What’s wrong with talking about the Scientific Revolution?
Applying lessons from history of science to applied fields of science studies
Lindy A. Orthia
Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science
The Australian National University
Abstract
Since the mid-twentieth century, the ‘Scientific Revolution’ has arguably occupied centre
stage in most westerners’, and many non-westerners’, conceptions of science history. Yet
among history of science specialists that position has been profoundly contested. Most
radically, historians Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams in 1993 proposed to demolish
the prevailing ‘big picture’ which posited that the Scientific Revolution marked the origin of
modern science. They proposed a new big picture in which science is seen as a distinctly
modern, western phenomenon rather than a human universal, that it was invented in the Age
of Revolutions 1760-1848, and that science be de-centred within the new big picture: treated
as just one of many forms of human knowledge-seeking activity. Their paper is one of the
most highly cited in the history of science field, and has the potential to transform the way
that science educators, science communicators, science policy-makers and scientists view
science. Yet the paper and historians’ scholarly response to it are not well-known outside the
history discipline. Here I attempt to bridge that disciplinary gap with a review of scholarly
papers published 1994-2014 that cited Cunningham and Williams or otherwise discussed the
Scientific Revolution, to gauge the extent of support for the old and new big pictures. I find
that the old big picture is disintegrating and lacks active defenders, while many scholars
support aspects of the new big picture. I discuss the significance of this for scholars in
‘applied’ fields of science studies such as education, communication and policy.
Introduction
The concept of ‘the Scientific Revolution’ was developed by a small group of historians of science
working before and after the Second World War, primarily Alexandre Koyré, Herbert Butterfield
and A. Rupert Hall. Put simply, it suggests that the origins of modern science were to be found in
the mathematical and natural philosophy works of people like Galileo, Descartes and Newton in
sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. It was then, the narrative suggests, that science burst into
the world in all its light, having struggled for so long in shadows. Koyré, Butterfield and Hall
successfully promoted the Scientific Revolution as supremely important in the history of science
‘big picture.’ As a result, it is arguably the only major history of science narrative that has currency
with people outside that specialist field, including many science educators, science communicators
and science policy specialists.
Since then, historians have challenged the Scientific Revolution concept on many grounds. Most
radically, its centrality within the history of science has been questioned. One of the most influential
such challenges came in 1993 from Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, who rejected the
notion of a Scientific Revolution altogether. They sought to establish a new big picture for the
history of science to replace it, and proposed that science was invented (their word) in the late
eighteenth to early nineteenth century, during ‘the Age of Revolutions,’ 1760-1848. They argued
that science be recognized as a distinctly modern, Western, cultural phenomenon — as bounded in
time, space and culture — rather than seen, as per the old big picture, as a universal human
endeavour that reached its zenith in the modern West. Specifically they asserted that the name
‘science’ should only be used to refer to this modern, Western phenomenon, not to other
knowledge-seeking activities. Ultimately they argued that the Scientific Revolution big picture is
not just a historically inaccurate story about science, but an ideologically loaded narrative about
science’s meanings for human beings and the world. Its development was, in their view, motivated
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by the war-era historians’ desire to promote a particular scientific mode of thinking within society,
by equating the emergence of Western science with the revelation of truth.
If this alternative thesis has any merit, it presents a profound challenge for scholars and
practitioners working in what I here call applied fields of science studies, such as the science
education, science communication and science policy domains. What workers in these domains
have in common are that we are at the coal-face of debates about science’s value and the
appropriate place of science in society. We are variously concerned with influencing things such as
scientific literacy, science funding, science jobs, enrolments in science subjects, public debate about
science and technology, the incorporation of science into government policies, and, broadly
speaking, the principle of making science a foundation-stone of society. Whatever each individual’s
specific views about science are, some idea of what science is lies at the heart of them. It is likely
that for many people this idea has been, to a significant extent, shaped by the Scientific Revolution
big picture, given the latter’s prominence within the public consciousness. That big picture’s
apparent basis in empirical historical research has in turn lent legitimacy to a raft of ideological
baggage about science that may in fact have no credible historical foundation.
For some applied science studies workers this history may not matter, if their views about science
are based on things other than the historical big picture, such as their own experiences with science,
or other evidence of its impact on society. However, for those who have constructed their views at
least in part on the Scientific Revolution big picture, with a sense of trust and faith in the truth of
that historical narrative, an alternative history may prove critically transformative. For that reason it
is important to bring that alternative perspective into the scholarly discourse of applied science
studies domains. Some of its component arguments are already in circulation within these domains,
in particular questions about Eurocentrism within the old big picture. But what is not currently
available is a critical review of the level of support for the Cunningham and Williams alternative
big picture, to enable applied science studies workers to evaluate its legitimacy as an alternative
history of science and, conversely, the strength of support remaining for the old big picture. Making
this body of work available outside of the history of science field will enable applied science studies
workers to make more informed decisions about how to proceed when applying history in their
work, or when considering how their idea of history has shaped their thoughts about science.
Accordingly, the format of this paper is a review of the post-1993 literature citing Cunningham and
Williams or discussing the Scientific Revolution, highlighting key points of agreement or
disagreement with the old or new big pictures. At the core of this I review works from the history of
science field. I also include papers from other disciplines, to identify additional perspectives that
have a bearing on the matter.
Methods
While elements of the Cunningham and Williams thesis have been argued elsewhere (e.g. in a 1988
paper by Cunningham), I use the 1993 paper as a focal point for the review because of the
considerable influence it has exerted within its field. Quantitatively, it is the most highly cited paper
published in its journal, The British Journal for the History of Science, and one of the most highly
cited papers ever in the history of science field.1 A more qualitative measure of its influence was its
inclusion in a 2003 historical reader on the Scientific Revolution, despite editor Marcus Hellyer
1
This was determined primarily with a citation search on the Web of Science database. Of the >27,000 papers Web of
Science lists for the keyword ‘science’ within research areas ‘history’ and ‘history and philosophy of science,’ it ranks
75th highest by number of citations (searched 13 January 2015). Many of the papers ahead of it in that list are from
disciplines other than history, such as philosophy of science or sociology of scientific knowledge. Web of Science lists
73 citations for the Cunningham and Williams paper; the next most cited paper in The British Journal for the History of
Science has 58. A search for papers referencing ‘the Scientific Revolution,’ conducted for the second part of the review,
yielded an additional citing paper that was mistakenly not listed among the 73, taking the total to 74. A search using the
disciplinary specialist Historical Abstracts database did not add any further citations to those listed by Web of Science.
