Zusammenfassung
Dieser Bericht enthält zunächst eine Skizze der Entwicklung der Wissenschaftsgeschichtsschreibung in den USA und Canada. Sodann werden die Aktivitäten der History of Science Society of North America besonders vorgestellt. Schließlich betrachtet der Bericht besonders wichtige Publikationen im einzelnen.
Im Anhang finden sich Übersichten über die jährlichen Versammlungen, eine vergleichende Statistik der Forschungsschwerpunkte der amerikanischen und internationalen Tätigkeit auf den einzelnen Gebieten sowie eine Liste der Forschungsstätten und der „Grading Programs“.
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Literatur
Lakatos may have been responding to Sarton's famous rhetorical question, “In the history of science shall we emphasize the first word or the second?” Cf. George Sarton,The Study of the History of Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 4.
Quoted from Campbell'sWhat is Science? by Larry Laudan in “Two Puzzles about Science,”Minerva, 20 (1982), p. 255.
For historical accounts of the establishing of history of science in American universities, see Arnold Thackray, “The History of Science in North America, 1891–1941: The Pre-History of a Discipline,”Minerva, 18 (1980), pp. 448–73; and Victor Hilts, “History of Science at the University of Wisconsin,”Isis, 75 (1984), pp. 63–94.
On the life and role of George Sarton, see Robert K. Merton, “On Discipline Building: The Paradoxes of George Sarton,”Isis, 63 (1972), pp. 473–95; “Recollections and Reflections” (by John T. Edsall, I. Bernard Cohen, Thomas S. Kuhn,et al),Isis, 75 (1984), pp. 11–32; and Hasam Elkhadem, Marc DeMey, Bern Dibner,et al, “George Sarton's Correspondence,”Isis, 75 (1984), pp. 33–62.
Initial suspicions about the nature of science voiced in the 1960s presaged downright distrust in the 1970s. Thackray cites “the public's uneasiness over nuclear power, genetic manipulation, and the role of ‘experts’,” which, in his view, “reflects far deeper, slow-moving causes, such as the somber record of twentieth-century violence and the great scale science itself has assumed.” See Arnold Thackray, “History of Science in the 1980s”,Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 12 (1981), p. 304.
Cf. William J. Bouwsma, “Intellectual History in the 1980s: From History of Ideas to History of Meaning,”Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 12 (1981), p. 281.
Quoted from George Iggers,New Directions in European Historiography by James Henretta, “Social History as Lived and Written,”American Historical Review, 84 (1979), p. 1297.
For an analysis of the difference between Marxist historians and those of the Annales School, see Henretta,op. cit., pp. 1301–06. Henretta credits Marxist historiography with an optimistic character absent from the more deterministicaly pessimisticAnnalistes.
A good review of the effects of this erosion of the image of science as the realm of objective knowledge on scientists may be found in Stephen G. Brush, “Should the History of Science be Rated X?”,Science, 183 (March, 1974), pp. 1164–1172.
Ronald L. Numbers, “The History of American Medicine: A Field in Ferment,”Reviews in American History, 10 (December, 1982), pp. 245–63. Cf. especially pp. 247–52.
Anne C. Roark, “History of Science Gains on U.S. Campuses,”The Chronicle of Higher Education, (May, 1979), p. 8; Arnold Thackray, “Making History,”Isis, 72 (1981),” p. 9.
Arnold Thackray, “History of Science in the 1980s,” p. 299.
Kathryn M. Olesko, “Employment Trends in the History of Science,”Isis, 72 (1981), pp. 477–79.
Thackray, “History of Science in the 1980s,” p. 309.
Roark,op. cit., p. 9; William J. Broad, “History of Science Losing its Science,”Science, 207 (1980), p. 389; Leonard G. Wilson, “Medical History without Medicine,”Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 35 (1980), pp. 5–7.
Thackray, “Making History,” p. 10.
Isis, 63 (1972), pp. 99–100.
Donald Fleming, “TheDictionary of Scientific Biography: A Review Symposium,”Isis, 71 (1980), p. 640. Other participants in the symposium included Joseph Needham, Edward Grant, and Jacques Roger, all of whose evaluations of theDSB are printed. Cf. pp. 633–52.
See Hankins' “In Defence of Biography: The Use of Biography in the History of Science,”History of Science, 17 (1979), pp. 1–16.
This book is balanced by James Moore'sPost-Darwinian Controversies (1979) in which the specifically polemical nature of the encounter between nineteenth century science and religion is questioned and rejected on historiographical grounds. Moore is an American, but he lives and writes in Great Britain.
For documentation of the paltry number of quantitative studies that have been written in history of science, see Roger Hahn,A Bibliography of Quantitative Studies on Science and its History, (1980).
For a distinction between the old and the new sociology of science, see Laudan,op. cit., pp. 258–61, 266–68.
For a friendly criticism of the book by Mendelsohn and Elkana, see the end of my review inArchives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences. 32 (1982), p. 295.
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Gregory, F. The Historical Investigation of Science in North America. Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 16, 151–166 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01800839
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01800839