Comment écrit-on l'histoire des sciences et des techniques? Ce livre présente les réponses que plusieurs générations successives ont apportées à ce problème essentiel des sciences humaines contemporaines. A partir du domaine extrêmement controversé de la biologie et de la paléontologie évolutionnistes, il étudie les débats épistémologiques et idéologiques entre historiens, philosophes, scientifiques et journalistes, qui développent des thèses souvent opposées à partir de l'étude de la dynamique culturelle. Peut-on parler de «précurseur» dans l'histoire des idées? Quel est le rôle du (...) milieu social dans la genèse des hypothèses scientifiques? L'idéologie imprègne-t-elle forcément toute théorie biologique? Doit-on rester neutre pour analyser objectivement un texte, un fait ou un procédé scientifique? Faut-il partir des connaissances actuelles pour comprendre les théories du passé? Quelle est la portée des révolutions dans l'histoire des sciences de la vie et de la Terre? Autant de thèmes revus aussi à la lumière du nouveau paradigme unificateur des sciences sociales: le modèle sélectif multipolaire. Pages de début Introduction Première partie. Les historiens de l'évolutionnisme Une histoire institutionnelle Les écoles philosophiques Jean Rostand et l'histoire scientifique modernisée Jacques Roger et la méthode historique Denis Buican et l'épistémologie évolutionniste Conclusion de la première partie Deuxième partie. Les questions de méthode La diversification des sources Internalisme contre externalisme Continuité et discontinuité L'objectivité en question L'historien et l'actualité scientifique Conclusion de la deuxième partie Troisième partie. Les sujets explorés Les « précurseurs » de l'évolutionnisme des lumières : mythe ou réalité? Cuvier : modèle ou anti-modèle scientifique? Le rôle de Lamarck dans la révolution transformiste Le néolamarckisme et l'affaire Lyssenko Le néodarwinisme et la sociobiologie sont-ils réductibles? Conclusion Une brève histoire de l'évolutionnisme en France Construction de l'arbre généalogique des idées aux xixe et xxe siècles Construction de l'arbre généalogique des idées auXVIIIe siècle Bibliographie Index Pages de fin. (shrink)

As historians of science increasingly turn to work on recent (post 1945) science, the historiographical and methodological problems associated with the history of contemporary science are debated with growing frequency and urgency. This book brings together authorities on the history, historiography and methodology of recent and contemporary science to review the problems facing historians of contemporary science, technology and medicine and to explore new ways forward. The chapters explore topics which will be of ever increasing (...) interest to historians of postwar science, including the difficulties of accessing and using secret archival material, the interactions between archivists, historians and scientists and the politics of evidence and historical accounts. (shrink)

Recently, many historians of science have chosen to present their historical narratives from the ‘actors’-eye view’. Scientific knowledge not available within the actors’ culture is not permitted to do explanatory work. Proponents of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge purport to ground this historiography on epistemological relativism. I argue that they are making an unnecessary mistake: unnecessary because the historiographical genre in question can be defended on aesthetic and didactic grounds; and a mistake because the argument from relativism is in (...) any case incoherent.The argument of the present article is self-contained, but steers clear of metaphysical debates in the philosophy of science. To allay fears of hidden assumptions, the sequel, to be published in the following issue, will consider SSK’s prospects of succour from scientific realism, instrumentalism, and a metaphysical system of Bruno Latour’s own devising. (shrink)

This article offers suggestions for what a labor history of science might look like and what it might accomplish. It does so by first reviewing how historians of science have analyzed the history of both “science as labor” and “science and labor” since the 1930s. It then moves on to discuss recent historiographical developments in both the history of science and labor history that together provide an analytical frame for further research. The article ends by (...) projecting into the future, considering how a labor history of science might help us grapple with connecting our understanding of the past with the challenges of today and tomorrow. (shrink)

