Discipline and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science as Seen through the Externalism-Internalism Debate

Apart from the reviews referenced below, I want also to acknowledge: MacLeod R. , “Changing perspectives in the social history of science”, in Spiegel-Rösing I. de S. Price D. (eds), Science, technology and society: A cross-disciplinary perspective (London, 1977), 149–95; Reingold N. , “History of science today, 1. Uniformity as hidden diversity: History of science in the United States, 1920–1940”, The British journal for the history of science, xix (1986), 243–62; Thackray A. , “The pre-history of an academic discipline: The study of the history of science in the United States, 1891–1941”, Minerva, xviii (1980), 448–73; and Collins H. M. , “The sociology of scientific knowledge: Studies of contemporary science”, Annual review of sociology, ix (1983), 265–85. As this piece was being written, I became increasingly aware of the extent to which e/i talk appeared predominantly as an Anglo-American concern. Dutch, French and German commentators on earlier drafts pointed out some Continental resonances of these debates (e.g., the ‘finalization thesis’), while generally confirming that historical and sociological studies of science in their countries were, for a variety of reasons, not nearly so obsessed with e/i as the United States and Britain. A recent review of French traditions of science studies, for example, has scarcely any reason even to mention e/i, speculating that the early French “defeat of empiricism” made any such discourse about science seem quaintly Anglo-Saxon: Bowker G. Latour B. , “A booming discipline short of discipline: (Social) studies of science in France”, Social studies of science, xvii (1987), 715–48, p. 741.

See, e.g., Douglas M. , Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo (London, 1966).

See, among very many examples, Emile Durkheim's discussion of claims for “wholly internal” methodological rules in each science: The division of labor in society (New York, 1964; orig. publ. 1893), 367–8; also Kuklick H. , “Boundary maintenance in American sociology”, Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences, xvi (1980), 201–19.

See, for example, Oakeshott M. , Experience and its modes (Cambridge, 1933); MacIntyre A. , After virtue: A study in moral theory (Notre Dame, Ind., 1981), esp. ch. 15.

E.g., Foucault M. , “The order of discourse”, in Young R. (ed.), Untying the text: A post-structuralist reader (London, 1981), 48–78, esp. pp. 49, 55–56, 61–62 (quotation from p. 56); cf. Bourdieu P. , “The specificity of the scientific field and the social conditions for the progress of reason”, Social science information, xiv (1975), 19–47, esp. p. 22.

Mannheim K. , Ideology and utopia: An introduction to the sociology of knowledge (London, 1936; orig. publ. 1929–31), ch. 5, quoting pp. 239–40, 261 (cf. 150).

In early modern practice the Port Royal logicians referred to the evidence of things as “internal” and that of testimony as “external”: Hacking I. , The emergence of probability (Cambridge, 1975), 33, 37, 79. And in modern philosophy of science Rudolf Carnap, for example, discriminated between the “internal” and the “external” as a way of delimiting sensical and non-sensical, answerable and non-answerable questions, within any given linguistic framework, including the natural sciences. But Carnap never associated the “external” with extrinsic sociological considerations, and his usage appears entirely independent of the e/i debates in history and sociology of science: Carnap, Meaning and necessity: A study in semantics and modal logic (Chicago, 1958; orig. publ. 1947), 206–7.

Lakatos I. , “History of science and its rational reconstructions”, in Buck R. C. Cohen R. S. (eds), PSA 1970 (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, viii; Dordrecht, 1970), 91–108. Few historians, however, noted just how much of what they routinely accounted ‘external’ was encompassed within Lakatos's ‘internal history’. One of the more systematic recent philosophical defences of internalism and scientific “rationality” against (a badly misrepresented version of) “cognitive sociology” is Laudan L. , Progress and its problems: Toward a theory of scientific growth (Berkeley, 1977), ch. 7.

Shapin S. , “Understanding the Merton thesis”, Isis, lxxix (1988), 594–605, and the subtle but unfairly neglected King M. D. , “Reason, tradition, and the progressiveness of science”, History and theory, x (1971), 3–32, esp. pp. 9–17. For an intriguing and informative firsthand account of circumstances bearing upon the emergence and early reception of Merton's Thesis, see Cohen I. B. , “Introduction: The impact of the Merton Thesis”, in idem (ed.), Puritanism and the rise of modern science: The Merton Thesis (New Brunswick, N.J., 1990), 1–111.

