The sociology and philosophy of science, as
well as the entire field of science studies,
have in the 20th century been occupied with
the question of large-scale patterns and trends
in the development of science, and asking
questions about how science "works" both in
a philosophical and practical sense.
== Science as a social enterprise ==
Science as a social enterprise has been developing
exponentially for the past few centuries.
In antiquity, the few people who were able
to engage in natural inquiry were either wealthy
themselves, had rich benefactors, or had the
support of a religious community.
Today, scientific research has tremendous
government support and also ongoing support
from the private sector.
Available methods of communication have improved
tremendously over time.
Instead of waiting months or years for a hand-copied
letter to arrive, today scientific communication
can be practically instantaneous.
Earlier, most natural philosophers worked
in relative isolation, due to the difficulty
and slowness of communication.
Still, there was a considerable amount of
cross-fertilization between distant groups
and individuals.
Nowadays, almost all modern scientists participate
in a scientific community, hypothetically
global in nature (though often based around
a relatively few nations and institutions
of stature), but also strongly segregated
into different fields of study.
The scientific community is important because
it represents a source of established knowledge
which, if used properly, ought to be more
reliable than personally acquired knowledge
of any given individual.
The community also provides a feedback mechanism,
often in the form of practices such as peer
review and reproducibility.
Most items of scientific content (experimental
results, theoretical proposals, or literature
reviews) are reported in scientific journals
and are hypothetically subjected to peer scrutiny,
though a number of scholarly critics from
both inside and outside the scientific community
have, in recent decades, began to question
the effect of commercial and government investment
in science on the peer review and publishing
process, as well as the internal disciplinary
limitations to the scientific publication
process.
A major development of the Scientific Revolution
was the foundation of scientific societies:
Academia Secretorum Naturae (Accademia dei
Segreti, the Academy of the Mysteries of Nature)
can be considered the first scientific community;
founded in Naples 1560 by Giambattista della
Porta.
The Academy had an exclusive membership rule:
discovery of a new law of nature was a prerequisite
for admission.
It was soon shut down by Pope Paul V for alleged
sorcery.
The Academia Secretorum Naturae was replaced
by the Accademia dei Lincei, which was founded
in Rome in 1603.
The Lincei included Galileo as a member, but
failed upon his condemnation in 1633.
The Accademia del Cimento, Florence 1657,
lasted 10 years.
The Royal Society of London, 1660 to the present
day, brought together a diverse collection
of scientists to discuss theories, conduct
experiments, and review each other's work.
The Académie des Sciences was created as
an institution of the government of France
1666, meeting in the King's library.
The Akademie der Wissenschaften began in Berlin
1700.
Early scientific societies provided valuable
functions, including a community open to and
interested in empirical inquiry, and also
more familiar with and more educated about
the subject.
In 1758, with the aid of his pupils, Lagrange
established a society, which was subsequently
incorporated as the Turin Academy.
Much of what is considered the modern institution
of science was formed during its professionalization
in the 19th century.
During this time the location of scientific
research shifted primarily to universities,
though to some extent it also became a standard
component of industry as well.
In the early years of the 20th century, especially
after the role of science in the first World
War, governments of major industrial nations
began to invest heavily in scientific research.
This effort was dwarfed by the funding of
scientific research undertaken by all sides
in World War II, which produced such "wonder
weapons" as radar, rocketry, and the atomic
bomb.
During the Cold War, a large amount of government
resources were poured into science by the
United States, USSR, and many European powers.
It was during this time that DARPA funded
nationwide computer networks, one of them
eventually under the internet protocol.
In the post-Cold War era, a decline in government
funding from many countries has been met with
an increase of industrial and private investment.
The funding of science is a major factor in
its historical and global development.
So although science is hypothetically international
in scope, in a practical sense it has usually
centered around wherever it could find the
most funding.
During the Scientific Revolution, early scientists
communicated in Latin, which had been the
language of academia during the Middle Ages,
and which was read and written by scholars
from many countries.
In the mid-1600s, publications started to
appear in local languages.
By 1900, German, French and English were dominant.
Anti-German sentiment caused by World War
I and World War II and boycotts of German
scientists resulted in the loss of German
as a scientific language.
In later decades of the 20th century, the
economic dominance and scientific productivity
of the United States led to the rise of English,
which after the end of the Cold War has become
the dominant language of scientific communication.
== Political support ==
One of the basic requirements for a scientific
community is the existence and approval of
a political sponsor; in England, the Royal
Society operates under the aegis of the monarchy;
in the US, the National Academy of Sciences
was founded by Act of the United States Congress;
etc.
Otherwise, when the basic elements of knowledge
were being formulated, the political rulers
of the respective communities could choose
to arbitrarily either support or disallow
the nascent scientific communities.
For example, Alhazen had to feign madness
to avoid execution.
The polymath Shen Kuo lost political support,
and could not continue his studies until he
came up with discoveries that showed his worth
to the political rulers.
The admiral Zheng He could not continue his
voyages of exploration after the emperors
withdrew their support.
Another famous example was the suppression
of the work of Galileo, by the twentieth century,
Galileo would be pardoned.
== Patterns in the history of science ==
One of the major occupations with those interested
in the history of science is whether or not
it displays certain patterns or trends, usually
along the question of change between one or
more scientific theories.
Generally speaking, there have historically
been three major models adopted in various
forms within the philosophy of science.
The first major model, implicit in most early
histories of science and generally a model
put forward by practicing scientists themselves
in their textbook literature, is associated
with the criticisms of logical positivism
by Karl Popper (1902–1994) from the 1930s.
