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ScienceI. THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE [1]Thomas S. KuhnBIBLIOGRAPHY [2]II. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE [3]Michael ScrivenBIBLIOGRAPHY [4]III. THE SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCE [5]Bernard BarberBIBLIOGRAPHY [6]IV. SCIENCE-GOVERNMENT RELATIONS [7]Don K. PriceBIBLIOGRAPHY [8]V. SCIENTISTS [9]Warren O.
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Science

I. THE HISTORY OF SCIENCEThomas S. Kuhn

BIBLIOGRAPHY

II. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCEMichael Scriven

BIBLIOGRAPHY

III. THE SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCEBernard Barber

BIBLIOGRAPHY

IV. SCIENCE-GOVERNMENT RELATIONSDon K. Price

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. SCIENTISTSWarren O. Hagstrom

BIBLIOGRAPHY

VI. SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATIONNorman Kaplan and Norman W. Storer

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

As an independent professional discipline, the history of science is a new field still emerging from a long and varied prehistory. Only since 1950, and initially only in the 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. 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. Similar works—together with a growing body of heroic biography—had a continuous history from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century, when their production was much stimulated by the Enlightenment’s vision of science as at once the source and the exemplar of progress. 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).

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’s lead, attempted to base normative descriptions of true rationality on historical surveys of Western scientific thought. 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—one whose status as sound knowledge could scarcely be doubted—and described when, where, and how the elements that in his day constituted its subject matter and presumptive method had come into being. 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. The romantics’ passion for distant times and places had to combine with the scholarly standards of Biblical criticism before even general historians could be brought to recognize the interest and integrity of value systems other than their own. (The nineteenth century is, for example, the period when the Middle Ages were first observed to have a history.) That transformation of sensibility which most contemporary historians would suppose essential to their field was not, however, at once reflected in the history of science. 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’s secrets to sound methods skillfully deployed. 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: “In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories.” That attitude toward past thinkers came to the history of science from philosophy. Partly it was learned from men like Lange and Cassirer who dealt historically with people or ideas that were also important for scientific development. (Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science and Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being were, in this respect, especially influential.) And partly it was learned from a small group of Neo-Kantian epistemologists, particularly Brunschvicg and Meyerson, whose search for quasi-absolute categories of thought in older scientific ideas produced brilliant genetic analyses of concepts which the main tradition in the history of science had misunderstood or dismissed.

These lessons were reinforced by another decisive event in the emergence of the contemporary profession. Almost a century after the Middle Ages had become important to the general historian, Pierre Duhem’s search for the sources of modern science disclosed a tradition of medieval physical thought which, in contrast to Aristotle’s physics, could not be denied an essential role in the transformation of physical theory that occurred in the seventeenth century. Too many of the elements of Galileo’s physics and method were to be found there. But it was not possible, either, to assimilate it quite to Galileo’s physics and to that of Newton, leaving the structure of the so-called Scientific Revolution unchanged but extending it greatly in time. 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 “New Science” sprang. More than any other, that challenge has shaped the modern historiography of science. The writings which it has evoked since 1920, particularly those of E. J. Dijksterhuis, Anneliese Maier, and especially Alexandre Koyré, are the models which many contemporaries aim to emulate. 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 Koyré, usually minimized the importance of nonintellectual aspects of culture to the historical developments they consider. 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 “internal approach,” is concerned with the substance of science as knowledge. Its newer rival, often called the “external approach,” is concerned with the activity of scientists as a social group within a larger culture. 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’s present state must unfortunately still treat the two as virtually separate enterprises.

Internal history. What are the maxims of the new internal historiography? 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. Recognizing that scientists are often famous for results they did not intend, he should ask what problems his subject worked at and how these became problems for him. Recognizing that a historic discovery is rarely quite the one attributed to its author in later textbooks (pedagogic goals inevitably transform a narrative), the historian should ask what his subject thought he had discovered and what he took the basis of that discovery to be. And in this process of reconstruction the historian should pay particular attention to his subject’s apparent errors, not for their own sake but because they reveal far more of the mind at work than do the passages in which a scientist seems to record a result or an argument that modern science still retains.

For at least thirty years the attitudes which these maxims are designed to display have increasingly guided the best interpretive scholarship in the history of science, and it is with scholarship of that sort that this article is predominantly concerned. (There are other types, of course, though the distinction is not sharp, and much of the most worthwhile effort of historians of science is devoted to them. But this is not the place to consider work like that of, say, Needham, Neugebauer, and Thorndike, whose indispensable contribution has been to establish and make accessible texts and traditions previously known only through myth.) Nevertheless, the subject matter is immense; there have been few professional historians of science (in 1950 scarcely more than half a dozen in the United States); and their choice of topic has been far from random. There remain vast areas for which not even the basic developmental lines are clear.

Probably because of their special prestige, physics, chemistry, and astronomy dominate the historical literature of science. But even in these fields effort has been unevenly distributed, particularly in this century. Because they sought contemporary knowledge in the past, the nineteenth-century scientist—historians compiled surveys which often ranged from antiquity to their own day or close to it. In the twentieth century a few scientists, like Dugas, Jammer, Partington, Truesdell, and Whit-taker, have written from a similar viewpoint, and some of their surveys carry the history of special fields close to the present. But few practitioners of the most developed sciences still write histories, and the members of the emerging profession have up to this time been far more systematically and narrowly selective, with a number of unfortunate consequences. The deep and sympathetic immersion in the sources which their work demands virtually prohibits wide-ranging surveys, at least until more of the field has been examined in depth. Starting with a clean slate, as they at least feel they are, this group naturally tries first to establish the early phases of a science’s development, and few get beyond that point. Besides, until the last few years almost no member of the new group has had sufficient command of the science (particularly mathematics, usually the decisive hurdle) to become a vicarious participant in the more recent research of the technically most developed disciplines.

As a result, though the situation is now changing rapidly with the entry both of more and of better-prepared people into the field, the recent literature of the history of science tends to end at the point where the technical source materials cease to be accessible to a man with elementary college scientific training. There are fine studies of mathematics to Leibniz (Boyer, Michel); of astronomy and mechanics to Newton (Clagett, Costabel, Dijksterhuis, Koyré, and Maier), of electricity to Coulomb (Cohen), and of chemistry to Dalton (Boas, Crosland, Daumas, Guerlac, Metzger). But almost no work within the new tradition has as yet been published on the mathematical physical science of the eighteenth century or on any physical science in the nineteenth.

For the biological and earth sciences, the literature is even less well developed, partly because only those subspecialties which, like physiology, relate closely to medicine had achieved professional status before the late nineteenth century. There are few of the older surveys by scientists, and the members of the new profession are only now beginning in any number to explore these fields. In biology at least there is prospect of rapid change, but up to this point the only areas much studied are nineteenth-century Darwinism and the anatomy and physiology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the second of these topics, however, the best of the book-length studies (e.g., O’Malley and Singer) deal usually with special problems and persons and thus scarcely display an evolving scientific tradition. The literature on evolution, in the absence of adequate histories of the technical specialties which provided Darwin with both data and problems, is written at a level of philosophical generality which makes it hard to see how his Origin of Species could have been a major achievement, much less an achievement in the sciences. Dupree’s model study of the botanist Asa Gray is among the few noteworthy exceptions.

As yet the new historiography has not touched the social sciences. In these fields the historical literature, where it exists, has been produced entirely by practitioners of the science concerned, Boring’s History of Experimental Psychology being perhaps the outstanding example. Like the older histories of the physical sciences, this literature is often indispensable, but as history it shares their limitations. (The situation is typical for relatively new sciences: practitioners in these fields are ordinarily expected to know about the development of their specialties, which thus regularly acquire a quasi-official history; thereafter something very like Gresham’s law applies.) This area therefore offers particular opportunities both to the historian of science and, even more, to the general intellectual or social historian, whose background is often especially appropriate to the demands of these fields. The preliminary publications of Stocking on the history of American anthropology provide a particularly fruitful example of the perspective which the general historian can apply to a scientific field whose concepts and vocabulary have only very recently become esoteric.

