ABSTRACT
Over the last few decades, the classical approach to the history of science and technology has been challenged profoundly. One might take T.S. Kuhn's celebrated book [1962] as the starting point of a ‘new’ historiography whose central issues were concepts such as revolutions in science, ‘normal’ science, and scientific paradigms. In the context of the 1960s, it was the notion of revolution which was the most striking. With hindsight, however, we can see that it was not this which had the greatest long-term impact, but rather the insertion of the concept of scientific community into the ancestral confrontation of Subject vs. Nature, characteristic of the philosophy of science since the 17th century. Although anticipated by Alexandre Koyré, Kuhn's notion of ‘paradigm’ stimulated attempts at describing the inner workings of scientific communities in terms of ‘normal science', as well as their mental frameworks and habits of training which led them to tackle problems using the same approaches and methods and even to overlook anomalies. Finally, Kuhn also drew attention to the theme of consensus and the processes of persuasion among scientists.
