer established a Fortean Society, dedicated to promoting Fort’s works. Initially, the Society was a social club, but, after Fort’s death, its official magazine became a venue for Thayer to air his radical skepticism—about science, religion, and politics—as well as his conspiracy theories. While Thayer was venting his spleen in the pages of The Fortean Society Magazine (later retitled Doubt), a diverse group of other people in the U.S. and Great Britain came to identify themselves as Forteans, sometimes allying with Thayer’s group, sometimes striking out on their own. Their number included the naturalist Ivan Sanderson, the writer Anthony Boucher, and many others—indeed, most of them—far less famous (Knight 1970; Steinmeyer 2008).
It is easy to see how a study of the Forteans can apply the model of science as communicative practice. Forteans were dedicated readers of scientific reporting—in the mainstream press as well as in more specialized publications—hunting for inexplicable anomalies, which they used to build various theories of how the universe worked. Forteans, for example, were among the earliest proponents of studying UFOs, and offered a range of interpretations of these lights in the sky, explaining them as disturbances in the atmosphere, interdimensional objects, and vehicles of extraterrestrials. Paying attention to how the various Forteans made sense of these anomalies is a way of discovering what Secord calls “conventions” of circulation and reading (Secord 2004: 664). For instance, Forteans in San Diego interpreted flying saucers through Theosophical ideas, thus translating the language of this “first new age” (Jenkins 2000: 70) into a vocabulary more adapted to the twentieth-century. Meanwhile, in the San Francisco Bay Area, Forteans were drawn mostly from fans of the pulp Weird Tales and they studied Fortean reports to prove to themselves that the universe’s peculiarities were greater than scientists understood, or even imagined. Similarly close readings can define other modes of reading and making knowledge—for though it is often thought that such ideas are ad hoc, recent research suggests otherwise, that there is, at least sometimes, a logic to them (Laubach 2007). This study, however, will not just be another example of science as communicative practice, but extend the model. Because Forteans were both British and American, it will be possible to see how British traditions developed from the nineteenth century—the locus of most research—into the twentieth century, and then also compare those developments to activities in the U.S. Were there conventions of reading that were the same on both sides of the Atlantic? How did national and local contexts effect understanding of scientific anomalies?
A study of the Forteans will also offer an opportunity to see how the boundaries of science were drawn, how such demarcation compared in Britian and the U.S., and how it changed (or not) since the nineteenth century. Fortean ideas prompted a range of responses from scientists and defenders of scientific authority. Some scientists stood up for Fortean heresies. Others disputed them and tried to define the anomalies outside of science—as fantasies or mis-identifications. Unidentified flying objects were variously allowed into and set outside the bounds of science. The disputes also helped to structure post-War society—establishing who had the authority to speak in the name of science, who was a legitimate part of the public, and who an outsider. Ivan Sanderson, for instance, was sometimes allowed to speak as a scientist, but at other times was castigated as a fabulist. Watching these various battles unfold will allow for the gauging of the cultural strength of Forteans compared to nineteenth-century consumers of science. It will also uncover the networks of power that were instrumental in defining the boundaries of science in the years after World War II.
Over the course of the twentieth century, most Fortean ideas came to be defined as pseudoscience—which accounts for the lack of scholarly attention to them—but that hardly proves their lack of importance. Indeed, it is the fact that so much Fortean thought was cast from science that makes Forteans a useful subject for extending the model of science as communicative action. To this point, little attention has been paid to the fate of ideas after they are labeled pseudoscience; this project rights that imbalance. Forteans, for the most part, considered themselves rational, heirs to the Enlightenment, and there is something to that argument—it is more than self-serving. The anomalies explored by Forteans were potential knowledge—as Thomas Kuhn would make clear in 1962. While no Fortean damned facts have been the basis for scientific knowledge yet, there are precedents and a developing literature that adds some support to the Forteans’s claims. Folklorists and anthropologists have begun taking seriously reports of anomalies, and have found that scientific knowledge might need to be expanded to make room for what before were considered only legends or pimitive beliefs (Young and Goulet 1994; Walker 1995; Ellis 2001: 96-100; Goulet and Miller 2007). For example, folklorist David Hufford has argued that the Old Hag legend might be rooted in a poorly understood mechanism of sleep psychology (Hufford 1982). This quest for scientific understanding was central to the Fortean project; Forteans were hyper-rational in wanting science to explain everything (Daston 2000: 24-26)—and thus their work contributed to the power of science by assuming that science was the only arbiter of truth.
