Changes

In his article ''External and Internal Factors in the Development of Science'', [[Dudley Shapere ]] argues for the formation of disciplinary boundaries within the sciences as a necessary prerequisite for a distinction between intellectual and sociocultural factors. He argues that first, the knowledge-seeking enterprise of science was broken up into a multitude of small specialized disciplines, each smaller discipline with its own laws that dictated the behaviour of particular phenomena. Following from here, scientists in the nineteenth-century began to unify the multitude of smaller disciplines under general laws or “Grand-Unified Theories,” which were all conceptually and logically compatible with each other. Once scientific sub-disciplines were able to be demarcated as either scientific or non-scientific. Once an idea of what constituted as “science” was formed, it was possible for scientists to label all other disciplines that had not made the "internal" cut as "external" to the scientific enterprise.[[CiteRef::Shapere (1986)]]

The logical positivists were the first to distinguish influences derived from propositions within the sciences as “internal” factors, and all other influences originating in the realm of society as “external” factors.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 233]] [[Karl Popper ]] also used the terms “external” and “internal” when discussing sociocultural factors, and mainly discussed the role of the external factors on theory construction.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 233]] In 1970, Imre Lakotos Lakatos suggested that what constitutes as “external” and what is “internal” is defined by the methodology of the time.

“External history either provides non-rational explanation of the speed, locality, selectiveness etc. of historic events as interpreted in terms of internal history,” Lakotos [[Imre Lakatos]] writes in his ''History of Science and its Rational Reconstruction'', “or, when history differs from its rational reconstruction, it provides an empirical explanation of why it differs. But the rational as- pect aspect of scientific growth is fully accounted for by one's logic of scientific discovery.”[[CiteRef::Lakotos Lakatos (1971a)|pp. 105-106]]

[[Hakob Barseghyan ]] agrees with Lakotos Lakatos in ''The Laws of Scientific Change '' that the study of different methodologies across history of science can reveal which factors are internal to science and which external.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 234]] However, if we define all sociocultural factors as being “external” to science, then according to the laws of scientific change, those factors would not be able to have an influence over science. It is due to this that the Scientonomic community abandoned the use of the terms “internal” and “external” to describe intellectual and sociocultural factors.