A REVOLUTION IN HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SCIENCE

GERD BUCHDAHL, Cambridge University

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (International Encyclopedia of

Unified Science, ii, 2.) THOMAS S. KUHN (University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1962). Pp. xv + 172. 22S. 6d. (paper).
Towards an Historiography of Science. (History and Theory: Studies in
the Philosophy of History, 2.) JOSEPH AGASSI (Mouton & Co., The
Hague, 1963). Pp. viii + II7. $3.

EACH of these two works, in its own peculiar way, bears testimony to the
change in our contemporary views about the nature of history of science
that has taken place in recent years. Indeed, to believe Professor Kuhn,
these changes amount to nothing less than "a historiographic revolution
in the study of science" (p. 3). Moreover, what gives this revolution a
deeper and more pervasive interest affects not only the historian's ideas
about our scientific past but has also a relevance for anyone's view of the
nature of science. Nor can we stop there. As both these texts amply
demonstrate, it is not possible to isolate opinions concerning scientific
knowledge from questions of the validity of the ideas that are involved in
the general theory of knowledge. Indeed, even this is somewhat to
misconceive the intellectual situation. Kuhn believes that the "exper-
iences", concepts, laws, theories and instrumentations of science are not
a single monolithic body of accumulated fact, patiently collected over the
ages, stripped progressively of erroneous accretions, but that instead -we
must regard the scientific enterprise as somehow fragmented into a
number of relatively (temporarily and ideologically) isolated periods,
during which some privileged theory, world-view, tradition, tends to
govern the selection of problems, standards of solution, the verdict of
experiment, a particular theory type, and a host of other like factors.
Now if this is the case, it must follow that the history of ideas,
including philosophical ideas, will likewise appear as a series of 'Gestalt-
views' in terms of which we shall tend to interpret more special enterprises
like those of history in general, and history of science in particular.
There are hints of this in Kuhn's book, though he has not worked out the
problems raised by this historical relativism in detail. He believes that
"the philosophical paradigm initiated by Descartes and developed at
the same time as Newtonian dynamics ... is somehow askew" (p. 120);
present-day "research in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and even
art history", according to him, suggest that much. In other words,
there is not just one epistemological basis from which to judge history
and its methods, but several. If the Cartesian basis (or should we not
rather say: Lockean?), with its search after and optimistic anticipation
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of "individual and stable data" (p. 120), "raw data or brute experience"
(p. 124), begets the sort of view of history that Professor Kuhn opposes,
then presumably a different view will likewise demand and be relative
to a different epistemological doctrine.
The ancestors of such an epistemology, inimical to the notion of "hard
data" and "scissors-and-paste history", are not far to seek; they include
Hegel, Bradley and Collingwood, and a host of minor idealist thinkers,
although their names do not occur in this book. On the other hand, we
must remember that they, like competing epistemologies, have their
fashions and their competitors. Now does this mean that Kuhn's own
theory of history is subject to a like "relativism"? We might formulate
our question by asking: Is there a world of objective fact, which we
confront with a series of alternative interpretations? Or is any sharp
distinction between fact and theory altogether misconceived-as Whewell
among the earlier philosophers of science already maintained, himself
only following up the logical consequences of an idealist Kantian tradition?
Are there as many worlds as there are "world-views"? Here Kuhn
sometimes hesitates. True, he tells us that "the proponents of competing
paradigms practice their trades in different worlds" (p. 149); but one
cannot be certain that this bold pronouncement is more than metaphor:
since there is indeed a harmless sense in which (to take a specific example)
"after discovering oxygen Lavoisier worked in a different world" (p. II7).
One cannot be certain, because the suggestion is less acceptable when
taken in a broad sense. And Kuhn himself seems then to shrink from
the extreme, for a few pages later, where once again he is discussing the
theory of combustion, he points out that despite the advent of a revolution,
much remains invariant; and we are told that "whatever he may then see,
the scientist after a revolution is still looking at the same world" (p. 128).
Still, these are broader issues. There is no doubt that within their
context, the main contentions of this book imply a refreshingly new
approach to both science and its history. If we accept them, we shall
no longer be tempted to look at past scientific achievements merely from
the vantage point of present-day textbook science; we shall be more
concerned to see them in terms of the problems, ideas, technological
backgrounds of their own day. No longer shall we find the historian of
science exhausting his task by chronicling achievements, only occasionally
stopping to point to some past "absurdity", some error of judgment or
mal-observation. On the contrary, it will be his pride-of-trade to explain
why some particular impasse had to occur. The "errors" of past scientists
will become manifest as the children of the necessary logic of scientific
history.
I have mentioned the distinction (or lack of distinction) between theory
and fact. Actually, Kuhn's doctrine is more articulated. For both fact
and theory are caught up in a stream of environmental flux of general

