Rational reconstruction and the internal/external history distinction: is the history of science to be written as the rational reconstruction of the internal logic of research programmes, against Kuhn's sociology-of-knowledge historicism?

Imre Lakatos, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The history of science is to be written as the rational reconstruction of the internal logic of competing research programmes — the appraisal in retrospect of which programmes were progressive, which were degenerating, what the protective-belt adjustments accomplished, what the positive heuristic was reaching toward.12 "External" factors — social context, biographical accident, sociological pressure — appear in footnotes when needed but do not bear the primary explanatory weight.

Against Kuhn's sociology-of-knowledge historicism: science is rational and its history can be rationally reconstructed even where the actual historical agents were sometimes irrational, even where social context shaped the institutional conditions of the work. The famous Kantian gloss the 1971 essay opens with — philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind — captures the methodological reciprocity that the rational-reconstruction project was built to enact.34

Sources

  1. It is the use of such a premise in explanatory schernas describing scientific change that I called 'rational reconstruction of the history of science '. There are different ' These assumptions will spell out that the ceteris paribw clause is satisfied.
    Philosophical Papers Vol I - The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, p. 199
  2. But the answer, if indeed it is possible to give one, will not affect the appraisal that we have attempted here. This is a good example of how internal (methodological) history can define what are the important external problems, and why it is therefore of primary importance! What I shall, however, try to argue is that (I) the first question can be fully answered without going into the second one and independently…
    Philosophical Papers Vol I - The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, p. 197
  3. I N T R O D U C T I O N 'Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind. Taking its cue from this paraphrase of Kant's famous dictum, this paper intends to explain how the historiography of science should learn from the philosophy of science and vice versa.
    Philosophical Papers Vol I - The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, pp. 109–110
  4. I mean that the better a methodology seems to capture the rationality of science, the greater its actual mystification of science.
    For and Against Method - LSE Lectures + Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence, pp. 16–17

Where the argument is made

  • "History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions" (1971, in Philosophical Papers Vol I)
  • the methodology and historiography sections of "Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes" (1970)
  • the historiographical case studies in Philosophical Papers Vol II — particularly the Bohr early quantum theory essay, the Michelson-Morley essay, the Copernican astronomy essay
  • the 1973 LSE lectures in For and Against Method on the history of science

How the argument was received

settled-as-articulated