External history . Attempts to set science in a cultural context which might enhance understanding both of its development and of its effects have taken three characteristic forms, of which the oldest is the study of scientific institutions. Bishop Sprat prepared his pioneering history of the Royal Society of London almost before that organization had received its first charter, and there have since been innumerable in-house histories of individual scientific societies. These books are, however, useful principally as source materials for the historian, and only in this century have students of scientific development started to make use of them. Simultaneously they have begun seriously to examine the other types of institutions, particularly educational, which may promote or inhibit scientific advance. As elsewhere in the history of science, most of the literature on institutions deals with the seventeenth century. The best of it is scattered through periodicals (the once standard book-length accounts are regrettably out-of-date) from which it can be retrieved, together with much else concerning the history of science, through the annual “Critical BIBLIOGRAPHY” of the journal Isis and through the quarterly Bulletin signaletique of the Centre National de la Recherche Scienti-fique, Paris. Guerlac’s classic study on the professionalization of French chemistry, Schofield’s history of the Lunar Society, and a recent collaborative volume (Taton) on scientific education in France are among the very few works on eighteenth-century scientific institutions. For the nineteenth, only Cardwell’s study of England, Dupree’s of the United States, and Vucinich’s of Russia begin to replace the fragmentary but immensely suggestive remarks scattered, often in footnotes, through the first volume of Merz’s History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century.

Intellectual historians have frequently considered the impact of science on various aspects of Western thought, particularly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the period since 1700, however, these studies are peculiarly unsatisfying insofar as they aim to demonstrate the influence, and not merely the prestige, of science. The name of a Bacon, a Newton, or a Darwin is a potent symbol: there are many reasons to invoke it besides recording a substantive debt. And the recognition of isolated conceptual parallels, e.g., between the forces that keep a planet in its orbit and the system of checks and balances in the U.S. constitution, more often demonstrates interpretive ingenuity than the influence of science on other areas of life. No doubt scientific concepts, particularly those of broad scope, do help to change extrascientific ideas. But the analysis of their role in producing this kind of change demands immersion in the literature of science. The older historiography of science does not, by its nature, supply what is needed, and the new historiography is too recent and its products too fragmentary to have had much effect. Though the gap seems small, there is no chasm that more needs bridging than that between the historian of ideas and the historian of science. Fortunately there are a few works to point the way. Among the more recent are Nicolson’s pioneering studies of science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, West-fall’s discussion of natural religion, Gillispie’s chapter on science in the Enlightenment, and Roger’s monumental survey of the role of the life sciences in eighteenth-century French thought.

The concern with institutions and that with ideas merge naturally in a third approach to scientific development. This is the study of science in a geographical area too small to permit concentration on the evolution of any particular technical specialty but sufficiently homogeneous to enhance an understanding of science’s social role and setting. Of all the types of external history, this is the newest and most revealing, for it calls forth the widest range of historical and sociological experience and skill. The small but rapidly growing literature on science in America (Dupree, Hindle, Shryock) is a prominent example of this approach, and there is promise that current studies of science in the French Revolution may yield similar illumination. Merz, Lilley, and Ben-David point to aspects of the nineteenth century on which much similar effort must be expended. The topic which has, however, evoked the greatest activity and attention is the development of science in seventeenth-century England. Because it has become the center of vociferous debate both about the origin of modern science and about the nature of the history of science, this literature is an appropriate focus for separate discussion. Here it stands for a type of research: the problems it presents will provide perspective on the relations between the internal and external approaches to the history of science.

The Merton thesis . The most visible issue in the debate about seventeenth-century science has been the so-called Merton thesis, really two overlapping theses with distinguishable sources. Both aim ultimately to account for the special productiveness of seventeenth-century science by correlating its novel goals and values—summarized in the program of Bacon and his followers—with other aspects of contemporary society. The first, which owes something to Marxist historiography, emphasizes the extent to which the Baconians hoped to learn from the practical arts and in turn to make science useful. Repeatedly they studied the techniques of contemporary craftsmen—glassmakers, metallurgists, mariners, and the like—and many also devoted at least a portion of their attention to pressing practical problems of the day, e.g., those of navigation, land drainage, and deforestation. The new problems, data, and methods fostered by these novel concerns are, Merton supposes, a principal reason for the substantive transformation experienced by a number of sciences during the seventeenth century. The second thesis points to the same novelties of the period but looks to Puritanism as their primary stimulant. (There need be no conflict. Max Weber, whose pioneering suggestion Merton was investigating, had argued that Puritanism helped to legitimize a concern with technology and the useful arts.) The values of settled Puritan communities—for example, an emphasis upon justification through works and on direct communion with God through nature—are said to have fostered both the concern with science and the empirical, instrumental, and utilitarian tone which characterized it during the seventeenth century.

Both of these theses have since been extended and also attacked with vehemence, but no consensus has emerged. (An important confrontation, centering on papers by Hall and de Santillana, appears in the symposium of the Institute for the History of Science edited by Clagett; Zilsel’s pioneering paper on William Gilbert can be found in the collection of relevant articles from the Journal of the History of Ideas edited by Wiener and Noland. Most of the rest of the literature, which is voluminous, can be traced through the footnotes in a recently published controversy over the work of Christopher Hill.) In this literature the most persistent criticisms are those directed to Merton’s definition and application of the label “Puritan,” and it now seems clear that no term so narrowly doctrinal in its implications will serve. Difficulties of this sort can surely be eliminated, however, for the Baconian ideology was neither restricted to scientists nor uniformly spread through all classes and areas of Europe. Merton’s label may be inadequate, but there is no doubt that the phenomenon he describes did exist. The more significant arguments against his position are the residual ones which derive from the recent transformation in the history of science. Merton’s image of the Scientific Revolution, though long-standing, was rapidly being discredited as he wrote, particularly in the role it attributed to the Baconian movement.

Participants in the older historiographic tradition did sometimes declare that science as they conceived it owed nothing to economic values or religious doctrine. Nevertheless, Merton’s emphases on the importance of manual work, experimentation, and the direct confrontation with nature were familiar and congenial to them. The new generation of historians, in contrast, claims to have shown that the radical sixteenth-and seventeenth-century revisions of astronomy, mathematics, mechanics, and even optics owed very little to new instruments, experiments, or observations. Galileo’s primary method, they argue, was the traditional thought experiment of scholastic science brought to a new perfection. Bacon’s naive and ambitious program was an impotent delusion from the start. The attempts to be useful failed consistently; the mountains of data provided by new instruments were of little assistance in the transformation of existing scientific theory. If cultural novelties are required to explain why men like Galileo, Descartes, and Newton were suddenly able to see well-known phenomena in a new way, those novelties are predominantly intellectual and include Renaissance Neoplatonism, the revival of ancient atomism, and the rediscovery of Archimedes. Such intellectual currents were, however, at least as prevalent and productive in Roman Catholic Italy and France as in Puritan circles in Britain or Holland. And nowhere in Europe, where these currents were stronger among courtiers than among craftsmen, do they display a significant debt to technology. If Merton were right, the new image of the Scientific Revolution would apparently be wrong.

In their more detailed and careful versions, which include essential qualification, these arguments are entirely convincing, up to a point. The men who transformed scientific theory during the seventeenth century sometimes talked like Baconians, but it has yet to be shown that the ideology which a number of them embraced had a major effect, substantive or methodological, on their central contributions to science. Those contributions are best understood as the result of the internal evolution of a cluster of fields which, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were pursued with renewed vigor and in a new intellectual milieu. That point, however, can be relevant only to the revision of the Merton thesis, not to its rejection. One aspect of the ferment which historians have regularly labeled “the Scientific Revolution” was a radical programmatic movement centering in England and the Low Countries, though it was also visible for a time in Italy and France. That movement, which even the present form of Merton’s argument does make more comprehensible, drastically altered the appeal, the locus, and the nature of much scientific research during the seventeenth century, and the changes have been permanent. Very likely, as contemporary historians argue, none of these novel features played a large role in transforming scientific concepts during the seventeenth century, but historians must learn to deal with them nonetheless. Perhaps the following suggestions, whose more general import will be considered in the next section, may prove helpful.

Omitting the biological sciences, for which close ties to medical crafts and institutions dictate a more complex developmental pattern, the main branches of science transformed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were astronomy, mathematics, mechanics, and optics. It is their development which makes the Scientific Revolution seem a revolution in concepts. Significantly, however, this cluster of fields consists exclusively of classical sciences. Highly developed in antiquity, they found a place in the medieval university curriculum where several of them were significantly further developed. Their seventeenth-century metamorphosis, in which university-based men continued to play a significant role, can reasonably be portrayed as primarily an extension of an ancient and medieval tradition developing in a new conceptual environment. Only occasionally need one have recourse to the Baconian programmatic movement when explaining the transformation of these fields.

