Sociology and Science.
There never was a credible sociological history of science and this is its story. A long time ago a group of sociologists were employed in a cold northern city to do some journeyman work tidying up around a team of unruly scientists. They tired of their labour and took to some intellectual gardening, digging up facts and planting some ideas. They soon tired of that and badged themselves as historians. The rest is history. They are still at it, peddling their weary notions as history and continuing to disdain the scientists they were originally employed to assist.
What went wrong? In their innocence they that thought history should be a record of "what happened". When they observed that the scientists were less than concerned with such detail they had found their true metier. They would correct the scientists' perceptions, set the record right and save us all from error. Wrong! They failed utterly to note that which is the essence of science and which the scientists knew full well. The central issue of history is not "what happened" but "what was happening". There are at least three reasons for this. Discovering "what happened" is all but impossible, it is but a single and thus unrepresentative sample of what "might have happened" and it consequently lacks predictive power. The scientists correctly identified "what was happening" and separated the signal from the noise. The sociologists failed to notice the important difference in approach and thus all these years later they are still repeating their dreary notions and disdaining the scientists at any given opportunity. What became of the scientists? They changed the world and they gave the sociologist (and the rest of us) most of what they hold dear. But no gratitude in evidence!