The history of science and the philosophy of science have a long and tangled relationship. On the one hand, philosophical reflection on science can be guided, shaped, and challenged by historical scholarship—a process begun by Thomas Kuhn and continued by successive generations of ‘post-positivist’ historians and philosophers of science. On the other hand, the activity of writing the history of science raises methodological questions concerning, for instance, progress in science, realism and antirealism, and the (...) semantics of scientific theories, questions which are the subject of continued debate in philosophy. Clearly the history and the philosophy of science will continue to challenge each other's research agendas and guiding assumptions. (shrink)

Historiography in a metaphysical mode Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-17 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9524-6 Authors Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, CETCOPRA/Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne, 17 Rue de la Sorbonne, 75231 Paris Cedex05, France Jan Golinski, Department of History, University of New Hampshire, 20 Academic Way, Durham, NH 03824, USA Lissa L. Roberts, Department of Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS), University of Twente, Postbox 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands John McEvoy, Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA Journal Metascience Online (...) ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796. (shrink)

In the recent past, attempts to revitalize historico-religious studies have challenged the charismatic appeal of some of the most celebrated scholars of the twentieth century. At the same time, the old and ideological frameworks that characterized the field have been critically analyzed and deconstructed. The disciplinary status quo, taken for granted for quite a long time, has been shaken to its foundation, paving the way for new approaches. However, the postmodern tenet of problematizing any authority has also become a convenient (...) shortcut to blur the distinction between scientific signal and nonepistemic noise. Despite this troublesome feature, some scholars have deployed postmodern and poststructuralist tools to study the genealogy, reception, implementation, and diffusion of cultural representations within the aforementioned academic discipline. The present article briefly reviews one of the most recent and remarkable examples of such scholarship, that is, The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800–2000. (shrink)

In this paper, we present an interdisciplinary discussion on the relations between Science–Technology Education and Culture both historical standpoint and nowadays. The idea that a human mind can produce an intellectual revolution within science and its approaches strongly crossed like a paradigm both in the history of sciences and disciplines–literatures : but what about its social impact and science mission, as well? To describe the impact of the disseminated knowledge is a consequent aim. A case study on (...) energy conceptualization and its exhibitions in Society in Context is discussed; their correlations with education, science–techniques, industry and social impacts are discussed, as well. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: An Intellectual Historiography Why and When Historiography Needs Social Theory Why and When Does Social Theory Needs Historiography? Conclusion References.

In Towards an Historiography of Science (1963) and in other related works spanning over his entire career, Agassi presents his wide-ranging and original understanding of the history of science. It emerges from the criticism of two distinctive approaches, each informed by the uncritical acceptance, on the part of historians, of two philosophies of science: inductivism (scientific theories emerge from facts), and conventionalism (scientific theories are mathematical frameworks for classifying facts). Both produce unsatisfactory historical reconstructions, in which errors (...) are either concealed or condemned. Popper’s philosophy, by contrast, allows for a picture in which science grows from the recognition and criticism of our best and wisest errors. (shrink)

In Towards an Historiography of Science (1963) and in other related works spanning over his entire career, Agassi presents his wide-ranging and original understanding of the history of science. It emerges from the criticism of two distinctive approaches, each informed by the uncritical acceptance, on the part of historians, of two philosophies of science: inductivism (scientific theories emerge from facts), and conventionalism (scientific theories are mathematical frameworks for classifying facts). Both produce unsatisfactory historical reconstructions, in which errors (...) are either concealed or condemned. Popper’s philosophy, by contrast, allows for a picture in which science grows from the recognition and criticism of our best and wisest errors. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an explication of the notion of local explanation. In the literature, local explanations are considered as metaphysically and methodologically satisfactory: local explanations reveal the contingency of science and provide a methodologically sound historiography of science. However, the lack of explication of the notion of local explanation makes these claims difficult to assess. The explication provided in this paper connects the degree of locality of an explanans to the degree of contingency of the explanandum. (...) Moreover, the explication is shown to be compatible with the methodological need for a general consideration in the historiography of science. In this way, the explication satisfies the need to explicate an important notion, connects local explanations and contingency, and enables us to see how local explanations and general considerations can be connected. However, the explication also sheds critical light on many claims and expectations that are associated with local explanations and their satisfactoriness. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 487-498, September 2022.

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 487-498, September 2022.

ABSTRACTIn response to the rising popularity of empirical models of scholarship and an increasingly sharp sceptic criticism against historiography, early modern historiographers strived to place their reconstruction of the past on a more ‘scientific’ basis through a new approach to historical writing. Their strategies included the mobilization of various other scholarly disciplines, such as geography, chronology, linguistics, ethnography, philology, etc. that came to function as ‘auxiliary sciences’ of early modern historiography. These came to fulfil three main roles in historical writing. (...) Firstly, they supplied knowledge on cultural-historical topics that were newly introduced into the subject range of historiography. Secondly, they offered new solutions to the problem of reliable historical evidence by opening up new sources of historical information. And thirdly, they proved helpful in deciding scholarly discussions among historical writers. Through a detailed study of the use of ‘auxiliary sciences’ in seminal texts from the new current in historical writing, I will shed light on the range of scholarly disciplines that were enlisted in early modern historiography and how they contributed to the development of a new, more ‘scientific’ approach to the reconstruction of the past. (shrink)

The issue of internalism and externalism in historiography of science was intensely debated two decades ago. The conclusions of such debate on the ‘context of science’ appear to be a reinstatement of the positivist view of the ‘content of science’ as comprising only ideas and concepts uninfluenced by extra-scientific factors. The description of the roles of politics, economy, and socio-cultural factors in science was limited only within the ‘context of science’. This article seeks to resituate (...) the ‘content of science’ debate within the historical accounts of the Scientific Revolution to illustrate that their resort to historicism indicates that such content does not emerge from the void. It argues that, though some historicist accounts like Alexandre Koyré’s reinstate the positivist argument on the nature of the ‘content of science’, such historicist internalism greatly differs from positivist internalism, largely due to its acceptance of metaphysics in science. Therefore, as long as historicism is relied on to describe the content of science, a clear-cut distinction of the historicist internalism and externalism will be difficult to establish. (shrink)

First attempt at applying contemporary philosophy of science to the basic problems of the philosophy of historiography that culminated in "Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography" (Cambridge University Press 2004).

ABSTRACTThe narrativist turn of the 1970s and 1980s transformed the discussion of general history. With the rejection of Rankean historical realism, the focus shifted to the historian as a narrator and on narratives as literary products. Oddly, the historiography of science took a turn in the opposite direction at the same time. The social turn in the historiography of science emphasized studying science as a material and practical activity with traceable and documentable traits. This empirization of the (...) field has led to an understanding that history of science could be directly describable from scientific practice alone without acknowledging the role of the historian as a constructor of narratives about these practices. Contemporary historians of science tend to be critical of science's ability to describe its object—nature, as it is—but they often are not similarly skeptical of their own abilities to describe their object: past science, as it is. I will argue that historiography of science can only gain from a belated narrativist turn. (shrink)

I will examine the first of Thomas Kuhn’s Thalheimer Lectures delivered in 1984, with the purpose of establishing a connection between Kuhn’s historiographical thought and his criticism of the traditional distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification, or, as I call it, the DJ distinction. In order to do this, I will start by exploring the Kuhnian view of the so-called static approach in philosophy of science, taking as my main reference the work of Bacon, (...) Descartes, and foundationalist epistemology. I will continue by examining the relationship between Kuhnian historiography and the DJ distinction, comparing the first Thalheimer Lecture with other texts published by Kuhn. Finally, I will assert that Kuhn’s rejection of the DJ distinction is the result of adopting a historiographical matrix whose philosophical consequences are irreconcilable with the static approach in history and philosophy of science, for which the DJ distinction is essential. (shrink)

The author argues that the pragmatically oriented historiography of science that recently has been so strongly recommended has fallen into the mistake of focusing on scientists' circumstantial attempts to fix beliefs without discussing the scientific importance of the beliefs in the first place. This mistake has led historians of science to engage in pointless exercises, made them mute about crucial aspects of the development of science, and, above all, prevented them from avoiding, in a satisfactory way, the (...) ghost of "triumphalism." On the other hand, so-called traditional historiography of science is not vulnerable to any of these charges. Key Words: history of science • sociology of science • scientific revolution • SSK. (shrink)

Structural history, Conceptual history, Theory of historical time, Semantics of History: the work of Reinhart Koselleck is associated with a wide spectrum of methodological orientations that emerged during the post-war period and originated from the in-depth reflection on the significance of historical sciences. Koselleck shared with numerous West-German historians the observation that historical science was experiencing a profound crisis exacerbated by the increasing influence of social sciences. However, unlike his contemporary historians, who advocated the criticism of historicism as a (...) prerequisite for reforming their discipline, Koselleck championed a radically different path to remedy to this crisis. In this paper, we shall outline the major stages of the critical dialogue between Koselleck and the West-German historiography of his time. Two distinct historical intervals emerge from this analysis: the first is marked by the influence of the structural historical model, developed by Werner Conze during the 1950s, on Koselleck’s theoretical vision; the second, which started in the 1970s, is characterized by the refusal to consider the critical social history as the basis for a holistic explanation of national history. (shrink)

This paper argues that evaluation of the truth and rationality of past scientific theories is both possible and profitable. The motivation for this enterprise is traced to recent discussions by I. Lakatos, L. Laudan and others on the import of history for the philosophy of science; several objections to it are considered and T. S. Kuhn is found to advance the most substantive. An argument for establishing judgements of rationality and truth in the face of scientific revolutions is presented; (...) finally evidence is offered for the value of such assessments to historiography and to debates on scientific progress. (shrink)

Stepping-up the historiography of peripheral popularisation Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9454-8 Authors Aileen Fyfe, School of History, University of St Andrews, St Katharine’s Lodge, The Scores, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9AR UK Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

This paper outlines the case for a future research program that uses the tools of experimental cognitive science to investigate questions that traditionally fall under the remit of the philosophy of historiography. The central idea is this – the epistemic profile of historians’ representations of the past is largely an empirical matter, determined in no small part by the cognitive processes that produce these representations. However, as the philosophy of historiography is not presently equipped to investigate such cognitive questions, (...) legitimate concerns about evidential quality go largely overlooked. The case of mental state representation provides an excellent illustration of this. Representations of past mental states – the thoughts and fears and knowledge and desires of past agents – play much the same evidential role in historiography as in everyday life, serving in the causal explanation of agents’ behaviors and supporting normative evaluation of those behaviors. However, we have good reason to suspect that the theory of mind processes that support these representations may be more susceptible to error when deployed in the context of historiography than under everyday conditions. This raises worries about the quality of evidence that theory of mind can provide historiography, worries which require experimental cognitive science to properly address. (shrink)

This book presents a series of case studies and reflections on the historiographical assumptions, methods, and approaches that shape the way in which philosophers construct their own past. The chapters in the volume advance discussion of the methods of historians of philosophy, while at the same time illustrating the various ways in which philosophical canons come into existence, debunking the myth of analytical philosophy's ahistoricism, and providing a deeper understanding of the roles historiographical devices play in philosophical thought. More importantly, (...) the contributors attempt to understand history of philosophy in connection with other historical and historiographical approaches: contributors engage classical history of science, sociology of knowledge, history of psychology and historiography, in dialogue with historiographical practices in philosophy more narrowly construed. Additionally, select chapters adopt a more diverse perspective, by making place for non-Western approaches and for efforts to construe new philosophical narratives that do justice to the voice of women across the centuries. Historiography and the Formation of Philosophical Canons will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in history of philosophy, meta-philosophy, philosophy of history, historiography, intellectual history, and sociology of knowledge. (shrink)

By way of essays and a selection of primary sources in parallel text, Biography, Historiography, and Modes of Philosophizing provides an introduction to a vast, significant, but neglected corpus of early modern literature: collective biography. It focuses especially on the various related strands of political, philosophical, and intellectual and cultural biography as well as on the intersection between biography, historiography, and philosophy. Individual texts from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century are presented as examples of how the ancient collective biographical (...) tradition--as represented above all by Plutarch, Suetonius, Diogenes Laertius, and Jerome--was received and transformed in the Renaissance and beyond in accordance with the needs of humanism, religious controversy, politics, and the development of modern philosophy and science"--Provided by publisehr. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to sketch an approach for integrating the historiography of the sciences and of philosophy. More precisely, the paper suggests a method for investigating interactions within transdisciplinary constellations of researchers working in philosophy and in the exact sciences. I start off by introducing specific notions of analogy, variation, and conceptual space which provide the main ingredients of this method. The notion of a conceptual space, as well as other characteristics of the present approach, are adaptations (...) from so-called constellation research. Originally, constellation research was developed for the historiography of philosophy – especially in the context of the origins of German idealism. However, as I will argue in the second half of the paper, it is adaptable to the historiography of science, especially of the exact sciences. To support this claim and to illustrate the integrative power of the present approach, I will compare the notions of a constellation and a conceptual space with Ludwik Fleck’s notions of a »thought collective« and a »style of thought«, critically evaluate the distinction between contexts of discovery and of justification in a historiographical context, and relate the notions of analogy and variation, as introduced in the first part of the paper, to current debates about what is sometimes called »invariantism« in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Scientific revolution has been one of the most controversial topics in the history and philosophy of science. Yet it has been no consensus on what is the best unit of analysis in the historiography of scientific revolutions. Nor is there a consensus on what best explains the nature of scientific revolutions. This chapter provides a critical examination of the historiography of scientific revolutions. It begins with a brief introduction to the historical development of the concept of scientific revolution, followed (...) by an overview of the five main philosophical accounts of scientific revolutions. It then challenges two historiographical assumptions of the philosophical analyses of scientific revolutions. (shrink)

Exhibitions are embodied knowledge, and the processes of making exhibitions are also in themselves knowledge production practices. Science and technology exhibitions are therefore doubly of interest to historians of science: both as epistemic agents and as research methods. Yet both exhibitions and exhibition-making practices are ephemeral, as is the subsequent experience of the visitor. How can we research, interrogate, and understand both the productive creation of exhibitions and the phenomenologies and epistemologies of their reception and impact? “Exhibition histories” (...) has become a significant field of late, most closely associated with research on art exhibitions but also extending to world and trade fairs, and now increasingly crossing over into histories of science and technology. It is not an easy task: the range of exhibition archive materials includes – but is not limited to – 35mm slides, architectural blueprints, models, drawings, briefs, memos, budgets, press films, reviews, and personal accounts. This primary material is distributed unevenly across public and organized repositories, closed commercial archives, the personal papers of designers, often embargoed national bureaus of information, and more. Further, the experience of visiting an exhibition leaves far fewer traces to follow, requiring the researcher to do different kinds of things with the same widely varied material. This paper proposes methodologies for historians of science and technology wishing to understand the spatialization of science in exhibition contexts, the impacts of science exhibitions, and the more elusive phenomenological aspects of the exhibition visitor experience. Historians of science must accurately historicize context while researching both along and against the grain of archival material left by the making of exhibitions, as well as understanding the embodied trajectories of visitors. The practice of making exhibitions can also offer the researcher critically valuable insights into what to look for – and what may be absent – in archival records. (shrink)

The thirteen original essays in this book examine the status and development of the sciences in the eighteenth century. The last generation has seen a revolution in the methodology adopted by historians of science: The development of science is no longer described as a steady progress towards truth - certainties have given way to questions. The essays in this volume scrutinize these changing perspectives in historiography and recommend paths for future study. The eighteenth century has been a neglected (...) and much-misunderstood era in the development of science, all too often viewed as something of a trough between the towering achievements of the 'Scientific Revolution' and the nineteenth century. Yet it was a period of notable developments; it saw the establishment of such fields as electricity and heat, the 'chemical revolution', the new science of gases, the isolation of oxygen, the nebular hypothesis in cosmology, the foundation of rational mechanics, and the birth pangs of biology, geology and psychology. It was, indeed, an age when knowledge was in ferment. (shrink)

Legitimating the use of metaphysics in scientific research constituted a farreaching methodological revolution, invalidating the inductivist demands that science be guided by empirical information alone. Thus, science became tentative. The revolution was established when pioneering historians of science, Max Jammer among them, exhibited the working of metaphysics in scientific research. This raises many problems, since most metaphysical ideas are poor as compared with scientific ones. Yet taking science to be the effort to explain facts in a (...) comprehensive manner, makes some metaphysics unavoidable, and presents the better metaphysics as the possible frameworks within which older scientific theories may be reinterpreted and improved and newer ones may be developed. (shrink)

Counterfactual reasoning is broadly implicated in causal claims made by historians. However, this point is more generally recognized and accepted by economic historians than historians of science. A good site for examining alternative appeals to counterfactuals is to consider "what if" the Scientific Revolution had not occurred in seventeenth-century Europe. Two alternative interpretations are analyzed: that the revolution would eventually have happened somewhere else or that the revolution would not have happened at all. Broadly speaking, these two interpretations correspond (...) to the respective attitudes of philosophers and historians to the development of science. However, a case is presented for synthesizing the two interpretations into a normative historiography of science that would allow past and present concerns to interrogate each other. This exercise in counterfactual reasoning can be imagined in the spirit of a time traveler who aims to persuade, rather than simply understand, the natives he or she encounters. (shrink)

ABSTRACT As we strive for a more polyvocal history of science, historians have placed increasing emphasis on local case studies as a way to globalize the field. This tension between the local and the global extends to the practice as well as the content of the history of science, as the field has begun to pay more attention not just to local case studies, but also to local cultures of historiography. Many historians of science want multiple historiographical (...) voices that take seriously the concerns and literatures in different linguistic and national contexts. As more journals urge translation into what are perceived as the dominant languages in “global” humanities discourses and scholars are encouraged to facilitate the Englishing of their historical research, many questions remain: In what ways does it make sense to nationalize or culturally locate individual cultures of the history of science? Is translation a democratic and positive force in the discipline, and/or does it kill local difference? Will it continue to be meaningful to talk about the history of science? A collective dialogue within the field depends on finding a way to take local diversity in historiography and epistemology seriously while translating that local difference into a meaningful common conversation. This essay considers the challenges of embracing multiple ways of knowing that might fall under the purview of the history of science, while wondering what that means for the coherence of the field as we move forward into the next century of work in Isis. (shrink)

This paper emphasizes the crucial role of variation, at several different levels, for a detailed historical understanding of the development of the biomedical sciences. Going beyond valuable recent studies that focus on model organisms, experimental systems and instruments, we argue that all of these categories can be accommodated within our approach, which pays special attention to organismal and cultural variation. Our empirical examples are drawn in particular from recent historical studies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century genetics and physiology. Based on (...) the quasi-paradoxical conclusion that biological and cultural variation both constrains and enables innovation in the biomedical sciences, we argue that more attention should be paid to variation as an analytical category in the historiography of the life sciences. (shrink)