Historiography of Science and the Relationship Between History and the History of Science

Abstract

This chapter establishes a theoretical reflection on the scientific field of the historiography of science as a fundamental element for a critical understanding of the development and dynamics of science and its history. To reflect theoretically on the historiography of science means to think beyond the specific historiographical currents of science, involving aspects of research and debates in the history of science that have developed over more than a century. We propose a reflection based on the use of historiographical tools that enables us to think about the “writing of history” of science, problematized by the complexity of historical (or scientific-historical) sources. Thus, the focus is on the past and the possible fissures provoked by recent questions and discontents to write, rewrite, deconstruct, or re-signify this past. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, as a concept of history, historiography does not conceive “writing” as a simple historiographical report of the historical “fact,” which the historiography of science does not do in practical terms. However, it still seems to lack theoretical reflections on how (not on what) the history of science is written. The double assignment of the historiography of science, on the one hand, enables the analysis of the different ways of writing the history of science (and of the authors themselves) and, on the other, questions the theoretical and methodological scope of the different models created from the narratives of the history of science. However, more than that, without losing sight of history and its historiographical perspective, this theoretical reflection can unfold in a third assignment in which the theoretical analytics of the historiography of science would work as locus, space of tension, and propitious convergence that, through the “historiographical operation of science,” could propose, from interrelations and intercrosses, the interdisciplinary and complex critical analysis involving the history of science field.