HSS102 History of Science

Introductory Lectures

There is a general tendency to associate science with the modern world. Yet, as with
any other human activity, science has a history. At times, we recount great names
associated with science – Galileo, Newton, Einstein and so on – all who lived in the
past and whose lives and scholarly findings have shaped our lives profoundly. The
growth and development of science are not a mere chronicle but are ridden with
controversies. The advance of science has not been a smooth process of fact-
gathering. We have heard stories of Galileo’s trial by the Inquisition for teaching that
the earth goes around the sun and the controversy sparked by Darwin’s theory of
evolution remains active still today. History is about more than mere dates and
names. It is an interpretation based on evidence, and the latter can also be questioned.

The origins of the disciplinary history of science go back to the eighteenth-century

Enlightenment philosophy in Europe. The Enlightenment thinkers hailed human
reason and were hostile to the Church, which they saw as an agent for the old social
hierarchy derived from feudal times.1 These philosophers identified the New Science
of the 17th century as the first manifestation of a renewed flowering of rational
thought and celebrated the chief contributors to the modern worldview, including
Galileo and Newton. Galileo had troubles with Church for proclaiming the
Copernican model of universe and this further strengthened the views of 18th century
Enlightenment thinkers about the oppressive nature of the Church. It should be noted
that these Enlightenment philosophers suppressed any hint that Newton had dabbled
in magic and alchemy but selectively portrayed the achievements of New Science. It
is from this Enlightenment tradition that we have inherited the assumption that the
Scientific Revolution of the 17th century was a turning point in the progress of

1
For the definition and characteristic features of Enlightenment philosophy see Enlightenment (Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy). For a basic understanding see Age of Enlightenment - Wikipedia
Western thought and a pantheon of heroes identified with the key steps in the
foundation of modern cosmology and physical science.

William Whewell, the British scientist and philosopher, coined the word 'Scientist' in
his 1837 work titled History of Inductive Sciences.2 He argued that the scientific
approach rested on the rigorous testing of new hypotheses by observation and
experimentation. He contributed to the creation of the modern discipline of the
history of science. Whewell was a conservative than the 18th-century Enlightenment
thinkers, for he defended the idea of divinity in the understanding of nature. The
radical trend of the 18th century pitting science against religion also continued into the
19th-century histories of science. English-born American scientist and historian John
William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Science and Religion, published in
1874-5, was a pioneering effort in this revival of the Enlightenment program.3 This
debate between two rival views of science and its history is still active today.

In the early 20th century, the legacy of the rationalist program was transformed in the
work of Irish Marxist John Desmond Bernal.4 An eminent crystallographer who
pioneered X-Ray crystallography in molecular Biology, Bernal critiqued the scientific
community for selling out to the industrialists. In his Social Function of Science
(1939), he called for a renewed commitment to use science for the good of all.
Bernal’s multi-volume work Science in History was a monumental attempt to depict
science as a potential force for good (as in the Enlightenment program) that had been
perverted by its absorption into the military-industrial complex. Marxists argued that
science had emerged as a by-product of the search for technical mastery over nature,
not a disinterested search for knowledge, and the information it accumulated tended
to reflect the interests of the society within which the scientists functioned. The
objective was to reshape society so that the science that was done would benefit
everyone, not just the capitalists. Boris Hessen, the Soviet scientist and historian of

2
For a biography of William Whewell see William Whewell - Wikipedia
3
For a biography of JW Draper see John William Draper - Wikipedia
4
For a biography of JD Bernal see J. D. Bernal - Wikipedia
science, read a famous paper, ‘The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia’ at
the Second International Congress of the History of Science held in London in 1931,
which argued that intellectual achievements such as Newton’s are best explained by
examining the social context out of which they arose.5 It is one of the most influential
papers presented at the meeting of historians of science that had come to shape the
‘externalist’ accounts in the history of science.

The two World Wars and Nazism created severe stress on the claims of the European
civilization, particularly the Enlightenment ideals. The optimistic vision of the
Enlightenment had vanished along with the idea of inevitable progress in the
calamities that the Western world had now experienced. Science must either turn its
back on materialism and renew its links with religion or turn its back on capitalism
and begin fighting for the common good.

It was at this time that the history of science began to achieve recognition as a distinct
academic specialization. The Belgian scholar George Sarton founded the journal Isis
in 1912 – it continues today as the journal of the History of Science society – but on
moving to America, he found it impossible to persuade Harvard University to create a
history of the science department at that time.6 The first specialist departments only
began to flourish after World War II. The concern was that the technological
consequences of science were now so powerful that a broader analysis of its history
was essential to understand how it had come to play this dominant role in society.

The concern of the historians of science during the first half of the twentieth century
was to explain the origins of modern science. They saw the emergence of the
scientific method and the main steps in the creation of the modern worldview as
major contributions to human progress. Much attention thus focused on the Scientific
Revolution of the seventeenth century and the associated developments in astronomy

5
For a biography of Boris Hessen see Boris Hessen - Wikipedia
6
For a biography of George Sarton see George Sarton - Wikipedia
and physics. Historians like Herbert Butterfield (The Origins of Modern Science,
1949), Alexander Koyre (From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, 1958) and
Rupert Hall (The Scientific Revolution, 1500-1800, 1954) made efforts to explain the
origins of modern science broadly focusing on the developments in the European
context. These works broadly recounted the triumphalist history of science largely
within the geographical boundaries of Europe. There was hardly any effort to focus
on civilizations and histories other than Europe.

