Doing the History of Science and the Suspension of Belief

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1817) described the suspension of disbelief as a sort of bargain between the author and the audience necessary to creative literature. Conversely, one might describe the suspension of belief as a necessary element of doing the history of science. In modern civilization, science counts as the social institution which delineates the boundaries of knowledge per se, as opposed to belief, opinion, etc. We might describe this as the cultural myth of science--not in the sense of judging its truth or falsehood, but rather in the sense of its being foundational and largely unquestioned in modern society. Yet a historical account of how science developed requires that we suspend our current state of knowledge as a relevant factor, unless we are prepared to claim, teleologically, that this current state of knowledge played a causative role in past developments. Two aspects of the cultural myth of science have seemed to me particularly persistent and needing of suspension in order to create a cogent historical account: 1) an almost overwhelming tendency to interpret historical significance (exclusively) from the perspective of the known winners ; 2) Uncritical belief in pure science or knowledge for its own sake which casts any kind of economic, political, or other external involvement as necessarily deterimental to the scientific enterprise.https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/systems_science_seminar_series/1041/thumbnail.jp