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Historiography of science

Topic: Philosophy

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Short description: History and analysis of the history of science
File:Montucla - Histoire des mathématiques, 1758 - 277 (cropped).tif
Histoire Des Mathématiques (1758) by Jean-Étienne Montucla: "In which an account is given of its progress from its origin until our own day; wherein is set forth the overview and the development of the principal discoveries, the disputes to which they have given rise, and the principal traits of the lives of the most famous Mathematicians."
"Many shall pass through and knowledge shall be increased." - Bacon

Historiography of science is the history and analysis of the sub-discipline of history known as the history of science, including its disciplinary aspects and practices (methods, theories, schools), and controversies. Its subject is the variety of ways that science's past has been written about.

The earliest histories of science were written by scientists largely as celebrations of scientific progress. Scholars in the 19th and early 20th century frequently treated the history and philosophy of science as a single scholarly undertaking but the fields began to diverge under the influence of logical positivism, which demarcated scientific justification as the proper concern of philosophy, leaving scientific discovery to the historians.

The increasing professionalization of science history (i.e. the emergence of "history of science" as an independent field) in the 20th century and the entry of sociologists into the field caused friction with scientists and "practitioner" historians (practicing or retired scientists writing about their own fields). The divide has often centered on a disagreement over whether the history of science should be an accounting of scientific progress or a critical analysis of science as a cultural activity, a split in point-of-view that has been both exacerbated and reinforced by a wider cultural fracturing between the sciences and the humanities in the 20th century. Since the history of science requires a difficult intellectual "bilingualism" that straddles science and history, the polarization of the surrounding culture remains an inherent, and ongoing, challenge for the field.

Disagreement between scientists and non-scientists writing about the history of science reached a climax during the "science wars" of the 1990s when prominent scientists criticized sociologists and historians for ignoring the objective reality of nature in favor of political explanations when writing science history. Some science historians have acknowledged the reality of the divide but also argued that it can be bridged by scholars who are trained as both scientists and historians.[1][2]

Scientists

Narratives of progress

Internalism and externalism
Further information: Internalism and externalism
Internalism in the history of science is the claim, or view, that science develops due to its own internal and intellectualist logic that is independent of social influences. Internalist histories of science often focus on the rational reconstruction of scientific ideas - a "progressive succession of disembodied ideas"[3] - and consider the development of these ideas wholly within the scientific world.[4] Externalism, in contrast, is the claim, or view, that science is a product of broader social forces.[4] Externalist histories of science have a sociological, instead of philosophical, logic.

General historians have, historically, been inclined to leave the history of science to specialists.[5][6] The first histories of science, in the 18th century,[7] were instead written by Enlightenment-era scientists like Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725-1799),[8], Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783)[9] and Joseph Priestley (1733-1804)[10] who generally saw history as a pedagogic tool for celebrating the progress of human reason and/or as a narrative of a linear and progressive march toward the superior knowledge of the present.[11]Template:Sfnq Biographies of scientists were also popular in the 19th century, helping to amplify Newton's reputation as both a scientific genius and national hero in Great Britain,[12][13] and scientist-historian John William Draper advanced an influential conflict thesis between religion and science.[14] By the mid-20th century, however, historians specializing in the history of scienceTemplate:Sfnq began to disparage these earlier efforts.[15][16][17][18][19]Template:Sfnq[20][21] In particular, they criticized "practitioner" (i.e. scientist) historians for systematically neglecting primary sources,[22] failing to truly understand those sources when they didn't neglect them,[23] being oblivious to the social (i.e. "external") context of science[24] and favoring hagiographic stories of scientist-heroes and their myopic, misguided and/or prejudiced adversaries.[25]

Science wars

Main article: Philosophy:Science wars

While most scientists writing history of science have tended to favor an internalist approach, the Soviet physicist Boris Hessen (1893-1936) was a notable exception, arguing that even Newton’s physics was a direct product of the economic needs of 17th-century British capitalism.[26][27] Hessen’s externalist approach gained momentum over the following decades as sociologists entered the field, but it also eventually sparked a backlash from scientists and philosophers[28] in the 1990s who fiercely criticized sociologists and externalist historians for ignoring the objective reality of nature and for their position that the history of science should be written without regard for whether the theories involved were actually correct.Template:Sfnq The "frenzied confrontations"[29] of this conflict - later known as the science wars - were escalated by the book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science by the biologist Paul R. Gross and the mathematician Norman Levitt. The term itself was coined for a special 1996 issue of Social Text, a Duke University Press publication of postmodern critical theory, that featured multiple articles emphasizing the social construction of science.[30] The dispute gained significant media interest because of the Sokal hoax, which generated unusually wide public interest and transformed what had been a specialized academic debate about how science develops into a broader public controversy.[31]

Philosophers

Methods and justifications

File:Instauratio Magna 1620 (cropped).jpg
The title page of Francis Bacon's Novum Organum Scientiarum (1620) depicts a galleon passing between the mythical Pillars of Hercules that stand on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar, marking the exit from the well-charted waters of the Mediterranean into the unknowns of the Atlantic Ocean. The Pillars have been smashed through by European sailors, leading to the discovery of previously unknown continents. Bacon argues that a new method for attaining knowledge will begin a similar era of new discovery. The Latin tag across the bottom – Multi pertransibunt & augebitur scientia – means "Many will travel and knowledge will be increased." The page was liberally copied from Andrés García de Céspedes's Regimiento de Navegación, published in 1606.[32]

The origins of the philosophy of science as a field of inquiry distinct from epistemology extend back to Francis Bacon's (1561-1626) Novum Organum ("true directions concerning the interpretation of nature") and René Descartes' (1596-1650) Discourse on Method (full title: "Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences") and then continue with the 2nd edition of Isaac Newton's (1643-1727) Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica and David Hume's (1711-1776) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in the 18th century.