By the seventeenth century, however, these were not the only areas of intense scientific activity, and the others—among them the study of electricity and magnetism, of chemistry, and of thermal phenomena—display a different pattern. As sciences, as fields to be scrutinized systematically for an increased understanding of nature, they were all novelties during the Scientific Revolution. Their main roots were not in the learned university tradition but often in the established crafts, and they were all critically dependent both on the new program of experimentation and on the new instrumentation which craftsmen often helped to introduce. Except occasionally in medical schools, they rarely found a place in universities before the nineteenth century, and they were meanwhile pursued by amateurs loosely clustered around the new scientific societies that were the institutional manifestation of the Scientific Revolution. Obviously these are the fields, together with the new mode of practice they represent, which a revised Merton thesis may help us understand. Unlike that in the classical sciences, research in these fields added little to man’s understanding of nature during the seventeenth century, a fact which has made them easy to ignore when evaluating Merton’s viewpoint. But the achievements of the late eighteenth and of the nineteenth centuries will not be comprehensible until they are taken fully into account. The Baconian program, if initially barren of conceptual fruits, nevertheless inaugurated a number of the major modern sciences.

Internal and external history . Because they underscore distinctions between the earlier and later stages of a science’s evolution, these remarks about the Merton thesis illustrate aspects of scientific development recently discussed in a more general way by Kuhn. Early in the development of a new field, he suggests, social needs and values are a major determinant of the problems on which its practitioners concentrate. Also during this period, the concepts they deploy in solving problems are extensively conditioned by contemporary common sense, by a prevailing philosophical tradition, or by the most prestigious contemporary sciences. The new fields which emerged in the seventeenth century and a number of the modern social sciences provide examples. Kuhn argues, however, that the later evolution of a technical specialty is significantly different in ways at least foreshadowed by the development of the classical sciences during the Scientific Revolution. The practitioners of a mature science are men trained in a sophisticated body of traditional theory and of instrumental, mathematical, and verbal technique. As a result, they constitute a special subculture, one whose members are the exclusive audience for, and judges of, each other’s work. The problems on which such specialists work are no longer presented by the external society but by an internal challenge to increase the scope and precision of the fit between existing theory and nature. And the concepts used to resolve these problems are normally close relatives of those supplied by prior training for the specialty. In short, compared with other professional and creative pursuits, the practitioners of a mature science are effectively insulated from the cultural milieu in which they live their extra-professional lives.

That quite special, though still incomplete, insulation is the presumptive reason why the internal approach to the history of science, conceived as autonomous and self-contained, has seemed so nearly successful. To an extent unparalleled in other fields, the development of an individual technical specialty can be understood without going beyond the literature of that specialty and a few of its near neighbors. Only occasionally need the historian take note of a particular concept, problem, or technique which entered the field from outside. Nevertheless, the apparent autonomy of the internal approach is misleading in essentials, and the passion sometimes expended in its defense has obscured important problems. The insulation of a mature scientific community suggested by Kuhn’s analysis is an insulation primarily with respect to concepts and secondarily with respect to problem structure. There are, however, other aspects of scientific advance, such as its timing. These do depend critically on the factors emphasized by the external approach to scientific development. Particularly when the sciences are viewed as an interacting group rather than as a collection of specialties, the cumulative effects of external factors can be decisive.

Both the attraction of science as a career and the differential appeal of different fields are, for example, significantly conditioned by factors external to science. Furthermore, since progress in one field is sometimes dependent on the prior development of another, differential growth rates may affect an entire evolutionary pattern. Similar considerations, as noted above, play a major role in the inauguration and initial form of new sciences. In addition, a new technology or some other change in the conditions of society may selectively alter the felt importance of a specialty’s problems or even create new ones for it. By doing so they may sometimes accelerate the discovery of areas in which an established theory ought to work but does not, thereby hastening its rejection and replacement by a new one. Occasionally, they may even shape the substance of that new theory by ensuring that the crisis to which it responds occurs in one problem area rather than another. Or again, through the crucial intermediary of institutional reform, external conditions may create new channels of communication between previously disparate specialties, thus fostering crossfertilization which would otherwise have been absent or long delayed.

There are numerous other ways, including direct subsidy, in which the larger culture impinges on scientific development, but the preceding sketch should sufficiently display a direction in which the history of science must now develop. Though the internal and external approaches to the history of science have a sort of natural autonomy, they are, in fact, complementary concerns. Until they are practiced as such, each drawing from the other, important aspects of scientific development are unlikely to be understood. That mode of practice has hardly yet begun, as the response to the Merton thesis indicates, but perhaps the analytic categories it demands are becoming clear.

The relevance of the history of science . Turning in conclusion to the question about which judgments must be the most personal of all, one may ask about the potential harvest to be reaped from the work of this new profession. First and foremost will be more and better histories of science. Like any other scholarly discipline, the field’s primary responsibility must be to itself. Increasing signs of its selective impact on other enterprises may, however, justify brief analysis.

Among the areas to which the history of science relates, the one least likely to be significantly affected is scientific research itself. Advocates of the history of science have occasionally described their field as a rich repository of forgotten ideas and methods, a few of which might well dissolve contemporary scientific dilemmas. When a new concept or theory is successfully deployed in a science, some previously ignored precedent is usually discovered in the earlier literature of the field. It is natural to wonder whether attention to history might not have accelerated the innovation. Almost certainly, however, the answer is no. The quantity of material to be searched, the absence of appropriate indexing categories, and the subtle but usually vast differences between the anticipation and the effective innovation, all combine to suggest that reinvention rather than rediscovery will remain the most efficient source of scientific novelty.

The more likely effects of the history of science on the fields it chronicles are indirect, providing increased understanding of the scientific enterprise itself. Though a clearer grasp of the nature of scientific development is unlikely to resolve particular puzzles of research, it may well stimulate reconsideration of such matters as science education, administration, and policy. Probably, however, the implicit insights which historical study can produce will first need to be made explicit by the intervention of other disciplines, of which three now seem particularly likely to be effective.

Though the intrusion still evokes more heat than light, the philosophy of science is today the field in which the impact of the history of science is most apparent. Feyerabend, Hanson, Hesse, and Kuhn have all recently insisted on the inappropriateness of the traditional philosopher’s ideal image of science, and in search of an alternative they have all drawn heavily from history. Following directions pointed by the classic statements of Norman Campbell and Karl Popper (and sometimes also significantly influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein), they have at least raised problems that the philosophy of science is no longer likely to ignore. The resolution of those problems is for the future, perhaps for the indefinitely distant future. There is as yet no developed and matured “new philosophy” of science. But already the questioning of older stereotypes, mostly positivistic, is proving a stimulus and release to some practitioners of those newer sciences which have most depended upon explicit canons of scientific method in their search for professional identity.

A second field in which the history of science is likely to have increasing effect is the sociology of science. Ultimately neither the concerns nor the techniques of that field need be historical. But in the present underdeveloped state of their specialty, sociologists of science can well learn from history something about the shape of the enterprise they investigate. The recent writings of Ben-David, Hagstrom, Merton, and others give evidence that they are doing so. Very likely it will be through sociology that the history of science has its primary impact on science policy and administration.

Closely related to the sociology of science (perhaps equivalent to it if the two are properly construed) is a field that, though it scarcely yet exists, is widely described as “the science of science.” Its goal, in the words of its leading exponent, Derek Price, is nothing less than “the theoretic analysis of the structure and behavior of science itself,” and its techniques are an eclectic combination of the historian’s, the sociologist’s, and the econometrician’s. No one can yet guess to what extent that goal is attainable, but any progress toward it will inevitably and immediately enhance the significance both to social scientists and to society of continuing scholarship in the history of science.

Thomas S. Kuhn

[Other relevant material may be found in the biographies ofKoyreandSarton.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Ben-David, Joseph 1960 Scientific Productivity and Academic Organization in Nineteenth-century Medicine. American Sociological Review 25:828–843.

Boas, Marie 1958 Robert Boyle and Seventeenth-century Chemistry. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Boyeh, Carl B. (1939) 1949The Concepts of the Calculus: A Critical and Historical Discussion of the Derivative and the Integral. New York: Hafner. → A paperback edition was published in 1959 by Dover as The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development.

Butterfield, Herbert (1950) 1957 The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800. 2d ed., rev. New York: Macmillan. → A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Collier.

Cardwell, Donald S. L. 1957 The Organisation of Science in England: A Retrospect. Melbourne and London: Heinemann.

