This is starting to sound like history or sociology. The next step comes when you notice that the "the theory of" keys on your typewriter are getting excessively worn, and adopt a convention that any reference to "atoms" actually means "the atomic theory of matter".
There's a convention in scientific reasoning, that I'm not allowed to say, "Einstein believed that spacetime is curved", although in fact he did. This is a safety measure: if we forbid people from saying that, we don't lose much, but we avoid some common ways of fooling ourselves.
Sociologists are coming from the other side. They are allowed to say, "because Einstein believed that spacetime is curved", but they can't say "... because spacetime is curved." The readers know that spacetime is curved, and it's tempting for them to forget they are not the people whose actions they want to explain, and those people acted as if spacetime were flat. Perhaps they noticed things that were inconsistent with spacetime being flat. They never directly noticed that spacetime was curved: if it were possible to notice that directly, no one would ever have believed otherwise.
This is starting to sound like history or sociology. The next step comes when you notice that the "the theory of" keys on your typewriter are getting excessively worn, and adopt a convention that any reference to "atoms" actually means "the atomic theory of matter".
There's a convention in scientific reasoning, that I'm not allowed to say, "Einstein believed that spacetime is curved", although in fact he did. This is a safety measure: if we forbid people from saying that, we don't lose much, but we avoid some common ways of fooling ourselves.
Sociologists are coming from the other side. They are allowed to say, "because Einstein believed that spacetime is curved", but they can't say "... because spacetime is curved." The readers know that spacetime is curved, and it's tempting for them to forget they are not the people whose actions they want to explain, and those people acted as if spacetime were flat. Perhaps they noticed things that were inconsistent with spacetime being flat. They never directly noticed that spacetime was curved: if it were possible to notice that directly, no one would ever have believed otherwise.