DOUBLE
REFRACTION
Looking twice at the history of science

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Guest blogger

I'll be travelling for the next three weeks, and won't post again on this blog until the New Year. In the meantime I'm pleased to introduce Matthew Paskins, who will be writing a few posts in my absence. Matt is a PhD student in the STS department at UCL whose diverse interests include the historiography of science.

Update: Matt will be contributing a series of posts on the theme of critical historiography, with the collective title "From vision to inheritence."

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Was Kuhn an internalist?

Thomas Kuhn
50th anniversary celebrations are in full swing, and my internalist manifesto is on the table. So it seems like a good time to look at Thomas Kuhn's attitude to internalism in the history of science. The standard view, I take it, is that Kuhn was a pretty uncompromising internalist who was much more interested in the dynamics of specialist communities than he was in the larger political or social scene. This view gets some support from the book being celebrated this year, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). But some of his other writings paint a different picture. Expand post.