Historiography of science

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

Contents

An enduring divide in writing about the history of science has existed between "practitioner" historians - practicing or retired scientists writing about their own fields - and professional historians - academic scholars trained in the methodology of history. 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 [1] [2] and has historically been further reinforced by "institutionalized boundaries which separate the audience for 'science' from the audience for 'history.'" [3] The scientist and novelist C. P. Snow wrote in the 1950s that science and the humanities as a whole (not just history) had become divided into two mutually uncomprehending cultures. [4]

The professionalization of science history in the 1960s and 70s widened the rift between scientists and historians. The friction between the two groups eventually reached a climax during the "Science Wars" of the 1990s when prominent scientists criticized academic historians for ignoring the objective reality of nature in favor of political explanations when writing science history. [5]

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. [6] [7] Many professional historians of science now have undergraduate or even graduate degrees in the sciences before turning to history. Similarly, some scientists have become more sophisticated about historical methods before writing about the history of their fields.

Scientists and Historians

The first histories of science were written by scientists in the eighteenth century. [8] Biographies of natural philosophers (early scientists) were also popular in the nineteenth century, helping to create Isaac Newton as a scientific genius and national hero in Great Britain. [9] By the mid-twentieth century, however, professional historians of science began to disparage these earlier efforts. [10] [11] [12] In particular, they criticized 'practitioner' (i.e. scientist) historians for systematically neglecting primary sources and favoring hagiographic stories of scientist-heroes over the kind of rigorous historical analysis required to understand the past in its own terms and for its own sake. [13]

Internalism and externalism

In the early 1930s, a paper given by the Soviet historian Boris Hessen prompted many historians to look at the ways in which scientific practices were allied with the needs and motivations of their context.[ citation needed ] Hessen's work focused on socio-political factors in what science is done, and how.

This method of doing the history of science that became known as externalism looks at the manner in which science and scientists are affected, and guided by, their context and the world in which they exist. It is an approach which eschews the notion that the history of science is the development of pure thought over time, one idea leading to another in a contextual bubble which could exist at any place, at any time, if only given the right geniuses.[ citation needed ]

The method of doing history of science which preceded externalism, became known as internalism . Internalist histories of science often focus on the rational reconstruction of scientific ideas and consider the development of these ideas wholly within the scientific world. Although internalist histories of modern science tend to emphasize the norms of modern science, internalist histories can also consider the different systems of thought underlying the development of Babylonian astronomy or Medieval impetus theory.[ citation needed ]

In practice, the line between internalism and externalism can be incredibly fuzzy.[ citation needed ] Few historians then, or now, would insist that either of these approaches in their extremes paint a wholly complete picture, nor would it necessarily be possible to practice one fully over the other. However, at their heart they contain a basic question about the nature of science: what is the relationship between the producers and consumers of scientific knowledge? The answer to this question must, in some form, inform the method in which the history of science and technology is conducted; conversely, how the history of science and technology is conducted, and what it concludes, can inform the answer to the question. The question itself contains an entire host of philosophical questions: what is the nature of scientific truth? What does objectivity mean in a scientific context? How does change in scientific theories occur?[ citation needed ]

The historian/sociologist of science Robert K. Merton produced many works following Hessen's thesis, which can be seen as reactions to and refinements of Hessen's argument.[ citation needed ] In his work on science, technology, and society in the 17th-century England, Merton sought to introduce an additional category — Puritanism — to explain the growth of science in this period. Merton split Hessen's category of economics into smaller subcategories of influence, including transportation, mining, and military technique. Merton also tried to develop empirical, quantitative approaches to showing the influence of external factors on science.[ citation needed ]

Even with his emphasis on external factors, Merton differed from Hessen in his interpretation: Merton maintained that while researchers may be inspired and interested by problems which were suggested by extra-scientific factors, ultimately the researcher's interests were driven by "the internal history of the science in question".[ citation needed ] Merton attempted to delineate externalism and internalism along disciplinary boundaries, with context studied by the sociologist of science, and content by the historian.

Historiographical approaches to theory change in science

A major subject of concern and controversy in the philosophy of science has been the nature of paradigm shift or theory change in science. Karl Popper argued that scientific knowledge is progressive and cumulative; Thomas Kuhn, that scientific knowledge moves through "paradigm shifts" and is not necessarily progressive; and Paul Feyerabend, 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. [14]

Thought collectives

In 1935, Ludwik Fleck, a Polish medical microbiologist published Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact . Fleck's book focused on the epistemological and linguistic factors that affect scientific discovery, innovation and progress or development.

