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Sociology of science
Merton carried out extensive research, creating a new field of sociology of science. He developed the Merton Thesis to explain some of the causes of the scientific revolution, and the Mertonian norms of science to guide scientists in their quest for knowledge.
The Merton Thesis
The Merton Thesis is an argument about the nature of early experimental science. Similarly to Max Weber's claim that there was a link between the Protestant ethic and the rise of capitalism, Merton argued for a positive statistical correlation between the rise of Protestant pietism and early experimental science (Sztompka 2003).
The Merton Thesis has two distinct parts: Firstly, it says that the changes in the nature of science are due to an accumulation of observations and better experimental technique; secondly, it proposes that the popularity of science in England in seventeenth century can be explained by a correlation between Protestantism and the values of the new science:
The theme of Puritanism-and-science seemed to exemplify the “idealistic” interpretation of history in which values and ideologies expressing those values are assigned a significant role in historical development. The [correlative] theme [in this study] of the economic-military-scientific interplay seemed to exemplify the “materialistic” interpretation of history in which the economic substructure determines the superstructure of which science is a part. And, as everyone knows, “idealistic” and “materialistic” interpretations are forever alien to one another, condemned to ceaseless contradiction and intellectual warfare. Still, what everyone should know from the history of thought is that what everyone knows often turns out not to be so at all. The model of interpretation advanced in this study does provide for the mutual support and independent contribution to the legitimatizing of science of both the value orientation supplied by Puritanism [and Pietism] and...