At the same time, however, they challenged the authority of science. Some Forteans were tricksters or hoaxers, playing with ideas they knew to be untrue in order to make others think more carefully about the power of science to constrain imagination (Saler 2004). Other Forteans sustained interest in alternative forms of knowledge—such as Theosophy, Buddhism, and magic—which had been popular during the first part of the century but lost their luster after World War II only to be rediscovered in the 1970s (Jenkins 2000: 170). Forteans also influenced—and were often writers of—science fiction and related genres (Derleth 1952). Sometimes seen as the lapdog of science, science fiction can also be read as a critique of science, a championing of humanistic values against instrumental reason. Fortean science fiction fit this last mold, pushing against the limits and power of science. It kept alive debates over the line between science and peudoscience. Fortean heresies thus haunted the twentieth century. They were the basis of fantasies, of alternative forms of knowledge, and of legends that gave meaning to lives by borrowing from the legitimacy of science at the same time they challenged its boundaries. Even after being excluded—defined as pseudoscience—Fort’s damned facts had cultural power.
The Forteans: Science, Pseudoscience, and the Making of the World Overview
This project will explore the idea that science can be understood as a form of communicative action through a case study of the Forteans. The Forteans were a loosely allied group of British and Americans united in their esteem for the author Charles Fort and their interest in scientific anomalies. Their researches, writings, and presentations both affirmed the power of science to define truth and prompted public contests over the meaning of science. The outcome of these battles helped to create science. But the results were never stable: those things defined outside of science continued to haunt the scientific imagination. This study will refine the model of science as communicative action by introducing a previous ignored but important group—the Forteans—by expanding the chronological and national focus from nineteenth-century Britain to twentieth-century Britain and America, and by introducing new categories of analysis. It will also help build bridges between the history of science and history, sociology, postcolonial studies, geography, and folklore. Finally, the resulting book will be aimed at a broad audience.
The Historical Problem: How Is Science Made
The development of constructivist histories of science since the 1970s has provided deep insights in the production of scientific knowledge (Golinski 1998), but their proliferation has also revealed a new set of pressing questions. Constructivist histories of science focus on the social context that makes science possible—although what exactly counts as context varies greatly. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump, for example, showed how politics during Britain’s tumultuous seventeenth century influenced scientific practices at the Royal Academy (Shapin and Schaffer 1985). Robert Kohler’s Lords of the Fly, while explicitly drawing on the work of Shapin, focused on the sociology of several interacting laboratories and the institutional structures in which they were embedded (Kohler 1994). Michael Lynch studied the way that language shaped work in a single laboratory (Lynch 1984). But whether the focus is on large-scale cultural currents or small-scale sociology, whether the focus is on the social organization of scientific work, the quotidian practices, or the language—whatever the exact categories of analysis—these constructivist histories agree in showing that scientific work is not the application of transcendental methods, nor the direct communion between humans and nature, but a social process shaped by the time and place in which it is done. Although there remains debate over the constructivist vision, it seems fair to say that this has been the dominant most productive mode of work in the history of science over the last three decades.
Immediately, though, these studies raise the question: How does science travel? If its creation relies on specific contexts—national ideologies, local practices, ways of speaking—how does science become universal, the results of Robert Boyle’s experiments on the air pump and T. H. Morgan’s research on fruit flies taught to high school students? An answer of sorts was implicit in even some of the earliest constructivist histories. In their seminal enthnography of Jonas Salk’s laboratory during the late 1970s, for instance, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar focused on the way in which writings about the natural world increasingly lost their hesitancy and became established facts (Latour and Woolgar 1979). Shapin argued that Boyle communicated his results in certain calculated ways—prolix and modest—to encourage its acceptance by others (Shapin 1984). Jan Golinski examined Antoine Lavoisier’s methods for spreading his ideas about chemistry (Golinski 1992). The problem with focusing on rhetorical strategies, though, is that one must assume how the public understood them, rather than demonstrate it—Boyle may have thought he was being persuasive, but was he? By the late 1980s, Latour offered a different way to account for the spread of scientific knowledge, along side Michel Callon and other advocates of what came to be called Actor-Network Theory. Latour argued that, in doing science, what scientists actually did was rebuild society in such a way that their theories worked—and the more of world that could be remade, the longer distances that science could travel; the sciences that spread best were those shepherded by people who could best enroll others and remake society (Latour 1987). This approach, however, foundered on the problem of power (Harding 2008: 36-48). Actor-Network theorists paid little attention to existing social structures, to social orders that might resist being remade or that might constrain the activities of scientists. This weakness is probably best captured in Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology in which he explains the France’s decision not to develop an extremely complicated transportation project by an insufficient love for the technology (Latour 1996). Clearly, a better explanation would look at entrenched powers and their interests, but, because Latour assumes that society is infinitely malleable, he forecloses that possibility without investigation.