First published in Minerva, 2016. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11024-016-9299-4 — page 2
framing it as ‘a dissenting view’ that ‘has not found universal favor’ (Hellyer 2003, pp. 14, 216).
These factors make it a useful lens for examining current thinking about the Scientific Revolution
and its alternatives.
My review is in two parts, following a brief re-visitation of Cunningham and Williams’ paper. In
the first part I review 68 of the 74 works published between 1994 and 2014 inclusive that are
indexed on the Web of Science database as having cited Cunningham and Williams.2 These 68
comprise a comprehensive survey of the scholarly response to their work. I review them to assess
whether Cunningham and Williams’ premises have been broadly accepted or disputed by scholars
and on what grounds.
In the second part I review journal papers published between 1994 and 2014 inclusive that engaged
with the concept of the Scientific Revolution but did not cite Cunningham and Williams. In this part
I sought to identify how the authors of those papers used the term ‘Scientific Revolution’ compared
to the objections Cunningham and Williams raise to it, and what, if any, historiographical issues
they raised about the concept or about the ‘big picture’ in the history of science. The papers for this
second section were identified by a key word search for ‘the scientific revolution’ in the Web of
Science and Historical Abstracts databases, restricting the results to English language journal
papers, including review essays and proceedings papers published in journals. I manually checked
those I could access (approximately 90% of returned hits) and excluded those that only mentioned
‘the scientific revolution’ in the abstract but not in the body of the paper, or those using the term to
mean some other event (such as the ‘revolution’ in biotechnology). This search strategy yielded a
set of 110 papers available for analysis, in addition to the 68 works citing Cunningham and
Williams. Following this second part of the review, I offer some synthetic conclusions, focusing on
the results’ significance for applied science studies fields.
To fully cite 178 sources would take several thousand words in itself, so some of the bibliographic
evidence underlying this paper is referenced in an online resource file. There are 20 instances in the
review where I summarize the perspectives of multiple works without citing all directly in the text;
for each such instance, I provide the full bibliographic substantiation in a section of the online
resource file. I refer to the appropriate section using a bracketed formulation with the letters OR and
numbers 1 through 20. For example, to refer readers to the third section of the online resource file, I
would follow a statement with (OR3). The file also contains a complete bibliography of the 178
works.
A methodological limitation of this survey is its restriction mainly to journal papers, and therefore
its exclusion of the many books published since 1994 that have included the term ‘Scientific
Revolution’ somewhere in their title — possibly over a hundred, judging by listings on
worldcat.org. Several of these books continue to exert a strong influence on scholars, particularly in
the book-oriented discipline of history, but no doubt also beyond that field because of books’
general accessibility, and so should rightly be considered part of the body of scholarly works. I
excluded them for pragmatic reasons. First, the sheer volume of books was prohibitive, considering
the journal papers on the topic were numerous enough to comprise a substantial review. Second, it
is near impossible to discern where the boundary lies between scholarly and popular works on this
topic, and so a survey of books would bleed into a study of popular discourse about the Scientific
Revolution. That would be a fascinating study in itself, and informative for understanding the
dynamics of these ideas within the applied science studies fields of concern. But such a study would
be a departure from the present aim, which was primarily to review scholars’ engagement with
challenges to the Scientific Revolution big picture, and so restricting the reviewed texts to journal
2
See footnote 1 for search details. The six works listed as citing Cunningham and Williams that were not included in
the review were either not in English, were inaccessible, or appear to have been erroneously listed by Web of Science.
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papers was a logical choice. Should future researchers take on the challenge of studying popular
discourse on this topic, the present study will hopefully provide a useful point of comparison.
The Cunningham and Williams thesis
Cunningham and Williams built their thesis on three premises: that the ‘old big picture’ could no
longer be sustained in light of more recent scholarship; that the evidence suggests ‘science’ as we
currently conceive of it was invented in the Age of Revolutions; and that a new big picture should
de-centre science as ‘just one amongst a plurality of ways-of-knowing the world’ (Cunningham and
Williams 1993, p. 429). The last point provides a theoretical framework for the whole, with
Cunningham and Williams disputing the tendency under the old big picture for historians to
appropriate ‘all ways-of-knowing-the-world...to a single, unitary “history of science”’ (p. 409). The
influence of postcolonial theory is evident here — we could substitute Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000)
term ‘provincialize’ for Cunningham and Williams’ term ‘de-centre’ — and indeed, Cunningham
and Williams rejected the Eurocentrism (and presentism) inherent in the notion that science ‘could
act as a neutral framework on which to organize ways-of-knowing across the whole span of human
history and human cultures’ (Cunningham and Williams 1993, p. 410).
If taken literally, one implication of this is that applied science studies workers seeking to apply the
label ‘science’ to non-modern or non-Western ways-of-knowing should not do so; and nor should
such ways-of-knowing be seen as inferior or superior to science. This would then exclude a whole
range of knowledges and practices from the purview of science communication, education and
policy. It would also confine the latter disciplines to a narrowly modern, Western epistemological
frame, potentially pitted against the many alternative ways-of-knowing. In this sense, the
Cunningham and Williams thesis would frame applied science studies activities that promote
science as attempts at intellectual imperialism, undermining any view that they are more innocently
a neutral, universal good.
Cunningham and Williams argued that the old big picture emerged from an ideological imperative
to promote science in particular, now familiar ways: certainly as a universal human enterprise, but
also as a specific method of inquiry, and as ‘the embodiment of basic values of freedom and
rationality, truth and goodness, and the motor of social and material progress’ (p. 411). Drawing on
existing scholarship, they contended that none of these ways of characterizing science are robust:
that it cannot be equated with all human knowledge-building activities, is not methodologically
consistent, and is often not morally good nor intellectually free nor a positive contributor to
‘progress.’ They argued that a new big picture must be built to accommodate this profound shift in
beliefs about the nature of science, starting with what was now believed and known, rather than
tweaking the old model. They felt that the old big picture would continue to haunt their discipline if
it was not replaced by a new one.