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 A REVOLUTION IN HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SCIENCE 57

ideas, presuppositions, techniques, principles of choice; in short, in the

scientist's "world". Here there is a vagueness: how wide or how narrow
is this "world"? What precisely are the boundary-lines of the
"paradigm", that elusive creature which determines the direction of
scientific activity; which, when once established, will maintain itself,
and the "theories" and "facts" which it governs, with stubborn adherence;
setting fashions for enquiry; raising questions, but also suppressing
problems? How indeed can it ever be overthrown?
It is difficult to answer these questions easily from a study of Kuhn's
text, because of an inherent lack of definition or precision in the key-
concept of the "paradigm". This causes confusion. Thus, whilst one
might for instance accept some special thesis, based on a "narrow
interpretation" of the term, such a thesis may well be unacceptable when
referred to a wider meaning, and vice versa. Paradigms, we find
sometimes, are certain privileged examples of scientific practice that
have come to act as models for the scientific research of a period (p. 10).
Here already there lurks a vagueness. Is the relevant example of
"paradigm", taken in this sense, Newton's Principia? Or should it be
the kind of mechanical world-view which the Principia tended to
incorporate, such as the idea of central distance-forces, the "inertial"
conception of space and time, and so on? The former interpretation
may well be trivial, and the broader one too general for use. Again, is
the "Copernican" paradigm Copernicus's theory, including his dynamical
quasi-Aristotelian speculations? Or is it a short-hand expression for a
certain sort of methodology?
However, often it is clearly the narrow interpretation that is intended;
but this has its difficulties because the narrower it is, the more likely will
it have to maintain itself against the context of competing small-scale
"paradigms", with the result that some of the exciting contentions of the
author's can hardly follow. Corpuscular and wave-optics in this way
are said to be two alternative "paradigms" (p. 12); and so are Proust's
and Berthollet's competing theories of the composition of chemical com-
pounds. Now it is true that part of the background to the quarrel
between Proust and Berthollet was that the former was prepared, almost
from the start, to operate with a new concept ("chemical compound");
and that Proust's reference to "nature's power" to "regulate the ratios"
showed that this concept was backed by certain "regulative" considera-
tions. But it might none the less be regarded as a perfectly straight-
forward theory. Indeed, the three main considerations which the author
enumerates in Chapter XII and which are meant to explain how one
"paradigm" comes to be replaced by another, look very much like the
very criteria which old-fashioned logicians of science have indicated for
centuries as governing acceptance of theories: capability of accounting
for the data; ability to predict new data; the existence of "simplicity",

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"aesthetic considerations" (pp. 152-155). However, being criteria for

