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— Written by Reece Barlow

I'm not proud to admit it, but for a large part of my academic life, I dismissed the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences as inferior to STEM. There is no nice way to put this: I was a snob who judged every discipline by the norms and assumptions of the one I knew best. Now, as I work to reinvent myself as a historian of science, a faint hangover from these foolish prejudices still lingers, making itself felt in my current work. Do not misunderstand: I am not attempting to adapt to a new research paradigm while simultaneously harbouring doubts about the legitimacy, value or rigour of my new field. Rather, my mind, trained for so many years in a rather narrow tradition of enquiry rooted in (post-)positivism, scientific realism and quantification, has now been opened to the vast array of epistemological and methodological orientations possible in historical research. Such possibilities have been, to my surprise, paralysing.

After recognising the folly of my dismissal of such research as less rigorous and less legitimate (perhaps even less real) than the experimental science I was trained to do, I find myself becoming unusually careful about making judgements about which epistemological, methodological or theoretical positions to adopt in my current work.

It is hard to explain in words what I found so challenging about the switch to historical research. In the biology I studied, a cell is a system which we model so that its functions and mechanisms may be elucidated in order to treat illness (which is the dysregulation of the system) in the human body (which is, itself, a system - but on a larger scale than a cell, of course). Despite the complexities of the systems under study, there is a relatively simple and incredibly stable implicit philosophy that underpins the whole endeavour. Perhaps more significantly, molecular biologists generally share a set of fundamental assumptions about what is studied, why it is studied and how it ought to be studied. In history, so far as I can tell, there is much less that I can take for granted about what a source can tell me and how I ought to approach its study.