The philosophy of history of science of Thomas Kuhn
Alexander Bird asdfafsd.academia.edu
The philosophy of history of science of Thomas Kuhn
I argue that Kuhn was a historicist in two respects. First, he was a conservative in Mannheim's sense—tradition is important for understanding scientific change, and the evaluation of a scientific idea is relative to historical context. Secondly, Kuhn embraced determinism—there is a pattern to scientific change, akin to laws of scientific development. I show that Kuhn's determinism requires that he is an internalist about the causes of scientific change; Kuhn's internal-ism contrasts with the externalism that characterises much post-Kuhnian science studies. I conclude by considering how Kuhn's historicism relates to the philosophical purposes of Kuhn's history of science.

The publication of Thomas S. Kuhn’s "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" in 1962 stands for a turning point in the history and philosophy of science. The repercussions of this work have rearticulated the theoretical framework of history and philosophy of science and have also generated discussions that contributed to the formation of the communities of historians as well as philosophers of science in many parts of the world. Different approaches to history of science have since emerged and most of them have the "Structure" as their reference point. In October 2012, a conference at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science brought together some of the historians of science whose work has played a decisive role in the ways history of science has evolved as a field of research in the past 50 years, both intellectually and institutionally. This volume gathers reflections by many of these historians on the history of the history of science, based on the presentations and discussions at the conference. The topics covered range from personal recollections of working with Thomas Kuhn to broad overviews of the historical development of the history of science as a discipline in the past half-century. The series Proceedings of the Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of Knowledge presents the results of scientific meetings on current issues and supports further cooperation on these issues via an electronic platform. The volumes are available both as print-on-demand books and as open-access publications on the Internet. The material is freely accessible online at www.edition-open-access.de.

This paper considers the legacy of Kuhn and his Structure with regard to the current history and philosophy of science. Kuhn can be seen as a myth breaker, whose contribution is the way he connected historical and philosophical studies of science, questioning the cumulativist image and demanding historical responsibility of the views of science. I build on Kuhn’s legacy and outline a suggestion for theoretical and philosophical study of history (of science), which can be subdivided into three categories. The first is the philosophical analysis of historical interpretation and its relation to the historical record. The second is ‘theoretical history’ in which one tries to infer philosophically relevant interpretations on the nature of science on the basis of historical evidence. The third is the conceptual reflection of the assumptions and implications of the contemporary historiography of science. At the end I suggest that theoretical and philosophical study of history offers a fresh way to make history and philosophy relevant to each other.

In this essay I argue that Kuhn’s account of science, as it was articulated in The Structure of Scientiªc Revolutions, was mainly defended on philosophical rather than historical grounds. I thus lend support to Kuhn’s later claim that his model can be derived from ªrst principles. I propose a transcendental reading of his work and I suggest that Kuhn uses historical examples as anti-essentialist Wittgensteinian “reminders ” that expose a variegated land-scape in the development of science. T. S. Kuhn was a physicist who became a historian, but who also wrote a book, the Structure of Scientiªc Revolutions (1970),1 that proved seminal in philosophy of science. In that book, unlike what was typical in philosophy of science before the so-called historical turn, there are quite a few refer-ences to particular cases from the history of science. After the Structure, and all the praise and controversy that it evoked, Kuhn published Black-Body Theory and Quantum Discontinuity (1987), a book ...

In 1957 Kuhn publishes The Copernican Revolution, and in 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Most commentators believe both works to be an expression of the same philosophical project. Against this interpretation, we argue that there is a lack of continuity between both books, arising from the fact that between 1957 and 1958 Kuhn comes into contact with the works of Hanson, Wittgenstein and Feyerabend, whose influence marks a break from his previous work. We also suggest that in 1957 Kuhn applies a case-based historiography, and, in 1962, a structural historiography. We conclude that there is no relationship of continuity between Kuhn’s first two works.