• DOI:10.1177/007327536500400103
• Corpus ID: 142838889

A Revolution in Historiography of Science

@article{Buchdahl1965ARI,
  title={A Revolution in Historiography of Science},
  author={Gerd Buchdahl},
  journal={History of Science},
  year={1965},
  volume={4},
  pages={55 - 69}
}

• G. Buchdahl
• Published 1 March 1965
• Philosophy
• History of Science

EACH of these two works, in its own peculiar way, bears testimony to the change in our contemporary views about the nature of history of science that has taken place in recent years. Indeed, to believe Professor Kuhn, these changes amount to nothing less than "a historiographic revolution in the study of science" (p. 3). Moreover, what gives this revolution a deeper and more pervasive interest affects not only the historian's ideas about our scientific past but has also a relevance for anyone's view of the nature of science. Nor can we stop there. As both these texts amply demonstrate, it is not possible to isolate opinions concerning scientific knowledge from questions of the validity of the ideas that are involved in the general theory of knowledge. Indeed, even this is somewhat to misconceive the intellectual situation. Kuhn believes that the "experiences", concepts, laws, theories and instrumentations of science are not a single monolithic body of accumulated fact, patiently collected over the ages, stripped progressively of erroneous accretions, but that instead -we must regard the scientific enterprise as somehow fragmented into a number of relatively (temporarily and ideologically) isolated periods, during which some privileged theory, world-view, tradition, tends to govern the selection of problems, standards of solution, the verdict of experiment, a particular theory type, and a host of other like factors. Now if this is the case, it must follow that the history of ideas, including philosophical ideas, will likewise appear as a series of 'Gestaltviews' in terms of which we shall tend to interpret more special enterprises like those of history in general, and history of science in particular. There are hints of this in Kuhn's book, though he has not worked out the problems raised by this historical relativism in detail. He believes that "the philosophical paradigm initiated by Descartes and developed at the same time as Newtonian dynamics ... is somehow askew" (p. 120); present-day "research in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and even art history", according to him, suggest that much. In other words, there is not just one epistemological basis from which to judge history and its methods, but several. If the Cartesian basis (or should we not rather say: Lockean?), with its search after and optimistic anticipation