Cunningham and Williams built their new big picture on the historiographic principle that science
does not derive from a transcendent realm, so therefore requires a conventional historical
explanation. In other words, any definition of science developed on the basis of philosophical
reasoning or descriptions of the present nature of science (for any given ‘present’) is inadequate,
because it creates an impression that the concept ‘science’ transcends temporal, geographic,
material, political and cultural boundaries. Cunningham and Williams argued to the contrary that,
like everything else, the idea of science has a very grounded, situated history — it came from
somewhere. Accordingly, they established the second premise of their thesis by reference to
empirical historical research that identified the timings of things important to the identity of
science: the first use of the word ‘science’ in its current sense; the creation and/or consolidation,
and differentiation, of disciplines such as physics, biology, chemistry and geology; the
professionalization of ‘scientific’ labour; the laboratory being seen as basic to research; and the
shift in the investigation of nature from a godly pursuit to a secular one. Since all of these things
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had been dated to the Age of Revolutions, they chose that era as the basis for their new
periodization. They argued that science of the late eighteenth to twentieth centuries was not the
same kind of activity as natural philosophy and mathematics in seventeenth or sixteenth century
Europe. They also dated the roots of the Scientific Revolution creation story to the same point in
time as science itself was invented: with early nineteenth century ‘men of science,’ under the
influence of the Enlightenment philosophes and the Romantics, locating science’s origins in the
seventeenth century and, before that, in ancient Greece. Therefore, Cunningham and Williams
concluded, the events of the so-called ‘Scientific Revolution’ — though perhaps important to the
history of European natural philosophy and mathematics — were not properly considered the
origins of modern science. Indeed, they considered the qualifier ‘modern’ redundant, as the origins
of science were only modern.
In other words, Cunningham and Williams emphasized an institutional identity for science over and
above an identification with science’s subject matter — ostensibly, the study of the natural world.
While the study of the natural world may indeed be a human universal, it has been carried out in
diverse ways across the world and throughout history, and that diversity is governed and shaped by
institutional factors — social, cultural, political, economic, ideological factors. It is in this
institutional respect that modern, Western science — or simply ‘science’ — is unique, and different
from the ways-of-knowing dominant in seventeenth century Europe, for example. A potential
implication of this for applied science studies workers is that our primary allegiance, as manifest in
our use of the label ‘science,’ appears to be with the institutional aspects of science, rather than with
a more universal interest in studying the natural world. At the very least, Cunningham and
Williams’ differentiation between these ways of thinking about science must give us pause for
thought about where our allegiances do lie.
A key question this review seeks to address, however, is how other historians of science have
received this thesis or otherwise negotiated its ideas, to help us evaluate how seriously we should
take it. In the next two sections I address this, beginning with the 68 available papers that cite
Cunningham and Williams. It is noteworthy that 22 (32%) of these works only included relatively
trivial citations of the paper, using it to assert minor and uncontroversial points in this context, for
example that science is the West’s dominant way of knowing, that there is a big picture in science
history, that the big picture is Butterfield’s, and so on (OR1). These works do not contradict
Cunningham and Williams’ thesis, but their authors only tacitly support it by, in essence, admitting
that they are aware of it and not arguing against it. It is not possible to analyze these 22 papers in
greater depth than this, therefore I will not engage with them further. This reduces the body of
available literature that has critically and/or deeply engaged with Cunningham and Williams’ thesis
to 46 papers, which I review next.
Works citing Cunningham and Williams
This first part of the review is divided into three sections, following Cunningham and Williams’
three premises. I begin with the first premise: to what extent have scholars accepted the argument
that the Scientific Revolution is an unsustainable concept that should be rejected? I continue with
the paper’s second premise, asking: has the proposed new periodization of the origins of science
been accepted? Finally I examine whether scholars agree that (modern, Western) science should be
de-centred within the history of human knowledge making.
Is ‘the Scientific Revolution’ an unsustainable concept?
Of the three premises, the first is the least widely endorsed in the literature citing Cunningham and
Williams, primarily because few scholars have engaged directly with the crucial proposition that the
Scientific Revolution should be written off. Those who have engaged with it seemed to agree with
it. Diederick Raven expressed the view that ‘the seventeenth century events’ were not ‘that
significant’ when viewed ‘from a comparative and civilizational point of view’ (Raven 2011, pp.
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450-451). David Wade Chambers and Richard Gillespie agreed that the institutionalization of
science as a ‘polycentric communications network’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
‘represented a revolution in knowledge making more significant for both science and society than
the theoretical advances of the seventeenth century, traditionally known as the Scientific
Revolution’ (Chambers and Gillespie 2000, p. 223). Soraya de Chadarevian (2009, p. 15) generally
acknowledged that ‘There seems to be agreement that the overarching accounts as produced in the
past are not viable anymore.’ Adrian Johns argued that the Scientific Revolution framework had
hindered historians, whereas recasting the seventeenth century events as part of ‘natural philosophy’
rather than ‘science’ had enabled them to identify continuities with the pre-Renaissance era (Johns
1999; see also Osler 1998). Johns in essence argued that this more sensitive attention to
continuities, breaks and periodization enables better history to be done.
Support for Cunningham and Williams’ analysis of the problem has come more commonly in
another form. A number of scholars have elaborated on the view that the old big picture was
ideologically driven by a transcendent view of science, critiquing the lack of a historicist approach
to put science in its social, cultural and political context (OR2). This body of work includes some
detailed empirical archival substantiation, particularly by Anna-K. Mayer (2004). Most have not
commented on the proposition of rejecting the Scientific Revolution concept outright, but have
recognized the concept as a historiographical product, one of the ‘fundamental experiments in
narrating the history of science’ (Findlen 1998, p. 244). These authors have thus kept the question
of rejecting it open.
Others, mostly not historians of science, have more passively perpetuated the Scientific Revolution
concept, sometimes adding scare quotes to its name, but otherwise carrying on as normal (OR3).
Some read the Cunningham and Williams thesis as a mere ‘revision’ or ‘redefinition’ of the
concept, or a ‘second scientific revolution,’ not acknowledging the stated extent of their challenge
(OR4). This seems to support Cunningham and Williams’ contention that a strong new big picture
is required if we are to de-centre the old one.