19th-century scholars, including the philosopher and mathematician (and "father of sociology"[33]) Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (1838-1916), frequently treated the history and philosophy of science as a single scholarly undertaking where the study of what science had been (its history) and what science ought to be (its methods and justifications) were productively intermingled.[34] Comte and Mach were associated with the philosophical school of positivism, which also advanced ideas for the reform of history generally. "Historical" positivists argued that historians should pursue the objective truth of the past by allowing historical sources to "speak for themselves", without additional interpretation.[35] The heavy emphasis placed by historical positivists on documentary sources led to the development of methods of source criticism, which seek to expunge bias and uncover original sources in their pristine state.[36]

Under the influence of logical positivism in the early 20th century, the fields of philosophy of science and history of science began to separate.[37] The philosopher of science Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953) introduced a distinction between the "context of discovery" (e.g. how scientists come up with ideas) and the "context of justification" (i.e. how those ideas are justified). The latter was demarcated as the proper domain of philosophy while the former was assigned to the attention of historians who, "chary about using the historical record to address...questions...about the justification of science", agreed to the divorce.[38]

Paradigms

Main article: Philosophy:Paradigm shift
Thomas Kuhn is credited with coining the term "paradigm shift" to describe the creation and evolution of scientific theories.

Although most contemporary science historians now completely eschew philosophy a small, but influential, handful of scholars emerged in the 1960s to challenge the increasing separation of the history of science from the philosophy of science.[39][40] In the "hyper-influential" The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) introduced the idea of "paradigm shift" in science, which is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. Kuhn wrote that while a given paradigm shift in science might occur for rational (or philosophic) reasons,[41] at other times the shift happens for reasons that may have little to do with the objective merits of the science involved.[42] By emphasizing the sociological nature of at least some paradigm shifts, however, Structure had the effect of distancing the history of science even further from philosophy. While Kuhn viewed himself as a philosopher-historian, the ironic impact of Structure was to even further exile philosophical questions from the practice of the history of science.Template:Sfnq

The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) argued that scientific knowledge is not cumulative or progressive and that there can be no demarcation in terms of method between science and any other form of investigation[43] The philosopher of science Gerd Buchdahl (1914-2001) wrote that Kuhn and Joseph Agassi (1927-2023)[44] had demonstrated that historiographical views greatly influence the writing of the history of science. In Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (1971), the philosopher of science Jerome Ravetz's (1929-) referred to the role of the scientific community, as a social construct, in accepting or rejecting (objective) scientific knowledge.[45] Although his studies of scientific practice were at one time associated with social constructionist[46] approaches to the philosophy of science, the philosopher Bruno Latour diverged significantly from such approaches and later insisted that he was interested in helping to rebuild trust in science and that some of the authority of science needed to be regained.[47] According to Latour, the originality of science studies lies in demonstrating that facts are both real and constructed.[48][49]

Historians

Professionalization

See also: History:Professionalization and institutionalization of history

From its modest beginnings early in the century, the history of science became firmly institutionalized in the United States between the 1950s and 1970s through a rapid expansion of academic programs and departments.[50] I. Bernard Cohen (1914-2003) was the first person to receive a PhD in the History of Science in the U.S. in 1947[51][52] but, by the 1970s, scores of PhDs were being awarded each year in the U.S. By the end of the century, the history of science possessed all the institutional paraphernalia of a mature discipline, including graduate schools, research institutes, professional associations, specialized journals,Template:Sfnq conferences and awards, even if its dedicated university departments remained fewer and smaller than those of more established disciplines.[53][54][52]

Cohen received his undergraduate degree in mathematics before becoming a graduate student in the history of science. He considered the completion of the first completely new translation into English in almost two centuries of Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica[55] to be his most important work.[56][57] Other members of the first generation of professional historians of science followed a similar professional path (i.e. training first in the sciences). Alistair Crombie (1915–1996) earned a PhD in biology and zoology and worked for several years as a zoologist before pivoting to history.[58] Charles Gillispie (1918–2015), who graduated with a degree in chemistry before earning his PhD in history,[59] was the main editor of the massive (20 volume) Dictionary of Scientific Biography.

