Scientists’ Imagined Pasts and Historians’ Appreciation of Scientific Thought

Abstract

Historians should heed Adrian Wilson’s call for deeper study of the “imagined pasts” of science, but they should avoid thinking of those pasts as corrupted versions of professional history. The past (and future) that historians of science have often imagined for themselves casts them in a heroic role within the history of science, destined to diagnose and dispel flaws in scientists’ broadly accepted ideas about the nature of their enterprise. Abiding by this narrative with respect to scientists’ imagined pasts would lead historians to presume that flaws in scientists’ historical understanding are reflections of flaws in scientists’ thinking more generally. Simon Schaffer’s work on the evolution and “end” of natural philosophy is exemplary of the historiographical rewards to be expected from careful research into the totality of scientific figures’ understanding of their own work.