T. S. Kuhn's Theory of Science and Its Implications for History

Abstract

NOT SINCE THE PUBLICATION of R. G. Collingwood's Idea of History has a work of theory'' won from historians the amount of interest recently accorded Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.' If historians are conventionally aloof from philosophy of history, they are even less attentive to philosophy of science-yet contemporary footnotes prove that Kuhn's theory of science speaks to, and for, historians asi few works of philosophy of history ever have. Even the revered Collingwood, for all his influence upon intellectual historians during the 1940S and 1950S, served to stop discussions as often as to advance them; a citation to Collingwood's profound but forbidding Epilegomena2 enabled historians to perform an act of calm defiance: we historians are on to something basic and complicated about human experience, which you can read about in Collingwood, and if you can't understand what he says, well, that's your problem. This defiant use of Collingwood may have been appropriate in some cases, and Collingwood will presumably continue to serve historians in this way without coming down off the shelf he now shares with a more mobile junior partner. Kuhn, unlike Collingwood, is being read carefully by many practicing historians. Not since the time of Charles Beard has any guild historian attracted an audience among the academic intelligentsia as extensive as Kuhn's. Collingwood, too, was a historian, but he always remained the peculiar possession of historians and of a handful of philosophers; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has become a major text for interdisciplinary discourse and has been acclaimed by the cognoscenti that reads Levi-