The Figural Model for a History of Science Historiography

Abstract

The analysis of the linkages between different texts on history of science entails formulating, or employing, a concept of history of science historiography. Hayden White holds that the figural model for literary history, proposed by Erich Auerbach, constitutes a paradigm of relationships between successive attempts of representation. This scheme displays a plot structure in which linkages are created through performative acts that point from the present to the past, and, at the same time, establish the earlier events as figures and the present events as their fulfillment. The purpose of this article is to elaborate a fragmentary history of science historiography by making use of the figural model. In this sense, I examine a set of historiographic writings by Steven Shapin as the fulfillment of a series of figure-fulfillment mediations shaped around the origin of modern science in seventeenth-century England.