Clagett, Marshall 1959 The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.

Cohen, I. Bernard 1956 Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry Into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin’s Work in Electricity as an Example Thereof. American Philosophical Society, Memoirs, Vol. 43. Philadelphia: The Society.

Costabel, Pierre 1960 Leibniz et la dynamique: Les textes de 1692. Paris: Hermann.

Crosland, Maurice 1963 The Development of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 24:369–441.

Daumas, Maurice 1955 Lavoisier: Theoricien et experimentateur. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Dijksterhuis, Edward J. (1950) 1961 The Mechanization of the World Picture. Oxford: Clarendon. → First published in Dutch.

Dugas, Rene (1950) 1955 A History of Mechanics. Neuchatel (Switzerland): Editions du Griffon; New York: Central Book. → First published in French.

Duhem, Pierre 1906–1913 Études sur Leonard de Vinci. 3 vols. Paris: Hermann.

Dupree, A. Hunter 1957 Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap.

Dupree, A. Hunter 1959 Asa Gray: 1810–1888. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Feyerabend, P. K. 1962 Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism. Pages 28–97 in Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell (editors), Scientific Explanation, Space, and Time. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 3. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Gillisfie, Charles C. 1960 The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas. Princeton Univ. Press.

Guerlac, Henby 1959 Some French Antecedents of the Chemical Revolution. Chymia 5:73–112.

Guerlac, Henry 1961 Lavoisier; the Crucial Year: The Background and Origin of His First Experiments on Combustion in 1772. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press.

Hagstrom, Warren O. 1965 The Scientific Community. New York: Basic Books.

Hanson, Norwood R. (1958) 1961 Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry Into the Conceptual Foundations of Science. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Hesse, Mary B. 1963 Models and Analogies in Science. London: Sheed … Ward.

Hill, Christopher 1965 Debate: Puritanism, Capitalism and the Scientific Revolution. Past and Present No. 29:88–97. → Articles relevant to the debate may also be found in numbers 28, 31, 32, and 33.

Hindle, Brooke 1956 The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.

Institute For The History OF Science, University OF Wisconsin, 1957 1959 Critical Problems in the History of Science: Proceedings. Edited by Marshall Clagett. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.

Jammer, Max 1961 Concepts of Mass in Classical and Modern Physics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Journal OF The History OF Ideas 1957 Roots of Scientific Thought: A Cultural Perspective. Edited by Philip P. Wiener and Aaron Noland. New York: Basic Books. → Selections from the first 18 volumes of the Journal.

KoyrÉ, Alexandre 1939 Eludes galileennes. 3 vols. Actualites scientifiques et industrielles, Nos. 852, 853, and 854. Paris: Hermann. → Volume 1: A I’aube de la science classique. Volume 2: La loi de la chute des corps: Descartes et Galilée. Volume 3: Galilee et la loi d’inertie.

KoyrÉ, Alexandre 1961 La revolution astronomique: Copernic, Kepler, Borelli. Paris: Hermann.

Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Univ. of Chicago Press. → A paperback edition was published in 1964.

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Maier, Anneliese 1949–1958 Studien zur Naturphilos-ophie der Spatscholastik. 5 vols. Rome: Edizioni di “Storia e Letteratura.”

Merton, Robert K. (1938) 1967 Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-century England. New York: Fertig.

Merton, Robert K. 1957 Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science. American Sociological Review 22:635–659.

Metzger, Helene 1930 Newton, Stahl, Boerhaave et la doctrine chimique. Paris: Alcan.

Meyerson, Emile (1908) 1964 Identity and Reality. London: Allen…Unwin. → First published in French.

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Needham, Joseph 1954–1965 Science and Civilisation in China. 4 vols. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Neugebauer, Otto (1951) 1957 The Exact Sciences in Antiquity. 2d ed. Providence, R.I.: Brown Univ. Press. → A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Harper.

Nicolson, Marjorie H. (1950) 1960 The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the “New Science” Upon Seventeenth-century Poetry. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. → A paperback edition was published in 1962.

O’Malley, Charles D. 1964 Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514–1564. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.

Panofsky, Erwin 1954 Galileo as a Critic of the Arts. The Hague: Nijhoff.

Partington, James R. 1962— A History of Chemistry. New York: St. Martins. → Volumes 2–4 were published from 1962 to 1964; Volume 1 is in preparation.

Price, Derek J. de Solla 1966 The Science of Scientists. Medical Opinion and Review 1:81–97.

Roger, Jacques 1963 Les sciences de la vie dans la pensee francaise du XVIIIs siecle: La generation des animaux de Descartes a 1’Encyclopedie. Paris: Colin.

Sarton, George 1927–1948 Introduction to the History of Science. 3 vols. Baltimore: Williams…Wilkins.

Schofield, Robert E. 1963 The Lunar Society of Birmingham: A Social History of Provincial Science and Industry in Eighteenth-century England. Oxford: Clarendon.

Shryock, Richard H. (1936) 1947 The Development of Modern Medicine. 2d ed. New York: Knopf.

Singer, Charles J. 1922 The Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood. London: Bell.

Stocking, George W. JR. 1966 Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective. American Anthropologist New Series 68:867–882.

Taton, Rene (editor) 1964 Enseignement et diffusion des sciences en France au XVIIIe siecle. Paris: Hermann.

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Vucinich, Alexander S. 1963 Science in Russian Culture. Volume 1: A History to 1860. Stanford Univ. Press.

Westfall, Richard S. 1958 Science and Religion in Seventeenth-century England. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.

Whittaker, Edmund 1951–1953 A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity. 2 vols. London: Nelson. → Volume 1: The Classical Theories. Volume 2: The Modern Theories, 1900–1926. Volume 1 is a revised edition of A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity From the Age of Descartes to the Close of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1910. A paperback edition was published in 1960 by Harper.

Yates, Frances A. 1964 Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Univ. of Chicago Press.

II THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

The general topic of the philosophy of science can be divided into subareas by subject matter: the philosophy of physics, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of the social sciences, and so on. But it may also be divided into discussion of structural problems in science, on the one hand, and substantive problems within specified sciences, on the other. Structural problems are those traditionally associated with such topics as scientific inference, classification, explanation, prediction, measurement, probability, and determinism. Substantive problems arise when a question is asked such as “How can learning theory be axiomatized?” or “How should anxiety be defined?” Substantive problems, as a class, merge gradually into abstract scientific problems, which are properly handled by scientists themselves.

The substantive philosophy of science usually requires some professional training in the relevant field, whereas the structural philosophy of science may require only a general scientific education. Both require professional training in philosophy or, to be more specific, in logic, broadly conceived (that is, not only in classical or in symbolic logic). The history of science is also of very great importance to the philosopher of science, for it provides him with more numerous and more diverse examples of conceptual schemes and theories than he could ever find in contemporary science, and such schemes and theories are his raw data.

It will be seen, then, that a large part of the philosophy of science stands to scientific theorizing, classifying, and so on, as experimental design stands to scientific experimenting. For the philosophy of science is simply the discussion of general criteria for theories, classifications, and the rest, and is necessary as long as the intuitions or assertions of scientists about what constitutes good procedure are in conflict or might be improved by analysis. Curiously enough, however, many scientists reject the philosophy of science as irrelevant to their own activities, although they constantly talk it and teach it and illustrate its relevance in their work, sometimes under the title “methodology” and sometimes just as advice without a title. It is only the hyperspecialized, rock-ribbed empiricist who can entirely avoid discussing the subject in his scientific work and teaching, and even he usually contradicts himself by espousing operationism as the epitome of empiricism—a rather elementary mistake which would have grave consequences for the validity and utility of his results if he acted on it. Often the antagonism of science to philosophy seems due to a low tolerance of ambiguity, and particularly to insecurity about involvement with the more debatable and less decidable issues of philosophy. This is surely an immature reaction, unless it can be shown that these issues need not be raised in the teaching and practice of science.

This article will provide (a) a brief discussion of those aspects of the structural philosophy of science which have special relevance for the social sciences and (b) some reference to substantive issues in the philosophy of particular social sciences. In general, these aspects will be intertwined, in order to illustrate the immediate relevance of the structural topics to substantive isues.

