12.2 THREE PERSPECTIVES ON CONCEPTUAL CHANGE

The language of innovation, development, and enterprise, which Schumpeter captured so neatly, is pervasive in discussions of conceptual change among historians. It provides a means for making sense of how historians have reconciled their insistence that disruptive change is the heart of the discipline, with their rejection of anything that smacks of teleology, determinism, reductionism and schematism.

We can start with the work of Quentin Skinner. Historians of political thought have long drawn on the language of innovation when describing the phenomenon of conceptual change. For example, the contextualist coun­terpart to dictionaries of political and ideological ‘keywords' is called Political Innovation and Conceptual Change.^[816] It seems likely that one inspiration for this title was a central figure in Skinner's earliest writings on conceptual change: the ‘innovating ideologist'. Skinner has often noted that conceptual change can come in the form of waves of neologisms or transvaluations of existing normative terms, but he has focused most of his attention on the kind of conceptual change that is brought about by innovators.^[817] Innovating ideologists seek to cast in a more favourable light what is, in the existing normative vocabulary of a society, a morally or politically questionable activ­ity.

One of Skinner's key examples of this kind of rhetorical enterprise involves the defenders of incipient ‘capitalist' practices in early-modern England. When Skinner first wrote on this topic, his aim had been to rethink Weber's famous thesis about the role of the Protestant work ethic in preparing the conditions for the rise of capitalism. Although a projected book on the topic was left in abeyance, Skinner did redeploy some of his findings in his methodological writings.^[820] As Weber had indicated, Elizabethan merchants and their advocates certainly had used the vocabulary of Protestant Christianity to describe commercial activities. The terms in question implied positive evaluations of the activities thus described; the purpose of using these descriptive-evaluative terms was to legitimate capitalist enterprise. The aim of these innovating ideologists was to recategorise a set of questionable social practices so as to remove the moral opprobrium that hindered their pursuit. Having often described these moves of the innovating ideologist in invidious terms as a ‘trick' or ‘sleight of hand', which turned on the ‘manipulation' of settled linguistic conventions, Skinner has come to insist upon the inherent possibility of rhetorical redescription of any behaviour that can be ranged under the names of the virtues and vices.^[821] In either case, however, the innovating ideologist is a quasi-entrepreneur who mobilises existing linguistic and cultural resources and deploys them in unfamiliar ways.

The innovating ideologist is neither a utopian nor a Realpolitiker, but someone who deals with ‘untoward' claims by using some possibilities as resources which are recognised as being available in the situation but which are not commonly used to alter the situation. To legitimate a change means thus, to persuade the audience to accept the view that it is really only a question of using some already legitimate possibilities in an unconventional manner.^[822]

Skinner's innovating ideologists, like Schumpeter's entrepreneurs, work with a stock of extant ‘resources' or habitual forms of categorisation. Innovation, in both cases, consists in putting these existing resources to novel uses. An ideological innovator, like a Schumpeterian entrepreneur, is not merely an ‘inventor' or keenly imaginative person: they are someone who actually acts to bring about the redeployment of existing resources - in the innovating ideologist's case by attempting to reclassify some existing, untoward form of behaviour. The innovating ideologist, like the entrepreneur, must be trying to bring about this effect - to exercise leadership in the use of language (and, by extension, moral or political categories). We shall return presently to this comparison between Skinner and Schumpeter.

Let us turn next to Thomas Kuhn's attempt to create a genuinely historical philosophy of science. If historians of political thought like Skinner have studied the mechanisms of innovation in politics and moral life, historians of science have done the same for scientific innovation. Like Skinner, Thomas Kuhn explicitly invoked the concept of innovation in his methodological writings. Indeed, he began using the term at the very same time that he first introduced the concept of the paradigm into his account of the enterprise (again, Kuhn's word) of ‘normal science'.

