On Thomas Kuhn's Philosophical Significance
Paul Hoyningen-Huene (bio) Paul Hoyningen-Huene
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I. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—Survey

Probably the most important single work contributing to the turmoil in philosophy of science in the early 1960s was The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Let us look at its outline in order to survey its subject, which will prepare the discussion of its philosophical significance. The table of contents of Structure presents a developmental scheme for scientific fields in the basic sciences. I note in passing that this sort of structuring occasionally makes the close reading of a particular topic very difficult, as passages scattered through the whole book must be considered.

The first chapter of Structure opens with a much-quoted sentence that concisely describes what the book is all about: [End Page 1]

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed. 1

Here, Kuhn refers to two different approaches to the history of science, or two different historiographic traditions. 2 For the older tradition, the primary goal was to reach a deeper understanding of contemporary science by displaying its historical evolution. This was to be achieved by a chronological presentation of the discoveries of today’s concepts, theories, experimental methods, and so on. The image of scientific development that resulted was necessarily cumulative: science grows step by step, adding new pieces of knowledge to those already in place. But this form of historiography invariably distorts the presentation of the older science by projecting contemporary science into the past. The “new historiography of science,” as it was called, attempts instead to display the historical integrity of a science in its own time, mainly following Alexandre Koyré’s model. More specifically, the concepts, the research problems, and the standards of evaluation of an older science must be reconstructed in a historically adequate way—that is, understood in their own terms, not from today’s perspective. Kuhn’s project is irretrievably tied to this second mode of historiography. The aim of Structure, as Kuhn puts it, is to delineate a new image of science “by making explicit some of the new historiography’s implications” (p. 3).