The relationship between history of science and science

One of the first serious histories of science was written by Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) in 1600, called A defense of Tycho against Ursus, containing a history of world systems and cosmological models form the time of Pythagoras to Kepler's own time. He intended to use the historical record to help him understand what kinds of features make a theory powerful and fertile and to discredit the claims to originality by his astronomical contemporary, Ursus.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many scientists turned to the historical record to establish their own approaches. They wrote history as a way of testing, confirming, and ultimately legitimating their own scientific perspectives and as an answer to skepticism from their own professional colleagues concerning their value about what kinds of scientific theories were desirable.


So what could science learn from its past?
Narrative history tends to treat every episode, every part of the past, as unique rather than as a local instance of some larger pattern of behaviors.

One can also conceive of history of science as a collection of case studies, each or all designed to answer one or a set of general questions about how science works.


History may not only remind us of what we have, but may teach us how to improve and increase our store and afford us some indication of the most promising mode of directing our future efforts to add to its extent and completeness. (Whewell 1837)

Whig theory of history: If our intent is to use the historical record to draw morals about what makes for "good science", the historian ceases to be a disinterested observer of the past and becomes rather a partisan, and advocate for one vision of science over another.