Main concerns of the philosophy of science . Science has been said to be concerned with observation, description, definition, classification, measurement, experimentation, generalization, explanation, prediction, evaluation, and control of the world. This list is of course much too comprehensive; to be at all useful it has to be narrowed down in the course of examining individual scientific activities (for instance, instead of analyzing description in general, we might ask what kind of describing is scientific, as opposed to poetic). In any case, there are as many (though probably no more) points of view about main topics in the philosophy of science as about main topics in any of the sciences. If the area of dispute sometimes appears greater than it is, this is because when a subtopic in philosophy is settled, it is given a new name and called a science. Philosophy is the mother of sciences and has spawned physics, astronomy, symbolic logic, economics, and psychology, among other subjects. The domain of fundamental and still unresolved conceptual disputes at any time is called philosophy and, of course, bears the cross of conflict. But, perhaps for that very reason, it is a residue that eternally regenerates, is perpetually fertile. The social sciences began with a similar handicap; what was well known about human behavior was called common sense, and only the muddy residue was left for psychology and the other social sciences to clarify. It is no wonder that a subject is difficult and debatable when it is defined to exclude the easy and certain.

Because “science” is a term for an activity as well as for a body of knowledge, we ought not to be surprised if it is continuous with the prescientific activities directed to the same ends, and if these, in turn, are an extension of prelinguistic adaptive behavior. This synoptic view of man’s cognitive development and current equipment should—and, I believe, does—provide some criteria for good scientific practice. We can begin by applying it to the various procedures connected with scientific concept formation: observation, description, definition, and classification, with measurement and generalization as closely related activities.

Concept clarification . It is now widely accepted in the philosophy of science that we must qualify or reject the traditional idea that the basic data from which the scientist forms his hypotheses and classifications are provided by a faculty of observation which is somehow independent of science. Not only has the attempt by sense-data theorists and phenomenologists to identify these basic data been a total failure, but the failure begins to appear explicable. We have come to see the “observation language“—the nonscientific language in which such basic data were supposed to be reported—as really just a “theory language,” with somewhat higher interjudge reliability than more abstract language, yet still subject to perceptual errors in its application and even to pervasive errors caused by infiltration by unnoticed theory. When errors of the latter kind are recognized, we may redescribe our observations or we may retain the old language and simply reinterpret it, perhaps metaphysically. Thus Feyerabend has pointed out (in conversation with the author) that the expression “The sun is rising,” although it originally incorporated a false astronomical theory, has been retained as a statement of pure observation. So there is no absolutely basic observation level on which all theory rests and, even more clearly, no sharp distinction between observation and theories. We must think instead of a constant interaction and exchange between observation, which seems immune from correction, and speculative theory. Indeed, the development of new instruments may simply render observable the hitherto unobservable (as when the electron microscope was developed) or the observed mistaken (as when it became possible to measure the curvature of the seemingly flat earth). Does this relativization of the distinction between observation and theory destroy the distinction’s utility? Not at all. Indeed, it strengthens our understanding of the hierarchical structure of science as a whole when we realize that observables of the nth level (for instance, in neurophysiology) may include some hypothetical constructs from the (n + l)th level (in this case, individual psychology).

What leads us, then, to introduce concepts at a given level? Not just the pressure of their existence on our blank brain. Rather, the preconscious selective effect of certain environmental and internal pressures began the process of concept formation in our ancestors, as in other organisms—a sequence of events that can be summarized as “discrimination under drive conditions.” The preverbal organism comes to react to certain stimulus configurations that represent ingestibles or predators, and it is simply an extension of this process when an interpersonal vocabulary is introduced to refer to these configurations. The psychologist refers to both the preverbal and the verbal stages of this process as concept formation, and although many philosophers prefer to restrict the term to the verbal stage, there is no doubt that the verbal stage develops from the preverbal one, whether or not it becomes qualitatively different in the course of development. [See CONCEPT FORMATION.]

Definition . Given the pragmatic view of concept formation outlined above, it is very natural to abandon classical definition theory (in which a definition is a set of logically necessary and sufficient conditions for the use of a term) and to adopt instead an approach based on the notions of indicator and of indicator clusters. The rationale for such an approach may be stated as follows. Within a formal system, such as mathematics or an invented language, we can find examples of classical definitions, but seldom, if ever, can we find them within a natural language or the language of a developing science. The reason for this is simply that natural phenomena are extremely untidy, and a language for referring to them must be flexible enough to accommodate this untidiness if it is to be scientifically useful. For instance, the concepts “subject,” “length,” “response,” “group,” “aggression,” and “temperature” cannot be given classical definitions (other than trivially circular ones). But we have no serious difficulty in learning or teaching these concepts, which we do by giving paradigm examples, contrasts, and explicitly approximate or conditional definitions. Any paradigm provides us, if it can be successfully analyzed, with a set of sufficient conditions for the application of the term, but it is not possible to insist that paradigms, let alone analysis of them, can never turn out to be erroneous. So the sense in which these conditions are sufficient is still not that of logical sufficiency. It is still more obvious that we often cannot specify any properties that are logically necessary for the application of the concept. We therefore adopt the notion of “weighted indicators,” or criteria—that is, properties which are relevant to the application of the term, but in varying degrees. Some of the properties may, in some cases, be virtually necessary; some small groups of them may be sufficient; but these are special cases. The clustering of these properties in property space indicates an entity for which it is useful to have a name, but there is typically considerable scatter and no sharp boundary to the cluster (the so-called open texture of concepts). The charm of a concise translation (that is, of a classical definition) is not often provided by the cluster approach, but it does preserve that most valuable feature of classical theory—a reliable verbal response that can be successfully taught. Contrasting and approximating, which are the other procedures involved in specification of meaning, depend on the psychological superiority of discrimination skills over absolute recognition skills and involve no new logical points.

At this point, it should be stressed that there are two elements in the theory of definition: the pragmatic and the literal. We have been talking about the limitations of the literal theory of definition as a kind of translation. But there is the independent question of how one can best—that is, most usefully—select the terms that one will mention in the definition, whether it is a translation or a cluster of indicators. A famous answer to this has often been taken as both literal and pragmatic, which makes it nonsensical instead of good pragmatic advice of a limited range of applicability. I refer to operationism (for which see especially Bridgman 1927). There are, of course, some areas where it is to be taken very seriously as advice, and psychology is one of them. (In theoretical physics, contrary to the common impression, it is extremely rare to seek or find operational definitions.) But if operationism is taken as requiring that definitions actually contain nothing but operations, then it is absurd, a category error—and, in addition, it is self-refuting, since the concept of an operation cannot be defined operationally. Definitions should therefore be of such a kind that we can apply some independently determinable criteria to decide when the defined term should be used (we can, if we wish, call the process of determining whether these criteria apply “operations"). But we cannot require that the only content of definitions should be operations, or we find ourselves caught in the dilemma of deciding when we have only one operation and, hence, only one concept. . . and so on.

Classification . The traditional requirements for classification also need to be relaxed. Instead of the Aristotelian requirement of exclusive and exhaustive subcategories, we must settle for minimized overlap and maximized coverage, balancing these desiderata against considerations of simplicity and applicability. The development of a scientific classification scheme is essentially a remapping of property space, using a new system of coordinates or a new projection. Hence, assessment of the scheme’s value very much depends, as in the map analogy, on the purposes for which it is intended (which may be as diverse as fast labeling, representation of a new theoretical insight, and easy recall) and very little on the idealized and context-free notion of “cutting Nature at the joints,” which was the goal of earlier taxonomists (and which still admirably expresses the feeling inspired by a successful classification scheme).

Measurement . The urge to measure is a kind of conditioned reflex among empirically trained scientists, and with some reason. Measurement requires—or, when developed, provides—an inter-subjectively reliable procedure for applying the potentially infinite descriptive vocabulary of number. For describing any continuous variable we need such a vocabulary, and for describing many discrete variables it is exceedingly useful because it creates the possibility of applying some mathematical apparatus. But the social scientist all too often assumes that scaling and measuring will make it likely that we can discover useful laws. In fact, many scales disguise the existence of regularities, and many others fail to reveal them. The descriptive utility of a scale must be considered independently of its theoretical fertility, for the two considerations may lead in different directions. The proliferation of scales, like the proliferation of statistical analyses, often merely clogs the channels of communication. There is no magic about numbers per se, and only hard thinking and good fortune, in combination, achieve a worthwhile new scale. The same is true of classification. The cluster concept is peculiarly suited to the needs of statistical scaling and to those of statistical inference in general. [See CLUSTERING; SCALING.]