normal scientific theories, they cannot by themselves explain the peculiar
nature of paradigms. The same remarks might go for the transition
from "the impetus paradigm" to Galilee's paradigm. That this transition
involved more than merely collecting new data, or falsifying old rules,
has long been recognised; one need only remember Butterfield's reference
to "new thinking caps" in The origins of modern science (1949), a work
itself deeply indebted to one of Kuhn's intellectual ancestors, Alexandre
Koyre,
Still, for Kuhn a paradigm is clearly meant to be more than a theory,
particularly when the "regulative" element forms a pronounced part of
it and thus generates a world-picture, such as that of a Descartes or a
Newton. In such cases, not only is there no single fully articulated
scientific theory as such; rather, the Cartesian and related doctrines
when accepted imply of what kinds of entities the universe consists, and
suggest the forms of the laws and explanations to be expected in such a
universe (p. 41). It is an interesting aspect of such paradigms that they
never solve all the problems to which they point, but leave a lot of loose
ends which the particular researches of what Kuhn calls "normal science"
aim to tie up subsequently. "Normal science" includes a vast body of
activity usually associated with science in general, such as the deter-
mination of specific constants, and "fact-gathering" in general; the
formulation of special laws, such as Coulomb's or Boyle's; or more
generally, just "paradigm articulation" (pp. 29, 33); as when scientists
tried to determine what particular hypotheses were relevant in the range
of "heat phenomena", considered in the light of the "caloric theory".
Similar remarks apply to the more "theoretical aspect" of science, such
as the prediction of additional factual information based on such a theory.
However, even here one feels a little bewildered by the lack of
definition of the boundaries of the "paradigm". When we look at the
list of "normal scientific" activities, for which paradigms are made
responsible (e.g., p. 25), we begin to wonder whether the concept of the
"paradigm" is not simply equated with scientific activity in general.
On the other hand, when we are given some very specific cases, such as
the "caloric theory", the "phlogiston theory", the "wave theory of light" ,
one suspects whether they may in the end turn out to be nothing more
than very powerful theories. After all, it has always been assumed that
theories direct research, as well as explaining data. In a case like the
caloric theory of heat, surely what is paradigmatic is its employment of
the concept of material substance; or-where caloric was thought of as
possessing a particulate structure-it is simply the Cartesian-Newtonian
world picture all over again. If so, it would make the paradigm notion
far less exciting as an element in specific historical research. In other
words, in order to maintain its regulative role, we have to generalise it beyond

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usefulness; and in order to preserve its specificity, we have to let it contract into
normal scientific theory. So whilst we might agree that there are trends
of scientific fashions, bodies of agreed methods and rules (cf. pp. 45-46),
and prestige research projects (physics one day, molecular biology
another), the picture is vaguer and messier than Kuhn's seemingly exciting
presentation at first sight suggests. Reading this volume, one gets the
suspicion that the author's facts are used to illustrate a preconceived
notion of historiography, not to prove it. Nor is this necessarily a very
damning criticism. As Kuhn admits (pp. 44-50), it is extremely difficult
to determine the paradigm by "direct inspection"; activities and theories
belonging to a paradigm have not in common a single set of properties
belonging to it alone and to no others; its rules and methods are usually
acquired implicitly and almost unawares.

II
If the notion of the "paradigm" tends to engender a more sympathetic
attitude to "older science", it has however still other far-reaching
implications for our understanding of the nature of scientific change.
Here, it sets out to abolish several apparent shibboleths erected by a
variety of evidently misguided philosophical schools, such as logical
positivists and their successors (p. 97), old-fashioned empiricists and
believers in "sense-data" and "brute" or "immediate experience" (p. 124),
verificationists (probabilistic or otherwise) (p. 144), as well as the
falsificationist disciples of Professor Popper (p. 145)-a truly formidable
array of scholars to take on all at once!
Now it might have been thought that since according to Kuhn's view
the distinction between theory and fact is no longer so sharp as entertained
by the more old-fashioned view of science, a paradigm-dominated period
would tend toward self-perpetuation. On the contrary however, the
effect of paradigm operation is quite the reverse; for although this may
dominate problem-search, methods of investigation, corrections of
answers, and a whole set of models in terms of which a given period
organises its research (stabilised eventually into "normal science"),
nevertheless the domination of a paradigm is never complete, so that
even as part of "normal science" there constantly arise "anomalies"
leading to minor or major "crises". To the degree to which the paradigm
postpones its own change or demise, pressures build up which eventually
lead to "revolution", much in the way in which this often happens in the
political history of nations.
For empiricist-minded philosophers, the important insight offered by
this view is to teach them that the notions of "verification" and
"falsification" (counter-instances) in their relation to theories, have been
misconceived-at least, in so far as they affect our understanding of
science. The naive view seems to be that positive instances are used as

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"verifications", whilst negative ones operate as falsifiers of a given theory.

Far from it! The tidy assumption of a constant and current corres-
pondence between theory and fact is quite misconceived. "Science is ...
rather a ramshackle structure" (p. 49), with lots of unsolved problems
always lying around; "there are always discrepancies" (p. 81) facing
"normal science"; and they can always be accommodated; unless, that
is, they are the kind of "anomaly" that leads to "crises", though it may
be difficult to anticipate the kind which proves to be mortal. Indeed,
most of the so-called "verifying facts" are really no more than
"applications" of a theory (p. 80); their importance as criteria for adoption
and maintenance of theories, according to the author, has been vastly
overrated. "To the historian ... it makes little sense to suggest that
verification is establishing the agreement of fact with theory" (p. 146).
The author does not of course mean that facts do not matter. Rather,
there are none of the "raw" or "brute" kind so beloved by the older
empiricist and the modern positivist; for facts are always "theory-laden",
and the very "operations and measurements [that uncover such facts]
are paradigm-determined" (p. I2S). Secondly, even with such conceptual-
ised data, verification is not sufficient. For data are not data unless they
make for or against a theory (a very old saying!). So unless they either
support an established paradigm or favour one which is in the process
of becoming established, or are data supporting what appears to be a
better paradigm (p. 146), they will be of no importance to the scientist,
and a fortiori to the historian attempting an appraisal of a scientific
period. Too much has therefore been made of the individual or small-
scale set of data (though this is not to say that the whole realm of data
is insignificant); far more important is the world picture which the
scientist comes to make for himself at a certain period. "The act of
judgment that leads scientists to reject a previously accepted theory is
always based upon more than a comparison of that theory with the world"
(p. 77) ; instead of speaking of "proof or error", the change from one theory
to another should instead be described as "a conversion experience"
(p. ISO).
As will be expected from what has been said, the falsificationists fare no
better. "Falsification", like "verification", has been misconstrued.
Obviously, isolated falsifying instances are, if not a myth, at least never
crucial. Not that they are ignored (though this may happen); but they
are again more like "anomalies" which lead to the building up of tensions
unless they are integrated. Above all, the negative aspect of falsification
as a rejection device is meaningless unless regarded at the same time as a
"verification" supporting an alternative paradigm (pp. 145-146). And
even this is too simple-minded a viewpoint. It isn't that a negative
instance, from bringing down an old theory, comes to support a new one.
Rather, a counter-instance will be fatal if and only if it can be shown to

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serve as an important and central cog of a new paradigm. However,

the old and the new paradigms do not speak the same language; they are,
as it were, "incommensurable". The small additional precession of the
perihelion of Mercury, unaccounted for in the Newtonian theory, did not
bring the latter down in fragments; its consideration tended to be left
"for another day". Only as part of General Relativity did it turn out
to be a crucial item of observational support. Similarly, whilst the
relatively large weight-increase involved in the combustion of sulphur or
phosphorus could be explained by the phlogiston theory only through
considerably increasing the complexity of the theory, in terms of the
oxygen concept it could be easily understood and accommodated.
Now there can be no doubt that the logician's picture of verification
and falsification suffers from the disease of abstraction of the full concrete
complexity of the scientific fabric. But it is not at all certain whether
Kuhn's strictures are strictures of the actual philosophical positions which
are part of the logicians' apparently misleading appraisals. Let us take
the falsificationist theory as an example. It is of course perfectly true,
as Kuhn insists, that every theory, and still more every paradigm, is
inevitably open-ended, with many puzzles unsolved, and a vast array of
anomalous experiences looking over its shoulder. And for that reason, a
single negative observation, interpreted within some given conceptual
framework, may not be sufficient to overthrow a weighty structure.
But how does this affect the falsificationist? The truth is surely that
negative instances, even when treated as "anomalies", logically demand
adjustment; it is not at all to the point that such adjustment may not be
forthcoming. The most this would show is that the requirement of a
Popperian hypothesis, that it should be falsifiable, is often indefinitely
postponed or, alternatively, the hypothesis is lugged on to another ground,
and moved in another direction. Which is precisely the position adopted
by the "falsificationist" author of the second work under review.
I stress that the demand is a logical one; for Popper's theory, however
much it parades in terms of the scientist's jargon of testing and corrobora-
tion (and is to this extent justifiably jostled by our author), is ultimately
philosophical, not to say metaphysical. Its main point is a denial of the
possibility of meaningful "verification". According to Kuhn, as just
noted, falsification of one theory can in fact be accepted by a scientist
only in terms of "verification" of another, apparently better one (p. 146);
but if Popper is right, then "adoption of an alternative hypothesis" is
just not its verification, for the simple reason that there can be no such
thing as verification.
Nor does Kuhn think there is, since he passes equally severe strictures
upon the verificationist school. The latter apparently bases its com-
putation of probabilities upon the comparison of some given theory with
the results of all possible tests that could be carried out within a certain

