Science & Tech Quote by Talcott Parsons

Parsons is doing that very Parsonian move: tightening the screws on a sprawling question until it fits inside a system. The phrasing is deliberately procedural - "From all this it follows" signals a chain of deductions, not a flourish of inspiration. He’s writing as if the messy history of ideas can be treated like a well-behaved variable in an analytic model. That’s the intent: to make the growth of scientific knowledge legible, not as a romantic saga of geniuses, but as a problem with a "general character" that can be specified, classified, and explained.

The loaded clause is the last one: "in so far as it depends on elements internal to science itself". Parsons is bracketing the outside world. Funding, politics, institutions, wars, fashions in patronage - all the noisy stuff that later sociology of science (Merton onward, then Kuhn, then STS) would insist you cannot ignore - gets held at arm’s length. He’s not denying it exists; he’s asserting a boundary so his argument can run cleanly. The subtext is jurisdictional: sociology can explain science without reducing it to mere social forces, because science has its own internal logic worth respecting.

Context matters. Parsons is a mid-century architect of structural functionalism, obsessed with how complex systems stabilize and reproduce themselves. In that light, "development" reads less like revolutionary rupture and more like orderly differentiation: new concepts emerge because the system of knowledge requires them to resolve tensions and integrate anomalies. It works rhetorically because it promises mastery - if you accept the premise of internal elements, the rest "follows" with the calm inevitability of a proof.