Over the last decade or so, a more nuanced, more robust model for understanding the spread of scientific knowledge has emerged in the work of Jonathan Topham, James Secord, Thomas Gieryn and others. These studies set aside interest in the work practices of science and concentrate on the way scientific ideas are communicated—but they do not set aside an interest in practice, but rather extend it. The focus is not just on the practices by which scientists tried to make their arguments persuasive, but the practices by which the rest of the world read, interpreted, and used those ideas—and thus this method expands our understanding of the diversity of historical actors involved in the construction of scientific knowledge, investigating those usually excluded from histories of science by borrowing techniques from histories of reading and studies of audience reception (Secord 2004). Topham, for instance, studied the way that the Bridgewater Treatises were received (Topham 1998) and James Secord studied the reactions to Robert Chambers’s anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in Victorian England (Secord 2003). By reconstructing the many ways that the book was read, Secord could offer a new interpretation of science in the nineteenth-century. Previously, Darwin’s Origin of Species was seen as sparking a revolution in thought by prompting Victorians to consider that they were the product of material evolution. Secord shows that Chambers precipitated the crisis in faith, and that Darwin’s work resolved many of the tensions.
These works also build on earlier constructivist (and Actor-Network) accounts in emphasizing that the definition of science is not self-evident but actively negotiated. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Steven Shapin, Barry Barnes, and Roger Cooter showed that phrenology became a pseudoscience not because its practices were inherently unscientific but because various social groups had vested interests in the truth or falsity of phrenology and it was these debates—as much as empirical evidence—which shaped phrenology’s fate (Shapin 1975; Shapin and Barnes 1976; Cooter 1984). Sociologist of science Thomas Gieryn developed these ideas in his Cultural Boundaries of Science, which argued that science was not created in the laboratory but in the public arena—again shifting attention to the communicative practices of scientists (Gieryn 1999). The definition of science resulted from public contests over the meaning of the word, as when John Tyndall differentiated science from religion and mechanics in Victorian England (Gieryn 1999: 37-64), or when eugenics, once an accepted part of science, became reinterpreted as pseudoscience (Marks 2009: 129-161). These communicative practices, though, have far-reaching effects—helping to construct not only science but society, as well, just as Latour had suggested. This is true especially in the years after World War II, when practices and ideas called science were given a great deal of deference and power (Bensaude-Vincent 2009). Defining what counts as science also defines who has the authority to speak for nature, who has access to the machinery of knowledge-making, who is an insider, and who is an outsider. But these more recent investigations have been sensitive to already existing power structures and their ability to constrain debate—the networks created by scientists are not infinitely malleable (Galison 1997: 803-844). For example, in Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, Joshua Buhs examines attempts by cryptozoologists to establish themselves as legitimate scientists; he explains their failure by their relative lack of power—cryptozoologists were tightly tied to the working class and so were often not as convincing as their middle-class antagonists (Buhs 2009).
