History of science

Science history

A Role for History

group affected by them, Maxwell’s equations were as revolutionary as

Einstein’s, and they were resisted accordingly. The invention of other

new theories regularly, and appropriately, evokes the same response

from some of the specialists on whose area of special competence they

impinge. For these men the new theory implies a change in the rules

governing the prior practice of normal science. Inevitably, therefore, it

reflects upon much scientific work they have already successfully

completed. That is why a new theory, however special its range of

application, is seldom or never just an increment to what is already

known. Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and

the re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that

is seldom completed by a single man and never overnight. No wonder

historians have had difficulty in dating precisely this extended process

that their vocabulary impels them to view as an isolated event.

Nor are new inventions of theory the only scientific events that have

revolutionary impact upon the specialists in whose domain they occur.

The commitments that govern normal science specify not only what

sorts of entities the universe does contain, but also, by implication, those

that it does not. It follows, though the point will require extended

discussion, that a discovery like that of oxygen or X-rays does not simply

add one more item to the population of the scientist’s world. Ultimately

it has that effect, but not until the professional community has reevaluated

traditional experimental procedures, altered its conception of

entities with which it has long been familiar, and, in the process, shifted

the network of theory through which it deals with the world. Scientific

fact and theory are not categorically separable, except perhaps within a

single tradition of normal-scientific practice. That is why the unexpected

discovery is not simply factual in its import and why the scientist’s world

is qualitatively transformed as well as quantitatively enriched by

fundamental novelties of either fact or theory.

This extended conception of the nature of scientific revolutions is the

one delineated in the pages that follow. Admittedly the extension strains

customary usage.

Nevertheless, I shall continue to speak even of discoveries as revolutionary, because it is just the possibility of relating their structure to that of, say, the Copernican revolution that makes the extended conception seem to me so important. The preceding discussion indicates how the complementary notions of normal science and of scientific revolutions will be developed in the nine sections immediately to follow. The rest of the  essay attempts  to dispose of three remaining central questions.

Section XI, by discussing the textbook tradition, considers why scientific revolutions have previously been so difficult to see. Section XII describes the revolutionary competition between the proponents of the old normal scientific tradition and the adherents of the new one. It thus considers the process that should somehow, in a theory of scientific inquiry,

replace the confirmation or falsification procedures made familiar by

our usual image of science. Competition between segments of the

scientific community is the only historical process that ever actually

results in the rejection of one previously accepted theory or in the

adoption of another. Finally, Section XIII will ask how development

through revolutions can be compatible with the apparently unique

character of scientific progress. For that question, however, this essay

will provide no more than the main outlines of an answer, one which

depends upon characteristics of the scientific community that require

much additional exploration and study.

Undoubtedly, some readers will already have wondered whether

historical study can possibly effect the sort of conceptual transformation

aimed at here. An entire arsenal of dichotomies is available to suggest

that it cannot properly do so. History, we too often say, is a purely

descriptive discipline. The theses suggested above are, however, often

interpretive and sometimes normative. Again, many of my

generalizations are about the sociology or social psychology of scientists;

yet at least a few of my conclusions belong traditionally to logic or

epistemology. In the preceding paragraph I may even seem to have

violated the very influential contemporary distinction between “the

context of discovery” and “the context of justification.

Prepared By :Bharat Awasthi