Whig history

Main article: Religion:Whig history
File:Herbert Butterfield (1).jpg
Sir Herbert Butterfield, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge (1963–1968)

The historian and philosopher of history Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979) published The Whig Interpretation of History in 1931,[60] a book which would later come to have an enormous impact on science historians.Template:Sfnq Butterfield invented the label of "whig history" for historical narratives which interpret past events in terms of the present.Template:Sfnq

Butterfield argued that writing history as a narrative of progress leads to the mistaken belief that the progressive sequence of events is "a line of causation", tempting the historian to go no further to investigate the causes of historical change.[61] The focus on the present can also lead the historian to a special kind of "abridgement", selecting only those events that seem important from the present point of view or which serve the purposes of creating a narrative with "drama and apparent moral clarity".Template:SfnqTemplate:Sfnq He also criticised it for modernising the past:

...the result [of whig history] is that to many of us [historical figures] seem much more modern than they really were, and even when we have corrected this impression by closer study we find it difficult to keep in mind the differences between their world and ours.[62]

Whig history also easily lends itself to a view of history that is populated by heroes on the side of progress (or some other cherished modern value) while their confused, misguided or villainous opponentsTemplate:Sfnq[63] are portrayed, at best, as a "dummy that acts as a better foil to the grand whig virtues".[64]

In place of a view of history as following some sort of inevitable or structural pattern, Butterfield urged historians to pay attention to the accidental and contingent nature of historical events[65] and "to evoke a certain sensibility towards the past, the sensibility which studies the past 'for the sake of the past', which delights in the concrete and the complex, which 'goes out to meet the past', which searches for 'unlikenesses between past and present'".[66]

Specialization

Influenced by Butterfield, many of the professionalizing mid 20th-century historians of science saw the entire previous history of the history of science, written primarily by scientists, as a sustained centuries-long exercise in whiggism:[15]Template:Sfnq[67][21]

By the mid-1970s, it had become commonplace among historians of science to employ the terms "Whig" and "Whiggish", often accompanied by one or more of "hagiographic", "internalist", "triumphalist", even "positivist", to denigrate grand narratives of scientific progress....post-WWII champions of the newly professionalized history of science...were out to establish a critical distance between the history of science and the teaching and promotion of the sciences. In particular, they were suspicious of the grand celebratory and didactic narratives of scientific discovery and progress...[68]

Template:History of science sidebar The professionalization of the history of science has been accompanied by a prodigious and proliferating specialization, with the field seeming to strive to match the protean diversity of modern science itself.[69] Butterfield called such specialization "technical history", and he said it was the counterpart to "abridged" (whig) history.Template:Sfnq As the historian Roy Porter notes, "in specialization lies safety" (from whiggism). By restricting their inquiries to extremely specific and/or highly technical niches and producing micro-studies, science historians are almost guaranteed to make themselves invulnerable to charges of whiggism. But some observers, including Porter, warn that this defensive strategy may have a cost:

...there are dangers too in the alternatives to Whig history. On the one hand looms the prospect of overspecialisation, narrowness and fragmentation. Few general historians are any longer prepared to chance their arm at writing the histories of whole societies over spans of centuries; and historians of science have caught the same disease. Even at the level of student textbooks, professional historians of science have ceased to write synoptic histories of science.[70]

The historian William Cronon insists that "[a]bridgement - and with it, by Butterfield’s own argument, whiggish history - is inescapable":

...without abridgement, there can be no history. Historians distill the nearly infinite records of the past in order to impose some semblance of order on what would otherwise feel like overwhelming chaos. This is all the more true when they seek to write for audiences other than their colleagues, whose patience for historical technicalities far surpasses that of the public. And because nonhistorians often do want to know how history relates to their own lives, there is no evading their demand for narratives that show how the present did indeed emerge from the past...Whenever historians seek to make their knowledge accessible to a wider world - whether in books, classrooms, museums, videos, websites, or blogs - they unfailingly abridge, simplify, analyze, synthesize, dramatize, and render judgments about why things happened as they did in the past, and why people should still care today.[71]

Cronon says that "historians exist to explain the past to the present" and notes that Butterfield's own history of the Scientific Revolution "would seem to partake of at least a little whiggishness itself."Template:Sfnq

Sociologists

Constructionism

While earlier scholars had advocated to a greater or lesser extent for the importance of considering external (i.e. outside of science) and/or non-empirical and non-rational social factors when trying to explain when or where science happens, the emergence of Sociology of Scientific Knowledge ("SSK") in the 1970s extended, amplified and intensified the earlier debate. "SSK explicitly adopted Kuhn at his philosophically most extravagant, and radicalized that stance even further"[72] by wholly embracing externalist explanations related to the social organization of scientific activity[73] and arguing that scientific knowledge has no special epistemological status compared to ordinary, non-scientific knowledge:

......what counts as knowledge in most social contexts it is tempting to call "customarily accepted belief". It is sustained by consensus and authority much as custom is sustained. It is developed and modified collectively, much as custom is developed and modified. This we might call the standard sociological conception of knowledge, the conception which both inspires and is confirmed by most of the empirical studies of knowledge undertaken in the social sciences. On inductive grounds one might expect this standard, widely applicable conception to make good sense of scientific knowledge and of the distinctions between knowledge and mere belief sustained and enforced by natural scientists. And so indeed it does. Scientific knowledge assimilates to the standard conception very readily, and much of profound importance can be discerned and understood when science is analysed in this way. But this is something that has only readily been acknowledged and accepted over the last two decades, and even now a sociological conception of scientific knowledge is still vigorously challenged and opposed...[74]

While SSK-influenced sociologists do not deny the existence of "the real world", they do argue that reality is not "determinative" of what scientists believe.Template:Sfnq Instead these sociologists see science as "just another form of culture, rather than...something special and set apart"[75] and scientific knowledge as something that is constructed rather than discovered.

