= Solution
\b[Selection is unavoidable in historical writing, but selecting only eventual winners corrupts the explanation of how scientific knowledge developed.] A defensible account can judge a theory false while still asking why capable investigators accepted it, what it enabled them to do and how its rejection became justified. Historical explanation and endorsement are different activities.
The first problem is circularity. If significance means contribution to what is now accepted, the account first chooses its endpoint and then discovers a past that appears to have been moving toward it. <Historical presentism> substitutes later categories and standards for the questions available to the participants. <Whig history of science> then turns the selected sequence into a story of foreseen progress. The process looks inevitable because alternatives have been removed from the narrative, not because their historical impossibility has been demonstrated.
<Phlogiston theory> provides an instructive example. Rejecting it as an accurate modern account of <combustion> does not explain the experiments on different airs that were conducted within it. <Joseph Priestley> investigated a gas through its production, its effect on a flame and its respiratory properties. His description of <dephlogisticated air> records an important experimental achievement even though its theoretical name differs from the later account of <oxygen>. If his framework is omitted as merely foolish, the history loses both the investigator's reasons and part of the evidence on which the competing chemistry depended.<Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air by Joseph Priestley (1775)>[volume II, section III: experimental preparation and tests of the newly investigated air]{ref}
The winner's side also resists tidy retrospective sorting. <Antoine Lavoisier>'s <Elements of Chemistry by Antoine Lavoisier> integrated <caloric theory> and an erroneous universal acidifying role for <oxygen> with influential practices of material accounting and <chemical nomenclature>. Calling the entire package modern and therefore correct would be just as inaccurate as discarding all of <Joseph Priestley>'s work. A historian needs to follow which practices, concepts and commitments were retained, modified or rejected, rather than assigning a single final truth value to a whole person.<Elements of Chemistry by Antoine Lavoisier>[Preliminary Discourse, part I chapter V and part II table of simple substances]{ref}
The second problem is causal omission. Published theories depended on instrument makers, assistants, collectors, translators, teachers and readers able to repeat or adapt operations. Restricting attention to celebrated authors treats these conditions as if they supplied themselves. The dedication in <Sidereus Nuncius by Galileo Galilei> demonstrates that even a canonical discovery claim was situated in patronage and reputation. Examining that setting explains part of its form and audience; it need not imply that the satellites of <Jupiter> were merely a social invention.<Sidereus Nuncius by Galileo Galilei>[dedication to Cosimo II and the presentation of the Medicean stars]{ref}
The third problem is that an unsuccessful explanation can generate a productive investigation. <Wilhelm Roux>'s interpretation of an injured frog embryo helped make controlled intervention central to <embryology>. <Hans Driesch> disagreed with important conclusions while explicitly crediting the experimental programme. A history that retained only the eventual lesson of <regulative development> would struggle to explain why the decisive manipulation was attempted, why its controls mattered or why the result was surprising.<The Science and Philosophy of the Organism by Hans Driesch>[part I, section B.1: praise of Roux's programme followed by criticism of the inference from partial development]{ref}
This is not an argument that all theories are equally good, or that a historian must reconstruct every discarded speculation in equal detail. Selection should be justified by the explanatory problem. An account of a particular measurement may concentrate on calibration and instruments; an account of a theory's acceptance may require rivals, teaching practices and institutional settings. Scientific evaluation can ask how well competing theories answered the evidence then available and how later tests altered the balance. Historical judgment can also identify unjustified claims. What it cannot do is use later success as a substitute for evidence about the earlier process.
The same caution applies to very large labels. <Steven Shapin>'s discussion of the <Scientific Revolution> makes the category itself an object of investigation rather than an unquestioned starting point.<The Scientific Revolution by Steven Shapin>[Introduction: the unity and retrospective construction of the event]{ref} A good history can explain genuine advances and unequal achievements while keeping lost alternatives visible. Its aim is neither a procession of heroes nor a refusal to distinguish better from worse explanations, but an account of how particular judgments became possible and persuasive.
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