Historiography of Science - The Hessen Thesis and The Birth of Externalism

The Hessen Thesis and The Birth of Externalism

Just as the 1930s were a seminal decade for the development of our modern understanding of science, they were a seminal decade for the history and historiography of science as well. While Sarton taught the first American doctoral students in the discipline, in Europe some of the most influential historians and philosophers of science were first coming into the picture, and the setting of the philosophical battle which is now known as "the Science Wars" was being set.

In 1931, the Second International Congress of the History of Science was convened in London. The papers delivered by the Soviet delegation, led by N.I. Bukharin, quickly invigorated the discipline. Boris Hessen in particular delivered a paper entitled "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia," in which he asserted that Isaac Newton's most famous work was created to cater to the goals and desires of 17th century industry and economy. Hessen asserted that Newton's work was inspired by his economic status and context, that the Principia was little more than the solution of technical problems of the bourgeoisie.

Present scholarship has revealed that Hessen's motives were not completely academic. At that time in the Soviet Union, the work of Albert Einstein was under attack by Communist Party philosophers; being supposedly motivated by bourgeois values, it was "bourgeois science" (Graham 1985: 711), and should henceforth be banned. (In many ways this attack was similar to the Deutsche Physik movement in Germany which occurred only a few years later.) Hessen's paper was a lobbying tactic: Party philosophers would not challenge the accuracy of Newton's theories, and to show them as being motivated by bourgeois concerns would, in Hessen's eyes, show that scientific validity could exist whatever the motivations were for undertaking it. However, there is little evidence that his paper had any effect in the internal Soviet philosophical battles over Einstein's work.

Despite its lack of effect in his home country, Hessen's thesis had a wide effect in Western history of science. Though Hessen’s work is now easily dismissed as "vulgar Marxism" (Shaffer 1984: 26), its focus on the relationship between society and science was, in its time, seen as novel and inspiring. It was a challenge to the notion that the history of science was the history of individual genius in action, the dominant view at least since William Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences in 1837.

Few contemporary Western readers of Hessen took his paper at face value. His rigid connection between economy and knowledge was not accepted by a majority of historians. However, his assertion that a connection existed between the growth of knowledge and the art of war, and that ballistics played a central part of physics and Newton's world, was viewed with keen interest. In the shadow of the first war to employ chemical weapons, and as the war machines were again gearing up in preparation for another world war, the role between science, technology, and warfare was becoming more interesting to scholars and scientists. Previous views of science as separate from the mundane or vulgar aspects of practical life — the disembodiment of the scientific mind from its context — were becoming less attractive than a view that science and scientists were increasingly embedded in the world in which they worked.

This became reflective in the scholarship of the time as well, with dissertations written on such subjects as "Science and War in the Old Regime," which examined the ways in which military engineering influenced pre-Revolution French scientists.

This method of doing the history of science became known as externalism, looking at the manner in which science and scientists are affected, and guided by, their context and the world in which they exist. It is an approach which eschews the notion that the history of science is the development of pure thought over time, one idea leading to another in a contextual bubble which could exist at any place, at any time, if only given the right geniuses.

The contrast to this approach, the method of doing history of science which preceded externalism, became known as internalism. Internalist histories of science often focus on the rational reconstruction of scientific ideas and consider the development of these ideas wholly within the scientific world. Although internalist histories of modern science tend to emphasize the norms of modern science, internalist histories can also consider the different systems of thought underlying the development of Babylonian astronomy or Medieval impetus theory

In practice, the line between internalism and externalism can be incredibly fuzzy. Few historians then, or now, would insist that either of these approaches in their extremes paint a wholly complete picture, nor would it necessarily be possible to practice one fully over the other. However, at their heart they contain a basic question about the nature of science: what is the relationship between the producers and consumers of scientific knowledge? The answer to this question must, in some form, inform the method in which the history of science and technology is conducted; conversely, how the history of science and technology is conducted, and what it concludes, can inform the answer to the question. The question itself contains an entire host of philosophical questions: what is the nature of scientific truth? What does objectivity mean in a scientific context? How does change in scientific theories occur?

The historian/sociologist of science Robert K. Merton produced many famous works following Hessen's thesis, which can be seen as reactions to and refinements of Hessen's argument. In his work on science, technology, and society in the 17th century England, Merton sought to introduce an additional category — Puritanism — to explain the growth of science in this period. Merton worked to split Hessen's crude category of economics into smaller subcategories of influence, including transportation, mining, and military technique. Merton also tried to develop empirical, quantitative approaches to showing the influence of external factors on science. Despite these changes, Merton was quick to note his indebtedness to Hessen. Even with his emphasis on external factors, though, Merton differed from Hessen in his interpretation: Merton maintained that while researchers may be inspired and interested by problems which were suggested by extra-scientific factors, ultimately the researcher's interests were driven by "the internal history of the science in question." Merton attempted to delineate externalism and internalism along disciplinary boundaries, with context studied by the sociologist of science, and content by the historian.