Few scholars, though, have explicitly defended the Scientific Revolution concept. Hellyer is an
exception, but offered an argument based on institutional convenience rather than empirical
evidence: ‘The Scientific Revolution does retain considerable usefulness as a shorthand name for
the field, and it certainly shows no signs of simply disappearing’ (Hellyer 2003, p. 14). This may
have been a defensive move, but perhaps with good reason. Markku Peltonen wrote as early as
1999 that a coherent Scientific Revolution ‘has become increasingly difficult to sustain and is, in
fact, seldom defended anymore’ (Peltonen 1999, p. 325). Peltonen quietly asserted that this
‘historiographic programme’ against the Scientific Revolution had become not only dominant, but
also hegemonic. He invoked as evidence the fact that Steven Shapin’s popular book on the
Scientific Revolution had paid extensive lip service to the challenges, but essentially covered the
same content as John Henry’s less apologetic book on the subject, seemingly demonstrating a
degree of political correctness on Shapin’s part (Shapin 1996; Henry 1997). The historian most
heavily engaged in this debate, Peter Dear, made a similar point in 1998:
The ‘Scientific Revolution’ is nowadays, as a category, much less attractive to historians
than it once was.... Nonetheless, as our historiographic heritage, it continues to set agendas
and direct us to particular problem areas. (Dear 1998, p. 173)
Dear used that as a starting point for querying whether the idea was ‘nothing but an ideological
construct’ (Dear 1998, p. 173). He went on to defend a renovated version of the Scientific
Revolution, while also acknowledging Cunningham and Williams’ Age of Revolutions
periodization. As a reconciliation, Dear proposed ‘two interconnected stories’: a seventeenth
century story ‘best told in a sociologized idiom of intellectual/cultural history’ and a nineteenth
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century story ‘told in the predominant idiom of social/institutional history’ (Dear 1998, p. 192; for
some support of this idea, see Szmrecsányi 2009). Since, as he stated, ‘any historical story...is
situationally determined,’ in his view it was premature to completely reject the events associated
with the ‘Scientific Revolution’ as important — their value depends upon the question being asked.
By 2012, however, the discussion had substantially moved on. That year Dear concluded that while
‘Grand overviews survive in the pedagogically necessary genre of the textbook...the days of the
large scale historical account of the Scientific Revolution seem to be almost gone’ (Dear 2012a, p.
207). This may signal a warning to science educators that the history we are teaching, based on such
textbooks, is no longer recognized by historians as an appropriate way of reading history.
The safest general conclusion to draw about Cunningham and Williams’ first premise is that
historians largely agree on the problem: that the Scientific Revolution of Koyré, Butterfield and
Hall was formulated using ideologically driven rather than socio-culturally contextualized
approaches to historical study, and a flawed, ahistorical concept of science. For this reason, the
Scientific Revolution concept and the big picture centred on it have fallen out of favour, at least
among most history of science specialists.
Historians, however, have not loudly reached a consensus on Cunningham and Williams’ proposed
solution, to abandon the Scientific Revolution altogether. It seems that to do so would result in an
identity crisis for the history of science field. This, of course, need not particularly concern those in
the science education, communication and policy domains, and so seems an inadequate reason to
perpetuate an outmoded model of history there. In any case, Cunningham and Williams proposed a
solution to that problem too: to replace the old big picture with a new one, ‘to give identity and
meaning to our specialism’ (Cunningham and Williams 1993, p. 407). The next question is, then,
how have scholars of the past two decades received this second premise, that science was invented
in the Age of Revolutions?
Has Cunningham and Williams’ proposed periodization been accepted?
The most obvious answer to this question is that almost all of the many scholars who mention
questions of periodization agree with Cunningham and Williams about the date of origin of science,
and about the appropriate measures to use to distinguish it from pursuits such as natural philosophy,
including secularism, professionalization and disciplinary identities (OR5). This is easily the least
contentious aspect of their thesis, and does seem to have become accepted as a commonplace within
the history of science, including by scholars who wish to retain the Scientific Revolution concept,
or who have objected to other aspects of the thesis. Even Hellyer admitted that Cunningham and
Williams ‘may well be correct in arguing that the origins of MODERN (sic) science lie in the age of
revolutions,’ but downplayed the significance of this, saying that the other authors in his reader ‘do
not insist that early modern science was identical to modern science’ (Hellyer 2003, p. 217).
Understanding this period’s significance for science would thus seem to be an important task for
anyone in an applied field of science studies who talks about the history of science in their work.
The strength of commitment to the second premise in its entirety may be reasonably low though.
For example, the terminology of ‘invention’ of science has not been taken up widely; only three
authors whose work is reviewed here adopted it without scare quotes or other qualifiers (OR6).
Some scholars also harbour a lingering concern that the recognition of the new periodization has
made little actual difference to historiography. As Dear put it:
The practical consequence is that whenever we think about ‘science’ for that time and place
[early modern Europe], we can simply substitute the term ‘natural philosophy’ and carry on
exactly as before — while feeling pleased at having avoided the pitfalls of presentcentredness. (Dear 2001, p. 377; see also Pickstone 2007)
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Dear asserted that Cunningham and Williams’ periodization has been largely accepted without
much interrogation, and that more detailed study of the proposal is warranted (Dear 2012a). Tamás
Szmrecsányi agreed, stating, ‘The only question which remains open is that of defining when, why
and how the transition occurred’ (Szmrecsányi 2009, p. 51). Nonetheless, some works (including
those of Dear and Szmrecsányi) have added further elaboration and evidentiary weight to
Cunningham and Williams’ argument (OR7).
Two main points of concern about the second premise have been raised, both disputing
Cunningham and Williams’ seemingly sharp differentiation between the ‘early modern’ era of
natural philosophy and the ‘modern’ era of science. The first is a practical matter: too sharp a
division seems to isolate these eras from each other, suggesting that any studies of continuity across
them are somehow problematic. A number of scholars have argued that they agree with the
periodization but want to study these two ‘eras’ in conjunction, because both are important to
understanding the story of science (OR8). The second concern is related but more philosophical,
and therefore perhaps of more importance to applied fields of science studies: that Cunningham and
Williams have overly essentialized both ‘science’ and ‘natural philosophy.’ Dear, in particular,
made the point that both categories are heterogeneous, underwent change, and are not neat, for
example ‘“science” in the nineteenth century that...involved God rather centrally’ would not neatly
fall into either ‘science’ or ‘natural philosophy’ (Dear 2001, p. 381).
Early on, Dear (1995) identified Cunningham and Williams’ view as a minority one for these
reasons. Although this designation of ‘minority view’ did not last, the concerns do identify an
ambiguity in Cunningham and Williams’ paper. It is unclear how they conceptualized legitimate
approaches to the history of knowledge across the break between ‘natural philosophy’ and
‘science.’ This ambiguity — Dear (2001, p. 385) called it a ‘tactical error’ — left the door open for
some writers to make overblown assertions about their thesis. For example, Nick Tosh filled the
ambiguity with the (probable) overstatement that Cunningham and Williams believed topics like
‘Newton’s work on gravity...should not be studied as part of the history of science’ (Tosh 2003, p.
648). Such apparent attacks on the identity of their field may remain an obstacle to a fuller embrace
of the proposed new big picture by some historians, and presumably also by some applied science
studies workers.