The comparative approach in the history of science and the focus on civilizations
other than Europe started receiving attention from the writings of George Sarton and
Joseph Needham. George Sarton (1884-1956) was a Belgian-born American chemist
and historian of science. He wrote an influential work, Introduction to the History of
Science (1927-47), which consists of three volumes. Sarton founded “New
Humanism” which aimed to achieve a connection between the sciences and the
humanities. After his move to the United States from Belgium in 1915, Sarton
became a defining force in the early development of the history of science as an
academic discipline in the curriculum of US institutions. In his three-volume
Introduction to the History of Science, Sarton moved away from Euro-centrism and
included discussions of developments in various civilizations outside Europe, notably
those of Asia and North Africa.

The controversy which occupied scholars in various parts of the world from the
1930s until at least the 1970s was around the question of whether the basic causes of
scientific and technical change are to be accounted for in terms of developments
within scientific thought and practice or result from broader transformations in
society. This is known as the internalist-externalist debate in the history of science.
By the late 1970s, a broad consensus was achieved that it required both the methods –
integration and assessment.
Joseph Needham (1900-1995) was a British biochemist and historian of science. He
studied in Cambridge obtaining D.Phil in 1925.7 Influenced by Frederick Hopkins,
the English biochemist, Needham worked in his laboratory at the Department of
Biochemistry in Cambridge University. It was here that he published his first
pioneering work Chemical Embryology in 1931 in three volumes. The first volume of
this work was devoted to history of Embroyology. In 1931, Needham was involved in
organizing the second international conference on the history of science. Here,
Needham was influenced by the Marxist approach to the history of science presented
by the Soviet delegation. It was here that historian of physics Boris Hessen presented
the famous paper ‘The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia’. The paper
stirred debates on internalist-externalist accounts on history of science.

One notices internalist slant in Needham’s Chemical Embryology (1931) but

throughout 1930s and later, Needham had come to champion the externalist cause.
This was based on his conviction that understanding the dynamics of scientific and
technological development required detailed examination of concrete discoveries and
inventions, and analysis of broad changes in society which affected scientific
interests, ideas and practices. The arrival of Chinese research students in Cambridge
provided opportunity for Needham for collaborative study of the history of science in
China. Needham was intrigued by China after the Japanese invasion of China in
1937. He started learning Chinese and committed to write History of Chinese science
to fill the gap in the literature. He also maintained active communication with Gustav
Haloun, Professor of Chinese in Cambridge University with whom he made careful
reading of ancient Chinese texts.

Under the direction of Royal Society, Needham was appointed the Director of the
Sino-British Science Cooperation office in China between 1942 and 1946. He
travelled widely in China during this period. These travels allowed him to gain an
intimate knowledge of the Chinese scientific community, its conditions of work and

7
For a biography of Joseph Needham see Joseph Needham - Wikipedia
its concerns. By late 1942, Needham was contemplating of writing a major work on
history of Chinese science. Needham appealed for the formation of a permanent body
responsible for international scientific liaison on a world scale. This resulted in the
formation of science division in UNESCO set up in 1945. From 1946 to 1948,
Needham was the first Director of that division. One of his conceptual contributions
there was the notion that modern science is an ecumenical enterprise in which people
from all nations and cultural backgrounds could and ought to be involved. Needham
returned to Cambridge in 1948 to resume his duties as William Dunn Reader in
Biochemistry. He embarked on a project ‘Science and Civilization in China’ together
with Chinese colleague Wang Ling. The first volume appeared in 1954. By the time
Needham died in 1995, 16 volumes had appeared.

While heading the Natural Sciences division of the UNESCO, Joseph Needham
encouraged forging intellectual communication between the East and the West
through institutional means. Under his mentorship, UNESCO embarked on the
project to publish Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind in 1947. The objectives
of the project laid emphasis on the exchange of all kinds between civilizations as the
driving force for the evolution of mankind, the exchange of scientific and technical
knowledge among other cultural interactions and that European civilization should
not be considered the model, neither in the past nor in the future for all civilizations.
For Needham, all civilizations and cultures had participated in preparing the ground
for the emergence of modern science. Joseph Needham influenced and inspired
scientists of the countries like India and China to study the history of science in their
respective countries. For Indian scientists, Needham was someone who could
introduce their research findings to western audience still unfamiliar with the
subcontinent. For Indian scientists of the time, Needham was probably the only
scientist in the western academia in empathy with their problematization of the
Eurocentric history of science.
George Sarton and Joseph Needham were exceptional among the historians of
science in the west for giving attention to histories of science in Asian societies. The
prevalent view during the large part of the 20th century was that modern science
originated in the west and spread to the rest of the world. George Basalla (b. 1928),
an American historian of science published an influential paper in the journal Science
in 1967 that addressed the question of what he called the globalization of ‘western’
science.8 Basalla proposed a three-stage model of evolutionary progress for the
globalization of ‘western’ science. The first stage was a characterised as a preliminary
period of scientific exploration where non-European societies served as passive
reservoir of data. This is followed by the second stage of colonial dependence in
which European scientific institutions encourage western scientific activity outside
Europe by European colonists or settlers. In the third stage the colonised societies
gain maturity and struggle to establish independent national scientific traditions based
upon western standards. Such a formulation by Basalla had far reaching impact on
subsequent historiography of science in India. In particular, this model propelled
studies on ‘Science and Empire’ in modern Indian context by historians of science in
India.

