THE HISTORY OF SCIENCEThomas S. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCEMichael Scriven. BIBLIOGRAPHYIII. THE SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCEBernard Barber. BIBLIOGRAPHYIV. SCIENCE- GOVERNMENT RELATIONSDon K. Hagstrom. BIBLIOGRAPHYVI. SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATIONNorman Kaplan and Norman W. Storer. BIBLIOGRAPHYAs an independent professional discipline, the history of science is a new field still emerging from a long and varied prehistory. Only since 1. 95. United States, has the majority of even its youngest practitioners been trained for, or committed to, a full- time scholarly career in the field. From their predecessors, most of whom were historians only by avocation and thus derived their goals and values principally from some other field, this younger generation inherits a constellation of sometimes irreconcilable objectives. Nelson Rockefeller 41st Vice President of the United States In office December 19, 1974 – January 20, 1977 President Gerald Ford Preceded by Gerald Ford Succeeded by Walter Mondale 49th Governor of New York In office January 1, 1959 – December 18, 1973.
The resulting tensions, though they have relaxed with increasing maturation of the profession, are still perceptible, particularly in the varied primary audiences to which the literature of the history of science continues to be addressed. Under the circumstances any brief report on development and current state is inevitably more personal and prognostic than for a longer- established profession. Development of the field . Until very recently most of those who wrote the history of science were practicing scientists, sometimes eminent ones. Usually history was for them a by- product of pedagogy. They saw in it, besides intrinsic appeal, a means to elucidate the concepts of their specialty, to establish its tradition, and to attract students. The historical section with which so many technical treatises and monographs still open is contemporary illustration of what was for many centuries the primary form and exclusive source for the history of science. That traditional genre appeared in classical antiquity both in historical sections of technical treatises and in a few independent histories of the most developed ancient sciences, astronomy and mathematics. From the last fifty years of that period come the earliest historical studies that are sometimes still used as such, among them the historical narratives embedded in the technical works of Lagrange (mathematics) as well as the imposing separate treatises by Montucla (mathematics and physical science), Priestley (electricity and optics), and Delambre (astronomy). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though alternative approaches had begun to develop, scientists continued to produce both occasional biographies and magistral histories of their own specialties, for example, Kopp (chemistry), Poggendorff (physics), Sachs (botany), Zittel and Geikie (geology), and Klein (mathematics). An 18-item version of the Client Satisfaction Questionnaire (CSQ-18) was included in an experimental study of the effects of pretherapy orientation on psychotherapy outcome. The psychometric properties of the CSQ-18 in this study were compared with earlier. Get information, facts, and pictures about science at Encyclopedia.com. Make research projects and school reports about science easy with credible articles from our FREE, online encyclopedia and dictionary. THE HISTORY OF SCIENCEThomas S. The Science Program was published by Nelson Doubleday, Inc., with the help of the Science Service. These books, called 'albums,' were sold as a subscription service and. A greeting letter from the Science Program, thanking the subscriber for joining, touting. Political Science The basic subject matter Content Method and theory BIBLIOGRAPHY This article provides a broad introduction to the discipline of political science. The major subfields are reviewed in the entries International law; International relations; Political.A second main historiographic tradition, occasionally indistinguishable from the first, was more explicitly philosophical in its objectives. Early in the seventeenth century Francis Bacon proclaimed the utility of histories of learning to those who would discover the nature and proper use of human reason. Condorcet and Comte are only the most famous of the philosophically inclined writers who, following Bacon. Before the nineteenth century this tradition remained predominantly programmatic, producing little significant historical research. But then, particularly in the writings of Whewell, Mach, and Duhem, philosophical concerns became a primary motive for creative activity in the history of science, and they have remained important since. Both of these historiographic traditions, particularly when controlled by the textual- critical techniques of nineteenth- century German political history, produced occasional monuments of scholarship, which the contemporary historian ignores at his peril. But they simultaneously reinforced a concept of the field that has today been largely rejected by the nascent profession. The objective of these older histories of science was to clarify and deepen an understanding of contemporary scientific methods or concepts by displaying their evolution. Committed to such goals, the historian characteristically chose a single established science or branch of science. Observations, laws, or theories which contemporary science had set aside as error or irrelevancy were seldom considered unless they pointed a methodological moral or explained a prolonged period of