Merton R. K. , Science, technology and society in seventeenth-century England, new edn (New York, 1970; orig. publ. 1938), e.g., pp. xviii, xxix, 48, 50, 75, 136, 198–200, 238; idem, “Puritanism, pietism and science”, in idem, Social theory and social structure , rev. edn (New York, 1957), 574–606, p. 579. It was not obligatory that demonstrations like Merton's should employ the vocabulary of internal and external; see roughly contemporary historical work by Dorothy Stimson which is free of such locutions: “Puritanism and the new philosophy in 17th century England”, Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, iii (1935), 321–34 (cf. Cohen , op. cit. (ref. 9), 83, n. 96).

Sorokin P. A. , Social & cultural dynamics: A study of change in major systems of art, truth, ethics, law and social relationships , 1 vol. abridged edn (Boston, 1957; orig. publ. in 4 vols, 1937), 18–19 (also 64, 630ff). Sorokin repeatedly urged the young Merton (with partial success) to give up causal speech of “stimulant-stimulated” in favour of Vilfredo Pareto's anti-causal scheme: Merton R. K. , “The Sorokin-Merton correspondence on ‘Puritanism, Pietism and Science,’ 1933–34”, Science in context, iii (1989), 291–8. Talcott Parsons's contemporary theoretical work confirms the Harvard academic significance of Sorokin's thinking about ‘immanent logics’, and offers a potted philosophy of science broadly compatible with Merton's sensibilities: Parsons T. , The structure of social action , 2nd edn (Glencoe, Ill., 1949; orig. publ. 1937), 5, 11, 21–27.

My impression is that most standard texts did not even allude to the relative motive power of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ factors. Examples of glancing engagement with these issues include: Pledge H. T. , Science since 1500: A short history of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology (London, 1939), 14–15, 322–4; Dampier-Whetham W. C. D. , A history of science and its relations with philosophy & religion (Cambridge, 1929), ch. 3; Crombie A. C. , Augustine to Galileo: The history of science A.D. 400–1650 (London, 1952), 274–8; Hall A. R. , The Scientific Revolution 1500–1800: The formation of the modern scientific attitude , 2nd edn (Boston, 1966; orig. publ. 1954), 224–5; Butterfield H. , The origins of modern science 1300–1800 , rev. edn (New York, 1965; orig. publ. 1957), 197–8.

Sarton G. , The study of the history of mathematics and The study of the history of science (2 vols, bound as 1; New York, 1957; orig. publ. 1936), 15–16. Interestingly, Sarton was here concerned equally to argue against Galois's claim for an internal necessity in the development of mathematics. Insofar as Sarton commended any particular historical attitude it was a particularistic orientation, willing to entertain the role of a range of contingent factors. As Thackray and Merton say, “The emphatic claims for a materialist history of science that enlivened the academic world of the 1930s seem to have meant little to him …. [Characteristically, [Sarton] chose not to engage the intellectual issues but to adopt an uneasy imagery in which social and intellectual influences are resisted by the authentic scientists and affect only the ‘job-holders’”: Thackray A. W. Merton R. K. , “On discipline building: The paradoxes of George Sarton”, Isis, lxiii (1972), 473–95, p. 480; also Cohen , op. cit. (ref. 9), 25–27, 83n–84n. Cf. Sarton G. , A history of science (2 vols, New York, 1970; orig. publ. 1952), i, pp. xii–xiv, where Sarton attempted to dissociate the proper practice of history of science from social and political theorizing of any kind.

Hessen B. , “The social and economic roots of Newton's ‘Principia’”, in Science at the cross roads , ed. by Bukharin N. I. , new edition ed. by Werskey P. G. (London, 1971; orig. publ. 1931), 147–212; see also Mendelsohn E. , “Robert K. Merton: The celebration and defense of science”. Science in context, iii (1989), 269–89, esp. pp. 273–5. While Hessen's materialism informed his attack on the supposed absolute autonomy of ideas, neither he nor the historical materialist tradition from which he came ever proposed to reduce science totally to its economic foundation: “According to the materialistic conception of history, the final determining factor … is the creation and recreation of actual life. But this does not mean that the economic factor is the sole determining factor” (Hessen, op. cit. (ref. 14), 177). From Marx and Engels onwards, materialists have always acknowledged that material influences proceed through culture and that cultural practices may come to have relative autonomy. Parenthetically, e/i vocabulary was not a pronounced feature of Hessen's essay. A fine appreciation of Hessen and the curious reception of his work is Schaffer S. , “Newton at the crossroads”, Radical philosophy, xxxvii (1984), 23–28.

