Abstract
Since the mid-twentieth century, the ‘Scientific Revolution’ has arguably occupied centre stage in most Westerners’, and many non-Westerners’, conceptions of science history. Yet among history of science specialists that position has been profoundly contested. Most radically, historians Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams in 1993 proposed to demolish the prevailing ‘big picture’ which posited that the Scientific Revolution marked the origin of modern science. They proposed a new big picture in which science is seen as a distinctly modern, western phenomenon rather than a human universal, that it was invented in the Age of Revolutions 1760–1848, and that science be de-centred within the new big picture: treated as just one of many forms of human knowledge-seeking activity. Their paper is one of the most highly cited in the history of science field, and has the potential to transform the way that science educators, science communicators, science policy-makers and scientists view science. Yet the paper and historians’ scholarly response to it are not well-known outside the history discipline. Here I attempt to bridge that disciplinary gap with a review of scholarly papers published 1994–2014 that cited Cunningham and Williams or otherwise discussed the Scientific Revolution, to gauge the extent of support for the old and new big pictures. I find that the old big picture is disintegrating and lacks active defenders, while many scholars support aspects of the new big picture. I discuss the significance of this for scholars in ‘applied’ fields of science studies such as education, communication and policy.
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Notes
This was determined primarily with a citation search on the Web of Science database. Of the >27,000 papers Web of Science lists for the keyword ‘science’ within research areas ‘history’ and ‘history and philosophy of science,’ it ranks 75th highest by number of citations (searched 13 January 2015). Many of the papers ahead of it in that list are from disciplines other than history, such as philosophy of science or sociology of scientific knowledge. Web of Science lists 73 citations for the Cunningham and Williams paper; the next most cited paper in The British Journal for the History of Science has 58. A search for papers referencing ‘the Scientific Revolution,’ conducted for the second part of the review, yielded an additional citing paper that was mistakenly not listed among the 73, taking the total to 74. A search using the disciplinary specialist Historical Abstracts database did not add any further citations to those listed by Web of Science.
See footnote 1 for search details. The six works listed as citing Cunningham and Williams that were not included in the review were either not in English, were inaccessible, or appear to have been erroneously listed by Web of Science.
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The author would like to thank Alex Cook, Blake Singley and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the manuscript.
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Orthia, L.A. What’s Wrong with Talking About the Scientific Revolution? Applying Lessons from History of Science to Applied Fields of Science Studies. Minerva 54, 353–373 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-016-9299-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-016-9299-4