A Structure for History: reflections from Kuhn’s historiographic studies

LEANDRO GIRI; MATÍAS GIRI

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 17th Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology (CLMPST, 2023): Science and Values in an Uncertain World; 2023

Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology

In this paper we propose a reconstruction of Thomas Kuhn's historiographical programme with an apologetic aim: we will defend its relevance from the attacks of the "history of contingencies", a school represented in the position diagrammed by Lorraine Daston (2016). Daston's proposal asserts that the Kuhnian historiographical programme of professionalising the history of science (moving it towards history departments to the detriment of science departments) has been fulfilled but has resulted in the abandonment of the Hegelian spirit from Kuhn's historiography, i.e. the search for a "structure" of the history of science has been abandoned. According to Daston, the esoteric work on historiographical sources has led to the generation of a history of science that does not seek patterns of theoretical change, but instead produces “contextual” narratives focused in practices in which historical episodes are unique in their kind, i.e. contingencies. We are not interested here in questioning whether the academy of the history of science has indeed abandoned the search for structures in favour of the analysis of contingencies, but rather in defending the relevance of Kuhnian historiography of science, in particular the fertility of a programme that seeks structural patterns in the history of science. To this end, we propose to: a) present a synthetic but refined version of Kuhnian historiography, complementing the usual reconstructions with work on previously unpublished Kuhnian lectures that have been published very recently. b) reconstruct Daston's criticisms of the notion of "structure" and its relevance for historiographical work, as well as the supposedly superior fertility of a history of contingencies. c) to propose a notion of "structure" that is compatible with Kuhnian historiography (but also with the concerns of general philosophy of science, especially about the ways in which theoretical change actually happens), and d) to show the ways in which a historiography of science sustained in such a (meta)theoretical framework is progressive, not only for the history of science but also for the philosophy of science, as originally claimed by the "new philosophy of science", which emerged after the publication of Structure in 1962.