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This chapter examines the most influential recent efforts by scientific realists to blunt or block the pessimistic induction by engaging the details of the history of science itself, including the first serious efforts to recruit those details to the realist cause. It argues that the most promising and influential realist replies to the historical challenge (including those of Clyde Hardin and Alexander Rosenberg, Philip Kitcher, Stathis Psillos, Jarrett Leplin, and John Worrall) ultimately manage to achieve only Pyrrhic victories for realism, that is, “defences” of scientific realism that are forced to concede to the realist's opponent either just the substantive points that were in dispute between them or everything he/she needs for a convincing historical case against realism itself. Both the problem of unconceived alternatives and the pessimistic induction itself survive even the best recent efforts to defend realism from the specter of the historical record.

This chapter examines the issue of the theory ladenness of observation. Data from laboratory experiments and episodes in the history of science provide convincing evidence that perception is theory-laden. The reviewed material supports a view that perception is constructed from theory-driven top-down information and bottom-up information from the world, the latter of which limits the potentially relativist epistemological consequences of theory ladenness. Theory ladenness seems to occur throughout the scientific process, in perception, attention, thinking, experimentation, memory, and communication. The top-down theory-laden processes tend to operate outside of awareness and can both facilitate and inhibit the the establishment of a correct representation of the world. So, one normative implication of this work is that scientists need to devote some of their methodological efforts to avoiding problems arising from top-down psychological factors. However, the overall normative implications with respect to controlling theory ladenness are for pluralism in science.

This chapter reviews a genre of the history of science appearing in the Indian Journal of History of Science that strictly observes the internal-external divide. One of the elements of this review is a bibliometric analysis that aims to identify the priorities of historians of science in India publishing in the journal. These priorities and the underlying historiography render certain kinds of problems amenable for research and investigation, and foreclose the pursuit of others. In attempting a social epistemology of the discipline, other themes and areas may be identified. While this review is partisan, it also seeks to evaluate the growth of the discipline in terms of the precepts set down by the founders of the journal itself. Rather than examining the avenues of professionalization of the discipline, this chapter focuses on the images of science that pervade the community of Indian scientists.

This chapter introduces the subject of Peruvian responses to climate change and ensuing glacier catastrophes from 1941 to the present. In Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range, which towers above the Callejón de Huaylas valley in the Ancash Department, 25,000 people have died from glacier-related disasters (glacial lake outburst floods and avalanches). The chapter places this study within current historiography on climate history, the history of science and technology, environmental history, Peruvian history, Latin American history, disaster studies, and glacier-society relations both globally and in the Andean region. The chapter then demonstrates why glacier retreat in Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range is an ideal case study for understanding long-term human adaptation to climate change, as well as analyzing how science evolves in societal context following climate change and natural disasters. Responses to climate change, which brought scientists and engineers to the Cordillera Blanca, unleashed a process called disaster economics: the use of catastrophes or disaster mitigation programs to promote and empower a range of economic development interests in both the public and private sectors. Climate change triggered historical processes and scientific developments far beyond the immediate disasters caused by melting glaciers.

This essay argues that the history of science and faith is not one of ongoing conflict. While earlier historiographers like Andrew Dickson White portrayed a triumphal science engaged in “warfare” with theology, that view has been largely replaced by a much more nuanced story of mutual influence. Davis concludes that historians of science, whether Christians or not, largely share the same goal: to document the complexity of this story without prejudicing the case either for or against faith.

Almost four decades after the volumes of Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China first appeared, it is fitting to ask why an Indian equivalent has not been produced. In attempting to seek an answer to this question, this essay proposes, rather provocatively, that the Needhamian oeuvre cannot be replicated in the Indian variant. First, it outlines the history of the history of sciences in India and then raises some relevant questions and problems in Needham's historiography that prove problematic for the history of science in India. It also discusses the conditions contributing to the non-emergence of the Indian equivalent of Science and Civilization in China. A ‘New Big Picture’ of the history of science has emerged from sociological approaches to the history of science. The chapter analyses what this picture holds for the history of science in India.

This chapter describes the discovery, perfection, and application of the scientific method as the Scientific Revolution happens. Bacon, Galileo, Harvey, Huygens, and Newton were singularly successful in persuading posterity that they contributed to the invention of a single, transferable, and efficacious scientific method. The treatment of Descartes' method by historians of science and historians of philosophy has been no exception to this pattern. The Discours de la methode has been seen as one of the most important methodological treatises in the Western intellectual tradition, and the Cartesian method has been viewed as doubly successful and significant within that tradition. First, Descartes' method has been taken to mark an early stage in that long maturation of the scientific method resulting from interaction between application of method in scientific work and critical reflection about method carried out by great methodologists, from Bacon and Descartes down to Popper and Lakatos. Second, Descartes' considerable achievements in the sciences and in mathematics during a crucial stage of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century have been taken to have depended upon his method. This chapter discusses the tendency of historians and philosophers to create a cult of the thoughts of thinkers and revive the link between theorizing about the purported scientific method and requiring a method-centric history of science. It explains further that in all cults, there is a doctrine of truth and it informs us of what we already know and that there is an open ended set of rules.