The social and economic implications of science that was examined in the writings of
Marxists paralleled the concerns of others who sought to make a distinction between
the “internal” history of science, which studied the intellectual factors involved in the
development of theories, and “external” history, which looked at the wider
implications of what was discovered. The post-war generation of historians had a
clear preference for internal history – they wanted a history of science firmly situated
within the history of ideas, with the external applications left for the separate
disciplines of the history of technology and the history of medicine. Several
universities founded departments of the history and philosophy of science during the
mid-20th century in the Euro-American world. This was a period when work in the
philosophy of science was extremely active. The old idea of science as a process of

8
For a biography of George Basalla see George Basalla - Wikipedia
fact gathering had been replaced by the “hypothetico-deductive method” in which the
scientist proposed hypotheses, deducted testable consequences, and then allowed
experimental tests to determine whether the hypothesis should be rejected. This
emphasis on the scientists’ willingness to test and, if necessary, refute hypotheses was
carried even further by Karl Popper in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959).9
Popper, Austrian-British philosopher of science theorised the idea of empirical
falsification in his famous work. Science provides a unique form of knowledge about
the world because its theories have all survived rigorous testing. No hypothesis can
ever be proved to be true because no matter how many positive tests it survives, there
is still the possibility that the next one may refute it. The history of science is full of
examples showing that a theory can be successful for decades or even centuries and
then be exposed as false like the Einstein’s undermining of the conceptual
foundations of Newtonian physics. Historiography was thus oriented towards
philosophy and the theory of science. Notwithstanding the dominance of philosophy
and theory that had come to structure the historiography of science during the middle
of the 20th century, it took a sociological turn that would study the actual functioning
of the scientific community. The challenge came from Thomas S. Kuhn’s The
Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962).10 Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) was an
American philosopher of science who introduced new ways of thinking about the
history of science. His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions transformed
the understanding of the history of science and the production and progress of
scientific knowledge. Kuhn studied BS, MS and PhD degrees in physics at Harvard
University between 1943 and 1949. It was here that Kuhn developed an interest in the
History and Philosophy of science. He taught History of Science at Harvard until
1956 and at the University of California, Berkeley subsequently. It was in Berkeley
that Kuhn wrote and published his influential book. Kuhn argued that the replacement
of theories is a much more complex affair than the orthodox or Popperian
philosophies of science imply. He used history to show that successful theories

9
For a biography of Karl Popper see Karl Popper - Wikipedia
10
For a biography of Thomas Kuhn see Thomas Kuhn - Wikipedia
establish themselves as the “paradigm” for scientific activity in the field: they define
not only acceptable techniques for tackling problems but also which problems are to
be considered relevant for the investigation. Science done under the influence of a
dominant paradigm is what Kuhn calls “normal science”. He introduced a range of
vocabularies – paradigm, normal science, anomaly, crisis, revolution – that had come
to stay in the historiography of science.

Since the 1970s, there has been a significant development in social theory and
intellectual thought that led to studies on the knowledge forms of non-Western
societies. The impact of these developments on the disciplinary history of science
will be far reaching. The last three decades of the 20th century witnessed a critical
turn towards the theory of history and an examination of the representation and
historiography of the Orient led by the works of Edward Said, Ronald Inden and
others. There was a colonial and imperial dominance from the 18th century on India
that ideologically the construction of Indian history and civilization by the Europeans
played a key role in maintaining the domination. Edward Said’s Orientalism: Western
Conceptions of the Orient (1978) provided a critique of the Euro-American discourse
on non-western civilizations. Ronald Inden’s Imagining India (1990) extended
Saidian framework to Indian context and offered a thoroughgoing critique of
European discourse on India. These works laid the foundation for what has come to
be known as postcolonial studies. Sandra Harding, the American feminist philosopher
of science and proponent of standpoint methodology and strong objectivity offered a
stimulating critique of western science in a number of her publications. As a feminist
philosopher of science, Harding has made issues of diversity and difference a central
aspect of her program of ‘strong objectivity’. This program has had two components -
firstly, an analysis of modern science as historically gendered and raced in ways that
privilege a predominantly white, patriarchal, and eurocentric standpoint and secondly,
is the development of an epistemological framework that allows for the recognition
of other non-white, non-patriarchal, and non-western standpoints without retreating
from a conception of objectivity or falling prey to a form of relativism. In a book
titled Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies
(1998), Harding adds a postcolonial dimension to the science and technology studies.