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1. Contemporary historians and philosophers of science have shown an even greater reluctance to accept a dichotomy between "internal" and "external" factors that intervene in the development of scientific knowledge. In the recent Anglo-Saxon tradition, we find two fundamental positions with respect to the internal-history/external-history problem. One of these consists in defending an "internalist" position with regard to the history of science, or, at least, in supposing that internal factors have a greater relevance for science than external ones. On the other hand, there is an increasingly more serious interest in constructing a "new history of science", based on the complementarity of the internalist approach and the externalist approach, and on the utilization of methods drawn from other social disciplines.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-0109-4_6

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