In studies on the history of science and technology in India, the historiographic frames are structured by a host of factors, such as the nature of the interaction between traditional forms of knowledge and new knowledge. The politics of knowledge throws up issues relating to the interplay between local cultural embodiments and structures of imperialism. Scientific and technological knowledge are essential components of the historiography of modernity. This chapter examines four phases in the evolution of this discourse, highlighting the differences between these phases and the contradictions implicit within each of them. These four phases are: British and French Orientalist studies on the sciences of India; pre-independence nationalist studies; the phase of post-colonial reconstruction or the golden age of scientism; and the post-positivist phase. First, the chapter considers the link between science and nationalism and then discusses the golden age of scientism.

This book is about how Indian scientists and historians of science engaged with the sciences of India. From the Orientalist period through the nationalist period, to the period of Nehruvian socialism in India, the forces of decolonization sought to challenge a hegemonic conception of the history of science, such that the history of sciences of the non-West would not be subordinate texts to the mainstream discourse of the history of Western science. The book discusses how historiography is situated within the social theory of science and explores the terrain of post-colonial theory of science, scientism and Romanticism, the work of chemist-historians Prafulla Chandra Ray and Marcelin Berthelot, and the exchange between the Sri Lankan-born historian of art Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy and the Belgian born historian of science George Sarton during the decade 1930–1940.

This chapter argues that Quinian bootstrapping underlies conceptual change, illustrating with examples drawn from conceptual change in the history of science as well as from conceptual change in childhood. It begins by discussing three accounts of the processes involved in theory construction that have wide currency: (1) historically, CS2 is socially constructed, and each child's individual construction is also a social process; (2) the transition between CS1 and CS2 is achieved via noting contradictions and inconsistencies within CS1 itself or as it applies to the world; and (3) domain-general cognitive development yields resources the child can draw upon for the purpose of theory construction. It argues that each of these proposals fails to fully engage the problem. The chapter shows how each falls short of the account wanted here, and then turns to a positive proposal.

The history of modern science dates back 300 or 400 years, depending on when historians or sociologically oriented historians seek to place the birth or origins of modern science, and historians of ideas seek to place the birth of modernity itself. And yet the paradox that confronts the historiography of science is that 90 per cent of all science that science historians investigate has been produced in the last fifty years, while the majority of historians are devoted to studying the science produced in previous centuries. Two external factors that have altered the trajectory of the history of science are post-colonialism and multiculturalism. In fact, from a third-world point of view, it is now recognized that developments in post-colonial history, feminist studies, post-structural critical theory, and developments within the sociology of scientific knowledge have played a non-trivial role in furthering the possibility of global history.

The Introduction frames the study of racial photography as scientific evidence. Based on the works of Lorraine Daston and Ian Hacking, the chapter develops the notion of “practical epistemology” as a method of analyzing different author’s assumptions that guided their uses of photography in the study of race. It then characterizes the form of “reactionary logic” to which the majority of writers studied in this book adhered, and the contradiction that undercut the work of racial writers: the belief in the self-evidence of race as well as a belief in its threatening and growing fluidity and concealment. It traces the appearance of the term “pseudo-science” as a countering to the term “Jewish science.” The chapter ends in arguing that the imagination is as important for the history of racial photography as visual perception.

As background to the book, a brief and historically organized account is given of highlights in (1) the early science of the stratosphere, (2) the development and use of chlorofluorohydrocarbons (CFCs), and their atmospheric impacts, and (3) the initial appearance of environmental concerns about the use of CFCs disrupting the atmosphere by destroying the ozone layer.

This chapter presents several guidelines for historians out to describe and explain the production of meaning in the sciences. It considers two important implications of the question-based account. First, the account links historical interpretation with the explanation of novelty in the sciences. Secondly, the apprehension of past styles of inquiry involves many practices that are relevant to the historical understanding of past works of the sciences. The chapter discusses how the study of the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of questions in the sciences tackled in this book shows affinities with much recent social and cultural history of science. It concludes that the study of scenes of inquiry in the sciences should form the core of the history of sciences.

This chapter considers the relation of history of philosophy to the history of science. Though these two disciplines are naturally linked, they also have special commitments that distinguish each from the other. The chapter begins with the history of the history of science, a discipline that was once allied with philosophy of science but that has increasingly evolved toward social history. The chapter then considers the debate over whether the history of philosophy is essential for, or rather largely irrelevant to, contemporary “analytic” philosophy. The conclusion is that the relation of history of philosophy to philosophy is best conceived in terms of the relation of history of science to history. Finally, the chapter considers a particular case study of the relation of history of science to history of philosophy that concerns contextualist scholarship on early modern philosophy and science.