apparent sterility. Similar selective principles governed discussion of factors external to science. Religion, seen as a hindrance, and technology, seen as an occasional prerequisite to advance in instrumentation, were almost the only such factors which received attention. The outcome of this approach has recently been brilliantly parodied by the philosopher Joseph Agassi. Until the early nineteenth century, of course, characteristics very much like these typified most historical writing. Though they agreed about nothing else, both the romantic and the scientist- historian continued to view the development of science as a quasi- mechanical march of the intellect, the successive surrender of nature. Only in this century have historians of science gradually learned to see their subject matter as something different from a chronology of accumulating positive achievement in a technical specialty defined by hindsight. A number of factors contributed to this change. Probably the most important was the influence, beginning in the late nineteenth century, of the history of philosophy. In that field only the most partisan could feel confident of his ability to distinguish positive knowledge from error and superstition. Dealing with ideas that had since lost their appeal, the historian could scarcely escape the force of an injunction which Bertrand Russell later phrased succinctly: . Partly it was learned from men like Lange and Cassirer who dealt historically with people or ideas that were also important for scientific development. Almost a century after the Middle Ages had become important to the general historian, Pierre Duhem. Too many of the elements of Galileo. But it was not possible, either, to assimilate it quite to Galileo. The essential novelties of seventeenth- century science would be understood only if medieval science were explored first on its own terms and then as the base from which the . More than any other, that challenge has shaped the modern historiography of science. The writings which it has evoked since 1. E. Dijksterhuis, Anneliese Maier, and especially Alexandre Koyr. In addition, the discovery of medieval science and its Renaissance role has disclosed an area in which the history of science can and must be integrated with more traditional types of history. That task has barely begun, but the pioneering synthesis by Butterfield and the special studies by Panofsky and Frances Yates mark a path which will surely be broadened and followed. A third factor in the formation of the modern historiography of science has been a repeated insistence that the student of scientific development concern himself with positive knowledge as a whole and that general histories of science replace histories of special sciences. Traceable as a program to Bacon, and more particularly to Comte, that demand scarcely influenced scholarly performance before the beginning of this century, when it was forcefully reiterated by the universally venerated Paul Tannery and then put to practice in the monumental researches of George Sarton. Subsequent experience has suggested that the sciences are not, in fact, all of a piece and that even the superhuman erudition required for a general history of science could scarcely tailor their joint evolution to a coherent narrative. But the attempt has been crucial, for it has highlighted the impossibility of attributing to the past the divisions of knowledge embodied in contemporary science curricula. Today, as historians increasingly turn back to the detailed investigation of individual branches of science, they study fields which actually existed in the periods that concern them, and they do so with an awareness of the state of other sciences at the time. Still more recently, one other set of influences has begun to shape contemporary work in the history of science. Its result is an increased concern, deriving partly from general history and partly from German sociology and Marxist historiography, with the role of nonintellectual, particularly institutional and socioeconomic, factors in scientific development. Unlike the ones discussed above, however, these influences and the works responsive to them have to date scarcely been assimilated by the emerging profession. For all its novelties, the new historiography is still directed predominantly to the evolution of scientific ideas and of the tools (mathematical, observational, and experimental) through which these interact with each other and with nature. Its best practitioners have, like Koyr. A few have acted as though the obtrusion of economic or institutional considerations into the history of science would be a denial of the integrity of science itself. As a result, there seem at times to be two distinct sorts of history of science, occasionally appearing between the same covers but rarely making firm or fruitful contact. The still dominant form, often called the . Its newer rival, often called the . Putting the two together is perhaps the greatest challenge now faced by the profession, and there are increasing signs of a response. Nevertheless, any survey of the field. Insofar as possible (it is never entirely so, nor could history be written if it were), the historian should set aside the science that he knows. His science should be learned from the textbooks and journals of the period he studies, and he should master these and the indigenous traditions they display before grappling with innovators whose discoveries or inventions changed the direction of scientific advance. Dealing with innovators, the historian should try to think as they did.
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