The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Chapter 1: A Role for History

History could produce a decisive transformations in the image
of science
One of the sources of such image: textbooks
However, the aim of such books is persuasive and pedagogic: a
concept drawn from them is no more likely to fit the enterprise
that produced them than an image of national culture drawn
from a tourist brochure or a language text.
Kuhns essay attempts to show that we have been misled by
them in fundamental ways.
It is to sketch a different concept of science that can emerge
from the historical record of the research activity itself.
A Role for History
What is history according to the conventional view?
Science = is the constellation of facts, theories and methods
collected in current texts
Scientists = are the men who, successfully or not, have striven
to contribute one or another element to that constellation
Scientific development = the piecemeal process by which
these items have added to the ever-growing stockpile that
constitutes scientific technique and knowledge
History of science = is the discipline that chronicles both these
successive elements and the obstacles that have inhibited
their accumulation
Historian
The historian (of science) has two main tasks:
To determine by what man (who) and at what point in time
(when) each scientific fact, law or theory was discovered or
invented
To describe and explain the congeries of error, myth and
superstition that have prevented the more rapid
accumulation of the constituents of the modern science
text
Recently, as chroniclers of an incremental process, historian
realize that fulfilling such tasks are getting more difficult.
It is harder to answer questions like: When was oxygen
discovered?

Simultaneously, same historians confront growing
difficulties in distinguishing the scientific component of
past observations and beliefs from what their ancestors
had readily labelled error and superstition.
Darn
If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then
myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and
held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific
knowledge.
If, on the other hand, they are to be called science, then
science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible
with the ones we hold today.
Historiographic Revolution
The result of all these doubts and difficulties is a
historiographic revolution in the study of science = a revolution in
historical research
This new historiographic tradition suggests the possibility of a
new image of science