Werskey G. , The visible college: A collective biography of British scientists and socialists of the 1930s (London, 1978); Thackray A. , “History of science”, in Durbin P. T. , (ed.), A guide to the culture of science, technology, and medicine (New York, 1980), 3–69, esp. pp. 14–15; Ravetz J. , “Bernal's Marxist vision of history”, Isis, lxxii (1981), 393–402.

For confirmation of historians' general lack of interest in Hessen's work, see Cohen , op. cit. (ref. 9), 54–60, 84, n. 117. For Sir George Clark's temperate engagement with Hessen's views, eschewing e/i vocabulary, see his Science and social welfare in the age of Newton (Oxford, 1937), ch. 3 (“Social and economic aspects of science”).

Needless to say, the Left valued science at least as much as the Right, even though the scheme used by Marxists to pour value over science was diametrically opposed to that used by more traditional scholars.

See, e.g., Bernal J. D. , The social function of science (London, 1939); Crowther J. G. , The social relations of science (London, 1941), esp. chs 73–77, 81. Crowther informally (p. 511) used the term “external” in reference to social motives for research, drawing a contrast with “personal” motives the most prominent of which is “the desire for understanding for its own sake”. See also Rose H. Rose S. , “The incorporation of science”, in idem (eds), The political economy of science (London, 1976), 14–31, where the science policy enterprise is characterized as “pragmatic externalism”; and Schaffer , op. cit. (ref. 14), 23–24.

For Michael Polanyi's role in the 1941 Society for Freedom in Science, see Werskey , op. cit. (ref. 15), 281–4, 288–9. The reaction of Karl Popper and Joseph Ben-David to these concerns is also significant for the developing e/i discourse. The lessons drawn in these respects from episodes of Nazi science and, later, Lysenkoist genetics are very well known. It would also be interesting to explore the role of British and American science planning in the Second World War and scientists' post-War reactions to that experience.

Lilley S. , “Social aspects of the history of science”, Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences, xxviii (1948), 376–443; idem, “Cause and effect in the history of science”, Centaurus, iii (1953–54), 58–72. The role of the United Nations, and especially the Commission for the History of the Social Relations of Science, in the emergence of postwar externalism should be explored.

Hall A. R. , Ballistics in the seventeenth century (Cambridge, 1952), 162–3. Hall suggested that different disciplines construed scientific change differently. “Sociological history” was here represented by Boris Hessen. The major Marxist-orientated history of science text of the early 1950s ( Mason S. F. , A history of the sciences (London, 1953)) weighed in vigorously on the ‘craftsman’ side of the debate over scientific origins but did not notably deploy e/i vocabulary.

Barber B. , Science and the social order (New York, 1962; orig. publ. 1952), 80–81.

Ibid., 55, 57–58, 60–61. The view that social factors might influence ‘soft’ but not ‘hard’ sciences remained popular at least through the 1970s, inspiring sociologists of scientific knowledge to take on whatever then appeared as ‘the hardest case’.

Shryock R. H. , “The interplay of social and internal factors in the history of modern medicine”, The scientific monthly, lxxvi (1953), 221–30, quoting p. 221. Shryock was evidently already broadly sympathetic to materialist historiography, e.g., idem, “American indifference to basic science during the nineteenth century”, Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences, xxviii (1948), 50–65, esp. pp. 59, 62, 64–65.

Shryock R. H. , The development of modern medicine: An interpretation of the social and scientific factors involved (Philadelphia, 1936), e.g., pp. vii–viii, 143–8. Shryock reverted to a similar subtitle in his later study of nursing: The history of nursing: An interpretation of the social and medical factors involved (Philadelphia, 1959).

