The externalists emphasised the importance of social and economic forces and downplayed any ´internal´ factors in the development and advancement of science.
According to Schuster,
Externalists, especially of the Marxist school, held that content as well as the direction of scientific knowledge was shaped by technological pulls that ultimately depended upon economic and social forces and structures.341
The reason for this emphasis is that, in the Marxist view, the methods and means of production are the fundamental factors underlying the structure of a society. Hessen states thus,
The method of production of material existence conditions the social, political and intellectual process of the life of society.342
For the extreme externalist position, the ideas and directions of science are completely shaped by social forces. It implies that the ´inside´ of the scientific field is, using John Locke´s aphorism, a tabula rasa to be imprinted on by society at large. The origin of the externalist interpretation of the Scientific Revolution is traced to Boris Hessen´s "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia¨(1931). Recent studies have shown that Hessen motives for an externalist account of the Scientific Revolution were not completely academic.343 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¨344, and should henceforth be banned. As a result of this, Hessen was more concerned with the connections between Newton´s Principia and the simultaneous development of the bourgeoisie and capital, and the
341John Schuster, ¨Internalist and Externalist Historiographies of the Scientific Revolution¨, p. 334 342B. Hessen, The Social and Economic Roots of Newton´s ´Principia´.(Sydney: Current Book, 1946) p.9 343H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry p. 331
344 Loren R Graham, "The socio-political Roots of Boris Hessen: Soviet Marxism and the History of Science", Social Studies of Science (London: SAGE, 1985) p. 711
creation of technical problems that were then solved by the application of Newton´s work. From this he draws the conclusion that the bourgeoisie were largely responsible for the creation of Newton´s work, and the Newtonian achievement should be seen from the perspective of a man being in the right place at the right time.
Hessen´s paper at the Second International Congress of the History of Science, convened in London in 1931, was a lobbying tactic. The Communist Party philosophers had no doubt about the accuracy of Newton´s theories, but Hessen thought that to demonstrate those theories as being motivated by bourgeois interest would justify the fact that scientific validity could exist whatever the motivations were for undertaking it.
Nevertheless, there has been no study that gives evidence that Hessen paper succeeded in creating such effect in the internal Soviet philosophical battles over Einstein´s work.
Even, Hessen´s paper was not able to achieve desired effect in his home country, although its wide effect in Western history of science is well noted.
Notwithstanding that his work has been severally tagged as ¨Vulgar Marxism¨345, its insights 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 which had been the dominant view at least since William Whewell´s History of the Inductive Sciences in 1837. Most interestingly, the idea from Hessen´s thesis struck profound chords in the minds of a number of somewhat vaguely leftist scientists and sociologists among whose works include Robert Merton´s Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century Englang (1938), Edgar Zilsel´s Sociological Roots of Science (1942), Joseph Needham´s Science and Civilisation in China (1954), and J. D. Bernal´s The Social function of Science (1939) and Science in History (1954).
The emergence of a new wave of externalist studies has been related to the more general impact of postmodernism over the social sciences. Even if ‘nothing about this term is unproblematic´346, postmodernism is generally employed to define a cluster of thinkers who, during the 1970s and the 1980s, shared a sceptical position about the major foundations of Western thought and about the attainment of scientific truths. The
345Simon Schaffer, "Newton at the crossroads", Radical Philosophy, 1984, 37, p. 26
346 B. McHale, Postmodernist Fictions (London: Routledge. 1987) p. 3
externalist approach at its extreme suggests that the scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were vividly inspired and interested by problems which were suggested by socio-economic factors. This type of materialist historiography was widely seen as an aggressive attempt to devalue science by displaying its ´banausic´ (utilitarian) and practical origins. It was understood that to depict scientists as motivated by mundane and material concerns, to see the genesis of science more in craftwork than in philosophy, and to show that scientific concerns were animated more by the search for solutions to technological problems than by the disinterested quest for truth which simply was denigration.347
Perhaps a less polemic example of externalism is Bernal´s Science in History (1954) Bernal looks at art, medicine, government, trade, capital, engineering, and many other factors to demonstrate the principal motivators of scientific advancement. Unlike Hessen, he did not attempt to reduce the achievements of the great scientists to any forces or modes of production. For him, the drive that gave the scientific revolution its particular novelty was the dissolution of feudalism and the birth of merchant capitalism.
