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. That disagreement reached a climax during the "science wars" of the 1990s when prominent scientists criticized sociologists and some historians for ignoring the objective reality of nature in favor of political explanations when writing science history.
Since the history of science requires a difficult intellectual "bilingualism" that straddles science and history, the polarization of the surrounding culture between the sciences and the humanities in the 20th century remains an inherent, and ongoing, challenge for the field. 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.
Scientists Narratives of progress
General historians have, historically, been inclined to leave the history of science to specialists. The first histories of science, in the 18th century, were instead written by Enlightenment-era scientists like Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725-1799),George Sarton (1936) Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725–1799). His Life and Works, Osiris 1: 519–67, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783) and Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) 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. 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, and scientist-historian John William Draper advanced an influential conflict thesis between religion and science. By the mid-20th century, however, historians specializing in the history of science began to disparage these earlier efforts. In particular, they criticized "practitioner" (i.e. scientist) historians for systematically neglecting primary sources, failing to truly understand those sources when they didn't neglect them, being oblivious to the social (i.e. "external") context of science and favoring hagiographic stories of scientist-heroes and their myopic, misguided and/or prejudiced adversaries.
Science wars
While most scientists writing history of science have tended to favor an internalist approach that traced the rational and logical evolution of scientific ideas, 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. 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 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. The "frenzied confrontations" 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. 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."Postmodern Gravity Deconstructed, Slyly." Jany Scott, New York Times, Section 1, page 1, May 18, 1996.
Philosophers Methods and justifications
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"Scott, John, and Gordon Marshall, eds. 2005. "Comte, Auguste." A Dictionary of Sociology (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. .) 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. 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. 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.
Under the influence of logical positivism in the early 20th century, the fields of philosophy of science and history of science began to separate. 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.
Paradigms
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. 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, at other times the shift happens for reasons that may have little to do with the objective merits of the science involved. 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. Kuhn later abandoned the language of "paradigms" altogether.
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 The philosopher of science Gerd Buchdahl (1914-2001) wrote that Kuhn and Joseph Agassi (1927-2023) 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.
Although his studies of scientific practice were at one time associated with social constructionistHeather Vidmar-McEwen,"Anthropologists biographies: Bruno Latour", "Anthropologists biographies: Bruno Latour", Indiana University Anthropology Department 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. According to Latour, the originality of science studies lies in demonstrating that facts are both real and constructed.
Historians
Professionalization
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. I. Bernard Cohen (1914-2003) was the first person to receive a PhD in the History of Science in the U.S. in 1947 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, conferences and awards, even if its dedicated university departments remained fewer and smaller than those of more established disciplines.
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 to be his most important work. 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. Charles Gillispie (1918–2015), who graduated with a degree in chemistry before earning his PhD in history, was the main editor of the massive (20 volume) Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Derek J. de Solla Price (1922–1983) spent ten years in experimental physics before pivoting to history to study the Antikythera mechanism, becoming the "herald" of scientometrics and the first recipient of the John Desmond Bernal Prize.
Whig history