Science of sociology

Just as sociologists have turned a skeptical eye on science, many scientists (as well as some philosophers and historians) have returned the favor, accusing some sociologists of deep ignorance about and hostility towards the field they are purporting to study, and a multi-generational intellectual laziness and complacency that has left their entire field unequipped to offer anything more than a primitive caricature of the vast intellectual landscape they have never bothered to map.[76][77]Template:SfnqTemplate:SfnqTemplate:SfnqTemplate:Sfnq

Terminology

As early as the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1910-1911), the word "science" had acquired an extremely broad meaning in English:

...science may be defined as ordered knowledge of natural phenomena and of the relations between them...The beginnings of physical science are to be sought in the slow and unconscious observation by primitive races of men of natural occurrences, such as the apparent movements of the heavenly bodies...Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; refs with no name must have content

More recently, the historian of computing R. Anthony Hyman (1928-2011) has warned against inappropriate use of the word "science":

One may be reasonably clear what "science" means in the 19th century and most of the 18th century. In the 17th century "science" has very different meaning. Chemistry, for example, was then inextricably mixed up with alchemy. Before the 17th century dissecting out such a thing as "science" in anything like the modern sense of the term involves profound distortions.[78]

Similarly, the historian Scott Hendrix has argued that the word "science" as it is used by 21st century English speakers means modern science and that the use of the word to describe pre-modern scholars is misleading. "[E]ven an astute reader is prompted to classify intellectual exercises of the past as 'scientific'...based upon how closely those activities appear to mirror the activities of a modern scientist." Noting that natural philosophy was a far more neutral term than "science", Hendrix recommended that term be used instead when discussing pre-modern scholars of the natural world. "[T]here are sound reasons for a return to the use of the term natural philosophy that, for all its imprecision, reveals rather than imposes meaning on the past."[79]

Confusion about the meaning of the word "science" has encouraged charges of "Eurocentrism" and complaints that the contributions of non-European civilizations to human knowledge of the natural world - Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Arabic, Indian, and Chinese - have been marginalized.[80][81][82]

The science historian Hendrik Floris Cohen proposed using the term nature-knowledge (natuurkennis in Dutch) as a more neutral term than either natural philosophy or science to describe the highly diverse approaches to understanding the natural world undertaken by different cultures:

Instead, the unit of analysis I have in the end found myself working with is modes of nature-knowledge. By this I mean consistent ranges of distinct approaches to natural phenomena, which may differ in several dimensions. Their scope may have been comprehensive, with a view to deriving the whole wide world from first principles, or deliberately partial. The way in which knowledge was attained may have been predominantly empiricist or chiefly intellectualist. If any practices went with a given mode of nature-knowledge, these may have been observational, experimental, instrumental, etc. Knowledge may have been sought for its own sake or with a view to achieving certain practical improvements. Exchange may or may not have taken place between practitioners of distinct modes of nature-knowledge that were pursued at the same time and place.[83]

