Historiography of science is the history and analysis of the sub-discipline of history known as the history of science, including its disciplinary aspects and practices (methods, theories, schools), and controversies. Its subject is the variety of ways that science's past has been written about. The earliest histories of science were written by scientists largely as celebrations of scientific progress. Scholars in the 19th and early 20th century frequently treated the history and philosophy of science as a single scholarly undertaking but the fields began to diverge under the influence of logical positivism, which demarcated scientific justification as the proper concern of philosophy, leaving scientific discovery to the historians. The increasing professionalization of science history (i.e. the emergence of "history of science" as an independent field) in the 20th century and the entry of sociologists into the field caused friction with scientists and "practitioner" historians (practicing or retired scientists writing about their own fields). The divide has often centered on a disagreement over whether the history of science should be an accounting of scientific progress or a critical analysis of science as a cultural activity. That disagreement reached a climax during the "science wars" of the 1990s when prominent scientists criticized sociologists and some historians for ignoring the objective reality of nature in favor of political explanations when writing science history. Since the history of science requires a difficult intellectual "bilingualism" that straddles science and history, the polarization of the surrounding culture between the sciences and the humanities in the 20th century remains an inherent, and ongoing, challenge for the field. Some science historians have acknowledged the reality of the divide but also argued that it can be bridged by scholars who are trained as both scientists and historians.
Scientists
Narratives of progress
General historians have, historically, been inclined to leave the history of science to specialists. The first histories of science, in the 18th century, were instead written by Enlightenment-era scientists like Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725-1799),, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783) and Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) who generally saw history as a pedagogic tool for celebrating the progress of human reason and/or as a narrative of a linear and progressive march toward the superior knowledge of the present. Biographies of scientists were also popular in the 19th century, helping to amplify Newton's reputation as both a scientific genius and national hero in Great Britain, and scientist-historian John William Draper advanced an influential conflict thesis between religion and science. By the mid-20th century, however, historians specializing in the history of science began to disparage these earlier efforts. In particular, they criticized "practitioner" (i.e. scientist) historians for systematically neglecting primary sources, failing to truly understand those sources when they didn't neglect them, being oblivious to the social (i.e. "external") context of science and favoring hagiographic stories of scientist-heroes and their myopic, misguided and/or prejudiced adversaries.
Science wars
While most scientists writing history of science have tended to favor an internalist approach that traced the rational and logical evolution of scientific ideas, the Soviet physicist Boris Hessen (1893-1936) was a notable exception, arguing that even Newton’s physics was a direct product of the economic needs of 17th-century British capitalism. Hessen’s externalist approach gained momentum over the following decades as sociologists entered the field, but it also eventually sparked a backlash from scientists and philosophers in the 1990s who fiercely criticized sociologists and externalist historians for ignoring the objective reality of nature and for their position that the history of science should be written without regard for whether the theories involved were actually correct. The "frenzied confrontations" of this conflict - later known as the science wars - were escalated by the book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science by the biologist Paul R. Gross and the mathematician Norman Levitt. The term itself was coined for a special 1996 issue of Social Text, a Duke University Press publication of postmodern critical theory, that featured multiple articles emphasizing the social construction of science. The dispute gained significant media interest because of the Sokal hoax, which generated unusually wide public interest and transformed what had been a specialized academic debate about how science develops into a broader public controversy.
Philosophers
Methods and justifications
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![Historiography of science: The title page of Francis Bacon's Novum Organum Scientiarum (1620) depicts a galleon passing between the mythical Pillars of Hercules that stand on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar, marking the exit from the well-charted waters of the Mediterranean into the unknowns of the Atlantic Ocean. The Pillars have been smashed through by European sailors, leading to the discovery of previously unknown continents. Bacon argues that a new method for attaining knowledge will begin a similar era of new discovery. The Latin tag across the bottom – Multi pertransibunt & augebitur scientia – means "Many will travel and knowledge will be increased." The page was liberally copied from Andrés García de Céspedes's Regimiento de Navegación, published in 1606.[36]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/Instauratio_Magna_1620_%28cropped%29.jpg/500px-Instauratio_Magna_1620_%28cropped%29.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=parser&utm_content=thumbnail)
