ABSTRACT
Under Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) influence, methodological debates in the humanities and social sciences commonly address where one’s discipline is on the road to becoming a “paradigm” and how a “revolution” may be staged to set the discipline aright. However, the remarkable ability of the field of history and philosophy of science (HPS) to establish spheres of influence in other disciplines is no indicator of the fate of the Kuhnian revolution at home. To be sure, historians of science have succeeded in pulling in a few philosophers to examine the details of past science. These philosophers have, perhaps, a greater sense of science’s institutional character than before the Kuhnian revolution, but in a way that is still studiously atheoretical and nonprescriptive. Moreover, with the latest revival of scientific realism, philosophers of science have returned to a quasi-transcendental mode of arguing that betrays their roots in classical epistemology and metaphysics (e.g. Leplin 1984). Thus, we have realists proffering just-so stories about what “must have happened” in history to enable science to be so “successful.” Instead of raising historical counterexamples, antirealists tell simpler versions of the same story. The homeliness of the scenarios imagined often takes the place of critical historical scholarship. This retreat from the Kuhnian revolution is significant. It reflects an ambivalence on the part of HPS toward breaking new theoretical ground, specifically, an ambivalence toward making the transition from the humanities to the social sciences—a reluctance to make the transition from HPS to STS.