See also

Citations

  1. ↑ "Scientific concepts are ideas, and as such they are the subject of intellectual history. They have seldom been treated that way, but only because few historians have had the technical training to deal with scientific source materials. I am myself quite certain that the techniques developed by historians of ideas can produce a kind of understanding that science will receive in no other way." Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. (Harvard University Press, 1957). p.viii. ISBN 0-674-17103-9
  2. ↑ Turner, John R. G. (1990). "The history of science and the working scientist". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 29. ISBN 978-0415019880. "Some scientists have converted to become good non partisan historians; a very few have combined both careers. Scientists who write history in this way bring to the field a deep understanding of the actual scientific subject matter which is hard to match." 
  3. ↑ Olby, R.C.; Cantor, G.N.; Christie, J.R.R. et al., eds (1990) (in en). Companion to the History of Modern Science. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-000-10754-8. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Steve Fuller, "Internalism versus Externalism" in Arne Hessenbruch (ed.), Reader's Guide to the History of Science, Routledge, 2013.
  5. ↑ Olby, R.C.; Cantor, G.N.; Christie, J.R.R. et al., eds (1990) (in en). Companion to the History of Modern Science. Routledge. p. xxv. ISBN 978-1-000-10754-8. "Because history of science often seems to present such a forbiddingly technical aspect, demanding highly specialized forms of understanding, general historians have on the whole inclined, in research and teaching, to leave the history of science to its specialized practitioners." 
  6. ↑ Porter, Roy (1990). "The history of science and the history of society". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 33. ISBN 978-0415019880. "General historians still think they can, to all intents and purposes, safely ignore the impact of science upon modern society - precisely at a time when science has given governments the capacity to put an instant end to civilisation as we know it." 
  7. ↑ Laudan, Larry (1990). "The history of science and the philosophy of science". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 47. ISBN 978-0415019880. "History of science is a comparative newcomer, usually seen as emerging from the pioneering studies of Priestley, Smith and Montucla in the late eighteenth century." 
  8. ↑ George Sarton (1936) Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725–1799). His Life and Works, Osiris 1: 519–67
  9. ↑ Christie, J. R. R. (1990). "The development of the historiography of science". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. p. 8. ISBN 978-0415019880. "...d'Alembert (1717-83) rehearsed a story which led from Galileo's trial by the Inquisition, through Bacon, Descartes, Kepler and Huyghens to Newton and Locke, a sequence whereby a few great men...prepared from afar the light which gradually, by imperceptible degrees, would illuminate the world...The protagonists in this narrative take on heroic and exemplary status for d'Alembert and his readers: 'Such are the principal geniuses that the human mind ought to regard as its masters.'" 
  10. ↑ Priestley, Joseph (1767). The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments. London: J. Dodsley, J. Johnson and T. Cadell. 
  11. ↑ Olby, R.C.; Cantor, G.N.; Christie, J.R.R. et al., eds (1990) (in en). Companion to the History of Modern Science. Routledge. p. xix. ISBN 978-1-000-10754-8. "Modern science is indeed almost definable as a science that believes in a progressiveness of scientific change that makes the past passé, a past only to be turned to in order to reveal how science, inevitably and cumulatively, leaves its past behind." 
  12. ↑ Christie, J. R. R. (1990). "The development of the historiography of science". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. p. 15. ISBN 978-0415019880. "David Brewster (1781-1868), the Scottish physicist, wrote popular biographies of Galileo, Tycho Brahe and Kepler, and also produced a monumental biography of Isaac Newton, a work only recently superseded, so considerable was its range and detail." 
  13. ↑ Higgitt, Rebekah (2007). Recreating Newton : Newtonian biography and the making of nineteenth-century history of science. London: Pickering & Chatto. ISBN 978-1-85196-906-7. OCLC 137313664. 
  14. ↑ Draper, John William (1881). History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. New York: D. Appleton and Co.. p. vi. "The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other." 
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Reingold, Nathan (1986). "History of Science Today, 1. Uniformity as Hidden Diversity: History of Science in the United States, 1920–1940". British Journal for the History of Science 19 (3): 243–262. doi:10.1017/S0007087400023268. "History supposedly showed efforts to impede progress; proper history showed how impediments were attenuated and removed...The very certainty with which Progress was held guaranteed a limited vision of the past of science, even among 'proto-historians' of science coming from the scientific community.". 
  16. ↑ Olby, R.C.; Cantor, G.N.; Christie, J.R.R. et al., eds (1990) (in en). Companion to the History of Modern Science. Routledge. p. xix. ISBN 978-1-000-10754-8. "...the commitment of science to its own progress...prevents science from producing the history that others, beyond science, require." 
  17. ↑ Brooke, J. H. (1991). Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge University Press. p. 42. "In its traditional forms, the conflict thesis has been largely discredited." 
  18. ↑ Russel, C. A. (2002). Ferngren, G. B.. ed. Science & Religion: A Historical Introduction. Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-8018-7038-5. "The conflict thesis, at least in its simple form, is now widely perceived as a wholly inadequate intellectual framework within which to construct a sensible and realistic historiography of Western science." 
  19. ↑ Jardine, Nick (2003-06-01). "Whigs and Stories: Herbert Butterfield and the Historiography of Science" (in en). History of Science 41 (2): 127–128. doi:10.1177/007327530304100201. ISSN 0073-2753. Bibcode: 2003HisSc..41..125J. https://doi.org/10.1177/007327530304100201. "By the mid-1970s, it had become commonplace among historians of science to employ the terms "Whig" and "Whiggish", often accompanied by one or more of "hagiographic", "internalist", "triumphalist", even "positivist", to denigrate grand narratives of scientific progress...post-WWII champions of the newly professionalized history of science...were out to establish a critical distance between the history of science and the teaching and promotion of the sciences. In particular, they were suspicious of the grand celebratory and didactic narratives of scientific discovery and progress that had proliferated in the inter-war years.". 