This driving factors were not only visible in the scientific revolution there were present in the science of previous ages. According to Bernal,
The ¨flourishing periods [of science] are found to coincide with economic activity and technical advance. The track science has followed—from Egypt to … England of the Industrial Revolution—is the same as that of commerce and industrial.348
The transformation of science in any period in history coincides with its peculiar flourishing economic activity. Could this then signify that that any age without successful economic activity cannot witness tangible transformation of its science?
In a very practical sense, it is difficult to draw definitive line between the scope of the internalist and externalist approach since none of the historians of the respective approaches could insist that any of them either paints a wholly complete picture of the
347Steven Shapin, ¨Discipline and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science as Seen Through the Externalism-Internalism Debate¨, History of Science, 1992, 30, p. 339
348John D. Bernal. Science in History. p.47
scientific revolution or could be adopted exclusively. It can be seen that both internalist and externalist positions agree on two main points: Science has an ´inside´ and an
´outside´, and these two areas have minimal effect on each other. The ´inside´ of science consists of all of the ideas, theories and method, while the ´outside´ of science consists of the larger society.
Both approaches debate on which area determine the course of science. The primary factor affecting who became proponents of one side or another in the argument was the relative desirability of incorporating Marxist thinking into the process of scientific development. In other words, for scientists in the West, during the Cold War, anything that smacked of Marxism or Communism was to be avoided, while for scientists behind the Iron Curtain, the converse was the case. Steven Shapin suggested that neither of the approaches seems to have been properly established as valid or viable and it wasn’t long before a professed eclectic approach became all the rage.349
Resuming the implication of the internalist and externalist debate
As various illustrations from the internalist-externalist debate has shown, internal historians of science do not deny the obvious truth that an activity carried on by a scientist living in a society has a valid social history. Likewise, external historians of science do not deny that the content of science is an essential part of the story. The internalist and externalist debate created a richer contextualization of scientific knowledge. Its result is a sub-discipline of history which is flourishing in its own terms, and which more generally is making a major contribution to our understanding of how and why science has become such an overwhelming feature of the Western culture.
However, at heart of that debate is contained 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 way, inform the method by which the history of science and technology is conducted. The question itself contains an entire host of philosophical questions: what is the nature of scientific truth? What
349Steven Shapin, ¨Discipline and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science as Seen Through the Externalism- Internalism Debate¨, pp. 345-51
does objectivity mean in a scientific context? How does change in scientific theories occur? Shapin wrote that
Treating externalism and internalism as theories of scientific change is the most coherent way to formulate them: scientific change proceeds (wholly/ mainly/partly, in response to intrinsic/extrinsic factors.350
This formulation could serve to bring a lasting resolution to the complex historiographical issues in the ´Scientific Revolution´. One of the major impacts the internalist-externalist debate has brought to the historiography of science is that it has demonstrated that science does not have any ´immanent logic or rationality´, with a dynamic force, that guarantees scientific change. Some historically oriented philosophers like Lakatos, Laudan, McMullin, Shapere, and Toulmin had in their account of the scientific change demonstrated the role external-social and internal-cognitive factors play in science, but were more inclined to appealing to a historical notion of rational progress.
What differentiates the notion of rationality of the aforementioned philosophers with that of the historicist accounts of the scientific revolution is that they regard science as being globally rational. Their attempt is inversely contrary to the notion of the scientific rationality that the historicists’ historiography would accept. Nevertheless, the arguments most of the theses of scientific revolution, treated in chapter two, highlighted in the internalist-externalist debate helps us to see their enthusiasm and interest in showing how science is historically or locally rational. This type of rationality is quite different from the historical notion of rational progress the aforementioned philosophers adopted. Likewise, it is quite distanced from the logical notion of rational inferential argued by the traditionalist accounts of scientific change. They, therefore, insist that if we must talk about rationality of the Scientific Revolution that rationality should be historical or contextual—situated in a particular time. Scientific knowledge does not have global rationality. The only way we can understand adequately scientific
350 Ibid., p. 346
rationality is by employing the method of hermeneutic contextualism in discussing the science of any particular period and location