Thomas Kuhn Wasn’t So Bad

In a recent post I review The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality), filmmaker Errol Morris’s takedown of philosopher-historian Thomas Kuhn. My friend and colleague James McClellan, a distinguished historian of science at Stevens Institute of Technology, was also Kuhn’s student in Princeton the early 1970s. Beyond that, the historiography of science in the 60s and 70s centered on distinctions between the “internal” history of science, or the internal logic of scientific ideas and their disembodied development over time, and the “external” history of science, or the grubby social and institutional contexts in which serene natural philosophers built on the work of their predecessors.

Source: blogs.scientificamerican.com