The History of Science and the History of Knowledge

Abstract

The article examines the state of the history of science as a discipline and its objectives in the context of its origins and current transformations. The establishment of this discipline and its assumptions about the nature of science together with its goals and structure are briefly discussed. The history of science became a discipline only at the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, and its start is associated with the work of chemist James Conant, a high-level administrator in Manhattan project who was also president of Harvard University and a high-ranking bureaucrat. It was based also on the narrative developed by Alfred North Whitehead, Edwin Burtt, Alexandre Koyré and other historians of science, which claimed modern science was the creator of modernity and a necessary condition for the geopolitical domination of the West. In that understanding, modern science meant science since the time of Galileo and Newton. The author provides a critical analysis of this foundation narrative for the discipline and of its consequences while showing how contemporary history of science has overcome it. The contradiction between modernism and historicism has been resolved in favor of the latter. A key role in this was played by the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, which held the potential to undo the presumed monolithic unity of science by rejecting teleology and introducing incommensurability and discontinuities into the historical process. By rejecting explanation of the knowledge of other times and places in terms of modern science, the discipline faced a radical multiplication of independent types of knowledge. This was facilitated by the reorientation to the study of knowledge practices that took place in the 1980s. As a result, the subject matter of the history of science began to erode, and this launched discussion of the prospects for a transition to a history of knowledge based on the study of practices. The sweep of this change of vision is illustrated by the example of classifying sciences according to both their subject matter and the similarities in their research practices. Finally, the advantages and disadvantages of the new discipline along with its prospects and the challenges it faces are discussed.