It used a case study in the field of medicine (of the development of the disease concept of Syphilis) to present a thesis about the social nature of knowledge, and in particular science and scientific "thought styles" (Denkstil), which are the epistemological, conceptual and linguistic styles of scientific (but also non-scientific) 'thought collectives' (Denkkollektiv). Fleck's book suggests that epistemologically, there is nothing stable or realistically true or false about any scientific fact. A fact has a "genesis" which is grounded in certain theoretic grounds and many times other obscure and fuzzy notions, and it "develops" as it is subject to dispute and additional research by other scientists.

Fleck's monograph was published at almost the same time as Karl Popper's Logik der Forschung but unlike Popper's work, the book received no review notice in Isis. However, Thomas S. Kuhn acknowledged the influence it had upon the Structure of Scientific Revolutions .[ citation needed ] Kuhn also wrote the foreword to Fleck's English translation.

Revolutions

The mid 20th century saw a series of studies investigating the role of science in a social context. The sociology of science focused on the ways in which scientists work, looking closely at the ways in which they "produce" and "construct" scientific knowledge.

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is considered particularly influential. It opened the study of science to new disciplines by suggesting that the evolution of science was in part sociologically determined and that positivism did not explain the actual interactions and strategies of the human participants in science.

As Kuhn put it, the history of science may be seen in more nuanced terms, such as that of competing paradigms or conceptual systems in a wider matrix that includes intellectual, cultural, economic and political themes outside of science. "Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly presented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method made seem scientific." [15]

In 1965, Gerd Buchdahl wrote "A Revolution in Historiography of Science", referring to the studies of Thomas Kuhn and Joseph Agassi. [16] He suggested that these two writers had inaugurated the sub-discipline by distinguishing clearly between the history and the historiography of science, as they argued that historiographical views greatly influence the writing of the history of science.

Further studies, such as Jerome Ravetz's Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (1971) referred to the role of the scientific community, as a social construct, in accepting or rejecting (objective) scientific knowledge. [17]

Since the 1960s, a common trend in science studies (the study of the sociology and history of science) has been to emphasize the "human component" of scientific knowledge, and to de-emphasize the view that scientific data are self-evident, value-free, and context-free. [18] The field of Science and Technology Studies, an area that overlaps and often informs historical studies of science, focuses on the social context of science in both contemporary and historical periods.

Corresponding with the rise of the environmentalism movement and a general loss of optimism of the power of science and technology unfettered to solve the problems of the world, this new history encouraged many critics to pronounce the preeminence of science to be overthrown.[ citation needed ]

Science wars

The Science Wars were a series of scholarly and public discussions in the 1990s about the objectivity and realism of science, the scholarly merit of commentary on the physical sciences by those in the humanities and the influence of postmodern philosophy. Catalyzed initially by the 1994 book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science by scientists Paul R. Gross and 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 roles of society and politics in science. The journal issue gained significant media interest because of the Sokal hoax [19] , which generated unusually wide public interest in what had previously only been an argument among academics.

21st century

The discipline today encompasses a wide variety of fields of academic study, ranging from the traditional ones of history, sociology, and philosophy, and a variety of others such as law, architecture, and literature.[ citation needed ] There is a tendency towards integrating with global history, as well as employing new methodological concepts such as cross-cultural exchange.[ citation needed ] Historians of science also closely work with scholars from related disciplines such as the history of medicine and science and technology studies.[ citation needed ]

Questioning postmodernism

Some critical theorists later argued that their postmodern deconstructions had at times been counter-productive, and had provided intellectual ammunition for reactionary interests.[ citation needed ] Bruno Latour noted that "dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we meant?" [20]

David Wootton accused postmodernists of believing that "there are no obstacles to our remaking the world as we choose, apart from the ideas in our minds. The world can be anything we want it to be, because thinking makes it so." [21]

Eurocentrism in the historiography of science

Eurocentrism in scientific history are historical accounts written about the development of modern science that attribute all scholarly, technological, and philosophical gains to Europe and marginalize outside contributions. [22] Until Joseph Needham's book series Science and Civilisation in China began in 1954, many historians would write about modern science solely as a European achievement with no significant contributions from civilizations other than the Greeks. [23] Recent historical writings have argued that there was significant influence and contribution from Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Arabic, Indian, and Chinese astronomy and mathematics. [24] The employment of notions of cross-cultural exchange in the study of history of science helps in putting the discipline on the path towards being a non-Eurocentric and non-linear field of study.[ citation needed ]

Terminology

The historian of computing R. Anthony Hyman 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. [25]

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." [26]

