¹ First published in Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 1975, 30, 975–98Google Scholar, it is intended for the edification of the general historian as much as for the historian of science. Kuhn hopes to shield the former from errors, for example identifying modern European science with the career of Newton and Newtonianism, or misconstruing the role of ‘Baconian’ experimentalism in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Along the way Kuhn makes important and controversial claims about the deep structure of that revolution, about the meaning of the Merton thesis, and about the so-called ‘second scientific revolution’ of the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries.

² King, M. D., ‘Reason, tradition and the progressiveness of science’, History and theory, 1971, 10, 3–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ To be sure the essay contains mention of a type of straightforward ‘proto-normal’ research, e.g. fitting new elements into the periodic table. This is contrasted not with grand revolutionary science per se; but, as we have seen, with any research which has a significant feed-back effect on practice, from the subliminal to the catastrophically revolutionary.

⁴ A version of this sort of revision of Kuhn's ‘normal science’ can be found in the opening portions of Ravetz, J. R., Scientific knowledge and its social problems, Oxford, 1971.Google Scholar

⁵ I do not mean to suggest that the views of any of these figures precisely mirror the picture presented here, only that there are significant ‘family resemblances’ amid real differences of interest and approach. Nor do I suggest that they reached their positions in the way outlined. For one thing they were all influenced by Kuhn's own evolution along the other path.

⁶ This may help explain some of the ambivalences of those deeply influenced by Kuhn and yet unwilling to accept very many or even any of the doctrines of SSR. Kuhn's own historical writing often owes much to views related to the first alternative, and this may partly explain the ‘lack of application’ of SSR to his concrete studies.

⁷ A detailed intellectual biographical sketch of Kuhn which stresses the shifting institutional contexts and opportunities of his earlier career has been written by Merton, R. K., and appears in Merton, R. K. and Gaston, J. (eds.), The sociology of science in Europe, London & Amsterdam, 1977, pp. 71–Google Scholar

⁸ The proceedings of this symposium were later published as Lakatos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan (eds.), Criticism and the growth of knowledge, Cambridge, 1970.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹ For example, the image of the scientist making bold conjectures and vigorously attempting to falsify them may fit aspects of revolutionary episodes, but misconceives the character of normal tradition-bound research. Conversely, the methodological slogan that the falsificationist ‘learns by his mistakes’ has plausible reference to the conditions of normal research but mistakes the character of revolutions. Normal science, moreover, rather than falsifiability, should serve to demarcate science from non-science. Astrology, for example, does not lack falsifiable predictions; yet it is no science, for it lacks a puzzle-producing and puzzle-solving paradigmatic core. It is more like traditional medicine—a not very effective practical art posturing under a pretentious theoretical cover which bore little relation to practice.

¹⁰ SSR and ‘Logic of discovery…’ hinted at themes Kuhn develops here.

¹¹ Progress itself can be seen as a Kuhnian value, for there are differing senses of progress and differing interpretations of how to achieve them. On such varying ideals and interpretations of progress see Kulka, T., ‘Some problems concerning rational reconstruction: comments on Elkana and Lakatos’, The British journal for the philosophy of science, 1977, 28, 325–33 (340–1).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹² At the end of the paper Kuhn turns to the problem of the ‘conversion’ to a new theory by immersion in its conceptual language. He seems to hold that all the talk about value judgements merely helps to explain how initial persuasion is possible. Effective work in the new theory requires conversion in which one effectively chooses, though ‘no process quite like choice has occurred’. Though Kuhn appears to think otherwise, I would suggest that for historians the most important matters to elucidate are value judgement and persuasion We need a non-Lakatosian theory of (practical) rationality; the fact of subsequent full conversion via immersion can take care of itself.

¹³ Piaget's young subjects split their original concept of ‘faster’ into ‘something like the adult's notion of “faster” and a separate concept of “reaching-goal-first”’ (p. 245)Google Scholar. Galileo's thought experiment teaches his reader not to conflate, as Aristotelians did, the concepts of instantaneous and average speed (p. 251; cf. the note on Carnot p. 259, n. 30).

¹⁴ I shall not be discussing the final metahistorical study, ‘Comment on the relations of science and art’.

¹⁵ The initiatives included the formulation of special cases of energy conservation; a general but qualitative conservation principle; or, with differing exemplars, formulation, and quantification of a conservation principle.

¹⁶ The ‘paradigms’ in question are, to repeat, not to be identified with the first law of thermodynamics as it appears in early systematizations of that science, e.g. those of Kelvin, Clausius, and Helmholtz, but rather they are the various ‘initiatives’ mentioned above.

¹⁷ All but one have appeared previously, sometimes in several forms, as the editorial note make clear. The previously unpublished paper, ‘Newton's effect on scientific standards’ is partly symptomatic of Lakatos's ‘Popper-centric’ view of the recent history of Western culture. In seeing Popper (and Einstein) as the improvers of standards of scientific rationality, triumphing over the mistakes of the Newtonian ideology of science, Lakatos actually manages to writehistory better than his usual standard. But he still conflates real standards of practice, grand methodological pronouncements, and vague scientistic ideology, while always giving the impression that he knows better than to do this. This paper, and ‘Popper on demarcation and induction’, may well be viewed by non-Lakatosians as curious scholastic pieces reflecting, respectively, the public ideology of the sect, and the content and quality of its private dialogue with Popper.

¹⁸ See, for example, pp. 119, 48, 51.