In Kuhn's theory, the ‘essential tension' that beset creative work in science could be found in its dependence on what he variously described as ‘traditionalism', ‘dogma', or ‘convergent thinking' within particular subdisci­plines. The creativity theorists were making a mistake, Kuhn maintained, in supposing that ‘flexibility and open-mindedness' were the ‘characteristics requisite for basic research'.^[825] His counter-thesis was that genuine break­throughs in science, as opposed to incremental increases in knowledge, were possible only because scientists within a given field or subdiscipline under­went through a process of ‘relatively dogmatic initiation into a pre-established problem-solving tradition that the student is neither invited nor equipped to evaluate'.^[826] The process of scientific education was thus a more-or-less authori­tarian exercise in closing down, for the initiate, open-ended or ambiguous thought-patterns, and the inculcation of a dogmatic commitment to specific ways of modelling problems and determining what would count as legitimate solutions to those problems.

Kuhn further filled out these ideas concerning the nature and sources of creativity in science in short comments for a conference held in i960 on the economics of innovation.^[830] At this time, the attempt to understand the eco­nomic dimensions of research and development was reaching a peak of intensity, for the same reasons that ‘creativity' had become a watchword within the American academy. What, economists were asking, was the optimal allocation of resources to invention (usually called research-and-develop- ment)? Could markets, even in theory, achieve such an optimal allocation, or must basic research be treated as a public good and (because of the market failure inherent in the production of optimal amounts of public goods) be provided, at least to some degree, by the state? In his responses to the economists, Kuhn made it clear that genuine innovation - the kind of creativity he was exploring in his work on scientific revolutions - was a feature of basic scientific work, and not of the work of engineers and ‘inventors' further downstream in the flow of scientific knowledge.

immersion.

I have stressed this additional feature of Kuhn's theory of scientific develop­ment in order to underscore the substantive content given to the concept of innovation in Kuhn's thought. Neither for Skinner nor for Kuhn is it an empty metaphor. Innovation begins with the innovator seizing on existing resources - a background of concepts or classifications - given to the scientist by their dogmatic initiation into the discipline. If innovation, as in Schumpeter, is about the reallocation of existing resources, their rearrangements in the service of new and entirely unforeseeable ends, then Kuhn's zeroing in on paradigms and the convergent thinking they promoted was itself not a simple addition to his prior theory of revolutions (which focused on consensus, not paradigms, as the source of convergent thinking) but a necessary and trans­formative feature of that theory. Only with that assumption in place could Kuhn claim that creativity in science - innovation, as he often called it - was made possible by dogmatic training. The realignment of conceptual categor­ies that occurred during a revolution could only happen in fields of inquiry marked by the hegemony of a paradigm communicated through textbooks.

Ian Hacking's writings on ‘human kinds' offer a further illustration of how conceptual change is theorised under the rubric of innovation and enterprise. ‘Innovation', it must be said, is not one of Hacking's words, but his exploration of the dynamic change built into the function of human kinds pursues many

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Kuhn, Comment on Donald W. MacKinnon, ‘Intellect and Motive in Scientific Inventors: Implications for Supply', in Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity, 379-84, at 383. of the same themes as Skinner's writings on ideological innovation. Moreover, the language of enterprise is unmistakable in Hacking's work on the human sciences.

Human kinds, as Hacking describes them, have some peculiar characteris­tics. For a class of behaviour to qualify as a human kind, it must have four properties. It must be, or have been, a ‘relevant' kind, namely a classification widely recognised and applied by the members of a society. It must be the kind of behaviour associated with people; that is, it must be behaviour explicable in terms of our concepts of persons, rather than animal behaviour that could be explained ethologically. It must be a kind of behaviour about which members of a society want to have knowledge, so as to enable intervention of some sort. Lastly, it must be a kind of behaviour that defines a particular type of person.^[831] Hacking has sought to demonstrate that, once we grasp these singular features of human kinds, as opposed to natural kinds, we will understand the way in which they generate, by their very nature, a dynamic process of radical cultural change.

