Understanding the Merton Thesis

FIFTY YEARS ON, the Merton thesis continues to arouse historians' passions. It is difficult to understand why. There has never been a celebrated historical theory so cautiously framed, so methodologically eclectic, so hedged about with qualifications as to its form, content, and consequences, and so temperately expressed. Robert Merton and his defenders are accustomed to say that his thesis has been "misunderstood." They are being much too kind to certain of the critics. One is tempted to put the case more strongly than that. On the evidence of some of those historians who have endeavored to refute what they represent to be his thesis, Merton's 1938 monograph and related texts can scarcely have been read at all. Merton is quite right to complain at the cavalier treatment he has received at the hands of his critics in the historical community. Modern literary theory rightly suggests that the meaning of a text is not determined by its structure or content, nor indeed by the author's intentions. Nevertheless, it is both a useful convention and a justifiable moral sanction in the academic world that interpretations and understandings be at least occasionally disciplined by reminding readers of what is written in the relevant text. How did Merton himself define and characterize his hypothesis? What bearing did these representations have on its subsequent career in the academic world? First, what was the nature of the thing that Merton was trying to explain? Here, at the very core of his enterprise, historians nervous about the black beast of "externalism" should be reassured. Neither in his 1938 text nor in subsequent writings was Merton ever concerned to adduce social factors to explain the form or content of scientific knowledge or scientific method. Indeed, it is a plausible hypothesis that our present-day language of "internal" and "external" factors, as well as the validation of an overwhelmingly "internalist" historiography of scientific ideas, actually originated with Merton and the circle of scholars with whom he studied and worked in the 1930s. Thus, for example, Merton was exceedingly careful to dissociate himself explicitly from any enterprise (e.g., that of the Marxist Boris Hessen) that sought to account for scientific method or knowledge by reference to social or economic considerations, or, indeed, by reference to nonscientific cultural factors such as religion.' Merton's claims were "not to imply that the discoveries of Newton, Boyle or other scientists can be directly attributed to the sanction of science by religion. Specific discoveries and inventions belong to the internal history of science and are largely independent of factors other than the purely scientific." And in an essay published even before