¹⁹ Similarly, historical evidence forces Lakatos to recognize occasional very radical alterations in the prevailing ‘preconceived plan’ or positive heuristic. The legitimacy of such moves can only be established in MSRP by the progressiveness of future work in the programme. Now, from the actor's perspective, any bids radically to alter the positive heuristic must be acted upon at the moment, in the light of skilled interpretation and judgement of the current and likely future state of play, something different from simply making ‘bold conjectures’ and waiting for the verdict of reason in history. The history of science is punctuated with such moves; yet for Lakatos they are either insufficiently rational, hopelessly ad hoc, or, as noted, awaiting ‘the long run’. Hence, Lakatos cannot theorize about a crucial type of history-making practical judgement exercised by actors.

For a nominally Lakatosian study which illustrates the fluidity of hard cores, see Frankel, H., ‘The career of continental drift theory: an application of Imre Lakatos' analysis of scientific growth to the rise of continental drift’, Studies in history and philosophy of science, 1979, 10, 21–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ironically, precisely because of the granted fluidity of the hard core, this excellent paper reads better as a neo-Kuhnian than as a Lakatosian study.

²⁰ P. 36.

²¹ Pp. 90–1, 135–6.

²² There is no need to believe that a consensus about novelty must emerge in the long run; that is simply a reflection of Lakatos's belief that the field is linear. And even if such consensus ever occurred, it would be just that: a consensus, a social process, explicable in terms of Kuhn's minor themes. There would not be widespread recognition of a cosmic truth that ‘x’ is a novel fact.

²³ Pp. 69–73. On the complex relations between criteria of progress and stagnation, and the heuristic rules, see Quinn, P., ‘Methodological appraisal and heuristic advice’, Studies in history and philosophy of science, 1972, 3, 135–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁴ ‘One may rationally stick to a degenerating programme until it is overtaken by a rival and even after. What one must not do is to deny its poor public record’ (p. 117)Google Scholar. ‘The scores of the rival sides, however, must be recorded and publicly displayed at all times (p. 113; cf. Lakatos' n. 5 on the same page about Feyerabend's apparent denial that the scores can be recorded).

³⁵ Chalmers, A., ‘Towards an objectivist account of theory change’, The British journal for the philosophy of science, 1979, 30, 227–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, tries to salvage Lakatos by turning ‘fruitfulness’ into an objective (third-world) property of theories. See his natural analogy on p. 231: he considers two identical gardens, suitably populated by birds. One garden contains nesting boxes; the other does not. That many more birds will nest in the first is ‘adequately explained’ by the objective nesting opportunities. One need not refer to the decisions of the birds. But what if birds also waged wars, and wrote theology, or what if they had the option of practising birth control? Would we then need to study their decisions about the interpretation of ‘fruitfulness’ and the weighting it should be given in the aviary ‘life world’?

²⁶ ‘We are no longer interested in the thousands of trivial verifying instances nor in the hundreds of readily available anomalies: the few crucial excess-verifying instances are decisive’ (p 36).Google Scholar

²⁷ The points in the last three sentences are established in an important and perceptive paper by Doppelt, G., ‘Kuhn's epistemological relativism: an interpretation and defense’, Inquiry, 1979, 21, 33–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The paper as a whole deserves an important place in any subsequent debate over Kuhn and his critics and competitors.

²⁸ Bloor, D., ‘Popper's mystification of objective knowledge’, Science studies, 1974, 4, 65–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Feyerabend, P. K., ‘Popper's Objective knowledge’, Inquiry, 1975, 17, 475–507.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁹ Pp. 169–78, 10–31. Another Lakatosian straw man is sociology, though in this case it is not clear whether his lack of critical discrimination is a ploy or a confession. There is in any case no whisper of a suggestion that Mertonian and post-Kuhnian sociology of science might differ in consequential ways. A fortiori one could not expect Lakatos to consider phenomenological sociology in the Schutz-Luckmann tradition. It just might happen that this tradition will prove fruitful in facilitating the nuanced study and reconstruction of scientists’ contexts of judgement and action, as it has in the study of the ordinary ‘Life world’. Its promise lies in its potential for showing the essentially and unavoidably historical and constructed character of knowledge, and its entanglement with socially created schemas of relevance and interest which can be studied from macro-sociological and biographical-psychological perspectives. Kuhn's views on value judgment pass near its gravitational field. And I would suggest that those historians producing the most sophisticated ‘internal’ history often have an intuitive grasp of some of its themes. Both fields would benefit from a dialogue on this relation.

³⁰ See, for example, p. 117 n. 4, for one of these falsely-aware concessions to the real complexity of human rational judgement.

³¹ Lakatos then claims that when Kepler and Galileo noted the stagnation of Copernicus's programme in dealing with calculational details, they each boldly opted for a new positive heuristic, loosely taken as the project of the new dynamics, celestial and terrestial respectively. In MSRP no attention is given, nor need be given, to where this bold departure came from, or why or how in more detailed terms it was worked out by the protagonists. Future progress retrospectively justifies the bold gambit, and that is all we can say as critical historians.

³² See Westman, R. S., ‘Three responses to the Copernican theory: Johannes Praetorius, Tycho Brahe, and Michael Maestlin’ in Westman, R. S. (ed.), The Copernican achievement, London, 1975, 285–345, (305–29)Google Scholar. Note also Westman, , ‘The Melanchthon circle, Rheticus and the Wittenberg interpretation of the Copernican theory’, Isis, 1975, 66, 165–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar