Sociology of the history of science
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The sociology of the history of science—related to
Science as a social enterprise
In the last few centuries, science as a social enterprise has grown rapidly. The few individuals who could conduct natural research in antiquity were either wealthy individuals themselves, had wealthy sponsors, or had the backing of a religious group. Today, scientific research has tremendous government support and also ongoing support from the private sector.
Available methods of communication have improved tremendously over time. Instead of waiting months or years for a hand-copied letter to arrive, today scientific communication can be practically instantaneous. Earlier, most natural philosophers worked in relative isolation, due to the difficulty and slowness of communication. Still, there was a considerable amount of cross-fertilization between distant groups and individuals.
Nowadays, almost all modern scientists participate in a scientific community, hypothetically global in nature (though often based around a relatively few nations and institutions of stature), but also strongly segregated into different fields of study. The scientific community is important because it represents a source of established knowledge which, if used properly, ought to be more reliable than personally acquired knowledge of any given individual. The community also provides a feedback mechanism, often in the form of practices such as peer review and reproducibility. Most items of scientific content (experimental results, theoretical proposals, or literature reviews) are reported in scientific journals and are hypothetically subjected to peer scrutiny, though a number of scholarly critics from both inside and outside the scientific community have, in recent decades, began to question the effect of commercial and government investment in science on the peer review and publishing process, as well as the internal disciplinary limitations to the scientific publication process.
A major development of the
The Academia Secretorum Naturae was replaced by the
Early scientific societies provided valuable functions, including a community open to and interested in
Much of what is considered the modern institution of science was formed during its professionalization in the 19th century. During this time the location of scientific research shifted primarily to
During the Scientific Revolution, early scientists communicated in Latin, which had been the language of academia during the Middle Ages, and which was read and written by scholars from many countries. In the mid-1600s, publications started to appear in local languages. By 1900, German, French and English were dominant. Anti-German sentiment caused by World War I and World War II and boycotts of German scientists resulted in the loss of German as a scientific language. In later decades of the 20th century, the economic dominance and scientific productivity of the United States led to the rise of English, which after the end of the Cold War has become the dominant language of scientific communication.[1][2]
Political support
One of the basic requirements for a scientific community is the existence and approval of a political sponsor; in England, the
Patterns in the history of science
One of the major occupations with those interested in the history of science is whether or not it displays certain patterns or trends, usually along the question of change between one or more scientific theories. Generally speaking, there have historically been three major models adopted in various forms within the philosophy of science.
The first major model, implicit in most early histories of science and generally a model put forward by practicing scientists themselves in their textbook literature, is associated with the criticisms of
A major challenge to this model came from the work of the historian and philosopher
Kuhn's model met with much suspicion from scientists, historians, and philosophers. Some scientists felt that Kuhn went too far in divorcing scientific progress from truth; many historians felt that his argument was too codified for something as polyvariant and historically contingent as scientific change; and many philosophers felt that the argument did not go far enough. The furthest extreme of such reasoning was put forth by the philosopher Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994), who argued that there were no consistent methodologies used by all scientists at all times which allowed certain forms of inquiry to be labeled "scientific" in a way which made them different from any other form of inquiry, such as witchcraft. Feyerabend argued harshly against the notion that falsification was ever truly followed in the history of science, and noted that scientists had long undertaken practices to arbitrarily consider theories to be accurate even if they failed many sets of tests. Feyerabend argued that a pluralistic methodology should be undertaken for the investigation of knowledge, and noted that many forms of knowledge which were previously thought to be "non-scientific" were later accepted as a valid part of the scientific canon.
Many other theories of scientific change have been proposed over the years with various changes of emphasis and implications. In general, though, most float somewhere between these three models for change in scientific theory, the connection between theory and truth, and the nature of scientific progress.
The nature of scientific discovery
Individual ideas and accomplishments are among the most famous aspects of science, both internally and in larger society. Breakthrough figures like
A detailed look at the history of science often reveals that the minds of great thinkers were primed with the results of previous efforts, and often arrive on the scene to find a crisis of one kind or another. For example, Einstein did not consider the physics of motion and gravitation in isolation. His major accomplishments solved a problem which had come to a head in the field only in recent years—empirical data showing that the speed of light was inexplicably constant, no matter the apparent speed of the observer. (See Michelson–Morley experiment.) Without this information, it is very unlikely that Einstein would have conceived of anything like relativity.
The question of who should get credit for any given discovery is often a source of some controversy. There are many priority disputes, in which multiple individuals or teams have competing claims over who discovered something first. Multiple simultaneous discovery is actually a surprisingly common phenomenon,[3] perhaps largely explained by the idea that previous contributions (including the emergence of contradictions between existing theories, or unexpected empirical results) make a certain concept ready for discovery. Simple priority disputes are often a matter of documenting when certain experiments were performed, or when certain ideas were first articulated to colleagues or recorded in a fixed medium.
Many times the question of exactly which event should qualify as the moment of discovery is difficult to answer. One of the most famous examples of this is the question of the discovery of oxygen. While Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley were able to concentrate oxygen in the laboratory and characterize its properties, they did not recognize it as a component of air. Priestly actually thought it was missing a hypothetical component of air, known as phlogiston, which air was supposed to absorb from materials that are being burned. It was only several years later that Antoine Lavoisier first conceived of the modern notion of oxygen—as a substance that is consumed from the air in the processes of burning and respiration.
By the late 20th century, scientific research has become a large-scale effort, largely accomplished in institutional teams. The amount and frequency of inter-team collaboration has continued to increase, especially after the rise of the Internet, which is a central tool for the modern scientific community. This further complicates the notion of individual accomplishment in science.
See also
References
- ^ How did English become the language of science?
- ISBN 978-1781251157.
- ISBN 978-0-306-80140-2, 1981) page 255