Abstract
This chapter establishes a theoretical reflection on the scientific field of the historiography of science as a fundamental element for a critical understanding of the development and dynamics of science and its history. To reflect theoretically on the historiography of science means to think beyond the specific historiographical currents of science, involving aspects of research and debates in the history of science that have developed over more than a century. We propose a reflection based on the use of historiographical tools that enables us to think about the “writing of history” of science, problematized by the complexity of historical (or scientific-historical) sources. Thus, the focus is on the past and the possible fissures provoked by recent questions and discontents to write, rewrite, deconstruct, or re-signify this past. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, as a concept of history, historiography does not conceive “writing” as a simple historiographical report of the historical “fact,” which the historiography of science does not do in practical terms. However, it still seems to lack theoretical reflections on how (not on what) the history of science is written. The double assignment of the historiography of science, on the one hand, enables the analysis of the different ways of writing the history of science (and of the authors themselves) and, on the other, questions the theoretical and methodological scope of the different models created from the narratives of the history of science. However, more than that, without losing sight of history and its historiographical perspective, this theoretical reflection can unfold in a third assignment in which the theoretical analytics of the historiography of science would work as locus, space of tension, and propitious convergence that, through the “historiographical operation of science,” could propose, from interrelations and intercrosses, the interdisciplinary and complex critical analysis involving the history of science field.
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Notes
- 1.
In complex discussions, it is sometimes essential to highlight the obvious. Kuhn knew this. “I have, for example, repeatedly taught graduate seminars in which prospective historians and philosophers read and discussed the same classic works of science and philosophy. […] Undoubtedly the two had looked at the same signs, but they had been trained (programmed, if you will) to process them differently. The professions are different, and they quite properly put different first things first. For the philosophers in my seminars the priority tasks were, first, to isolate the central elements of a philosophical position and, then, to criticize and develop them […] historians, on the other hand, were concerned with the viable and the general only in the forms that had, in fact, guided the men they studied. Their first concern was to discover what each one had thought, how he had come to think it, and what the consequences had been for him, his contemporaries, and his successors” (Kuhn 1968/1977, 6–8). In the emblematic three-day-long interview Kuhn adds, “[…] when I read that lecture on the relationship between the history and philosophy of science, a philosopher came up to me afterwards and said, ‘But we have such good scholarship! We have such good scholars in the history of philosophy!’.” Kuhn agreed in part and replied: “Yes, but they are not doing history” (Kuhn 2000, 316).
- 2.
“The term appeared in France in the Bescherelle of 1845 under the influence of the Polish historians Lelewel, Wronsky and Plebanski. It designates then ‘the art of writing history.’ From 1869 onward, the term was used in the sense of ‘historical literature,’ as used by the German school. Those who study historical literature fall into the field of the history of historiography, like the German Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung and the Italian Storia della storiografia. The term ‘historiography,’ used in the field of research, appears in the supplements of the Littré of 1877. Historiography is defined there as the ‘literary history of the books of history,’ a definition retaken in the Supplements to the Dictionary of the French language in 1886. […] In the 8th edition of the Dictionary of the French Academy, ‘historiography’ means ‘collection of works by historiographers’” (Zeller 2021). “Le terme apparaît en France dans le Bescherelle de 1845 sous l’influence des historiens polonais Lelewel, Wronsky et Plebanski. Il désigne alors ‘l’art d’écrire l’histoire’. À partir de 1869 le terme se diffuse dans le sens de ‘littérature historique,’ employé par l’école allemande. Ceux qui étudient la littérature historique s’inscrivent dans le domaine de l’histoire de l’historiographie, à l’image de la Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung allemande et de la Storia della storiografia italienne. Le terme d’ ‘historiographie,’ utilisé dans le sens de domaine de recherche, apparaît dans les suppléments du Littré de 1877. L’historiographie y est définie comme l’ ‘histoire littéraire des livres d’histoire,’ définition reprise dans les Suppléments au Dictionnaire de la langue française en 1886. […] Dans la 8e édition du Dictionnaire de l’Académie française,‘historiographie’ a le sens de Recueil d’ouvrages d’ historiographes” (Zeller 2021).
- 3.
The author explains that “the discourses and practices of historians in their societies” […] “relate their writings to contexts, to academic struggles, to political issues, to social worlds” (Offenstadt 2011). “les discours et les pratiques des historiens dans leurs sociétés” […] “rattacher leurs écrits à des contextes, à des luttes académiques, à des enjeux politiques, à des mondes sociaux” (Offenstadt 2011).
- 4.
In note 2 of Chapter II, “The Historiographical Operation” of the book. The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau clarifies: “Once and for all, I want to specify that I use the word history in the sense of historiography. That is, I understand by history a practice (a discipline), its result (a discourse), and its relationship.” Cf. “Making history…” (de Certeau 1975/2011a, 109).
