Steven Weinberg argues Whig history is legitimate specifically for science, because scientific progress lets historians say who was right

In "Eye on the Present — The Whig History of Science" (New York Review of Books, 17 December 2015), the Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg takes the minority position against the historians' consensus that Whig history (claim-butterfield-1931-coined-whig-history-as-present-referenced-past) is a fallacy to be avoided. His argument: physics, chemistry, and biology are different from politics or art because "in scientific history we really can say who was right." The story of a scientific episode "makes no sense unless we recognize that some were wrong and some right… only from the perspective of our present knowledge." He calls the pure-historicist alternative — describing past science strictly on its own terms, without judging it against what came later — "nonsense."

This does not license unlimited presentism. Weinberg's exemption is narrow: it covers judging whether a past claim turned out to be correct, not importing a later concept or intent the original actors never had. That distinction does the real work when applied to the vault's own AI-history corrections (claim-werbos-1974-no-credit-assignment-language, claim-complex-systems-issue-one-paired-nettalk-with-cellular-automaton): judging that Werbos's equations amount to a gradient computation is present-knowledge appraisal of the Weinberg-licensed kind, while attaching the retrospective label "spatial credit assignment" — a phrase and concept his 1974 thesis never used — is the anachronism Butterfield warned against, not the kind Weinberg defends. See moc-backpropagation-origins.