Science, Technology & Society in Seventeenth Century England

"As you say, it’s a classic sociological work. What I like about it is that Merton looks at a relatively constrained case of a specific time period in a specific place. He’s trying to explain why we get this efflorescence of scientific activity in England in the middle decades of the 17th century. This is when the Royal Society was founded, and considerable progress was made towards establishing the foundations of early modern science. Merton offers us a middle-range theory, as he would call it. It’s not a grand theory, but he’s not giving up on offering a proper explanation for what’s going on. What’s particularly interesting is that he treats science itself as a kind of ‘black box’ and focuses on external factors and, crucially, values. He argues that Puritan values were important to setting up science and justifying scientific practice. That’s the key thing about this book. He understands that more generally, social values are crucial to the legitimation of science. That means it’s not just to do with the inherent internal logic of science as something that is somehow self-evidently true. That’s not how you make science successful—it’s something external to the sciences that leads us to value them, that makes scientific advance possible, and that makes science an important and central feature of society. Why this question is so vital to this very day is that science is undergoing challenges to its legitimacy. It’s simply not enough for a scientist to rehearse the chorus ‘well, we’re scientists and this is what the science tells us’; they have to understand the role played by values in giving legitimacy to what they’re doing. I should add that there’s a number of difficulties with Merton’s book around some of the specifics. He wanted to argue that it was a puritan ethos that was distinctive for the rise of modern science. I think there are difficulties with who gets to be identified as ‘puritan’ and so on, but the general approach is very fruitful. That’s a good question. I think it does generalise. Stephen Gaukroger is a historian and philosopher of science at the University of Sydney who is writing a long series of books on the emergence of the scientific culture in the West. What Gaukroger argues—rightly, in my view—is that part of the explanation for why we have science in the West is to do to with these issues of religious legitimation. The contrast cases are the boom-bust patterns where scientific activity gets started in China, medieval Arabic cultures, and ancient Greece, but does not consolidate into a central and ensuring part of the culture. So, the question is not just about the origins of science, but also about its consolidation. That then leads to the question of social legitimacy, which then takes us to the question of which cultural values underpin science. For me in the West, it is religious values that helped give science a boost and consolidate its position as a legitimate and important activity. That’s another reason I like this book—Merton put his finger on something that is more generalisable than the specific case he dealt with. It’s not a problem for Merton, but it is a problem for the more general story that I’ve just told. He would be completely unembarrassed by that because he was focussing on a very particular time and place. But moving from the specific case to the more general argument takes a lot of work. I don’t think you can say that it is just Protestantism alone that’s responsible for modern science. We have key Catholic thinkers like Galileo and Descartes (whose contributions are often underrated). “The question is not just about the origins of science, but also about its consolidation” But interestingly both Galileo and Descartes ran into difficulties with the Catholic Church. Things were more difficult for them. Protestantism in one sense was more open to new ideas than Catholicism and it was easier for Protestants to attack authorities like Aristotle than it was for Catholics. And that made a difference. We need to remember that the Reformation is a Catholic movement. It originates within Catholicism. And then Catholicism has its own Reformation, or as it’s sometimes called the ‘Counter-Reformation’. The other thing we need to understand is that the Protestant Reformation has unintended consequences that change the whole face of Europe. When we talk about the role of Protestantism and the rise of science, we’re not simply speaking about specific Protestant doctrines or practices. We’re talking about what happens to the West as a consequence of the Reformation. To return to the general question about Christianity and why the scientific revolution wasn’t earlier, then, the Protestant Reformation is part of that story. But there are other factors, in including material ones. Nothing much is happening after the fall of Rome until we get the rise of the universities in the 13th century. But this hiatus owes more to material factors than ideological ones. Then, when the universities do get up and running, the intellectual environment is dominated by Aristotelian natural philosophy. Here again, the Reformation plays some role, because it gives people the scope to reject that synthesis of Aristotle and Christian theology so powerfully articulated by thinkers like Thomas Aquinas. Protestant Reformers attacked Aristotle as a pagan influence on Christianity, which needed to be purged from the tradition. That then gave legitimacy to a rejection of Aristotelian natural philosophy, which made space for other ways of understanding the natural world, including the theories of the new sciences. It’s a good question. As an intellectual historian, I deal in the realm of ideas, but there are material practices that are really important, along with the development of specific technologies. The invention of the telescope is one good example. Without the telescope, would these things have happened? What about the printing press? We get networks of communication, we get new technologies, and we have the capacity to make new instruments, like the air pump that individuals like Robert Boyle put to good use. So, there’s a range of material factors that are really quite important. While these are not part of my purview, I’m quite happy to acknowledge them as key."