- 5.
The “problem-history” occupies the central core of the new historiography proposed by the Annales movement, which inspired historians such as Peter Burke and many others outside France. Burke clarifies that this “new kind of history,” in addition to problem-history, promoted two other historiographical revolutions: the broadening of the object to “the history of all human activities” and not just political history and interdisciplinarity, that is, “collaboration with other disciplines, such as geography, sociology, psychology, economics, linguistics, social anthropology, and so many others” (Burke 1990, 12).
- 6.
American philosopher Gary Gutting points out that Koyré’s “influence on him [Kuhn] was historiographical rather than philosophical” (Gutting 2002, 53).
- 7.
Although the historians mentioned by Kuhn are historians of science, they all belonged to the same Parisian intellectual circle formed around the Revue de Synthèse (1900), whose main objective was interdisciplinarity in search of the integration of history, with the participation of the founding historians of the Annales movement, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, with several areas, including the natural sciences. The philosopher and historian Henri Berr (1863–1954), a protagonist in this intellectual exchange, also founded the Centre International de Synthèse, in which researchers from different fields also participated in the Semaines de Synthèse (Maia 2013; Vieira 2014).
- 8.
In an article published in 1920, the American historian of science Harry E. Barnes pointed out the lack of dialogue, interest, and mutual cooperation between historians and the history of science. (Barnes 1920, p. 122). On the other hand, the American chemist and historian of science Allen G. Debus, from the analysis of several classics of historians of science, defended the idea of the “History of Science as a branch of the field of History” (Debus 1991, 3).
- 9.
Since the last decade of the twentieth century with the article Science Teaching: The Role of History and Philosophy of Science (1994) by Michael Matthews and more intensely in the first decade of the twenty-first century with the publication of the literature review The Nature of Science Education: A bibliography (Bell, R. Abd-el-khalick, F.; Lederman, N. G.; Mccomas, W. F.), specialists in science education have advocated the insertion of philosophy of science and history of science in science teaching to aid the understanding of the Nature of Science and make science teaching more attractive. See also Vieira (2022) and Matthews (2014).
- 10.
We have avoided terms like historiographical currents, paradigms, schools, and movements, using “historiographical trends” because it is broader and encompasses all the others.
- 11.
Sarton, a professor at Harvard from 1940 to 1951, had Thomas Kuhn as a student. Although Kuhn recognized Sarton’s importance as a historian of science, in his opinion, “there was a sort of history of science to do that Sarton wasn’t doing. […] There were a number of other people who taught it within one or another of the science departments. But what they taught often was not quite history – in my terms, at least, not quite history; it was textbook history” (Kuhn 2000, 283).
- 12.
According to Condé, “Kuhn may not have known the article in which Ludwik Fleck uses the expression ‘science of science,’ and thus he took as a reference the expression used by Price (1966), twenty years after Fleck, but in a sense very close to that of the Polish thinker” (Condé 2017, 66).
- 13.
According to Rossi (2001), the Royal Society refused to acquire his manuscripts with religious content upon Newton’s death and recommended the family not to show them to anyone. Also, the University of Cambridge, the British Museum, and the American universities of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton refused to acquire Newton’s manuscripts, all for the same reason: to preserve the Newtonian “image of science.” However, part of these manuscripts on alchemy, universal interpretation, theological controversies on the apocalypse, and occult wisdom “was acquired in 1936 by John Maynard Lord Keynes” (Rossi 2001, 408), and the State of Israel received most of them and, eighteen years after the acquisition, made them available at the University Library in Jerusalem.
- 14.
Vieira (2014) points out that since the thirteenth century, the existence of cumulative errors and the need to reform the Julian calendar were already being discussed. In the sixteenth century, the reform became an official project of the Church, and Copernicus was asked to advise the Papacy about it; however, he refused because the existing theories and observations did not yet allow the elaboration of an adequate calendar. “Reform of the calendar demanded, said Copernicus, reform in astronomy. […] The Gregorian calendar, first adopted in 1582, was in fact based upon computations that made use of Copernicus’ work” (Kuhn 1957, 126).
- 15.
“Copernicus’ friend and teacher at Bologna, Domenico Maria de Novara, was a close associate of the Florentine Neoplatonists who translated Proclus and other authors of his school” (Kuhn 1957, 129).
- 16.
The historian we refer to is not only the one with an academic background in stricto sensu history. On the contrary, he is a professional who writes history using the theoretical and methodological framework of history, which is so often not observed in the history of science.
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Vieira, A.M.R.S. (2023). Historiography of Science and the Relationship Between History and the History of Science. In: Condé, M.L., Salomon, M. (eds) Handbook for the Historiography of Science. Historiographies of Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99498-3_31-1
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