Why should the history of science be divided into internal history and external history ?

The theory of internal history emphasizes that the study of the history of science should only focus on the independent development of science itself, pay attention to the logic, conceptual framework, method and procedure, elaboration of theories, completion of experiments, and the relationship between theory and experiment in the development of science, etc., and care about the connection between scientific facts in history, without considering the influence of social factors on the development of science, and tacitly assume that the development of science has its own internal logic. The "external history" of the history of science refers to the history of the influence of social factors on the development of science. "Theory of Foreign History" emphasizes that the study of the history of science should pay more attention to the influence of social, cultural, political, economic, religious, military and other environments on the development of science, and believes that these environments affect the direction and speed of scientific development.

The "internal history" of the history of science generally refers to the internal development history of science, and the "external history" refers to the independent development of science itself, and generally focuses on some experiments or some framework concepts and logic.

Considering social factors as the external background environment of scientific development does not touch on the construction and shaping of scientific content by social factors. To a certain extent, it can be said that the long-standing controversy between "internal history" and "external history" in the Western history of science may be precisely because of this scientific outlook itself.

In this way, the research directions are different, and the research directions will be different, and at the same time, they are also different in nature.

The so-called internal history, copy, refers to the study of the history of science is limited to the internal science, and the history of science is regarded as the history of the formation and development of the scientific knowledge system. The so-called foreign history is to regard science as an integral part of society and study its interrelationship with other parts of society, such as economic, educational, political, cultural, etc. Excerpted from page 3 of the second edition of History of Science and Technology (Wuhan University Press), edited by Zhang Misheng.

The definition of history is different, many, to put it simply, what has passed has become history.

History is a discipline or discipline that studies history, emphasizing the study of history as an object.

The history of historiography is the history of historical research, which is actually the abbreviation of the history of historiography.

Historiography is the form of knowledge in which human beings sift through and combine their own historical materials. Historiography is a dynamic concept of space in static time. History is an organic combination of five parts: history, science, philosophy, human nature, and time and space.

"Historiography" in a broad sense is the unity of "history has two meanings" produced by the simultaneous training of "history". Including: the objective existence and development process of human past societies that are completely independent of people's consciousness; Historians describe and explore the spiritual production practice of this objective existence and process and its laws, and the products it creates.

Historiography in the narrow sense refers exclusively to the latter, which is a unity of spiritual production practice and the creation of things that belong to conceptual forms.

Due to the different perspectives and starting points of historians, there are different definitions of "activity", "learning" or "scholarship", "knowledge system", "science", "art", "half science, half art", "integration", and so on. History majors mainly include first-level disciplines such as Chinese history, world history, and archaeology, as well as second-level disciplines such as museology, ethnology, and cultural relics.