As a final point on the second premise it is worth noting that not all historians like big pictures, as
Cunningham and Williams themselves noted. De Chadarevian discussed this in her review of the
question of ‘microstudies’ versus big picture accounts in the history of science, acknowledging the
historians who ‘argue that big pictures of that sort are obsolete,’ and the fact that a move by a
critical mass of historians towards microstudies was motivated by ‘uneasiness about overarching
explanatory systems’ (de Chadarevian 2009, pp. 14-15; see also Pickstone 2007). This, or a selfconscious awareness of this dominant tendency, may at least partially explain the relative dearth of
defenders of Cunningham and Williams’ new big picture in toto. In addition, both de Chadarevian
and Pamela Smith noted the difficulty of trying to construct a new big picture on a pluralist
premise. In Smith’s words, the ‘many components of a new narrative...just do not cohere in the
seductive way that the triumphalist story did’ (Smith 2009, p. 373). This may also prove an obstacle
to applied science studies people embracing the new big picture, if the weave of science is made up
of so many threads as to render it a meaningless concept. This pluralism throws down a significant
gauntlet to applied fields of science studies: a challenge to consider which threads have meaning for
us.
Should science be de-centred within historical study?
This brings us to the third and final premise of Cunningham and Williams’ thesis: de-centring
(modern, Western) science within the broad field of the study of human knowledge making. A
much smaller number of scholars have engaged with this premise than with the first or second, but
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most of those who did agreed with it whole-heartedly (OR9). Some but not all study non-Western
science and/or the history of science at a global level. Their grounds for support are clearly based
on postcolonial and related approaches to history, including opposition to the Eurocentrism implicit
in the old big picture, and a desire for a more pluralist, more historicist, more localized, less
universalist picture of science. This seems to have been tacitly supported more broadly. Of the
works reviewed here, only Tosh (2003), a non-historian, cut against it to defend the notion that
science is ‘timeless’ and has unique explanatory power.
Nonetheless, there are sticking points in this premise too. Most notable is the widespread retention
of the word ‘science’ to refer to non-Western science, by scholars advocating the de-centring of
modern, Western science. This is in stark contrast to scholars of early modern Europe, who have
generally embraced a shift in language away from ‘science’ when referring to things like
seventeenth century natural philosophy. The reason for the difference is the cultural prestige of the
label ‘science’ in the current academic (and non-academic) landscape. Scholars of early modern
Europe are acutely aware of anachronism, but other things come into play elsewhere, primarily the
denigration or lack of recognition of non-Western knowledge. Najm al-Din Yousefi (2008, p. 560,
fn.1) has asserted the importance of the term ‘science’ for studies of medieval Islam, because of
‘the continuity of many scientific methods and practices’ — a continuity often elided in a
Eurocentric history of science. Francesca Rochberg has argued that denying the use of ‘science’ for
ancient Babylonian knowledge can lead to anachronism of a more serious sort than a mere problem
of terminology:
To limit the discussion of what the nature of ancient Babylonian divination is by erasing the
term science from our discourse about it leads back to the predicament of binaries, to
science and pseudo-science, science and religion, rationalism and irrationalism, and even
science and superstition.... the category ‘pseudo-science’, in projecting a modern
demarcation between legitimate and illegitimate sciences, miscategorizes ancient
investigations of phenomena and ancient bodies of ‘natural’ knowledge as unjustified or
wrong belief, and perpetuates anachronistic ideas about what the nature of Mesopotamian
science was. (Rochberg 2010, p. 262)
The problem is that which Dear identified in 1998, discussed above: there are many dimensions to
science. Not only are there cultural, intellectual, social and institutional dimensions, there is also a
persistent ideological dimension. The latter is at the core of much of the heated debate about the
place of science in society: regardless of how much some scholars challenge science’s claims on
truth and universality, others continue to uphold and defend the claims. As such, in the present
landscape it would not be a politically astute move for everyone to restrict the term ‘science’ to the
narrow place, time and culture Cunningham and Williams strictly associate it with, irrespective of
how historically accurate that would be.
In 2012 Dear suggested a radical shift to accommodate the different issues at stake in these debates,
at least for historians: to shift the focus of the history of science field from ‘a history of science’
towards ‘a history of “science,”’ in other words towards ‘the history of the idea, or ideology, of
“science” that has so possessed modern culture’ (Dear 2012b, p. 37; see also Golinski 2012). Part of
his argument was that a broadly ecumenical history of science, where ‘science’ includes ‘any sort of
knowledge or human activity to do with the world that we regard as serious, formally organized,
and respectable,’ would, in his view, ‘have little real coherence’ (p. 37). Further:
An adequate, integrated history of science needs to confront many preconceptions about
what science is and is not: whether it is one or many (methodologically or otherwise), or,
indeed, whether it is nothing more than a culturally prestigious label to be attached to
absolutely anything whenever one can get away with it. (Dear 2012b, p. 45)
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This insistence on perpetual inquiry into the meaning of ‘science’ seems a reasonable caveat for a
field of research based on something whose definition is fundamentally contested, and the same
must be said of applied science studies fields. Of course, philosophers of science have always
engaged in such inquiry, but the critical point historians have added to the conversation is the notion
that the idea of science itself has a history. Taking that seriously, we can see that ‘science’ is not a
transcendent phenomenon whose nature we have as yet failed to define well. Rather, it is partly a
rhetorical phenomenon, which has at times been presented in the guise of a transcendent door to
truth. To be conscious of the history of this ideological framework is to remind oneself that
advocating for change around science’s place in society is an ideological act.
Dear’s suggestion is thus perhaps the most fruitful contribution yet to emerge from Cunningham
and Williams’ legacy, both for historians and for applied science studies fields. He takes their
program to a more sophisticated level, creatively interrogating the ideological scaffolding left by
Koyré, Butterfield and Hall and their nineteenth century antecedents — the scaffolding upon which
‘science’ itself is built — rather than trying to pretend it is not there at all and was just an
embarrassing historian’s fabrication.
The works citing Cunningham and Williams directly are of course not the only materials published
in the past two decades that have engaged with the old big picture of the history of science. To paint
a full portrait of that picture’s currency, we turn now to the 110 papers for which ‘the scientific
revolution’ was identified as a key word, but which did not cite Cunningham and Williams.