  20. ↑ Numbers, Ronald L. (2009). "Introduction". in Numbers, Ronald L.. Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 6. ISBN 978-0-674-03327-6. "Historians of science have known for years that White's and Draper's accounts are more propaganda than history...Yet the message has rarely escaped the ivory tower." 
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 "Since the mid-1970s, the labels 'Whig' or 'Whiggish' have been frequently used in history of science jargon to denigrate and repudiate certain histories of science which accept the idea of progress as an idea of significant value." Alvargonzález, David (2013). "Is the History of Science Essentially Whiggish?". History of Science 51 (1): 85. 
  22. ↑ Reingold, Nathan (1986). "History of Science Today, 1. Uniformity as Hidden Diversity: History of Science in the United States, 1920–1940". British Journal for the History of Science 19 (3): 243–262. doi:10.1017/S0007087400023268. "Most scientists in this tradition of practitioners' history had some awkwardness in comprehending real history of science...Most of the historical writings by scientists were not based on primary sources...". 
  23. ↑ Turner, John R. G. (1990). "The history of science and the working scientist". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 26. ISBN 978-0415019880. "History is harder than scientists think. Once the matter is more than a few decades old, the practising scientist finds it very difficult even to understand what an earlier scientist is saying, because of a deep inability to read the text in its contemporary context. Words in scientific discourse can shift their meaning in less than a decade in a rapidly developing field, making the reading of even slightly old texts an assault course of pitfalls for the linguistically naive scientist, who often regards words as having the fixed meanings assigned to them by scientific authority. Consequently, even when merely reviewing earlier work for scientific and scholarly purposes the scientist tends badly to distort the meaning of the earlier texts." 
  24. ↑ Turner, John R. G. (1990). "The history of science and the working scientist". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 29. ISBN 978-0415019880. "Science sets its own standards for the acceptance or rejection of theories, interpretations and observations, which are widely regarded by scientists as being internal, and not affected by external philosophical, political or religious criteria. Suggesting that the opposition has some kind of external axe to grind is usually regarded as a professional foul, and hence interpretations of the history of science which relate it to external intellectual and social developments are regarded with deep suspicion." 
  25. ↑ Turner, John R. G. (1990). "The history of science and the working scientist". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 25. ISBN 978-0415019880. "The scientists’ view of science tended to be excessively reverential to hero-figures...The losing side in major disagreements tended to be caricatured as knaves or fools: the unwritten assumption was that if the correct interpretation of the world is obvious to us now, it should have been obvious then, and only prejudice could have prevented them from seeing it." 
  26. ↑ Hessen, Boris (June 29 – July 3, 1931). "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's "Principia"" (PDF). Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology. London: Kniga. https://surplusvalue.org.au/Science_Environment/Hessen%20Social%20&%20Economic%20Roots%20Newtons%20Principia.pdf. Retrieved April 15, 2026. 
  27. ↑ Young, Robert M. (1990). "Marxism and the History of Science". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 81. ISBN 978-0415019880. "‘The social and economic roots of Newton’s “Principia” ’ by Boris Hessen...is the locus classicus of the base-superstructure approach to the history of science, using the greatest work of modem science’s most revered hero as its case study." 
  28. ↑ Laudan, Larry (1990). Science and Relativism: Some Key Controversies in the Philosophy of Science. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226469492. "...the displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is - second only to American political campaigns - the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time" 
  29. ↑ Golinski 2005.
  30. ↑ Ross, Andrew, ed (1996). "Science Wars (Special Issue)". Social Text (Duke University Press) (46/47). ISBN 978-0-8223-1881-1. https://www.dukeupress.edu/science-wars. 
  31. ↑ "Postmodern Gravity Deconstructed, Slyly." Jany Scott, New York Times, Section 1, page 1, May 18, 1996.
  32. ↑ Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge (2004). "Iberian Science in the Renaissance: Ignored How Much Longer?". Perspectives on Science 12 (1): 86–124. doi:10.1162/106361404773843355. 
  33. ↑ Scott, John, and Gordon Marshall, eds. 2005. "Comte, Auguste." A Dictionary of Sociology (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-860986-5.
  34. ↑ Laudan, Larry (1990). "The history of science and the philosophy of science". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 47. ISBN 978-0415019880. "During the great flowering of these disciplines in the century from the 1830s until the 1930s, the two subjects [history of science and philosophy of science] developed side-by-side, generally in very close liaison. Scholars such as William Whewell, John Herschel, Augustus De Morgan, Auguste Comte, Ernst Mach, Pierre Duhem, Abel Rey, Pierre Duhem, Emile Meyerson, E. A. Burtt, Arthur Hannequin, Kurt Lasswitz, Paul Tannery, Ernst Cassirer and Alexandre Koyré happily intermingled historical and philosophical concerns in their research. They inclined to the view that science needed to be understood in cognitive terms, and that such an understanding must encompass both what science had been (hence the historical component) and what science ought to be (the philosophical element). Despite numerous disagreements about specific points of doctrine, all believed that there were important epistemological lessons to be learned from a detailed understanding of the genesis and development of scientific ideas." 
  35. ↑ Flynn, Thomas R. (1997). Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason. 1. Chicago: Chicago University Press. p. 4. ISBN 9780226254692. https://books.google.com/books?id=pHoeJfETI1UC&pg=PA4. 
  36. ↑ Munz, Peter (1993). Philosophical Darwinism: On the Origin of Knowledge by Means of Natural Selection. London: Routledge. p. 94. ISBN 9781134884841. https://books.google.com/books?id=tMuIAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA94. 