Popper's model of science is one in which
scientific progress is achieved through a
falsification of incorrect theories and the
adoption instead of theories which are progressively
closer to truth.
In this model, scientific progress is a linear
accumulation of facts, each one adding to
the last.
In this model, the physics of Aristotle (384
BC – 322 BC) was simply subsumed by the
work of Isaac Newton (1642–1727) (classical
mechanics), which itself was eclipsed by the
work of Albert Einstein (1879–1955) (Relativity),
and later the theory of quantum mechanics
(established in 1925), each one more accurate
than the last.
A major challenge to this model came from
the work of the historian and philosopher
Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) in his work The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions published
in 1962.
Kuhn, a former physicist, argued against the
view that scientific progress was linear,
and that modern scientific theories were necessarily
just more accurate versions of theories of
the past.
Rather, Kuhn's version of scientific development
consisted of dominant structures of thought
and practices, which he called "paradigms",
in which research went through phases of "normal"
science ("puzzle solving") and "revolutionary"
science (testing out new theories based on
new assumptions, brought on by uncertainty
and crisis in existing theories).
In Kuhn's model, different paradigms represented
entirely different and incommensurate assumptions
about the universe.
The mode was thus uncertain about whether
paradigms shifted in a way which necessarily
relied upon greater attainment of truth.
In Kuhn's view, Aristotle's physics, Newton's
classical mechanics, and Einstein's Relativity
were entirely different ways to think about
the world; each successive paradigm defined
what questions could be asked about the world
and (perhaps arbitrarily) discarded aspects
of the previous paradigm which no longer seemed
applicable or important.
Kuhn claimed that far from merely building
on the previous theory's accomplishments,
each new paradigm essentially throws out the
old way of looking at the universe, and comes
up with its own vocabulary to describe it
and its own guidelines for expanding knowledge
within the new paradigm.
Kuhn's model met with much suspicion from
scientists, historians, and philosophers.
Some scientists felt that Kuhn went too far
in divorcing scientific progress from truth;
many historians felt that his argument was
too codified for something as polyvariant
and historically contingent as scientific
change; and many philosophers felt that the
argument did not go far enough.
The furthest extreme of such reasoning was
put forth by the philosopher Paul Feyerabend
(1924–1994), who argued that there were
no consistent methodologies used by all scientists
at all times which allowed certain forms of
inquiry to be labeled "scientific" in a way
which made them different from any other form
of inquiry, such as witchcraft.
Feyerabend argued harshly against the notion
that falsification was ever truly followed
in the history of science, and noted that
scientists had long undertaken practices to
arbitrarily consider theories to be accurate
even if they failed many sets of tests.
Feyerabend argued that a pluralistic methodology
should be undertaken for the investigation
of knowledge, and noted that many forms of
knowledge which were previously thought to
be "non-scientific" were later accepted as
a valid part of the scientific canon.
Many other theories of scientific change have
been proposed over the years with various
changes of emphasis and implications.
In general, though, most float somewhere between
these three models for change in scientific
theory, the connection between theory and
truth, and the nature of scientific progress.
== The nature of scientific discovery ==
Individual ideas and accomplishments are among
the most famous aspects of science, both internally
and in larger society.
Breakthrough figures like Sir Isaac Newton
or Albert Einstein are often celebrated as
geniuses and heroes of science.
Popularizers of science, including the news
media and scientific biographers, contribute
to this phenomenon.
But many scientific historians emphasize the
collective aspects of scientific discovery,
and de-emphasize the importance of the "Eureka!"
moment.
A detailed look at the history of science
often reveals that the minds of great thinkers
were primed with the results of previous efforts,
and often arrive on the scene to find a crisis
of one kind or another.
For example, Einstein did not consider the
physics of motion and gravitation in isolation.
His major accomplishments solved a problem
which had come to a head in the field only
in recent years — empirical data showing
that the speed of light was inexplicably constant,
no matter the apparent speed of the observer.
(See Michelson-Morley experiment.)
Without this information, it is very unlikely
that Einstein would have conceived of anything
like relativity.
The question of who should get credit for
any given discovery is often a source of some
controversy.
There are many priority disputes, in which
multiple individuals or teams have competing
claims over who discovered something first.
Multiple simultaneous discovery is actually
a surprisingly common phenomenon, perhaps
largely explained by the idea that previous
contributions (including the emergence of
contradictions between existing theories,
or unexpected empirical results) make a certain
concept ready for discovery.
Simple priority disputes are often a matter
of documenting when certain experiments were
performed, or when certain ideas were first
articulated to colleagues or recorded in a
fixed medium.
Many times the question of exactly which event
should qualify as the moment of discovery
is difficult to answer.
One of the most famous examples of this is
the question of the discovery of oxygen.
While Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley
were able to concentrate oxygen in the laboratory
and characterize its properties, they did
not recognize it as a component of air.
Priestly actually thought it was missing a
hypothetical component of air, known as phlogiston,
which air was supposed to absorb from materials
that are being burned.
It was only several years later that Antoine
Lavoisier first conceived of the modern notion
of oxygen — as a substance that is consumed
from the air in the processes of burning and
respiration.
By the late 20th Century, scientific research
has become a large-scale effort, largely accomplished
in institutional teams.
The amount and frequency of inter-team collaboration
has continued to increase, especially after
the rise of the Internet, which is a central
tool for the modern scientific community.
This further complicates the notion of individual
accomplishment in science.
== See also ==
Historiography of science
Inquiry
Scientific method