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"neutral system of language or concepts" (p. 145). But since, according

to Kuhn, there is no such neutral field, but only "paradigm-dominated"
experience, such comparisons would in fact have to be extremely limited,
and-as Feyerabend has also recently- pointed out-the required facts
needed for genuine "testing" might not even be forthcoming, dependent
as they are upon alternative theories. But what if such theories came to
be put forward? Would they not then almost certainly belong to a
different paradigm situation? Could they be used, considering the
awkward fact of the "incommensurability" (p. 147) of different scientific
traditions, as expressed through the different paradigms? Here it begins
to look as though scientific theories were beginning to be entirely neutral
relative to their factual basis.
The whole issue clearly hinges on the question: To what extent do
different paradigms involve different conceptual frameworks? To what
extent are the very meanings of the linguistic terminology changed?
And how conceptualised is the rendering of the "facts of experience",
how narrow the gap between "fact and theory", so that the different
paradigms will really be so many relatively self-contained scientific
worlds? The crucial question here is, of course, whether science really
divides into sets of self-contained paradigms, or whether it is not at
least to some extent "monolithic", acquisitive of an accumulative set
of "truths"? Kuhn, though explicitly in only a very narrow context,
denies it, in his discussion of and opposition to the logico-positivist view,
according to which a given theory, since it "describes" a well-established
set of experimental facts (of the "incorrigible" sense-data kind), cannot
ever really be falsified. According to such a view, later theories, apparently
embracing a wider range of facts, are accommodated by arguing that the
older theories are derivable from the more recent ones (cJ. pp. 95-100).
Kuhn counters this by a number of examples which are meant to
illustrate the lack of cogency in the "derivation" story, but I am not certain
against whom this is really meant to tell. No serious physicist or philo-
sopher would presumably ever have wanted to maintain that Newton's
theory was derivable from Einstein's-at least, if they believed that
Newton's theory was false in virtue of its impermissible assumptions
about the speed of light, the notion of absolute simultaneity, etc. (cJ.
example on pp. 98, 100). On the other hand, when we look at the
defenders of the "derivation theory", e.g., Whewell's conception of the
"consiliency of inductions" ,2 the elements that are there mentioned as
standing in a thorough-going deductive relationship to one another, are
all taken to be unexceptionable. Whewell achieves this simply by
retaining what (in his perhaps fallible opinion) was still appropriate among
the theories and facts inherited from previous scientific ideas.
But in any case Kuhn's objections to the logico-positivists seem some-
what misplaced. For actually, the motive for logico-positivist attempts

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to provide unitary theories, and to show that one can derive older theories
from later and presumably more adequate and more general ones, is that
according to logico-positivist doctrine a theory is not so much a
description of the facts (articulated by the use of deductive forms) but a
conventionalist device for "pigeon-holing" these facts (to use one of
Dr Agassi's labels). One of the chief objectives of the conventionalist
device is to try and explain, just like Kuhn, the relative incorrigibility of
the major principles of science, not to say their untestability. One may
then be tempted to infer that a conventionalist cannot conceive of
refutation of any kind. This would be a mistaken inference. Scientific
"conventions", logically speaking, are idealisations of empirical general-
isations (which is not to deny that as creatures of a certain "world-view"
they may not in fact have been discovered as "anticipations of nature").
As idealisations, they have their uses. "Conventions are conveniences",
to paraphrase Poincare, with whom this concept originated. Kuhn can
hence not refute conventionalism by insinuating the argument that on
logico-positivist principles a theory must be true, come what may. A
logical positivist may well agree that a theory has lost its uses, and be
quite prepared to abandon it.
It may of course be that Kuhn means to insist in principle on the
implausibility of ever being able to derive any laws or theories of one
period from those of another, both because logical derivations from later
theories never quite fit the earlier, and because the meanings of the
concepts employed in the two situations are not invariant-on the lines
argued in Feyerabend's celebrated chapter in Minnesota studies iii. 3
But the present text does not make this clear, partly because it occasion-
ally concedes that a new paradigm may only partially replace older
concepts and methods of interpretation as well as "world-views"; partly
because the notion of paradigm, as I have already argued, is not sufficiently
well delineated; and finally, because Kuhn's admission that a new
paradigm "permits prediction of phenomena that had been entirely
unsuspected" operates with a criterion which makes clear sense only if
it is granted that after all there is a certain relatively neutral set of data,
or "brute experiences".
To give a naive example: it is true that "standards of solutions" may
change; a new paradigm may redirect the scientist's gaze into directions
hitherto thought to be unimportant. But is will surely be admitted that
it was none the less always a fact that during a process of combustion
phosphorus gained considerable weight. True, this could be described
in different ways (including the "loss of levity"); but will it be denied
that to both the phlogistonist as well as Lavoisier the burnt specimen
would have felt heavier? It will of course be objected that this is not to
the point; that the phlogistonist would either not have noticed the fact,
or that had he done so he would have been able to reintegrate-it into his