Human kinds can produce major ideological or cultural changes because they recategorise, and place in a new moral light, an activity that did not previously hold the associations it does in its new classification. If this sounds like the enterprise of paradiastole, it both is and isn't: there are no rhetorical savants in Hacking's story, although there are armies of concerned profession­als who help to build the human kind into a component of a culture. Skinner has emphasised the kinship between his account of conceptual change and Hacking's treatment of human kinds. According to Skinner, Hacking's recon­struction of the history of the concept of child abuse exemplifies the process whereby ‘a virtue can come to be recognised as a vice'.^[832] The emergence of the human kind of ‘child abuse' in the 1960s bears the hallmarks of what Skinner calls ideological innovation. What would come, by the 1980s, to be identified as child abuse appeared to earlier generations as ‘wholesome discip­line in the rearing of children'.^[833] As Hacking observes, ‘no one had any glimmering, in i960, of what was going to count as child abuse in 1990'.^[834] Once the human kind began to take shape, and appear increasingly ‘relevant' within a society, then, in rapid order, there was a transvaluation of certain activities involved in the discipline of children. This is the moment of ideological innovation, which in the case of child abuse occurred in around 1980 or so. Actions and attitudes regarded as good practice in one generation were ‘viewed as cruelty in the next. Nothing in the conduct of adults need in the intervening period have changed. What will have changed, if the new evaluation is accepted, is the sensibility of the community.'^[835]

We have identified above some examples in Skinner's writings of this process of ideological innovation. What Hacking shows, in addition, is that the fashioning of these new human kinds creates entirely new forms of expertise, of authority, and new social sensibilities. Human kinds are mechan­isms for the production of new kinds of people. New kinds of persons are constructed by using these new forms of knowledge and the powers or capacities - of expert intervention, or punishment, and so on - that they provide. Because persons often absorb these categories into their own concep­tion of themselves as subjects, it follows that human kinds are not neutral descriptions of an existing social reality: they constitute, and change, the very reality they purport to describe. The changes they effect may in turn encour­age people to act in novel ways, to act, say, as victims of abuse, or as sufferers of a mental illness; or they may change their behaviour in the light of the new description, whether by resisting the application of the label or by changing the evaluative force it possesses. In the wake of such changes triggered by the classifications, new classifications, appropriate to the new situation, may be needed. Hacking calls this the ‘looping effect of human kinds'.

Truth, power, ethics - Hacking's analytical categories are avowedly borrowed from Foucault.^[836] Although there is nothing in these forms of analysis that directly suggests the language of enterprise, Hacking has been in the forefront of those who have emphasised that regimes of power/know- ledge are indeed, if only in a metaphorical sense, productive: as we have noted, they produce new kinds of persons. Hacking's discussion of the new possibil­ities for personhood opened up by new modes of power/knowledge is thick with references to the ‘manufacturing' and ‘invention' of new kinds of people. Speaking of the sudden profusion of diagnosed cases of multiple personality disorder around 1875, Hacking observes that the first such case ‘got the split­personality industry underway'.^[837]

No doubt this might be treated as a throwaway remark, but in fact the rhetoric of the sudden expansion of a new ‘industry' is a consistent feature of Hacking's work on human kinds. In the wake of innovations there emerge wholly new forms of enterprise. Hacking writes: ‘Social change creates new categories of people, but the counting [of such people in social statistics] is no mere report of developments. It elaborately, often philanthropically, creates new ways for people to be.'^[838] Not only do new possibilities for personhood, with no precedent in the antecedent culture, emerge at such moments. So, too, do new systems of knowledge: truths about the motives of suicides or what makes for excellence in waiting tables or the mark of the most innovative ‘scientists' and so on. And so also do new institutions for the exercise of power: new professions devoted to the therapeutic treatment of the mentally ill, for example, or voluntary groups devoted to defending the interests of patients. In Hacking's writings, these new persons, truths and techniques of power emerge in a dynamic fashion, just as a new, profitable industry will attract a deluge of capital, labour and entrepreneurial activity. For example, as soon as state bureaus began to recognise the significance of the statistics they had begun collecting, there followed in rapid order an ‘avalanche of printed numbers'; after the first diagnosis of a split personality, there followed a ‘rush of mul­tiples', and in their wake an expanding collection of clinicians, journals and conferences.^[839] Hacking has argued that these sudden emergences of new persons and forms of power/knowledge are often transient: a new human kind emerges, spreads quickly and fades soon thereafter, on the model of an ‘epidemic'.^[840] These are not permanent windows, then, being opened on to eternal truths about human nature: they are ‘culture-bound syndromes' or ‘transient' ways of being.