Unpublished and undated talk by Shryock R. H. , “Problems in the interpretation of American medical history”, quoted in Bell W. J. Jr , “Richard H. Shryock: Life and work of a historian”, Journal of the history of medicine, xxix (1974), 15–31, p. 23.

Bell , op. cit. (ref. 26), 23. Shryock's Development of modern medicine ((ref. 25), esp. pp. 41, 146–50) displayed basic awareness of Harvard sociological resources, including Pareto and Sorokin.

Wiener P. P. Noland A. , (eds), Roots of scientific thought: A cultural perspective (New York, 1957), Part II.

Crombie A. C. , “Introduction”, in idem (ed.), Scientific change (New York, 1963), 1–11, esp. pp. 3–4.

Kuhn T. S. , The structure of scientific revolutions (Chicago, 1962), e.g. pp. xii and note, 68–69, 75, 163–4. Kuhn had tentatively sketched the general form of this scheme in The Copernican revolution: Planetary astronomy in the development of Western thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 123–33, 270–1. And it was elaborated, together with its relation to Mertonian views, in idem, “The history of science”, in idem. The essential tension: Selected studies in scientific tradition and change (Chicago, 1977), 105–26 (art. orig. publ. 1968), esp. pp. 118–20.

Basalla G. , (ed.), The rise of modern science: Internal or external factors? (Lexington, Mass., 1968); also Kearney H. F. (ed.), Origins of the scientific revolution (London, 1964), esp. pp. xi–xv.

Kuhn , “History of science” (ref. 30), p. 110. Unlike Rupert Hall, Kuhn saw externalism as a “newer rival” to internalism rather than a dead body. But Kuhn here (p. 113) construed external history broadly as “attempts to set science in a cultural context”.

Thackray , op. cit. (ref. 15), 15–18; Gillispie C. C. , [art.] “Alexandre Koyré”, in Dictionary of scientific biography , vii, 482–90; Cohen I. B. , “The many faces of the history of science”, in Delzell C. F. (ed.), The future of history (Nashville, Tenn., 1977), 65–110, pp. 91–93; idem, op. cit. (ref. 9), 61–62; Porter R. , “The history of science and the history of society”, in Olby R. C. (eds), Companion to the history of modern science (London, 1990), 32–46, pp. 35–36; Forman P. , “Immanence, not transcendence, for the historian of science”, Isis, lxxxii (1991), 71–86, pp. 78–79. Note that I have not taken on the task of explaining why historians of science rendered the judgements they did on internalism/externalism, though any such explanation would doubtless have especially to engage with the local political environment of the United States in the 1950s, an environment which, like that of the immediate present, made the distinction between politics and proper intellectual behaviour worryingly problematic. For suggestions along these lines, see Thackray A. W. , “Science: Has its present past a future?”, in Stuewer R. H. (ed.), Historical and philosophical perspectives of science (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, v; Minneapolis, 1970), 112–33, pp. 116–22.

Gillispie C. C. , “Science in the French Revolution”, Behavioral science, iv (1959), 67–101; reprinted in The sociology of science ed. by Barber B. Hirsch W. (New York, 1962), 89–97, p. 89.

Hall A. R. , “Merton re-visited or science and society in the seventeenth century”, History of science, ii (1963), 1–16, pp. 10–11, 13. In 1968 George Basalla agreed that “the externalists have lost their influence”: “Introduction”, in idem, op. cit. (ref. 31), pp. vii–xiv, p. xiii. Professor Hall has been re-visiting Merton from the original 1957 Critical problems conference to the present. Recently his assessment of Merton's work has markedly mellowed, a shift evidently informed by the discovery that there are sociologists about even more threatening than his old antagonist: Hall, “Infant giants are not pygmies: The ‘Merton Thesis’ and the sociology of science”, in Clark J. (eds), Robert K. Merton: Consensus and controversy (London, 1990), 371–83.

Lilley , “Cause and effect”, 59; see also idem, “Social aspects”, 382–4 (both ref. 20), where Lilley acknowledged the unique “internal coherence” of science and argued that the “internal order” defined only the necessary but not the sufficient conditions for scientific discovery. For the relations between the “crudeness” of Marxist historiography and the “crudeness” attributed to it, see Schaffer , op. cit. (ref. 14).

