Study About The Issue Of "Internal History And External History" Of Science

One of the basic problems in the historiography of science involves internal history and external history, what's more, this problem is an important part of the historiography of science. At the beginning of the history of science, internal history took the leading role, and then external history. Today, most scholars in the field of history of science insist combining internal history with external history in condition that internal history takes the leading role.Every scientific ideology intrinsically establishes a certain ideology of history of science and historiography method. Scholars who hold different scientific ideologies insist different historiography methods. As a result, the issue about internalhistory-externalhistory has close relationship with philosophy of science, which reflects the connection between the philosophy of science and the history of science on another side. Scholars take their insights inside their understanding of "science". This situation in the last analysis results from the different understanding about "science". Affected by postmodernism, the definition of humanities such as philosophy, art, economics even natural sciences has changed greatly. "Big science" conception developed, people's comprehension to "science" becomes different from the one previous accordingly. An inevitable question is that in this situation how to write a history of science and whether the previous methods of historiography are useful still.This thesis will examine the issue about internal history and external history, analyze the resource, evolution and basis and argue the insufficiency of this issue. Then propose some new comprehension to "science", and bring up the theory centre of this thesis, that is, "what is science" and "what should a history of science contain". This thesis is not aimed at answer these questions, instead, analyze the problem of the issue about internal history and external history through them. According this thesis, the root of differentiation between internal history and external history is the traditional scientific ideology. If this scientific ideology were critiqued strongly, would the differentiation between internal history and external history still be reasonable? This thesis will combine some scholars' fourth understanding of the issue about internal history and external history, that is, eliminating the differentiation between internal history and external history, discover its rationality and the heckle and challenges it faced. At last, the goal of this thesis is to bring up some new thought about historiography, and try to probe a new historiography method, which transcends the differentiation between internal history and external history so as to develop some comprehensive history of science.The value of this thesis lies in review one old issue, that is, the issue about internal history and external history. And the aim is to attract the relative scholars' attention, apart from rich and develop the contents of historiography of science as well as point some new directions for the historiography of science. In this thesis' writing, I will take illustrations to discuss, and use comparative analysis as my method.