Science and Medicine

Historiography of science

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.

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See also

• ▸Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
• ▸Chelone (plant)
• ▸Brine pool

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