Other papers engaging the concept of ‘the Scientific Revolution’
Of the 110 papers, 39 (35%) used the term ‘Scientific Revolution’ only cursorily and as a mundane
name to identify a particular historical period, without qualification or comment on the term’s
historiographical implications (OR10). None of these focused on defining or debating the features
of the period in question, so I did not analyze them further. But as with the ‘trivial’ citations of
Cunningham and Williams, they are not without significance. It is worth noting their prevalence as
an indication of the continuing currency of the term ‘Scientific Revolution’ within the literature,
including history of science journals. It is not true to state that the notion of the Scientific
Revolution has outlived its usefulness entirely. These sources affirm Hellyer’s assertion noted
above that it is a useful shorthand for referring to a particular set of events. However, we cannot tell
from such cursory citations whether the term ‘Scientific Revolution’ still takes centre stage in these
scholars’ ‘big picture’ views of the history of science. There is a difference between using the term
as shorthand for a set of events as these 39 papers do, and using it as shorthand for a set of ideas
about the significance of those events. An additional seven papers (6%) help establish the
importance of this distinction. These still used the term cursorily, but qualified it as ‘the so-called
Scientific Revolution’, or placed the phrase in scare quotes (OR11) — usages that undermine the
significance implied by the convention of capitalizing the name and calling it a ‘revolution.’ Such
qualifications are ambiguous but may constitute an acknowledgement of its contested nature.
Excluding these 46 papers from deeper analysis, we are left with 64 papers that discussed the
Scientific Revolution in more detail, which provide the basis of the second part of the review. It is
worth noting that approximately 50% of these papers (32 of the 64) were authored by scholars
whose primary disciplinary identification (where it could be discerned) is something other than
history, including the sciences, philosophy, religious studies, archaeology and anthropology, or
language and communication studies. By comparison, only 20% of the 46 works citing
Cunningham and Williams non-trivially (reviewed above) were authored by non-historians (and
only 28% of all 68 works citing Cunningham and Williams). Those authors were also restricted to a
narrower set of disciplines (mostly philosophy or science and technology studies) than non-
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historians in this second part of the review. This in itself demonstrates the relative lack of awareness
of Cunningham and Williams’ work beyond the discipline of history.
The most striking thing to note about these 64 papers is that, with a few exceptions, the authors
tacitly accepted the historical existence of the Scientific Revolution in some sense. At the farthest
extreme, 14 papers accepted the concept and large or small elements of the old big picture
unquestioningly and without qualification (OR12). Non-historians authored the vast majority of
these. In a few cases these authors acknowledged that something else important happened to science
in the nineteenth century, lending some credence to Cunningham and Williams’ proposed
alternative big picture (OR13). But in all cases it was the Scientific Revolution that remained at
centre stage, and the nineteenth century developments secondary or only relevant in a reduced
context.
That approach, however, is in a minority. Much more commonly, authors have sought to challenge
the received view of the Scientific Revolution, though mostly without rejecting it altogether. The
kinds of arguments such authors have put forward include: disputes over its definition and timing,
or what it was that made it special or revolutionary (OR14); questions about what role was played
in the Scientific Revolution by particular technical concepts, epistemological positions, or bodies of
literature (OR15); critiques of ideological rhetoric that has emerged about science in the wake of the
Scientific Revolution (OR16); a desire to see particular disciplines or practices included in the
Scientific Revolution story (OR17); or a desire to radically revisit the Scientific Revolution story
with a greater incorporation of the global, cultural, economic or social contexts in which it took
place (OR18). The point for these authors is not to ask whether the Scientific Revolution happened,
but how it happened, why, where, exactly when, and with whom. As such, they individually provide
evidence that the concept is alive and well in the literature, and considered robust enough for its
terms to be debated. Taken as a whole, though, these papers strongly suggest that the Scientific
Revolution concept is vague, unwieldy and tattered, and can no longer be read as a neat and
coherent moment in history. The sheer variety of challenges mentioned demonstrates the range of
potential problems with the concept, a point noted by Cunningham and Williams in their decision to
reject it entirely.
Only a small subset of the 110 papers engaged directly and/or deeply with the kinds of questions
raised by Cunningham and Williams without citing them, so are worth discussing in more depth.
H. Floris Cohen (1999) provided the most uncompromising defence of the Scientific Revolution
published in journals in this period, but his article was a transcribed lecture, so lacked the scholarly
rigour expected of a journal paper. Cohen stated that he had ‘good reasons’ for persisting with the
Scientific Revolution name and concept, but did not explain them (p. 107), relying instead upon a
denigration of critical historians and of ‘forlorn, postmodern angst’ to make his point (pp. 108,
112). His article therefore adds little to the present debate, though this is an instance where his book
might have shed more light.
A far more rigorous defence of the concept — and the most comprehensive and convincing defence
in either part of this review — was mounted by economic historian Patrick O’Brien (2013). O’Brien
evaluated the merits of the Scientific Revolution concept from a global history perspective in order
to understand the impact of its events on the West, and thence on the rest of the world via Western
expansion and imperialism. O’Brien’s perspective was persuasively moderate: he accepted potential
problems with the term ‘Scientific Revolution’; acknowledged that related events developed
gradually between 1500 and 1800 rather than transforming all of a sudden in a truly revolutionary
manner; placed the Scientific Revolution in an economic and global context rather than fixating on
its usual heroes; and unequivocally rejected any Eurocentrism or valorization of reason that may
accompany the concept. He concluded with a statement that the Scientific Revolution’s ‘deeper
intellectual origins have been properly located in Indian, Chinese, Arab, and Persian thought’ (p.
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24). As such, O’Brien demonstrated a mixture of acceptance and rejection of Cunningham and
Williams’ thesis. He acknowledged that something like the Scientific Revolution took place, and
asserted that this something was inextricably related to our current concept of science, but he also
de-centred those events in the history of the world by contextualizing them on a global stage. An
essential part of his critique of academic debates about the Scientific Revolution was that they are
parochial in focusing on the European story. In this, his view has some elements in common with
that put forward by scholars like Rochberg, discussed above, that completely limiting the
boundaries of ‘science’ to the modern West denies the political nature of the idea of science.
O’Brien’s argument was focused more on material links and influences and less on the terminology,
but his interest was similarly in the politics of science.
Carolyn Merchant made an argument along similarly political lines, defending the use of the
Scientific Revolution concept from a narratological perspective:
the notion of a ‘Scientific Revolution’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is part of a
larger mainstream narrative of Western culture that has propelled science, technology, and
capitalism’s efforts to ‘master’ nature — a narrative into which most Westerners have
unconsciously been socialized and within which we ourselves have become actors in a
storyline of upward progress. Demoting the ‘Scientific Revolution’ to the mere nomer of
‘early modern science’ obscures the power of the dominant narratives of colonialism and
imperialism that have helped to shape Western culture since the seventeenth century at the
expense of nature, women, minorities, and indigenous peoples. (Merchant 2006, p. 517,
emphasis mine)
Merchant thus made a point critical to applied fields of science studies, that when we think about
the Scientific Revolution and the history of science, we must do so with a reflexive awareness of its
highly charged political nature. In other words she defended its discursive currency, though not
necessarily its positivist legitimacy. In this sense her stance, and to a lesser extent O’Brien’s,
corresponds with Dear’s idea for a reorientation towards a history of ‘science,’ or in the case of
applied science studies, a perpetual reflexivity about science being an idea supported by a narrative
framework, and the critical importance of actively interrogating that framework. These narrative
elements of the Scientific Revolution were discussed in detail by Rivka Feldhay (1994), who
identified the fictive narrative structures and techniques used by historians who engaged with the
concept, including Koyré.