There are some problems with this model of science as communicative practice. Most notably, it is based largely on studies of Great Britain in the nineteenth-century (Topham 2009). Britain in this era, though, cannot be taken as representative. Victorian and Edwardian Britain had several competing areas of cultural power in addition to science, and so those who resisted science or offered alternative interpretations had social and cultural power not always available to those living in different circumstances (Turner 1978). At the same time, science was particularly potent in nineteenth-century England, the cult of Isaac Newton—among other factors—granting science an authority it might have lacked in other times and other places (Dobbs 2000). As well, there were dedicated attempts to proselytize science in Britian which may not have exact equivalents elsewhere and elsewhen (Shapin and Barnes 1977). Second, there is a great body of work on how so-called how the line between science and pseudoscience was contructed (Winter 1998)—and, in other contexts, the complicated relationship between occult forms of knowledge and science (Harrington 1996; Owen 2004; Saler 2006; Sharp 2006; Monroe 2008)—but far less attention has been paid to those forms of knowledge that are defined as pseudoscience after they have been cast out of science proper. What happens to that knowledge? What happens to the networks of people that communicate it? Do they maintain some kind of cultural power? How is that power sustained, and what are the consequences of it?
These, though, are not crippling problems, but questions that can be addressed. What is needed, first, are additional case studies that extend beyond nineteenth-century Britain and test the results of the earlier studies against different spatial and temporal contexts. Second, the problem of what happens to knowledge after it is excluded from science can be answered by turning to work in sociology, post-colonial studies, geography, and folklore. Responding by calls to “provincialize the West” (Chakrabarty 2000), a number of scholars have shown that that modernity is “haunted” (Gordon 2008)—that excluded people and forms of knowledge, including pseudoscience—do not disappear but circulate through the First World (Pile 2006), sometimes causing social change and sometimes structuring responses to scientific artifacts such as cameras, telegraphs, and cathode rays (Sconce 2000; Dixon 2007). Folklorists have also done a great deal to understand how people reinvent official knowledge to make sense of their place in the world. One way to consider pseudoscience from this perspective is to see it as a legend—which in the technical parlance of folklore means “a proposition for belief,” something that may not be true, but that may be, as well (Fine 1992: 2; D¾gh 2001: 6-7). These legends, then, can be seen as potential knowledge that may, at some time, be remapped into science. For example, meteors were considered popular delusions throughout much of the nineteenth century before being written back into science (Westrum 1978); most scientists considered the idea of using rockets to fly into space a fantasy during the early part of the twentieth-century, even as fans of science fiction relished the idea (Pendle 2005; Siddiqi 2008); and alchemical ideas structured the response of some physicists to radioactivity (Morrison 2007). All of which shows that viewing science as communicative practice is an important way for understanding the creation and travel of science, yet its insights still can be improved and deepened through further research. A study of the Forteans will address these problems.
The Forteans: Expanding the Model of Science as Communicative Practice
The Forteans were a loosely allied group of British and Americans taken by the work of Charles Fort. Fort himself had been an author who in the fifteen or so years after World War I spent a great deal of time in the libraries of New York and London reading through old newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals looking for what he called “damned facts”—events that were reported as true but could not be explained by science, such as red rain, falls of frogs, and strange lights in the sky. Fort compiled these into four books, which gained something of a cult following among the literary set, thanks in large part to the support of Theodore Dreiser, Fort’s friend and advocate. In 1931, the author Tiffany Thayer established a Fortean Society, dedicated to promoting Fort’s works. Initially, the Society was a social club, but, after Fort’s death, its official magazine became a venue for Thayer to air his radical skepticism—about science, religion, and politics—as well as his conspiracy theories. While Thayer was venting his spleen in the pages of The Fortean Society Magazine (later retitled Doubt), a diverse group of other people in the U.S. and Great Britain came to identify themselves as Forteans, sometimes allying with Thayer’s group, sometimes striking out on their own. Their number included the naturalist Ivan Sanderson, the writer Anthony Boucher, and many others—indeed, most of them—far less famous (Knight 1970; Steinmeyer 2008).
