It seems to me like the field of History and Philosophy of Science does look at why scientific ideas spread and they usually don’t answer it with “the idea was simply true”.
I has the impression that when people write about the history of science, they tend to write about who discovered what, and how, but very little about what happened to the idea afterwards. I don’t expect to find many chapters of history of science titled, “How scientific theories are spread through the world” but it’s trivial to find an equivalent chapter on religion, or say, communism.
I think I’d expect to find chapters like that even if the book was written by an adherent of the religion or of communism. If I’m right, that seems to somewhat point away from “if it’s true, we don’t feel the need to explain it”.
Possible complicating factors there are belief-in-belief effects, the knowledge that other people don’t believe the thing, and desire to evangelize.
It seems to me like the field of History and Philosophy of Science does look at why scientific ideas spread and they usually don’t answer it with “the idea was simply true”.
I has the impression that when people write about the history of science, they tend to write about who discovered what, and how, but very little about what happened to the idea afterwards. I don’t expect to find many chapters of history of science titled, “How scientific theories are spread through the world” but it’s trivial to find an equivalent chapter on religion, or say, communism.
I think I’d expect to find chapters like that even if the book was written by an adherent of the religion or of communism. If I’m right, that seems to somewhat point away from “if it’s true, we don’t feel the need to explain it”.
Possible complicating factors there are belief-in-belief effects, the knowledge that other people don’t believe the thing, and desire to evangelize.