Although the internal versus external factors debate is no longer at the centre of discussions about the development and progress of science, it does outline major features which contribute to the social construction of science. The internal positivist account of science seems hard to maintain in the reality of scientific work; the
external debate answers many problems arising from the positivist ideas of science being ‘truth’, a ‘rational’ exercise, or a form of ‘progress’.
An early essay on the socio-economic roots of the scientific revolution in Newton’s physics by Hessen (1931) argued that Newton’s work was determined by the social and economic environment in which it was carried out. The early stages of capitalism needed, and therefore encouraged, science as a certain and dependable form of
knowledge. Although criticised as a crude interpretation (Barnes 1974), Hessen’s account has been influential. Merton’s work, influenced by Hessen (Aronowitz 1988) appreciates the social context of science insofar as the selection of scientific problems is influenced by social context, and the influence of social context on the forms of knowledge, but without endorsing the linkages between scientific knowledge and socio-economic structures. A major criticism of Merton’s approach centres on this view that the external account is unimportant (Mulkay 1979). Barnes (1974) argues that the promotion of the internal factors approach to the development of science has more to do with professional demarcation by the scientific community than the origins of scientific thinking.
Merton (1970) and Kuhn (1970) both focus on an internalist account of the
development and progress of science. Kuhn’s work, deriving from Koyre (1957), can be seen as internalist in its original intention (Restivo 1995:100). Kuhn (1970) is not
potential influence of social and cultural factors on paradigm shifts. Kuhn (1970) sees the need for more than an internalist account in his study of the Copemican
revolution, in terms of seeing science “within the larger intellectual milieu” (Kuhn 1970:132).
The examination of the external influences on science is the analysis of “the reciprocal relations between science and other social institutions” (Richards
1983:102), a view that is closely associated with the work of Marx and Weber. In the Marxist view science, although characterised as absolute knowledge, is part of the labour process, and as such is powerfully influenced by the prevailing economic conditions. Not conceived originally as an external account, the emergence of scientific concepts are traced in the “historical forms of their practice” (Aronowitz 1988:40). It is Marx’s (1975) formulation of the social source of ideas that has major repercussions for the way science is seen to progress within the later accounts of the sociology of science and scientific knowledge “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Marx 1975:425). As an alternative to the Kuhnian/ Mertonian paradigm the Marxist paradigm has been restricted in science studies. This restriction is in some views due to the “hegemonic ideology of modem science” (Restivo
1995:1(X)), or, alternatively to regarding Marx as “primarily an historian, ...[concerned with] discussing metaphysics, economics and politics than attending to physical science” (Hesse 1980:142).
Weber (1976), while not wholly discounting Marx’s idea, argued that ideas themselves have a role in society. Weber’s work on the Protestant ideology and the significance of mathematical empiricism (Weber 1976) greatly influenced Merton, the ‘Puritan thesis’ informing his work — ‘Science Technology and Society in
Seventeenth Century England’ (1970). Although Merton did not explicitly identify the causal factors in the rise of modem science, he implied that the dominant set of
prevailing values, especially those that encouraged experimentation as opposed to the influence of economic conditions, were chiefly responsible for the progress of
science. Merton (1984 :1096) returns to this idea stating that the Protestant ethic helped to “motivate and canalize the activities of men in the direction of experimental science”, and that the development of science was supported by group values.
At the most general level, group values evident in one institutional area, for example, economy or religion, are interdependent with group values in other institutional areas such as science, institutional spheres being connected by
individuals’ roles and multiple status (Restivo 1995). The externalist argument was carried through by Graham (1985) although this account focuses on the external influences on the growth of science to the exclusion of internal factors (Yearley
1988), whereas Newton -Smith (1981:266) çontends that it is only when anomalies appear in the internal factors that external factors are brought into play.
Attempts have been made to define the external factors of science (Lakatos 1981). Lakatos equates the use of sociological explanation with external factors “But rational reconstruction or internal history is primary, external history only secondary, since the most important problems of external history are defined by internal history” (Lakatos
1981:124). This conception is informed by the trichotomy propounded by Popper (1972), the first world is that of matter, the second of feelings, belief and
consciousness, and the third of objective knowledge (Hacking 1981), which is refined firom the Galilean concept of primary causes and secondary meaning. Lakatos’
(1981) account of the primacy of the internal construction of science becomes confused in the case of science drawing on other sciences for its development and whether this should be deemed an internal or external factor, and, if internal, then the growth of scientific knowledge would entail the growth of the internal influences. The internalist account presents no argument against an externalist view, rather it sees
itself as evidence of the correctness of the internalist view, and science not as a practice that reveals certain facts due to external stimuli, but as an intellectual pursuit.
The internalist account sees social, economic and political factors as having no relevance to the intellectual history of science which itself activates cultural change. This position is difficult to justify, not only in terms of the definitions involved, but also in terms of the concept of rationality being culturally derived, and in science being a creative process. Internal scientific assessments are therefore inseparable from social evaluations “Thus, in practice, there are no purely internal factors... scientists attend to matters internal to their laboratory life, but those matters are a fusion of social, personal and technical considerations” (Yearley 1988:38). Yearley (1995) presents two interpretations of the nature of scientific knowledge, the political economy view, which is outlined but not fully analysed, and the social constructionist view. But it is debatable whether these two interpretations represent distinct lines of enquiry.
Barnes (1974) argues that the internalist and external accounts of science have not been combined in an effective way, if at all. Gieryn (1995) sees this as part of the essence of boundary studies. The external versus internal factors debate as an either /or situation is no longer appropriate (Knorr-Cetina et al 1980, Cozzens and Gieryn
1990), it is the inter-relationship between internal and external factors that is
important. In historical terms the influence and symbiosis of internal/external factors are considered a valid subject of enquiry, yet in more recent studies a differentiation has arisen. The funding and obvious political connectivity of science to government and power has somehow detracted from a political approach to science. As scientific work is increasingly applied and utilitarian, and with the development of numerous satellite sciences for industrial application, the prevailing cultural political climate exercises control over the range of research.
Bames (1974) argues against the case for external factors in the case of the Copemican revolution and in Newton’s Principia, pointing out that these were changes against the prevailing cultural climate. Possibly a more accurate assessment would be that they were changes against the prevailing political climate, but in keeping with the prevalent cultural climate. This argument implies that science develops as a cultural artefact, and changes in terms of a cultural shift (Koyre 1957), and that the external influences of scientific change are not necessarily the same over time, nor would t h ^ be relevant at different times. But routine change, or change within a paradigm, does not account for the overall changes in Kuhn’s (1970) concept of revolutionary change.
Cultural change, involving the way in which patterns of culture may be combined and reordered by social processes, transferral of culture, and aggregation and
disaggregation from one subculture to another, and innovation can begin to account for revolutionary change, but in terms of external influence. There is, at certain times, an atmosphere of discovery, pushing the frontiers of knowledge, but the role of external/internal factors in the scientific revolution remains unclear. A direct analogy with modem science is inappropriate, because of the specialisations of the different branches of science, and the institutional nature of science, as well as other factors that are party to the constmction of science, such as the influence of funding and the political support that it depends upon (Ezrahi 1971), and influences that might be seen to be intemal to a scientific community but might be viewed as extemal by the