What is science?

The ways of understanding science are and have been very different through history.

Could you explain these changes in the ways of understanding science?

The major change has been around the boundaries of science: around the notion of internalism and externalism. … It is not at all clear why theology has been judged “internal” to the sciences and economics “external” to the sciences. Definitions of the boundaries of the sciences therefore become profound historical problems.

Have there been more changes?

Yes. Now we are interested in objects and bodies as well as ideas and minds. To put it simply, we are interested in rebuilding history of science through or from those things previously forgotten or ignored … And finally, and quite the most interesting for me, we are less interested in older questions such as “who came first”, but instead in explaining how and why people get to agree to accept a knowledge. Until relatively recently, controversy seemed embarrassing as a subject of study. And now it’s seen to be very informative. We are interested in what happens when people fight, since then their assumptions become much more visible.

What do you mean by that?

If the world is the same everywhere, then we always ought to agree about its contents and behaviour. And when we don’t that’s embarrassing. But what if difference is intrinsic? In that case, one would expect disagreement, and what would need explanation would be agreement. The main change in history of science in my lifetime is that we have moved from explaining difference to explaining agreement.

And where does this change of approach come from?

In many ways it comes from sociology of science. Sociology tries to explain social order. So sociologists of science insist that order needs explanation - that it is not natural nor inevitable - and that solutions to the problem of knowledge, that is “how do I come to agree with you”, are solutions to the problem of social order, that is “how do we get to live together”. Sociology of science is, thus, an indispensible resource for understanding agreement.

What has this new perspective apported to the history of science?

Sociology of scientific knowledge offers a series of challenges and provocations to history of science. There is a valuable struggle in which different groups of scholars are constantly provoking each other with challenges, responses and debates.

What kind of struggle?

One example: sociology of scientific knowledge claims that once a controversy was over it is extremely difficult to see how the controversy has been closed. What should be studied, they argue, is what they call “Science in Action”, to take the opportunity of seeing the process by which the agreement is reached. That is a provocation to historians because we write about people who are dead and about controversies that are closed.

And is it worth such a fight?

I think that the function of the history of science is to make things that are familiar seem strange and things that are strange seem familiar. The aim is to make it look odd or strange so as to be able to examine the assumptions we are making that are invisible or apparently unremarkable. One way of achieving this end is to provoke. Provocation helps call up for examination material that we might to take for granted and that would otherwise be unnoticed.

What can history of science offer to the society?

We face a number of crises in the modern world. These are crisis of authority, of trust. And without understanding how we got to where we are, we are very unlikely to make informed decisions. So one of the things that historians of science can offer the social world is a more reliable memory and resources to help citizens take part in the most urgent debates about planning the future. Historians of science study how processes to reach an accord work. As a great social scientist once said, “if you forget the past, you are condemned to repeat it”.

* Simon Schaffer is professor of history and philosophy of science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University.