The externalist viewpoint holds that the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cannot be adequately explained by tracing the internal logic of scientific ideas alone. Externalists argue that the social, economic, religious, institutional, and political conditions of early modern Europe were not merely backdrop to scientific change - they were constitutive causes of it. This viewpoint is held by historians of science, sociologists of knowledge, and scholars in science and technology studies (STS) who reject what they see as an idealist or “internalist” narrative in which ideas beget ideas in a vacuum.

Social and Economic Conditions Shape Scientific Priorities

Externalists contend that the questions scientists asked, the instruments they built, and the problems they chose to solve were shaped by material interests. The rise of early modern commerce and navigation created practical demand for improvements in astronomy, cartography, and mechanics. Boris Hessen's 1931 essay “The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton's Principia” argued that Newton's mechanics addressed problems - ballistics, hydraulics, mining, navigation - that were central to the emerging capitalist economy of England. Externalists need not accept Hessen's Marxist framing wholesale to take seriously his core point: that the agenda of natural philosophy tracked the material concerns of early modern society.

Institutions and Patronage Determine What Gets Produced

Externalists emphasize that science does not happen in minds alone but in courts, universities, instrument shops, and learned societies. Patronage structures shaped what natural philosophers investigated and how they presented their findings. Mario Biagioli's work on Galileo, for instance, argues that Galileo's rhetorical choices, his telescopic discoveries, and even his willingness to pick fights were shaped by the dynamics of Medici court culture. Scientific knowledge, on this view, is not simply discovered but performed, negotiated, and credentialed within social institutions.

Religion as External Cause

Several externalist arguments focus on religion - not as an obstacle to science, as the older “conflict thesis” would have it, but as a positive social force shaping scientific development. Robert K. Merton's influential 1938 thesis argued that English Puritanism, with its emphasis on the practical utility of knowledge, the glory of God through studying His creation, and the dignity of manual work, produced a cultural climate unusually hospitable to experimental natural philosophy. Merton documented a statistical overrepresentation of Puritans and nonconformists among early Fellows of the Royal Society. The Merton thesis has been debated and qualified extensively, but it remains a foundational externalist argument.

The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

More radical externalists, associated with the Edinburgh School's “Strong Programme” in the sociology of scientific knowledge, argue that the content of scientific beliefs - not merely their timing or institutional form - is explicable by social causes. David Bloor and Barry Barnes contend that the same type of sociological explanation should be applied symmetrically to true and false beliefs alike; social interests and group dynamics help explain why particular theories win acceptance, not just which scientists got funded. This moves externalism from a claim about context into a claim about the very constitution of scientific knowledge.

Externalist historiography took shape as a self-conscious program in the early twentieth century, partly in reaction to internalist histories that traced a linear progression of genius from Copernicus to Newton. Hessen's 1931 paper, delivered at the International Congress of the History of Science in London, introduced a Marxist externalism that was controversial but widely read. Edgar Zilsel in the 1940s argued that the experimental method arose from the convergence of university-trained scholars with the practical knowledge of superior craftsmen - a social thesis about the origins of scientific method itself.

Robert Merton's Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England (1938) established externalism as a mainstream sociological research program and introduced the language of “norms” and “ethos” that would define the sociology of science for a generation. The later emergence of STS as a field - marked by work from Thomas Kuhn (whose Structure of Scientific Revolutions emphasized the role of scientific communities and paradigm consensus over purely logical factors, and whose work is variously claimed by externalist and internalist traditions), Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, and the Edinburgh School - deepened and diversified externalist approaches. By the late twentieth century, laboratory studies by Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, and others extended externalism into fine-grained ethnographic analysis of scientific practice.

Boris Hessen (1893-1936) - Soviet physicist and historian whose 1931 essay on Newton's Principia launched the modern externalist debate by connecting Newton's mechanics to early capitalist economic problems. Executed during Stalin's purges.

Robert K. Merton (1910-2003) - American sociologist who argued in his 1938 dissertation that Puritan values in seventeenth-century England provided a cultural stimulus to the growth of experimental science. His “Merton thesis” remains a touchstone of externalist argument.

Edgar Zilsel (1891-1944) - Viennese philosopher and historian who argued that modern experimental science emerged from the social convergence of humanist scholars, scholastic philosophers, and skilled craftsmen in the sixteenth century.

Frances Yates (1899-1981) - British historian whose work on Hermeticism and Renaissance magic argued that occult traditions, particularly Neoplatonism and the Hermetic corpus, were preconditions for the active, manipulative attitude toward nature that characterized early modern science. Her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) is a landmark externalist text.

Mario Biagioli (b. 1955) - Historian of science at Harvard whose Galileo, Courtier (1993) argues that Galileo's scientific practice and self-presentation were constituted by the patronage culture of Italian Renaissance courts.

David Bloor (b. 1942) - Edinburgh sociologist and co-founder of the Strong Programme, whose Knowledge and Social Imagery (1976) argues for a fully symmetrical, causal sociology of scientific knowledge.

Steven Shapin (b. 1943) and Simon Schaffer (b. 1955) - Authors of Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), which argues that the dispute between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes over the air pump was simultaneously a dispute about the proper social order of knowledge-production - that the settlement of the scientific question and the settlement of political questions were mutually constitutive.

Externalists disagree significantly among themselves about how far their explanatory program should extend. A moderate externalism holds that social and economic factors explain the timing, direction, and institutional form of scientific development while leaving the content of successful theories to be explained by nature itself. A more radical externalism - associated with the Strong Programme and constructivist STS - argues that the content of accepted scientific theories is itself socially constituted, not merely socially conditioned. This distinction matters: the first position is compatible with scientific realism; the second is often taken to entail anti-realism or at minimum a deep agnosticism about the correspondence of theories to nature.

There is also disagreement about which external factors are primary. Marxist-influenced externalists emphasize economic structure and class interests; Mertonians emphasize religious ethos and institutional norms; court-society historians emphasize patronage and performance; feminist historians of science emphasize the gendered exclusions that shaped who counted as a knower and what counted as knowledge. These approaches are not always compatible, and their relative weight is contested within the externalist tradition.

The “Science Wars” of the 1990s - in which scientists including Alan Sokal, Paul Gross, and Norman Levitt challenged constructivist and strong-programme externalism - exposed tensions between externalist historians and sociologists on one side and practicing scientists and scientific realists on the other. Many externalists responded by clarifying that sociological explanation of belief-formation does not entail that scientific claims are merely social constructs or that nature plays no role in constraining theory.

• Scientific Revolution - Main Topic
• Internalist Viewpoint - Competing viewpoint holding that the history of ideas is primary
• Conflict Thesis Viewpoint - Related viewpoint on science and religion
• Scientific Revolution - History
• Scientific Revolution - Debate
• History of Science - Consensus
• Strong Programme Viewpoint
• Sociology of Scientific Knowledge Viewpoint

1. Hessen, Boris. “The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton's Principia.” In Science at the Cross Roads, edited by N. I. Bukharin et al. London: Kniga, 1931.
2. Merton, Robert K. Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England. Bruges: Saint Catherine Press, 1938. Reprinted with a new introduction, New York: Howard Fertig, 1970.
3. Zilsel, Edgar. “The Sociological Roots of Science.” American Journal of Sociology 47, no. 4 (1942): 544-562.
4. Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.
5. Biagioli, Mario. Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
6. Bloor, David. Knowledge and Social Imagery. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976. 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
7. Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
8. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
9. Gross, Paul R., and Norman Levitt. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
10. Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science. New York: Picador, 1998.