It is easy to see how a study of the Forteans can apply the model of science as communicative practice. Forteans were dedicated readers of scientific reporting—in the mainstream press as well as in more specialized publications—hunting for inexplicable anomalies, which they used to build various theories of how the universe worked. Forteans, for example, were among the earliest proponents of studying UFOs, and offered a range of interpretations of these lights in the sky, explaining them as disturbances in the atmosphere, interdimensional objects, and vehicles of extraterrestrials. Paying attention to how the various Forteans made sense of these anomalies is a way of discovering what Secord calls “conventions” of circulation and reading (Secord 2004: 664). For instance, Forteans in San Diego interpreted flying saucers through Theosophical ideas, thus translating the language of this “first new age” (Jenkins 2000: 70) into a vocabulary more adapted to the twentieth-century. Meanwhile, in the San Francisco Bay Area, Forteans were drawn mostly from fans of the pulp Weird Tales and they studied Fortean reports to prove to themselves that the universe’s peculiarities were greater than scientists understood, or even imagined. Similarly close readings can define other modes of reading and making knowledge—for though it is often thought that such ideas are ad hoc, recent research suggests otherwise, that there is, at least sometimes, a logic to them (Laubach 2007). This study, however, will not just be another example of science as communicative practice, but extend the model. Because Forteans were both British and American, it will be possible to see how British traditions developed from the nineteenth century—the locus of most research—into the twentieth century, and then also compare those developments to activities in the U.S. Were there conventions of reading that were the same on both sides of the Atlantic? How did national and local contexts effect understanding of scientific anomalies?
A study of the Forteans will also offer an opportunity to see how the boundaries of science were drawn, how such demarcation compared in Britian and the U.S., and how it changed (or not) since the nineteenth century. Fortean ideas prompted a range of responses from scientists and defenders of scientific authority. Some scientists stood up for Fortean heresies. Others disputed them and tried to define the anomalies outside of science—as fantasies or mis-identifications. Unidentified flying objects were variously allowed into and set outside the bounds of science. The disputes also helped to structure post-War society—establishing who had the authority to speak in the name of science, who was a legitimate part of the public, and who an outsider. Ivan Sanderson, for instance, was sometimes allowed to speak as a scientist, but at other times was castigated as a fabulist. Watching these various battles unfold will allow for the gauging of the cultural strength of Forteans compared to nineteenth-century consumers of science. It will also uncover the networks of power that were instrumental in defining the boundaries of science in the years after World War II.
Over the course of the twentieth century, most Fortean ideas came to be defined as pseudoscience—which accounts for the lack of scholarly attention to them—but that hardly proves their lack of importance. Indeed, it is the fact that so much Fortean thought was cast from science that makes Forteans a useful subject for extending the model of science as communicative action. To this point, little attention has been paid to the fate of ideas after they are labeled pseudoscience; this project rights that imbalance. Forteans, for the most part, considered themselves rational, heirs to the Enlightenment, and there is something to that argument—it is more than self-serving. The anomalies explored by Forteans were potential knowledge—as Thomas Kuhn would make clear in 1962. While no Fortean damned facts have been the basis for scientific knowledge yet, there are precedents and a developing literature that adds some support to the Forteans’s claims. Folklorists and anthropologists have begun taking seriously reports of anomalies, and have found that scientific knowledge might need to be expanded to make room for what before were considered only legends or pimitive beliefs (Young and Goulet 1994; Walker 1995; Ellis 2001: 96-100; Goulet and Miller 2007). For example, folklorist David Hufford has argued that the Old Hag legend might be rooted in a poorly understood mechanism of sleep psychology (Hufford 1982). This quest for scientific understanding was central to the Fortean project; Forteans were hyper-rational in wanting science to explain everything (Daston 2000: 24-26)—and thus their work contributed to the power of science by assuming that science was the only arbiter of truth.
At the same time, however, they challenged the authority of science. Some Forteans were tricksters or hoaxers, playing with ideas they knew to be untrue in order to make others think more carefully about the power of science to constrain imagination (Saler 2004). Other Forteans sustained interest in alternative forms of knowledge—such as Theosophy, Buddhism, and magic—which had been popular during the first part of the century but lost their luster after World War II only to be rediscovered in the 1970s (Jenkins 2000: 170). Forteans also influenced—and were often writers of—science fiction and related genres (Derleth 1952). Sometimes seen as the lapdog of science, science fiction can also be read as a critique of science, a championing of humanistic values against instrumental reason. Fortean science fiction fit this last mold, pushing against the limits and power of science. It kept alive debates over the line between science and peudoscience. Fortean heresies thus haunted the twentieth century. They were the basis of fantasies, of alternative forms of knowledge, and of legends that gave meaning to lives by borrowing from the legitimacy of science at the same time they challenged its boundaries. Even after being excluded—defined as pseudoscience—Fort’s damned facts had cultural power.