An essay review by Stephen Gaukroger (2002) would also fit Dear’s reconceptualization of the
history of science field. Gaukroger compared the Scientific Revolution to ‘boom/bust’ periods of
scientific activity that occurred elsewhere in the world and in other historical periods to identify
anything that made it unique — reasons why its ‘boom’ never went ‘bust.’ He concluded that it was
the subsequent consolidation and legitimation of the scientific enterprise that made it different.
Significantly for Cunningham and Williams’ thesis, Gaukroger identified the end of the eighteenth
century as the beginning of the period of consolidation and legitimation, which echoes their idea
that this was the period of institutionalization for science. Further, Gaukroger identified a transition
at that point from defending science ‘in terms of its usefulness’ to defending science ‘in terms of its
truth’ (p. 282). This chronology and interpretation dovetails neatly with Cunningham and Williams’
new big picture. It de-centres the Scientific Revolution in a new way, by casting it as one of many
‘mini-scientific revolutions’ (p. 280), and identifying historical rather than philosophical or
jingoistic reasons why it did not end in a ‘bust’ like the others.
Several other papers also commented on the place of the Scientific Revolution within a global
perspective, signalling an ambivalence about the old big picture and new ways forward. Harold J.
Cook argued that while greater knowledge of how local cultures have shaped science has been a
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positive result of ‘the decentering of stories about “the rise of the West,”’ what is now needed is ‘to
discern the relationships among local knowledges’ and ‘to understand the apparent universalism of
scientific knowledge’ (Cook 2011, p. 108). On a slightly different track, Ting Xu and Khodadad
Rezakhani (2012) criticized Eurocentric assumptions about the specialness of the Scientific
Revolution and, like O’Brien, sought to establish that it was the outcome of a dialogue between
civilizations. Roddam Narasimha (2003) went still further in an article responding to Joseph
Needham’s famous question of why the Scientific Revolution did not happen in India or China. He
argued that many of the ‘discoveries’ attributed to the Scientific Revolution had in fact already
occurred previously in India, as had some of the ideological battles such as clashes between science
and religion. All three papers thus rejected the element of Eurocentric triumphalism they saw as
present in the old big picture, and indeed that element seems to have been almost universally
rejected, including in other papers reviewed here (OR19).
Finally, two papers written in the period provide support for Cunningham and Williams’ thesis
while acknowledging the pragmatic reasons the Scientific Revolution occupied such a central place
in the history of science field. One, a posthumously published paper by B. J. T. Dobbs, presented
views similar to those published by Cunningham and Williams regarding the origins of the
Scientific Revolution concept (Dobbs 1994). She agreed that Koyré, Butterfield and Hall’s vision
was an ideologically motivated, whiggish history, shaped by the political environment in which
they were working. As such she criticized that history, while also acknowledging its strategic
usefulness for the field. She presents as a natural ally of Cunningham and Williams, and one
imagines she would have engaged deeply with their work had their papers not ‘crossed in the night.’
In the final paper, Mario Biagioli (1998) treated as a given the fact that the Scientific Revolution
has fallen out of favour with historians, a perspective backed up by three other historians of science
in review essays who characterized an unambivalent acceptance of the Scientific Revolution as
outdated (OR20). But Biagioli discussed the fact that it continues to be used in titles of university
courses on the history of science, essentially for marketing reasons. Like Cunningham and Williams
and Dobbs, Biagioli identified the Scientific Revolution as the ‘myth of origin’ for the history of
science field. But like Hellyer, he identified that it continued to have important practical value,
because ‘it is such a well established myth of origin that [historians] can get academic credit even
by criticizing it’ (Biagioli 1998, pp. 145-146).
In sum, the authors engaging with the Scientific Revolution concept between 1994 and 2014 who
did not cite Cunningham and Williams were, with a few notable exceptions, uninterested in
critically questioning the concept altogether, though many sought to pick small holes in it. Most
continued to use the term to reference a particular set of historical events, granting it continuing
currency, but often stripped of its former ideological weight. Those few scholars who overtly
defended it generally offered one of two arguments: first, that the idea of the Scientific Revolution
has had ideological and narratological potency in global history that should not be ignored; or
second, that it carries institutional benefits for the history of science field. Those few who explicitly
criticized the concept did so along lines largely consistent with the Cunningham and Williams
thesis.
All of this suggests that, with the exception of on-going debates about the uses of the terms
‘science’ and ‘Scientific Revolution,’ the historical tide is predominantly with Cunningham and
Williams. Historians and historically minded others wish to paint a new empirical big picture of the
history of science that does not have the Scientific Revolution at its centre. But discursively they
seek to recognize the rhetorical power of the old big picture in shaping our thoughts about science
for the past 70, or even 250, years.
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Conclusions
This review has shown that, among historians and some other scholars, there has been a profound
move against the old big picture of the history of science in the past twenty years. The events of the
so-called ‘Scientific Revolution’ are no longer seen as the single or primary origin point for
modern, Western science in the way they once were. Nor are they universally seen as the most
centrally important events in the global history of science. The Scientific Revolution is no longer
seen to be so clearly defined, so revolutionary nor so special. Many historians continue to be
interested in studying knowledge-making and technologies in sixteenth and seventeenth century
Europe, but the triumphalist tale of human beings finally alighting on the truth in that time and
place is no longer seen as empirically supportable, when viewed from a global, longue durée
perspective.
The consensus alternative big picture presented in the reviewed works seems to be that the
Scientific Revolution came to be seen as unique because of events that happened afterward. It did
become the symbolic core of a global knowledge movement, while other developments in
knowledge across the world did not. But this was not primarily because the understandings it
offered were of particularly unusual quality. It was primarily because powerful intellectual forces
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries successfully promoted some elements of Scientific
Revolution-era knowledge as useful and/or as the path to truth. Consequently, these elements were
consolidated during the Age of Revolutions, both institutionally and ideologically, as ‘science.’ The
old big picture is now seen as the product of a particular reading of this story by some historians,
who were inclined to frame it as the Revolutionary triumph of truth over ignorance, rather than
framing it as the victory of a socio-cultural movement that championed the new philosophy and in
doing so created ‘science.’