Hall, op. cit. (ref. 21), 162.

Guerlac H. , “Some historical assumptions of the history of science”, in Crombie (ed.), op. cit. (ref. 29), 797–812, p. 810.

Rosenberg C. E. , “Science and American social thought”, in Van Tassel D. D. Hall M. G. (eds), Science and society in the United States (Homewood, Ill., 1966), 135–62, pp. 160 and 162; see also idem, No other gods: On science and American social thought (Baltimore, 1976), 10.

Laudan L. , “Comment” [on Thackray, “Science: Has its present past a future?”], in Stuewer , op. cit. (ref. 33), 127–32, pp. 128–9. The current Laudan now deplores historians' lack of interest in addressing “various theories of scientific change” (“The history of science and the philosophy of science”, in Olby, op. cit. (ref. 33), 47–59, p. 52). And for a recrudescence of relaxed anti-theoretical philosophy of science, see Fine A. , The shaky game: Einstein, realism and the quantum theory (Chicago, 1986), 112–50; idem, “Unnatural attitudes: Realist and instrumentalist attachments to science”, Mind, xcv (1986), 149–79.

Young R. M. , “Malthus and the evolutionists: The common context of biological and social theory”, in idem, Darwin's metaphor: Nature's place in Victorian culture (Cambridge, 1985; orig. publ. 1968), 23–55, p. 23.

Young R. M. , “The historiographic and ideological contexts of the nineteenth-century debate on man's place in nature”, in idem, op. cit. (ref. 41), 164–247 (orig. publ. 1973), p. 177.

MacCormmach R. , “Editor's foreword”, Historical studies in the physical sciences, i (1969), pp. vii–ix, p. viii. See also idem, ibid., ii (1970), pp. ix–xxiv, esp. pp. ix–x.

Forman P. , “Weimar culture, causality, and quantum theory, 1918–1927: Adaptation by German physicists and mathematicians to a hostile intellectual milieu”, Historical studies in the physical sciences, iii (1971), 1–115, p. 114.

Shapin S. Thackray A. , “Prosopography as a research tool in history of science: The British scientific community 1700–1900”, History of science, xii (1974), 1–28, p. 22, n. 9; Barber B. , “Toward a new view of the sociology of knowledge”, in Coser L. A. (ed.), The idea of social structure: Papers in honor of Robert K. Mer ton (New York, 1975), 103–16, p. 107. Cf. Beaver D. deB. , “Possible relationships between the history and sociology of science”, in Gaston J. C. (ed.), Sociology of science (San Francisco, 1978), 140–61, esp. p. 142.

Shapin S. , “The audience for science in eighteenth century Edinburgh”, History of science, xii (1974), 95–121, esp. p. 116. Later on, he became bolder and a number of essays on phrenology in Edinburgh sought to show the penetration of ‘social influences’ into the domain of fact-judgements and observation-reports.

Blume S. S. , “Introduction: Sociology of sciences and sociologies of science”, in idem (ed.), Perspectives on the sociology of science (New York, 1977), 1–20, p. 12; see also Johnston R. , “Contextual knowledge: A model for the overthrow of the internal/external dichotomy in science”, Australian and New Zealand journal of sociology, xii (1976), 193–203; cf. Williams R. Law J. , “Beyond the bounds of credibility”, Fundamenta scientiae, i (1980), 295–315, esp. pp. 296, 305. A canonical anathema pronounced on “doctrinaire” externalism and internalism is M[orrell] J. B. , [arts.] “Externalism” and “Internalism”, in Bynum W. F. Browne E. J. Porter R. (eds), Dictionary of the history of science (London, 1981), 145–6, 211.

Christie J. , “The rise and fall of Scottish science”, in Crosland M. (ed.), The emergence of science in western Europe (London, 1975), 111–26, p. 111. Speech of “intellectualism” and “contextualism” was part of my own attempt to engage with substantive historical issues while avoiding the old usages: Shapin S. , “Social uses of science”, in Rousseau G. S. Porter R. (eds), The ferment of knowledge: Studies in the historiography of eighteenth-century science (Cambridge, 1980), 93–139.