Evaluation . The notion of measurement phases quite gradually into that of evaluation. “Pecking order," “peer-group ranking,” and “intelligence quotient” can all, in certain contexts, appear as value-impregnated scales. This is often disputed by those who think “value” is a dirty word. Social scientists are peculiarly susceptible to the charms of the Weberian myth of a value-free social science, which rests on a one-sided interpretation of the distinction between facts and values. In its more defensible form this distinction amounts to the assertion that (a) evaluation depends on establishing certain facts; and (b) evaluation goes beyond the facts on which it depends. To this it can be objected that evaluation may well result in facts, albeit facts different from those with which it begins.

Thus Consumer Reports can often substantiate evaluations such as “Brand X is the best dishwasher on the market today” on the basis of performance data plus data about the consumers’ wants. And that evaluation, when suitably supported, simply states a fact about Brand X. It is one thing to be cautious about importing dubious value premises into an argument; it is another to suppose that all value premises or conclusions are dubious, “mere matters of opinion.” It is not at all dubious that dishwashers should get the dishes clean, that clocks should keep good time, and so on. It may simply be a fact that Brand X of dishwasher excels at its task. Since the evaluation is nothing more than a combination of these facts, it is itself a fact, although it is also an evaluation.

Precisely this analysis applies to myriad issues in the social sciences—evaluation of the relative merits of protective tariff barriers and direct subsidies or of different forms of treatment for dysfunctional neurosis, to name only two examples. Of course, there are many other issues where only a relativized answer is possible, since legitimate differences of taste exist (that is, differences where no argument can establish the superiority of any particular taste). But this in no way distinguishes evaluation from theoretical interpretation. It will not do to say that “in principle” these differences can be resolved in the theoretical area when more facts are available, but not in the evaluation area. Not only are there very fundamental disagreements about the function of theory that make this improbable, but additional facts often reduce value disagreement. In any case, relativized answers, which are still value judgments, admit of no disagreement, and therefore do not involve subjectivity. It is simply naive to suppose that fields must, if they are to be regarded as objective, always contain answers to questions of the form “Which is the best X?” Neither mathematics nor engineering has this property, or any corresponding property with respect to “Which is the true solution to X?,” where the conditions of X are incompletely specified.

As to the final defense of the distinction between fact and value—that a particular choice of ultimate values, or ends, cannot be proved true—three answers apply: (1) No such choice has to be proved true, only relevant. (2) No one has yet produced a demonstrably ultimate value, and it seems clear that the hierarchical model is as inappropriate here as it is in epistemology. (There are no ultimate, or basic, facts, only some that are more reliable than others; and all can—under pressure—be given support by appeal to others.) (3) In the case of moral values, where some need for a single answer can be demonstrated, there is a perfectly good way of handling any moral disputes that are likely to arise in the social sciences. This is by appealing to the equality of prima-facie rights—the fundamental axiom of democracy. Justification of this is itself one of the most important tasks of the social sciences and requires contributions from game theory, political science, economics, sociology, and psychology, as well as from the obvious candidate, anthropology. It is the problem of deciding on the best system of sublegal mores—insofar, of course, as any answer is possible. But this type of problem is already familiar: it is an efficiency problem.

Indeed, the social sciences have for too long been reticent about pointing out the extent to which it is possible both to give answers to moral problems and to refute some of the current answers to them. For some reason, the sound point that there are many areas of morality where there cannot yet be any proof of the superiority of a particular answer is taken to imply that acting as if any answer were correct is defensible. But of course the only defensible position in such a situation is a compromise or, if possible, a suspension of action. In my opinion, the axiom of equal primafacie rights can be shown to be superior to any alternative, and also to be capable of generating a complete moral system. It achieves both of these ends by being the only such axiom that can be satisfactorily supported, and of course it roughly coincides with the Golden Rule and other basic maxims (details of this line of argument will be found in Scriven 1966). At any rate, it is time that the possibility of this kind of “strategic ethics” was examined by all the strategists who have sprung up to look at other kinds of social interaction in terms of the language of games.

In summary, the scientific approach to evaluation necessarily involves both applied science (finding the best solution to a practical problem) and pure science (finding the best estimate, hypothesis, or experimental design). Moreover, the element of evaluation enters into much “straight” measurement—that of intelligence, creativity, and social acceptability, for instance. The reason for this is as simple as the reason for introducing new classifications: we have to order our knowledge if we are to use it efficiently. It follows that the most appropriate kind of order is determined by the use to which that knowledge is to be put. One might put the point paradoxically and say that all science is applied science. The application may be to efficient explanation, accurate prediction, or improvement of the world, but it is still—in one important sense—an application. Nor can we assess (that is, evaluate) theories or instruments unless we have some analysis of their proposed use.

Data analysis . There are obviously limitations on the memory storage capacity of the human brain that would make it impotent in the face of even a modest amount of data about the path of a projectile or a planet, if these data were presented in discrete form. But if we can find some simple pattern that the data follow, especially if it is a pattern that we are familiar with from some other, preferably visual, experience, then we can handle it quite easily. (The preference for visual models is due to the vastly greater channel capacity of the visual modality; the notion of “handling” involves more than simple recovery, and even that involves more than storage capacity, since it includes look-up and read-out time.) This simple point can be taken as the start for a complete data-processing approach to the aspects of structural philosophy of science that remain to be discussed. It also pervades the parts already discussed, for the introduction of concepts is itself a device to cope with the “buzzing, blooming confusion” of sense experience.

Generalizations and laws . The simplest examples of the cognitive condensation described in the preceding section are laws and generalizations. They are so necessary that we are prepared to forgive them a very high degree of inaccuracy if only they will simplify the range of possibilities for us. Contrary to Karl Popper’s view, which stresses the equivalence of a law to the denial of counter-instances, the present view suggests that we are rightly very unimpressed by counterinstances in this irregular world, and extremely thankful if we can find a regularity that provides a reasonable approximation over a good range of instances. This is as true in the physical sciences as in the social, for the laws of gases, the laws of motion, gravitation, radiation, and so on, are all merely approximations at best. There are occasional exceptions (for example, the third law of thermodynamics), but the important feature of a law is that it introduces a pattern where none was before. In this sense its truth is its utility, not its lack of error. A great deal has been made in the literature of the fact that a law will support counterfactual inferences while an accidental generalization will not (Nagel 1961, pp. 68–73; compare Strawson 1952, pp. 85, 197, 200). On the present view, all this means is that we think natural laws are true of continuing or pervasive phenomena, i.e., of the nature of things. All other attempts to give logical analyses of the concept of law—for instance, the view that laws cannot contain reference to particular entities, or must support predictions—seem to me simply arbitrary.

Explanation . The task of explanation is the integration of “new” phenomena (whether subjectively or objectively new makes no difference) into the structure of knowledge. Typically, this consists in fitting these phenomena into a pattern with which we are already familiar. But explanation is not simply reduction to the familiar. Indeed, it may involve reducing the familiar to the unfamiliar, as Popper (1963, p. 63) has pointed out. But it must involve reducing the uncompre-hended phenomenon to phenomena that are comprehended, and it is hardly surprising if this sometimes increases the sense of familiarity.

It has long been argued that the way in which explanation is performed in science always involves subsuming the phenomenon to be explained under a known law [see SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION]. In view of the known deficiencies in our scientific laws, explanation, if this theory were acceptable, would in any case be a rather imprecise affair. But the restriction to laws is too confining, unless one treats the term “law” so loosely that it covers almost any statement except a pure particular. The real danger in this model of explanation—the “deductive” model, as it is usually called—is that it seems to support the view that explanations are closely related to predictions. In contrast, the “pattern” model of explanation, which I prefer, allows for retrospectively applicable patterns as well as for those which can be grasped in advance of their completion. It happens that this is very important in the behavioral sciences, since there is, and always will be, a real shortage of “two-way” laws (that is, laws that both predict and explain). This has typically been treated by social scientists as a sign of the immaturity of their subject; but in fact it is simply a sign of its nature and is very like the situation in the “messier” areas of the physical sciences, especially engineering. When a bridge fails, or a mob riots, or a patient commits suicide, there are often a number of possible explanations, of which only one “fits the facts.” We thus have no difficulty in saying that this one is the explanation, although the facts available before the event were not enough to permit us to tell what would happen. Indeed, it may be that the chances in advance were very strongly against the actual outcome, and that we would therefore have been entitled to make a well-founded scientific prediction of the event’s nonoccurrence. It is not helpful to suggest in such cases that we are explaining by deduction from a law. What sort of law? That some factors can cause others? That only certain factors cause a certain effect? These are indeed general propositions, but they do not look much like laws of the usual kind, and they do not support any predictions at all. It is not in the least important whether or not we call them laws, but it is important to understand that we often support explanations by appealing to general claims that will not support predictions.

