In the first half of the twentieth century it became a commonplace notion that modern science originated in a seventeenth-century "revolution" in thought precipitated by a new methodology for studying nature. In the last third of the twentieth century, a consensus developed among historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science that the emergence of modern science was more evolutionary than revolutionary. Furthermore, while modern science for 300 years claimed that its methodology generated value-free, objective knowledge, the late-twentieth-century consensus was that, implicitly and explicitly, the practice of science incorporated moral, ethical, and social value judgments.

The Seventeenth-Century Achievement

A fundamentally new approach to the study of nature did indeed emerge in seventeenth-century western Europe. The first herald of this development was Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who argued for a renovation in the human conception of knowledge and of knowledge of nature in particular. Especially in his Novum Organum (1620; New instrument...