George Sarton
Belgian-born historian of science (1884–1956) who founded the journal Isis and was a principal figure in establishing the history of science as an academic discipline, chiefly at Harvard.
Matters to this vault as the source of a specific formulation Merton borrows and builds on: in Merton's 1957 "Priorities in Scientific Discovery," quoting Sarton approvingly, the historian of science is said to be professionally driven toward "fixation of first events" when judging the relative novelty of scientific ideas. That phrase is the hinge of this vault's case that Merton's institutional-norm account of priority disputes names dated-document comparison, not mere analogy, as the actual mechanism of priority-norm enforcement — see claim-merton-1957-documentary-infrastructure-catalogue-for-priority-norm-enforcement. Sarton himself, not Merton, is the origin of the historian's-role framing the claim rests on.
References
- claim-merton-1957-documentary-infrastructure-catalogue-for-priority-norm-enforcement
- claim-merton-1957-full-text-read-finds-no-mention-of-ranke-quellenkritik
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