See, esp., MacCormmach R. , “Editor's introduction”, Historical studies in the physical sciences, iii (1971), 10: “[disciplines are] a natural unit of study”; “the prevailing institutions and culture affect the scientist's thought and career largely through the mediation of the discipline”. Also Rosenberg C. E. , “Toward an ecology of knowledge: On discipline, context, and history”, in Oleson A. Voss J. (eds), The organization of knowledge in modern America, 1860–1920 (Baltimore, 1979), 440–55, p. 441: “specific institutional structures mediate the relationship between men of learning and the society that supports them”; idem, No other gods (ref. 39), 185–6, 209, 214, n. 30; Kohlstedt S. G. , “The nineteenth-century amateur tradition: The case of the Boston Society of Natural History”, in Holton G. Blanpied W. (eds), Science and its public: The changing relationship (Dordrecht, 1976), 173–90, p. 173.

Laudan , “The history of science” (ref. 33), 50–51; Cohen , op. cit. (ref. 33), 79. Joseph Agassi did not, I think, greatly clarify the e/i debates with his attempted distinction between “externalism” and “pure externalism”: “whereas internal history ignores external factors, external history does not ignore internal factors. Let us label that external history that ignores internal factors ‘purely external’ so as to keep out much of today's confusion” (J. Agassi, “Externalism”, in idem, Science and society: Studies in the sociology of science (Dordrecht, 1981; art. orig. publ. 1978), 55–67, p. 55).

Rosenberg C. E. , “Woods or trees: Ideas and actors in the history of science”, Isis, lxxv (1988), 565–70, p. 565. Note Mary Hesse's trajectory on these issues over time, from “Hermeticism and historiography: An apology for the internal history of science”, in Stuewer, op. cit. (ref. 33), 134–62, to “Reasons and evaluation in the history of science”, in Teich M. Young R. M. (eds), Changing perspectives in the history of science: Essays in honour of Joseph Needham (London, 1973), 127–47, to “The strong thesis of sociology of science”, in Hesse M. , Revolutions and reconstructions in the philosophy of science (Brighton, 1980), 29–60, p. 29: “It is now a platitude to hold that the two approaches to the history of science labelled respectively ‘internal’ or ‘rational’, and ‘external’ or ‘social’ are complementary and not contradictory, and that any so-called conflicts between them are pseudo-conflicts”, but cf. the old-guard protest by Gregersen F. Koppe S. , “Against epistemological relativism”, Studies in history and philosophy of science, xix (1988), 447–87, p. 453. See also Elkana Y. , “Is there a distinction between external and internal sociology of science?”, in Cohen R. S. Schnelle T. (eds), Cognition and fact: Materials on Ludwik Fleck (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, lxxxvii; Dordrecht, 1986), 309–16.

E.g., Broman T. H. , “J. C. Reil and the ‘journalization’ of physiology”, in Dear P. (ed.), The literary structure of scientific argument: Historical studies (Philadelphia, 1991), 13–42, p. 13; Stroup A. , A company of scientists: Botany, patronage, and community at the seventeenth-century Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences (Berkeley, 1990), 8–10.

Richards R. J. , The meaning of evolution: The morphological construction and ideological reconstruction of Darwin's theory (Chicago, 1992), 1–2, 75.

Barber B. , Social studies of science (New Brunswick, N.J., 1990), 6–7.

Gillispie C. C. , “Scholarship epitomized”, Isis, lxxxii (1991), 94–98, p. 97.

All positions handled here without attribution can be identified in actual passages of e/i debate. It should not escape notice that I appear in this analysis in the character of criticized as well as critic.

See here an hilariously perceptive sketch of the vacuity of much ‘factor talk’ in Lynch M. , “Pictures of nothing? Visual construals in social theory”, Sociological theory, ix (1991), 1–21, pp. 5–6; and, for his unfortunate victim, Thagard P. , “Welcome to the cognitive revolution”, Social studies of science, xix (1989), 653–7, esp. Fig. 1 (for a “sensible” eclectic picture of the roles of “cognitive” and “social factors”).

Technically, one could continue to theorize about scientific change, as a sub-species of fully general theories of cultural change, but few participants in the e/i debates have shown any inclination to make that move.

