What have the History and Philosophy of Science to do for one Another?

Abstract

History of science has itself a long history, which goes back to at least a couple of centuries ago in the case of some disciplines. Still, it is particularly in the last few decades that it has started to receive a considerable new impulse. But what is more significant is that recent history of science shows a rather new face, if compared with the older one, the novelty being represented by the fact that it shows less and less the features of a “learned” enterprise. Old histories of science had the general character of patient compilations, recording results, discoveries, errors and shortcomings with impartial attention, and framing all that within a series of biographical sketches. The chronological ordering was tacitly supposed to provide by itself the structure of the narration, and this sequential order of justaposition was felt to account for a kind of self-apparent logic of the discourse. Nowadays we are inclined to say that this was no history of science proper, because it lacked the consciousness that science is an historical fact, and this cannot be expressed by the simple consideration that it evolves chronologically. In order to conceive of science as an historical fact, at least two fundamental characteristics must be clearly recognised: (i) that science is one among the factors which make history and, as such, has a complex relationship with the other factors and with the history “produced”, which cannot be ignored in making an history of science; (ii) that science is itself somehow “made” by history, it is an historical “product”, which cannot be adequately accounted for without considering the more general historical framework in which it is embedded. Let us remark that these considerations are independent (at least to a certain extent) of the discussion concerning the problems of the “internal” or “external” history of science. They simply express the fact that, at last, science too has been included in that “historical way of thinking” that had been customary, e.g., for literature, philosophy, music, and fine arts, but had left science in a kind of limbo of suprahistorical imperturbability.