It is notable that this ‘new new big picture’ version of the story differs from Cunningham and
William’s thesis in some respects. Cunningham and Williams sought to separate natural philosophy
from science rather than identifying continuities between them, and so sought to paint science as a
rather isolated phenomenon that is simply one among many approaches to the organisation of
knowledge. Modern, Western science, however, is a long way from being de-centred in the new
new big picture, and the Scientific Revolution still has a role to play in its story, so Cunningham
and Williams’ first and third premises are only supported halfway. Scholars largely agree that
natural philosophy in early modern Europe and science in the modern West are different entities,
and that understanding them as different has enhanced historical studies of natural philosophy. They
largely agree that there was a problem with the old big picture, and that neither modern, Western
science nor the Scientific Revolution were the only interesting things to happen to human
understanding. But they remain fascinated by how we arrived at that picture and by its power in the
modern world.
The work of scholars like Dear, Gaukroger, Merchant and O’Brien suggests that trying to decouple
the ‘Scientific Revolution’ from the invention of ‘science’ is not sensible, since one was the
narratological and ideological product of the other. Indeed, it may be more accurate to say that both
ideas were created simultaneously and mutually support each other. In addition, some authors argue
that the economic and political reality of Western science’s power in the world today cannot and
should not be ignored in our big pictures of the history of science. Rather, it is of interest to
understand, in Dear’s words quoted earlier, ‘the history of the idea, or ideology, of “science” that
has so possessed modern culture.’ Thus, while few of the reviewed scholars privilege modern,
Western science as the best way of understanding the world, many remain interested in how it came
to be seen by so many people as the best way of understanding the world. They are therefore
interested in how discourse about the Scientific Revolution influenced that history.
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However, this does not mean scholars have generally rejected Cunningham and Williams’ thesis. Its
second premise — that ‘science’ was invented in the Age of Revolutions — is extensively
supported within the literature, with almost nothing presented to contradict it. This is undoubtedly
the clearest, most widely accepted shift in the big picture of the history of science since the 1990s.
If a new new big picture does exist, it has the invention or consolidation of ‘science’ around 1800 as
one of its most prominent features.
This has some significant implications for those working in applied fields of science studies. The
thoughts I offer here are tentative though, and exactly what impact this new knowledge might have
remains to be seen.
Most obviously, this review may prompt those involved in teaching or communicating about
science history to reconsider the way they approach that task. This is most relevant to science
teachers who are obliged to incorporate history of science elements into their curricula, and to the
senior science education managers who write those curricula. It will also impact on science
communicators, and perhaps even science policy-makers, who employ elements of science history
when they write or talk about science.
Of more widespread relevance, this body of literature challenges us to reconsider the ways we
define ‘science.’ It is clear from Cunningham and Williams’ work that using the word too loosely,
without specifying which particular body of knowledge we are referring to (from which time, place
and culture) is inaccurate and unhelpfully reinforces old big picture thinking. On the other hand,
restricting the word’s application solely to modern, Western science, as Cunningham and Williams
suggest, is not universally endorsed. Rochberg in particular raised pertinent objections to doing so,
because of the negative judgements that might be implied about a knowledge system if we refuse to
allow it to be labelled with the term. There seems to be no easy solution to this quandary. The best
compromise may be qualifying the term with situating adjectives such as ‘modern’ and ‘Western’
where possible. But for practitioners in fields like science communication or science education this
would quickly become untenable — it is not realistic to expect every news article or lesson about
science to carry such qualifications. Nonetheless this issue is worth bearing in mind, and being
continuously re-interrogated, because of its importance. This is particularly so when questions
about the nature, authority or legitimacy of particular knowledge systems, including modern,
Western science, are under discussion.
The new new big picture also, then, challenges us to reconsider how we think about the relationship
between modern, Western science and other forms of knowledge making. None of the scholars
reviewed here suggest that scientific ways of knowing are methodologically flawed and result in
factual inaccuracies, but the literature does strongly undermine any idea that science has a
monopoly on truth and understanding. The suggestion that modern, Western science succeeded as a
global knowledge movement because of historically situated social, cultural and political factors,
rather than inherent epistemological superiority, may be challenging for people working in
disciplines primarily devoted to promoting science. For example, science communicators, policymakers or educators whose job entails debating, regulating or teaching controversies that pit science
against other sources of knowledge, such as climate change, creationism, vaccination or HIV
denialism, may feel the scientific position is undermined by a more historicist view of science.
Certainly, public opinion about such issues is often swayed more by ethos-style rhetoric appealing
to the established reputation of science (or its alternatives) than by the details of logos-style
arguments, so historical work that appears to challenge the foundations of science’s established
reputation may change the rhetorical landscape in adversarial situations.
On a more positive note, a view of science as historically situated may enhance the quality of
dialogue between representatives of science and representatives of other knowledge systems. For
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example, conversations about natural resource management on indigenous lands between
indigenous traditional owners on the one hand, and Western-trained scientists on the other, may be
more productive if there is a shared understanding about the geo-temporal and cultural situatedness
of Western science. This would place Western science on a par with indigenous knowledge systems
the world over, which are generally understood to be geo-temporally and culturally situated. For
science communicators and science policy-makers involved in facilitating such discussions and
translating them into law, again this will change the rhetorical landscape. But such changes may
prove more empowering for all, and enable a more ‘honest broker’ approach to arriving at
decisions.
Finally, the work reviewed here also paints a picture that has science’s advocates playing a more
central role in science history than appeared to be the case in the old big picture. The late-eighteenth
and early-nineteenth century equivalents to today’s science communicators, policy lobbyists and
educators were surely those who first developed ‘the idea, or ideology, of “science” that has so
possessed modern culture.’ A new history of science, then, would likely also be a history of the
disciplines that have become applied fields of science studies. Historical work specifically
examining these intertwined histories could radically alter our ideas about what the history of
science looks like, away from the ‘struggling lone genius’ model of the old big picture. Perhaps
applied science studies workers’ ideas about the history of science will become less dependent on
that old big picture if we can see the antecedents of ourselves alongside the geniuses, actively
creating this thing called ‘science’ that is at the centre of our work.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Alex Cook, Blake Singley and two anonymous reviewers for helpful
comments on the manuscript.
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ONLINE RESOURCE FILE
This file provides additional bibliographic substantiation for some of the arguments made in the
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