Or incorporating yesterday's extrinsic into today's intrinsic — Ideally by an effortless display of its ail-along appropriateness. Cf. Paul Feyerabend's critique of Lakatosian distinctions between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ in Feyerabend, Against method (London, 1978; orig. publ. 1975), 211, where he notes that the construction of a methodologically coherent ‘internal history’ may only be possible because its “‘external’ history contains compensating actions that violate the defining methodology at every turn”. Citing Galilean examples, he argues that “agreement ‘inside’ science is the result of numerous violations ‘outside’ of it”, and that, insofar as these ‘external violations’ were necessary for the cultural change celebrated by Lakatos's ‘internal history’, “they therefore belong to science itself”.

Historical work from the 1960s claiming non-scientific (magical, religious, hermetic, and otherwise ‘irrational’) influences upon early modern science was a notable locus for these confusions.

In this tradition it has been claimed, for example, that social influences work most strongly when actors are ‘least conscious’ of them. Here and elsewhere it is remarkable that history of science debates have been so uninformed by parallel issues in the historiography of political thought since the 1960s. I have specifically in mind Quentin Skinner's historicist contextualism and his powerful criticisms of ‘influence’ models: E.g., Tully J. (ed.), Meaning and context: Quentin Skinner and his critics (Oxford, 1988).

An attempt to identify some problems bearing upon historians' motive-ascription is B. Barnes and S. Shapin, “Darwin and Social Darwinism: Purity and history”, in idem (eds), Natural order: Historical studies of scientific culture (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1979), 95–121.

Merton's ‘other’ thesis (about the effect of economic needs upon scientific foci of interest) is an example of social structural analysis while his “Puritanism and science” thesis invoked individuals' motivational states.

My own research through the mid-1970s mostly answered to this description. We owe our increasing recognition of the analytic distinction between the ‘social’ and the ‘external’ largely to Barry Barnes, H. M. Collins, and Bruno Latour.

Shapin S. , “‘The mind is its own place’: Science and solitude in seventeenth-century England”, Science in context, iv (1991), 191–218; see also Agassi J. , “Towards an historiography of science”, History and theory, 1963, Beiheft 2.

E.g., Putnam H. , “The meaning of ‘meaning’”, in idem, Mind, language and reality (Philosophical papers , ii; Cambridge, 1975), 215–71; Kitcher P. , “Theories, theorists and theoretical change”. Philosophical review, lxxxvii (1978), 519–47; idem, “The division of cognitive labor”, Journal of philosophy, lxxxvii (1990), 5–22. And for a thoroughly naturalistic account of rationality, see Barnes B. , “Natural rationality: A neglected concept in the social sciences”, Philosophy of the social sciences, vi (1975), 115–26.

MacKenzie D. Barnes B. , “Scientific judgment: The biometry–Mendelism controversy”, in Barnes Shapin , op. cit. (ref. 62), 191–210, esp. p. 205. This is one of several quite fundamental features of recent work in the sociology of scientific knowledge missed by Richards R. J. , op. cit. (ref. 53), 1, who ridicules writers supposedly invoking “class jealousies and the kind of Molièrean interests that seem to explain everything”.

Barnes B. , Scientific knowledge and sociological theory (London, 1974), ch. 5.

See also the symbolic interactionist perspective on change and consistency in individual careers: E.g., Becker H. S. , “Notes on the concept of commitment”, American journal of sociology, lxvi (1960), 32–40.

Shapin S. , “History of science and its sociological reconstructions”, History of science, xx (1982), 157–211, esp. pp. 177–8, 194–8; see also idem, “Science and the public”, in Olby (eds), op. cit. (ref. 33), 990–1007.

