Changes

The notion that a general theory of scientific change can exist challenges the particularist approach to the history of science. Proponents of this approach included philosophers such as Shapin[[CiteRef::Shapin (1996)]] and Kuhn[[CiteRef::Kuhn (1977)]], who would hold that, since each social interaction that qualifies as science is unique, and that the changes between such interactions would also be specific to the circumstances that brought them about, there could be no general theory of scientific change. Related to this concept is the division between the nomothetic sciences which, are concerned with discovering universal laws, and the idiographic sciences, which are concerned with describing features particular to a given individual phenomenon (Bunge, 1998). It was not until Hacking (1999) that the the multi-headed nature of the social constructivist argument, and the problems it raised for the possibility of crafting a general theory of scientific change were clarified.