  37. ↑ Laudan, Larry (1990). "The history of science and the philosophy of science". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 48. ISBN 978-0415019880. "Philosophers of science, smitten with logical positivism's alluring promise of rigour, began to think that the method of conceptual analysis alone was sufficient to formulate an adequate understanding of the scientific enterprise; a detailed familiarity with the history of science (particularly of science before the twentieth century) was thought to have no particular bearing on questions about the conceptual and methodological foundations of the sciences. Significantly, none of the towering figures of logical empiricism (e.g. Schlick, Carnap, Reichenbach and Hempel) saw any need to follow in the footsteps of Comte, Whewell, Mach and Duhem, who had insisted on the necessity of using history to illuminate and sometimes to adjudicate between rival philosophical doctrines. Formal, logical analysis tended to replace historical research as the preferred mode of presentation." 
  38. ↑ Laudan, Larry (1990). "The history of science and the philosophy of science". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 48. ISBN 978-0415019880. "...historians of science since the 1940s and 1950s have generally been chary about using the historical record to address broad or general questions about the nature of scientific change and about the justification of science. By the late 1950s, therefore, history and philosophy of science had become as remote from one another's concerns as they had once been intimately intertwined. Historians thought it inappropriate to address epistemological questions in their research;" 
  39. ↑ "This book repeatedly violates the institutionalized boundaries which separate the audience for 'science' from the audience for 'history' or 'philosophy.'" Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. (Harvard University Press, 1957). p.viii. ISBN 0-674-17103-9
  40. ↑ Turner, John R. G. (1990). "The history of science and the working scientist". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 48. ISBN 978-0415019880. "During the 1960s, there emerged a small but influential handful of scholars (e.g. Feyerabend, Hanson, Buchdahl, Toulmin and Kuhn) who sought to persuade philosophers to re-think their dismissal of the relevance of historical research to philosophy of science. It had become clear by then that the positivist account of science was a gross misconstrual of science. Explanation in science did not typically satisfy the formal models of the positivists. Scientists did not draw the line between theory and observation in anything like the way that positivists had supposed. Empiricist theories of empirical support and confirmation - apart from generating their own internal contradictions - had dismally failed to account for the manner in which scientists used evidence and made theory choices. For such reasons, it was suggested that the philosophy of science associated with logical positivism was ill-suited to provide any epistemic rationale for real science." 
  41. ↑ Kuhn, Thomas S. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 153-154. ISBN 978-0-226-45808-3. "Probably the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm shift is that they can solve the problems that have led the old one into crisis...Claims of this sort are particularly likely to succeed if the new paradigm displays a quantitative precision strikingly better than its older competitor. The quantitative superiority of Kepler's Rudolphine Tables to all those computed from the Ptolemaic theory was a major factor in the conversion of astronomers to Copernicanism...[Further] particularly persuasive arguments can be developed if the new paradigm permits the prediction of phenomena that had been entirely unsuspected ... Copernicus' theory, for example, suggested that planets should be like the earth, that Venus should show phases, and that the universe must be vastly larger than had previously been supposed. As a result, when sixty years after his death the telescope suddenly displayed mountains on the moon, the phases of Venus, and an immense number of previously unsuspected stars, those observations brought the new theory a great many converts, particularly among non-astronomers." 
  42. ↑ Porter, Roy (1990). "The history of science and the history of society". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 38. ISBN 978-0415019880. "Scientific paradigms, Kuhn argued, were sustained and fostered by frames of mind, group loyalties and by a tenacious conservatism. The process whereby science abandoned an exploded paradigm and embraced a new one was not at all the joyous...quest for naked truth...but rather a series of agonizing psycho-social upheavals, the best analogy for which was religious: loss of faith and conversion." 
  43. ↑ Matthews, Michael Robert (1994). Science Teaching: The Role of History and Philosophy of Science. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-90899-3. https://books.google.com/books?id=qnwzRqh5jFMC&q=philosophy+of+science&pg=RA1-PR11. 
  44. ↑ Buchdahl Gerd (1965), "A Revolution in Historiography of Science", History of Science 4: 55–69, doi:10.1177/007327536500400103, Bibcode: 1965HisSc...4...55B 
  45. ↑ Ravetz, Jerome R. (1979). Scientific knowledge and its social problems. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-519721-1. https://archive.org/details/scientificknowle0000rave. 
  46. ↑ Heather Vidmar-McEwen,"Anthropologists biographies: Bruno Latour", "Anthropologists biographies: Bruno Latour", Indiana University Anthropology Department
  47. ↑ Frazier, Kendrick (2018). "'Science Wars' Veteran Latour Now Wants to Help Rebuild Trust in Science". Skeptical Inquirer 42 (1): 7. 
  48. ↑ Latour, Bruno; Woolgar, Steve (1986). Laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts. Princeton paperbacks science, sociology (1. Princeton paperback print ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. ISBN 978-0-691-02832-3. 
  49. ↑ Latour, Bruno (2000). Pandora's hope: essays on the reality of science studies (2. print ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-65336-8. 
  50. ↑ Christie, John R. R. (1990). "The development of the historiography of science". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 17-18. ISBN 978-0415019880. "...the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s...coincided with the notable professional expansion of history of science in higher education in America and elsewhere, witnessing an increasing number of academic programmes and departments being devoted to the history of science." 
  51. ↑ Gingerich, Owen (2005). "I. Bernard Cohen, 1 March 1914 · 20 June 2003". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 149 (3): 396. 
  52. ↑ 52.0 52.1 Dauben, Gleason & Smith 2009.
  53. ↑ Christie, John R. R. (1990). "The development of the historiography of science". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. p. 16. ISBN 978-0415019880. "...history of science has nonetheless generated the kinds of academic forms, publications and networks, and professional associations, which conventionally characterise academic professions. It has learned societies, many specialised journals, and has university and college departments devoted to it, although the departments tend to be fewer in number and smaller in size than those o f most other academic disciplines." 
