On History of Science (1975-)

"Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind." (Imre Lakatos, "The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes" Vol. 1, 1980)

"Things are similar: this makes science possible. Things are different: this makes science necessary. At various times in the history of science important advances have been made either by abstracting away differences to reveal similarity or by emphasizing the richness of variation within a seeming uniformity. But either choice by itself is ultimately misleading. The general does not completely contain the particular as cases, but the empiricist refusal to group, generalize, and abstract reduces science to collecting - if not specimens, then examples." (Richard Levins & Richard C Lewontin, "The Dialectical Biologist", 1985)

"It is a remarkable fact that the second law of thermodynamics has played in the history of science a fundamental role far beyond its original scope. Suffice it to mention Boltzmann’s work on kinetic theory, Planck’s discovery of quantum theory or Einstein’s theory of spontaneous emission, which were all based on the second law of thermodynamics." (Ilya Prigogine, 'Time, Structure and Fluctuations", 1993

"Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply." (Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark", 1995)

"Tektology was the first attempt in the history of science to arrive at a systematic formulation of the principles of organization operating in living and nonliving systems." (Fritjof Capra, "The Web of Life", 1996)

"Scientific and religious ways of speaking also resemble each other in that they often purport to offer absolute know ledge. I find that parallel also quite amusing at times. The belief of some scientists to propagate the truth can easily be revealed a delusion because in the history of science nothing ever stays the same; theories and models of reality constantly change." (Ernst von Glasersfeld) [in (Bernhard Poerksen, "The Certainty of Uncertainty: Dialogues Introducing Constructivism", 2004)]