The History of Science: Internal or External?

Abstract

1. Contemporary historians and philosophers of science have shown an even greater reluctance to accept a dichotomy between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ factors that intervene in the development of scientific knowledge. In the recent Anglo-Saxon tradition, we find two fundamental positions with respect to the internal-history/external-history problem. One of these consists in defending an ‘internalist’ position with regard to the history of science, or, at least, in supposing that internal factors have a greater relevance for science than external ones. On the other hand, there is an increasingly more serious interest in constructing a ‘new history of science’, based on the complementarity of the internalist approach and the externalist approach, and on the utilization of methods drawn from other social disciplines.