Historiography of science

Historiography of science examines how accounts of science’s past are produced, interpreted, and revised, including the methods and assumptions that shape them.

Presentism: The interpretation of the past through the concepts, values, or knowledge of the present. Historians of science debate when modern categories distort past scientific practices.
George Sarton: A Belgian-American historian who helped establish the history of science as an academic discipline. His work promoted a unified, cumulative account of scientific progress.
Ludwik Fleck: A Polish physician and philosopher who analyzed how scientific facts emerge within thought collectives. His sociology of knowledge anticipated histories attentive to communities and shared concepts.
Internalism and externalism: A distinction between explanations centered on a discipline’s intellectual development and those emphasizing external conditions. Historians debate how to balance scientific reasoning with political, economic, and social causes.
Feminist history of science: Historical scholarship examining how gender shaped scientific knowledge, institutions, and participation. It recovered excluded contributors and analyzed gendered assumptions in scientific accounts.
Historicism: An approach that interprets ideas and actions within the historical conditions in which they arose. It counters presentist readings by reconstructing past science in its own context.
Auguste Comte: A French philosopher who proposed a law of three stages for the development of human thought. His theory offered an influential early framework for narrating scientific development.
Steven Shapin: A historian and sociologist of science known for studies of scientific credibility and social order. His work links the authority of scientific knowledge to social relations.
Social construction of scientific knowledge: The view that social processes help shape the production and acceptance of scientific knowledge. It challenges histories that treat accepted facts as independent of their communities.
Postcolonial science studies: Scholarship examining science through the histories and power relations of colonialism and its aftermath. It challenges narratives that locate scientific knowledge solely in Europe and North America.

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