Abstract
This chapter seeks aid from Thomas Kuhn’s work in the 1960s and 1970s in order both to diagnose and to aid the recovery of early twenty-first-century history and philosophy of science. It begins with a statement of the current high entropy state of history and philosophy of science in order to ask a few questions of how, in the wake of Kuhn’s work and in Kuhn’s work itself the relations between history and philosophy of science were conceived. In some remarks of Kuhn on the reading and writing practices of historians and philosophers, the chapter finds some hope for a new project of reflexive articulation of the goals and methods of, especially, philosophy of science.
There have been philosophers of science, usually those of a vaguely neo-Kantian cast, from whom historians can still learn a great deal.
—(Thomas Kuhn 1977b, p. 11)
This essay’s first incarnation was commissioned by the chairs of the PSA and HSS 2012 program committees, Andrea Woody, Janet Browne, David Kaiser, for the plenary session on Kuhn at the collocated meetings that fall. I wish to thank them and also Alisa Bokulich and William J. Devlin for attempting to get me to think new thoughts about Kuhn.
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Notes
- 1.
This phrase was in his talk at the fiftieth anniversary session of the Boston Center for Philosophy and History of Science in October 2010.
- 2.
Or, again, history is no more a set of facts for Kuhn than a theory is for him a set of laws. His main concern is not with the question of which facts philosophy of science is beholden to.
- 3.
Cf. J. Schikore (2009).
- 4.
Indeed, consciousness has become a series of ever harder problems, needing an ever more rugged group of philosophers of mind to handle [it?].
- 5.
Not wholly displaced, however. There are both explicitly neo-Kantian philosophies of science (Friedman 2001; Domski and Dickson 2010) in the contemporary scene and a burgeoning literature in the neo-Kantian philosophers such as Ernst Cassirer (e.g. Friedman 1999; Mormann 2008; Heis 2014) that Kuhn himself points to as antecedents to professional history of science.
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Richardson, A. (2015). From Troubled Marriage to Uneasy Colocation: Thomas Kuhn, Epistemological Revolutions, Romantic Narratives, and History and Philosophy of Science. In: Devlin, W., Bokulich, A. (eds) Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions - 50 Years On. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 311. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13383-6_4
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