  54. ↑ Hoopes, James; Ross, Dorothy (1992). "The Origins of American Social Science". Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22 (3): 536. doi:10.2307/205020. ISSN 0022-1953. https://doi.org/10.2307/205020. 
  55. ↑ See pp. 29–37 in I. Bernard Cohen (1999), "A Guide to Newton's Principia", published as an introduction to Isaac Newton: The Principia, Mathematical principles of natural philosophy, a new translation by I Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, University of California Press, 1999.
  56. ↑ Poitier, Beth (July 17, 2003). "History of science scholar I. Bernard Cohen dies at 89: A Harvard man from undergraduate to emeritus". The Harvard Gazette. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2003/07/history-of-science-scholar-i-bernard-cohen-dies-at-89/. 
  57. ↑ Saxon, Wolfgang (June 28, 2003). "I. Bernard Cohen, 89, dies; Pioneer in History of Science". The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/28/us/i-bernard-cohen-89-dies-pioneer-in-history-of-science.html. 
  58. ↑ North, John. "Alistair Cameron Crombie (1915–1996)" (PDF). University of Oxford. https://www.hsmt.ox.ac.uk/files/north-crombie-obituarypdf. 
  59. ↑ Porter, Theodore M. (2016). "Eloge: Charles Coulston Gillispie (1918–2015)". Isis 107 (1): 122. doi:10.1086/686248. PMID 27197418. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6q25032k. 
  60. ↑ Butterfield, Sir Herbert (1981). The Whig Interpretation of History. University of New South Wales Library. OCLC 218992532. 
  61. ↑ Butterfield 1965, p. 12.
  62. ↑ Butterfield 1965, p. 34.
  63. ↑ Schuster, John Andrew (1995). "The Problem of 'Whig History' in the History of Science" (in en). The Scientific Revolution: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science. Department of Science & Technology Studies, University of Wollongong. ISBN 978-0-86418-337-8. https://descartesagonistes.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/schuster-scirev-ch-3.pdf. 
  64. ↑ Butterfield 1965, p. 35.
  65. ↑ Butterfield 1965, pp. 68–69.
  66. ↑ Wilson & Ashplant 2009, p. 10.
  67. ↑ Bowler & Morus 2005, p. 2. "The conventional stories of the past that appear in the introductory chapters of science textbooks are certainly a form of Whiggism. Historians take great delight in exposing the artificially constructed nature of these stories, and some scientists find the results uncomfortable".
  68. ↑ Jardine, Nick (2003-06-01). "Whigs and Stories: Herbert Butterfield and the Historiography of Science" (in en). History of Science 41 (2): 127–128. doi:10.1177/007327530304100201. ISSN 0073-2753. Bibcode: 2003HisSc..41..125J. https://doi.org/10.1177/007327530304100201. 
  69. ↑ Christie, John R. R. (1990). "The development of the historiography of science". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 20. ISBN 978-0415019880. "...historians of science now tend to identify themselves in much more specialised terms: as historians of biology, or of chemistry, or of the social sciences; of American science or German science; of medieval science, or of early modern science, or of twentieth-century science. Among other things, the proliferation of specialised journals marks this process. This kind of specialisation allows much closer and more detailed scrutiny of scientific development than was ever possible for pre professional or early professional practitioners." 
  70. ↑ Porter, Roy (1990). "The history of science and the history of society". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 43. ISBN 978-0415019880. 
  71. ↑ Cronon 2012.
  72. ↑ Zammito 2004, p. 4.
  73. ↑ Porter, Roy (1990). "The history of science and the history of society". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 37. ISBN 978-0415019880. "...the conceptual apparatus developed by sociologists...probing the 'social system of science' with its career structures, citation patterns, reward systems, intellectual property rights, publication networks..." 
  74. ↑ Barnes, Barry (1990). "Sociological theories of scientific knowledge". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 61. ISBN 978-0415019880. 
  75. ↑ "When I entered the field as a student in the late 1970s...[s]cience began to appear to some scholars as just another form of culture, rather than as something special and set apart, immune to self-interest and pure in its methods if not always in its motives. Increasingly, understanding why people in the past had believed and done the things they did under the name of science became the focus of historical interest: not how people found out the truth about the world, but why they had done the things they did in their own times and places." Dear, Peter (2019) Revolutionizing the Sciences. Princeton University Press. ISBN 1-352-00313-9. pp. viii-ix.
  76. ↑ "A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had." "Across the Great Divide". Nature Physics 5 (5): 309. 2009. doi:10.1038/nphys1258. Bibcode: 2009NatPh...5..309.. 
  77. ↑ Porter, Roy (1990). "The history of science and the history of society". in Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R. et al.. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. pp. 45. ISBN 978-0415019880. "It is surely a symptom of today’s alienation from science, rather than a mark of any real advance in historical interpretation, that we seemingly lack the empathy to grasp how attractive scientific culture was to ‘progressive’ sectors of society in the past." 
  78. ↑ Hyman, Anthony (1 Oct 1996). "Whiggism in the History of Science and the Study of the Life and Work of Charles Babbage". http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/babbage/whiggism.html. 
  79. ↑ Hendrix, Scott E. (2011). "Natural Philosophy or Science in Premodern Epistemic Regimes? The Case of the Astrology of Albert the Great and Galileo Galilei". Teorie Vědy / Theory of Science 33 (1): 111–132. doi:10.46938/tv.2011.72. http://teorievedy.flu.cas.cz/index.php/tv/issue/view/10. Retrieved 20 February 2012. 
  80. ↑ Dear, Peter (2001). Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press. pp. 4. 
  81. ↑ Bala, Arun (2006). The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science 1st ed.. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 21. 
  82. ↑ Duncan, David Ewing (1999). Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year. New York: Bard/Avon Books. pp. 182. 
  83. ↑ Cohen, H. Floris (2010). "Solving the Problem of the Scientific Revolution". How Modern Science Came into the World: Four Civilizations, One 17th-Century Breakthrough. Amsterdam University Press. pp. xxviii. ISBN 978-90-8964-239-4. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt45kddd.4?seq=14. 

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