Within history of science and medicine, the terms externalist and
internalist are used slightly differently. Internalist histories are those
that tell the story of science as a history of ideas and discoveries, with
no reference to a larger landscape of events or material structures. The
externalist version is the mirror image -- analyzing e.g. comparative
national science funding strategies, influence of forms of government on
scientific labor pools, etc. with no attention paid to scientific theories
or techniques.
Much of the last 20 years of "science studies" (sociology, history,
anthropology of science especially) has been dedicated to erasing this
dichotomy and looking at networks that do not stop at either sort of
boundary.
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