Prediction . On the other hand, it is often possible to predict on the basis of laws that do not explain. Any reliable correlation, however little we understand it, will give us a basis for predicting (that is, of course, provided there is temporal separation between the two correlated factors). To be able to predict, we need only to be able to infer that an event must occur at some conveniently remote time in the future. To explain, on the other hand, we have only to show why something occurred, not necessarily that it had to occur.

For a long time it was thought that the only way we could be sure to avoid ad hoc explanations was to require that (a) the grounds for the explanation be known to be true and (b) these same grounds imply only one possible outcome, the event or phenomenon to be explained. But there are many ways in which we can show that a particular explanation is correct in a particular case without having to show that the factors mentioned in the explanation would enable one to infer the explained event.

For example, we may demonstrate the presence and operation of a particular cause by exhibiting some clues that uniquely identify its modus op-erandi. Of course, we may still have reason to believe that there are certain other factors present which, in conjunction with the factors we have identified, would enable us to make a formal inference that the event we have explained was bound to occur. But in many cases we do not know what those other factors are, and we do not know the laws that would make the inference possible. In fact, our belief that we may still be able to make this inference merely indicates that we believe in determinism. It certainly does not prove that a good scientific explanation demonstrates the necessity of what it explains.

No doubt it is tempting to remark that a complete explanation would have this property, but even this approach is wrong. In the first place, there are many so-called complete scientific explanations that do not have it. Second, this approach recommends a use of the term “complete explanation” that has the unpromising property of identifying mere subsumption under a generalization as complete explanation. But the genius of Freud, for instance, was not manifested by proving that the “explanation” of obsessive behavior in a particular neurotic was that this behavior was common in neurotics. Rather, he claimed to show a causal connection between certain other factors and obsessive behavior; and a causal connection is neither as strong nor as weak as a high correlation, it is simply quite different.

Causes . We are often able to identify causes in the social sciences without being able to give the laws and other factors in conjunction with which they operate to bring about their effects. The basic control group study is a case in point. It may give us excellent grounds for supposing, let us say, that a particular drug accelerates the subjects’ rate of response, but it does not tell us what other factors are necessary conditions for this effect. Of course, we know that it is some set of the factors which are present, but we do not know which set. In more complex cases, even though a particular factor does not reliably lead to this effect, we may establish it as the cause simply by elimination of the alternative possible causes, either through their absence or through the presence of clues showing that, although present, they could not have been active this time. Of course, causal explanations are incomplete in the sense that there are always further interesting questions about the phenomenon that we would like answered. But this is also true even when we can subsume the explanation under a law: for instance, we can ask why the law is true. But causal explanations are often complete in the sense that they tell us exactly what we need to know, for our interest in a phenomenon is often very specific. Thus explanation is a context-dependent notion; explanations are devices for filling in our understanding, and the notion of the explanation makes sense only when there is a standard background of knowledge and understanding, as in the normal pedagogical development of an academic subject.

Understanding . The key notion behind that of explanation, and hence that of cause, is understanding. It must not be thought of purely as a subjective feeling; the feeling is only something associated with it. The condition of understanding itself is an objectively testable one; in fact, it regularly is tested by examinations, which are supposed to stress the detection of “real understanding,” not just rote knowledge. Understanding is integrated, related knowledge; more generally—so that the definition will apply to the understanding possessed by machines, animals, and children—it is the capacity to produce the appropriate response to novel stimuli within a certain range or field. It is a characteristic of tests for understanding that they present the student with new problems, and the possession of understanding is valuable just because it does embody this capacity to handle novelty.

Approaching it in this way, we see immediately that the question of how the brain can provide this capacity is of interest not only from a neurophysiological point of view but possibly also as a way of obtaining better insight into the nature of understanding itself. In fact, a remarkable overlap emerges between the requirements of efficient storage and understanding, as it is commonly conceived. Efficient storage, both to economize on storage capacity and to facilitate fast recovery and input, must use mapping, modeling, and simplifying procedures. But these are exactly what we use in the process of trying to understand phenomena, even in the more pragmatic process of trying to improve our classifications, descriptions, and predictions. Thus, to mention one example of how fruitful this conception is, the idea of simplicity, which has often been recognized as a criterion for satisfactory scientific theories, can be seen as equivalent to the familiar notion of economy, not as some mysterious aesthetic requirement. Nor is the whole aim of understanding to be seen as a concession to human weakness; for the most sophisticated and capacious computers we shall ever design will be hard pressed to store even part of the brain’s data and will therefore have to employ procedures that economize on storage space. Putting the matter more strongly, a simple map stores an infinity of facts with very little complication in the read-out procedures, in comparison with list storage, and an enormous improvement in speed of readout (that is, of recall); it also handles a quantity of information that would be beyond the capacity of ordinary list storage. (The difference between the use of models and the use of mnemonics is that the model stores an indefinite number of facts, which the mnemonic does not, and the model stores them in a way that is more directly related to truth.) Models, from analogies to axiomatizations, are the key to understanding. [See VERSTEHEN.]

Experimentation . The use of applied science for the purpose of controlling reality has its counterpart within the methodology of science itself in the area of experimentation. Thus applied science is to pure science as experimentation is to pure observation. In each case the armory of relevant methods is importantly different: the “purer” subjects are more concerned with understanding and description; the more applied ones, with causation and manipulation. Indeed, it does not appear possible to give an analysis of “cause” without some reference to manipulation, though a great deal can be said before coming to the irreducible element of intervention or action. [See CAUSATION.]

A number of topics have not been discussed here, although they are closely related. For example, the problem of the reduction of one science or theory to another is a combination of a problem about explanation with one about definition. I have also said very little, even implicitly, about the issue of free will versus determinism, and wish only to state that it now seems possible to reconcile the two positions, provided we first make a distinction between predictive and explanatory determinism. In conclusion, I should stress my conviction that there is very little in the social sciences that does not have a parallel in the physical sciences, but it has not been to these parallels that social scientists have turned for paradigms. They have turned instead to the absurdly over-simple paradigms of Newtonian mechanics and astronomy. Even there, the significant fact is that the problem of predicting the motion of pure point-masses, moving under the sole influence of the very simple force of gravity, passes from the realm where solutions and predictions are possible to the realm where solutions give way to (at best) explications as soon as the number of bodies is increased from two to three. It is surely absurd to imagine that the forces acting on human beings are simpler than those involved in the “three-body problem.” And if this is so, then we need a new “methodology of the complex domain,” perhaps along the lines indicated above.

Michael Scriven

[Directly related are the entriesCausation; Experimental Design; Models, Mathematical; Multivariate Analysis; Positivism; Prediction; Probability; Science, article onThe History OF Science;Scientific Explanation; Statistics, article OnThe Field; Systems Analysis, article onGeneral Systems Theory; Values; Verstehen; and in the biographies ofCohen; Galton; Hume; Koyre; Pearson; Peirce; Schlick; Weber, Max; Yule.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Contemporary philosophers of science can be roughly classified as either post-positivists (who form the majority) or linguistic analysts. For examples of work by leading post-positivists, see Popper 1934; 1957; Carnap 1950; Reich-enbach 1951; Hempel 1952; 1965; Braithwaite 1953; Nagel 1961; Feyerabend 1962; Kemeny&Snell 1962; Suppes&Zinnes 1963. There are many important topics on whichthese authors disagree, but it seems fair to say that among the predecessors they would be prepared to acknowledge are such founders of modern positivism as Karl Pearson, Moritz Schlick, and Ernst Mach. Other outstanding earlier writers who, although somewhat untypical of the field, have contributed to the philosophy of science in general, not just the post-positivist branch of it, include C. S. Peirce, Max Weber, N. R. Campbell, P. W. Bridgman, and Harold Jeffreys. Works by philosophers of science who use at least some of the methods of the linguistic analysts, even if they would not all classify themselves as such, include, in the study of the physical sciences, Toulmin 1953; Polanyi 1958; in the study of the social sciences, Dray 1957; Winch 1958; Kaplan 1964; Scriven 1966; and, in the field of measurement and probability, Ellis 1966; Hacking 1965. Certain trends in the history of science, particularly in the emphasis, developed in Butterfield 1950 and Kuhn 1962, and by Alexandre Koyrt, on autonomous conceptual schemes as units of progress, have influenced the philosophy of science. These trends have in turn been influenced by philosophical works such as Feyerabend 1962; Hesse 1963. Among the extremely valuable contributions to the philosophy of science made by practicing social scientists, special note should be taken of Simon 1947–1956; Skinner 1953; Meehl 1954; Stevens 1958; Chomsky 1966. Of the general treatises available in 1966, only McEwen 1963 and Kaplan 1964 are concerned principally with the social sciences, although Nagel 1961 and Hempel 1965 deal with them to some extent. Lazarsfeld 1954; Natanson 1963; Braybrooke 1966 are interesting collections that focus exclusively on the social sciences. As an introduction to the philosophical problems of the social sciences, Kaplan 1964 is to be recommended to layman and expert alike, although the work takes an approach somewhat different from that presented in this article.

