In his influential 1931essayThe Whig interpretation of history, Herbert Butterfield criticized what he called the "Whig history", the "study of the past for the sake of the present"; history, he stated, cannot be used to justify certain contents in the present. In particular, he denounced conceiving of history as a succession of goal-directed stages, such that past stages must be seen through the lens of their future goal. As his account goes, any investigation into the causes of historical change is hampered by anachronism, while any teleological, goal-directed narrative proves untenable. Butterfield, in the face of Whig historians, rather preferred an ideal whereby the past be studied "for the sake of the past", 1 whereby the historian become more than a mere observer and one who actually "goes out to meet the past". 2 Chief in the reticle of Butterfield's book was the political history of the circumstances leading to the Protestant Reformation and the modern constitution of the English people. There, he contradistinguished Whig history, which understood the Reformation as an inevitable step towards progress, from the Catholic, Tory interpretation of the same event; for Butterfield, Luther was nothing of a progressive. Whiggism, for him, was inherently related to what he called "abridged" or "general history" itself rectified, so to speak, by a specialized, technical history of very concrete, detailed issues.Around the same time as Butterfield, Alexandre Koyré published his well-known Études galiléennes in the field of the history of science. 3 In these important essays, Galileo takes shape less as a modern experimentalist (as a hagiographic presentcentred history would have it) and more as a speculative Platonist seeking to refute Aristotelianism.Since the mid-1970s, the labels "Whig" or "Whiggish" have been frequently used in history of science jargon to denigrate and repudiate certain histories of science which accept the idea of progress as an idea of significant value. This jargon, favouring a more skeptic, sociological approach, uses "Whiggism", "anachronism", "triumphalism", "presentism" and the like as labels to denote a chronological snobbery considering all things past as inherently inferior. "Studying the past with reference to the present", Whiggish history supposedly views the present as the inevitable product of the past. As such, past science is judged according to its contribution to theorems held as true in the present: the past is interpreted through current values, with a consequent dismissal of the problems and ideas of earlier scientists. 4 Opposing both a history of science used to illustrate the historian's own view of science as well as any narrative of scientific progress, an inductive history establishes itself as
