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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

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Chapter 1: A Role for History

History could produce a decisive transformations in the imageof science

One of the sources of such image: textbooks

However, the aim of such books is persuasive and pedagogic: aconcept drawn from them is no more likely to fit the enterprisethat produced them than an image of national culture drawnfrom a tourist brochure or a language text.

Kuhns essay attempts to show that we have been misled by

them in fundamental ways.

It is to sketch a different concept of science that can emergefrom the historical record of the research activity itself.

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A Role for History

What is history according to the conventional view?

Science = is the constellation of facts, theories and methodscollected in current texts

Scientists= are the men who, successfully or not, have strivento contribute one or another element to that constellation

Scientific development= the piecemeal process by whichthese items have added to the ever-growing stockpile that

constitutes scientific technique and knowledge

History of science= is the discipline that chronicles both thesesuccessive elements and the obstacles that have inhibitedtheir accumulation

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Historian

The historian (of science) has two main tasks: To determine by what man (who) and at what point in time

(when) each scientific fact, law or theory was discovered orinvented

To describe and explain the congeries of error, myth and

superstition that have prevented the more rapidaccumulation of the constituents of the modern sciencetext

Recently, as chroniclers of an incremental process, historian

realize that fulfilling such tasks are getting more difficult. It is harder to answer questions like: When was oxygen

discovered?

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Simultaneously, same historians confront growing

difficulties in distinguishing the scientific component ofpast observations and beliefs from what their ancestors

had readily labelled error and superstition.

Darn

If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then

myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and

held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific

knowledge.

If, on the other hand, they are to be called science, thenscience has included bodies of belief quite incompat ib le

with the ones we hold today.

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Historiographic Revolution

The result of all these doubts and difficulties is a

historiographic revolutionin the study of science = a revolution inhistorical research

This new historiographic tradition suggests the possibility of a

new image of science