Braithwaite, R. B. 1953 Scientific Explanation: A Study of the Function of Theory, Probability and Law in Science. Cambridge Univ. Press. → A paperback edition was published in 1960 by Harper.

Braybrooke, David (editor) 1966 Philosophical Problems of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan.

Bridgman, P. W. (1927) 1946 The Logic of Modern Physics. New York: Macmillan.

Butterfield, Herbert (1950) 1957 The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800. 2d ed., rev. New York: Macmillan. → A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Collier.

Campbell, Norman R. (1920) 1957 Foundations of Science: The Philosophy of Theory and Experiment. New York: Dover. → First published as Physics: The Elements.

Carnap, Rudolf (1950) 1962 The Logical Foundations of Probability. 2d ed. Univ. of Chicago Press.

Chomsky, Noam 1966 Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought. New York: Harper.

Dray, William (1957) 1964 Laws and Explanation in History. Oxford Univ. Press.

Ellis, Brian 1966 Basic Concepts of Measurement. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Feigl, Herbert; and Scriven, Michael (editors) 1956 The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 1. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Feyerabend, P. K. 1962 Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism. Pages 28–97 in Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell (editors), Scientific Explanation, Space, and Time. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 3. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. Hacking, Ian 1965 Logic of Statistical Inference. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Hempel, Carl G. 1952 Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science. Volume 2, number 7, in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Univ. of Chicago Press.

Hempel, Carl G. 1965 Aspects of Scientific Explanation, and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science. New York: Free Press.

Hesse, Mary B. 1963 Models and Analogies in Science. London: Sheed…Ward.

Jeffreys, Harold (1931) 1957 Scientific Inference. 2d ed. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Kaplan, Abraham 1964 The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science. San Francisco: Chandler.

Kemeny, John G.; and Snell, J. Laurie 1962 Mathematical Models in the Social Sciences. Boston: Ginn.

Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Univ. of Chicago Press. → A paperback edition was published in 1964.

Lazarsfeld, Paul F. (editor) (1954) 1955 Mathematical Thinking in the Social Sciences. 2d ed., rev. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press.

McEwEN, William P. 1963 The Problem of Socialscientific Knowledge. Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster.

Meehl, Paul E. (1954) 1956 Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Nagel, Ernest 1961 The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation. New York: Harcourt.

Natanson, Maurice (editor) 1963 Philosophy of the Social Sciences: A Reader. New York: Random House.

Polanyi, Michael 1958 Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy. Univ. of Chicago Press.

Popper, Karl R. (1934) 1959 The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic Books. → First published as Logik der Forschung.

Popper, Karl R. 1957 The Poverty of Historicism. Boston: Beacon.

Popper, Karl R. 1963 Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. New York: Basic Books; London: Routledge.

Reichenbach, Hans (1951) 1959 Probability Methods in Social Science. Pages 121–128 in Daniel Lerner and Harold D. Lasswell (editors), The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments in Scope and Method. Stanford Univ. Press.

Scriven, Michael 1956 A Possible Distinction Between Traditional Scientific Disciplines and the Study of Human Behavior. Pages 88–130 in Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven (editors), The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 1. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Schiven, Michael 1959 Truisms as the Grounds for Historical Explanations. Pages 443–475 in Patrick L. Gardiner (editor), Theories of History. Glencoe, III.: Free Press.

Scriven, Michael 1962 Explanations, Predictions and Laws. Pages 170–230 in Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell (editors), Scientific Explanation, Space, and Time. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 3. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Scriven, Michael 1965 An Essential Unpredictability in Human Behavior. Pages 411–425 in Benjamin B. Wolman and Ernest Nagel (editors), Scientific Psychology: Principles and Approaches. New York: Basic Books.

Schiven, Michael 1966 Primary Philosophy. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Simon, Herbert A. (1947–1956) 1957 Models of Man; Social and Rational: Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in a Social Setting. New York: Wiley.

Skinner, B. F. (1953) 1964 Science and Human Behavior. New York: Macmillan.

Stevens, S. S. 1958 Problems and Methods of Psychophysics. Psychological Bulletin 55:177–196.

Strawson, P. F. 1952 Introduction to Logical Theory. London: Methuen; New York: Wiley.

Suppes, Patrick; and Zinnes, Joseph L. 1963 Basic Measurement Theory. Volume 1, pages 1—76 in R. Duncan Luce, Robert R. Bush, and Eugene Galanter (editors), Handbook of Mathematical Psychology. New York: Wiley.

Toulmin, Stephen 1953 The Philosophy of Science: An Introduction. London: Hutchinson’s University Library. → A paperback edition was published in 1960 by Harper.

Winch, Peter (1958) 1963 The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge; New York: Humanities.

III THE SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCE

If the sociology of knowledge is defined as the part of sociology that studies the nature of and relations between different types of idea systems, on the one side, and the relations between these idea systems and a variety of institutional (or social-structural) and personality factors, on the other, then the sociology of science is one part of the sociology of knowledge. It is the part that specializes in defining the nature of scientific ideas and in describing their relations both to other kinds of ideas (e.g., ideological, philosophical, aesthetic, religious) and to various institutional and personality factors. Parsons (1951, especially chapter 8) has given us what is still the best analytic definition of idea systems in general and their several specialized subtypes, although further analysis and operational specification of his classification are necessary.

The sociology of science, as is the case with all sociology, general or special, is primarily interested in the construction of a set of highly generalized, systematic, and relatively exhaustive concepts and propositions of relationship. In this enterprise it uses data from all historical periods and all cultures, since its main concern is not with history as such, but with establishing sociological concepts and propositions. The history of science, although it always should use such explicit sociological concepts and propositions, often does not, preferring its traditional, less examined, and frequently common-sense ways of treating its materials. In either case, the history of science, both advertently and inadvertently, may be productive of materials or even of new concepts and propositions for the sociology of science, but this is not its essential task. Thus, the sociology of science and the history of science overlap but do not coincide.

The sociology of science, finally, is interested both in fundamental scientific ideas themselves and in the application of these fundamental ideas, or of more empirical ideas, to technology. In its study of technology, again, the sociology of science uses both historical and contemporary data, drawn from a variety of cultures, regardless of the original purpose for which these data were collected, so long as they serve its primary goal of constructing a system of analytic concepts and propositions.

The social nature of science . One of the basic working assumptions of structural-functional theory in sociology is that man’s behavior in society is a response to certain functional problems that he confronts in his nonsocial and social environments. On this assumption, sociology sees man’s scientific behavior as his response to the functional problem created by his need to have adequate adjustive knowledge of the physical, biological, and social aspects of the empirical world. Such knowledge is indispensable for some form of adjustment to that world in its three essential and different aspects. Everywhere, as archeology, ethnology, history, and sociology have severally demonstrated, man in society has a certain amount of this scientific knowledge. The amount, of course, varies a great deal among societies. In other words, science, as Malinowski recognized (1916–1941), is a matter of degree, with some societies having only a relatively small amount and others having a great deal more. This, indeed, sets some of the essential problems for the sociology of science. For it is not only the universal occurrence of at least a small amount of scientific knowledge, but also the patterns of variation in the degree of development of such knowledge in different societies, and variations at different stages in the evolution of a single society, that the sociology of science has undertaken to explain.

In order to explain the degree of development of science considered as a complex whole, it is necessary to distinguish its component cultural, social, and psychological parts, for each of these can develop at somewhat different rates in different social situations. It is useful to define at least four general components of science as a whole, each of which has a measure of autonomy: substantive sc