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. [27]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "David Bloor and Barry Barnes, at the University of Edinburgh...articulated what they called the “Strong Programme” in the sociology of science in the 1970s. This program, with its founding proposition that science should be studied like other aspects of human culture, without regard to its supposed truth or falsity, was controversial among philosophers and many historians." Golinski, Jan (2001). Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (reprint ed.). University of Chicago Press. ISBN   9780226302324.
  2. ↑ "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.
  3. ↑ "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
  4. ↑ "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. Bibcode:2009NatPh...5..309.. doi: 10.1038/nphys1258 .
  5. ↑ Gross, Paul R.; Levitt, Norman (1997). Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. JHU Press. ISBN   978-0-8018-5707-2.
  6. ↑ "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
  7. ↑ "Tradition expressed the demand for rationality as the requirement that scientific research should be utterly independent of external factors. At most these were allowed to present challenges to science, express the wish to study this or that aspect of reality, but no more than that. The reaction to the rationalist demand from scientific research for utter independence of historical circumstances was the irrationalist demand from historians to show that it is utterly dependent. This is known as the Edinburgh school in the sociology of science or the strong program. Of course, no explanation of any intellectual development by reference to social circumstances alone is possible, so that what members of this school are doing is a mystery... Needless to say, commonsense prescribes the right attitude: we can study intellectual developments in their context and try to find out how much the context prescribes and constrains and what remains for thinkers to contribute as free creations of the human intellect." Agassi, Joseph (2007) Science and Its History: A Reassessment of the Historiography of Science (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 253) Springer. pp. XVIII-XIX. ISBN   978-1-4020-5631-4
  8. ↑ Golinski, Jan (2001). Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (reprint ed.). University of Chicago Press. p. 2. ISBN   9780226302324. When [history of science] began, during the eighteenth century, it was practiced by scientists (or "natural philosophers") with an interest in validating and defending their enterprise. They wrote histories in which...the science of the day was exhibited as the outcome of the progressive accumulation of human knowledge, which was an integral part of moral and cultural development.
  9. ↑ 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.
  10. ↑ "In the second half of the twentieth century...[h]istorical narratives in which science appears to advance steadily in the direction of greater accumulations of factual knowledge are now widely scorned as “whig history.” Priestley’s and Whewell’s chronicles of the steady progress of discoveries have been revealed as nostalgic retrospectives...Today’s historians are more likely to set themselves the goal of understanding the past “in its own terms” (whatever that might mean) rather than in the light of subsequent developments." Golinski, Jan (2001). Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (reprint ed.). University of Chicago Press. ISBN   9780226302324.
  11. ↑ "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." Jardine, Nick (2003-06-01). "Whigs and Stories: Herbert Butterfield and the Historiography of Science" . History of Science. 41 (2): 127–128. Bibcode:2003HisSc..41..125J. doi:10.1177/007327530304100201. ISSN   0073-2753. S2CID   160281821.
  12. ↑ "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.
  13. ↑ "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..." 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. S2CID   145350145.
  14. ↑ Matthews, Michael Robert (1994). Science Teaching: The Role of History and Philosophy of Science. Routledge. ISBN   978-0-415-90899-3.
  15. ↑ Kuhn, T., 1962, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", University of Chicago Press, p. 137
  16. ↑ Buchdahl Gerd (1965), "A Revolution in Historiography of Science", History of Science, 4: 55–69, Bibcode:1965HisSc...4...55B, doi:10.1177/007327536500400103, S2CID   142838889
  17. ↑ Ravetz, Jerome R. (1979). Scientific knowledge and its social problems . Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-519721-1.[ page needed ]
  18. ↑ King Merton, Robert (1979). The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. University of Chicago Press. ISBN   978-0-226-52092-6.
  19. ↑ "Postmodern Gravity Deconstructed, Slyly." Jany Scott, New York Times, Section 1, page 1, May 18, 1996.
  20. ↑ Latour, B (2004). "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern" (PDF). Critical Inquiry . 30 (2): 225–248. doi:10.1086/421123. S2CID   159523434. Archived (PDF) from the original on 16 September 2012. Retrieved 2 January 2015.
  21. ↑ Wootton, David. The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (Penguin, 2015). p.555. ISBN   0-06-175952-X
  22. ↑ Dear, Peter (2001). Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press. p. 4.
  23. ↑ Bala, Arun (2006). The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science 1st ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 21.
  24. ↑ Duncan, David Ewing (1999). Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year. New York: Bard/Avon Books. p. 182.
  25. ↑ Hyman, Anthony (1 Oct 1996). "Whiggism in the History of Science and the Study of the Life and Work of Charles Babbage". The Babbage Pages. Retrieved 2021-04-25.
  26. ↑ 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 . S2CID   258069710. Archived from the original on 18 November 2012. Retrieved 20 February 2012.
  27. ↑ 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.

Bibliography

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