Shapin S. Schaffer S. , Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life (Princeton, 1985), 342. Sociological work exploring an actor-orientated instrumental approach to scientific boundaries includes: Wright P. E. G. , “Astrology and science in seventeenth-century England”, Social studies of science, v (1975), 399–422; idem, “On the boundaries of science in seventeenth-century England”, in Mendelsohn E. Elkana Y. (eds), Sciences and cultures (Sociology of the sciences yearbook, 1981; Dordrecht, 1981), 77–100; Collins H. M. Pinch T. J. , “The construction of the paranormal: Nothing unscientific is happening”, in Wallis R. (ed.), On the margins of science: The social construction of rejected knowledge (Sociological review monographs, no. 27; Keele, 1979), 237–69; Collins H. M. , “Public experiments and displays of virtuosity: The core-set revisited”, Social studies of science, xviii (1988), 725–48; Jasanoff S. S. , “Contested boundaries in policy-relevant science”, ibid., xvii (1987), 195–230; Gieryn T. F. , “Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science: Strains and interests in the professional ideology of scientists”, American sociological review, xlviii (1983), 781–95; idem, “Distancing science from religion in seventeenth-century England”, Isis, lxxix (1988), 582–93, esp. p. 590; idem, “Boundaries of science”, in Jasanoff S. S. (eds), Handbook of science, technology and society , forthcoming [kindly sent to me by the author after this paper was completed, it is a useful synthetic review of relevant recent work]; Fisher D. , “Boundary work and science: The relation between power and knowledge”, in Cozzens S. E. Gieryn T. F. (eds), Theories of science in society (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), 98–119; Star S. L. Griesemer J. R. , “Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39”, Social studies of science, xix (1989), 387–420; and, closest to the present argument, Pickering A. , “Big science as a form of life”, in De Maria M. Grilli M. Sebastiani F. (eds), Proceedings of the International Conference on the Restructuring of Physical Sciences in Europe and the United States 1945–1960 (Singapore, 1989), 42–54. Schaffer and I have continued to work in this idiom. Other recent historical work on the creation and maintenance of social and cultural boundaries in science includes: Dear P. , “Miracles, experiments, and the ordinary course of nature”, Isis, lxxxi (1990), 663–83; Golinski J. V. , “A noble spectacle: Research on phosphorus and the public cultures of science in the early Royal Society”, ibid., lxxx (1989), 11–39; Gooding D. , “‘In nature's school’: Faraday as an experimentalist”, in idem and James F. A. J. L. (eds), Faraday rediscovered: Essays on the life and work of Michael Faraday, 1797–1867 (London, 1985), 106–35; Iliffe R. C. , “‘The idols of the temple’: Isaac Newton and the private life of anti-idolatry” (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1989); idem, “‘In the warehouse’: Privacy, property and priority in the early Royal Society”, History of science, xxx (1992), 29–68; Westman R. S. , “The astronomer's role in the sixteenth century: A preliminary study”, ibid., xviii (1980), 105–47.

A synthetic source is Latour B. , Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society (Milton Keynes, 1987).

Latour B. , “Mixing humans and nonhumans together: The sociology of a door-closer”, Social problems, xxxv (1988), 298–310; idem, “Postmodern? No, simply omodern! Steps towards an anthropology of science”, Studies in history and philosophy of science, xxi (1990), 145–71.

Shapin S. , “Following scientists around”, Social studies of science, xviii (1988), 533–50; Schaffer S. , “The eighteenth Brumaire of Bruno Latour”, Studies in history and philosophy of science, xxii (1991), 174–92; Sturdy S. , “The germs of a new Enlightenment”, ibid., 163–73; Collins H. M. Yearley S. , “Epistemological chicken”, in Pickering A. (ed.), Science as practice and culture (Chicago, 1992), 301–26.

Latour , op. cit. (ref. 72), e.g., pp. 62, 127, 140, 240. It is unclear how speech of “networks” or “stronger and weaker heterogeneous associations” is supposed to be immune from the criticisms that ban “science” and “society”.

Paul Forman has recently and passionately (op. cit. (ref. 33), 78) renewed the plea for independence for the historian of science, though his programme for how this might be accomplished will come as a major surprise to practitioners who think that this is what they have been doing for many years: “Only by thoroughly historicizing scientific knowledge — Explaining possession of specific pieces or structures of it, not by appealing to a transcendent reality …, but by reference to mundane factors and human actors — Can historians of science move away from whiggery and toward intellectual independence.”.

Needless to say, this would not be a prudent course if we were seeking to write for an audience of seventeenth-century divines.

For germane philosophical treatment of weak, ineliminable, and historiographically innocuous presentism, see Hardcastle G. L. , “Presentism and the indeterminacy of translation”, Studies in history and philosophy of science, xxii (1991), 321–45; cf. Hull D. , “In defense of presentism”, History and theory, xviii (1979), 1–15, esp. pp. 4–5: “Histories are written not only by people and about people but also for people.”.