A neo-positivist theory of scientific change

Abstract Historians of science appear to agree on two things. There is a shortage of large-scale histories of science, and positivism is best avoided. In fact, we have many big-picture histories of science. The problem is not the lack of such histories but the lack of agreement between them. They differ with respect to chronology, geography, narrative structure, favoured disciplines, recent revisionism and epistemology. To make the most of these differences, I resurrect an idea from nineteenth-century positivism, namely that science evolves by the migration of methods from one matter to another. This is an old form of materialism that complements more recent materialisms. The neo-positivist approach may be illustrated by matters as varied as stars, crystals and the Pacific Ocean. If we revive positivism as an intellectual project, we might also revive the social goal of positivism, which was to use the history of science to make the world more rational. A present-day version of this project is to use the history of science to defend the humanities as a rational enterprise.