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alternative paradigm-although Kuhn admits that in the attempt he

would have increased the vagueness and decreased the utility of the
theory (p. 71). Very well! In that case the "heavier weight" is (on
the later view) integrated within a wider and more competent theory, and
not just one that is different; and it correlates also more adequately with
a considerable body of physical theory, as well as having a well-established
place within the chemical field. And that theory embraces a wider range
of facts than the older ones (cf. the first criterion for new paradigm
adoption, p. 152). If Kuhn has shown that "falsification" and "error"
are not as simple and straightforward as might have appeared from the
account of the verificationists and the Popperians (if they ever thought
it was so simple), he must still be operating with these notions in some
way or other. Surely he does not really want to say that to become
"converted" to a hew paradigm (p. ISO) is exactly like becoming converted
to a new religious faith, however much there may be similarities between
these two-I nearly said: "experiences". But one hesitates to adopt
this idea when speaking in a scientific context. Pascal's espousal of the
conceptual scheme of the "sea of air" (as against the archaic "horror
vacui") is surely different in kind from those religious experiences which
led to his famous conversion. Certainly, in both respects he saw the
world in a different way; the facts took on a different meaning. But in
one case my interest moves in an observational context: the fall of the
level of mercury, the expension of the balloon when going up a mountain;
in the other, I look for a way of sanctifying all the facets of my life, and
of making sense of the promise of immortality.
But I think that after reading this book no historian and no philosopher
of science will ever be quite the same again. Kuhn has a felicitous way
of organising his arguments and marshalling his facts; he is at home in a
fairly wide variety of scientific contexts, and there is an air of excitement
and revolutionary fervour which infects the reader. The richness and
plausibility of the argument perhaps demands a price: sometimes the
conclusion looks more promising than appears on closer inspection. Of
one thing one can be certain: that we have here a new historiographical
paradigm which will surely leave its mark on future generations of
historians of science.

III
The author of the second of the two works under review is a disciple of
Popper, and we might expect him therefore to defend some form of
falsificationism and thus collide with some of Kuhn's theses. In the
event this does not turn out to be the case; as with Kuhn, the positive
methodological underlying doctrine is very general and plastic and
adaptable to numerous interpretations. What unites Agassi and Kuhn
is their critique of old-fashioned "scissors-and-paste" history, and of the

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chronicler's attitude towards the so-called "facts" of the history of

science with no attention given to the historical background, or to the
competing arguments and theories supporting the putative facts-the
chronicler who, instead of comparing the theories, apportions praise and
blame by reference solely to the criterion of whether some given fact has
survived in contemporary scientific text-books. Thus, the historian
should not be primarily concerned so much with the question of the
empirical truth of some scientific fact-that is a task for the scientist;
what is important is that he should show the superiority of some idea,
some theory, some interpretation, over its immediate predecessor (p. 41).
With much of this one will agree; and one must admire the skill with
which the author supports his views through a vivid presentation of certain
case-studies taken from the scientific histories of such men as Faraday,
Ampere, Priestley and Oerstedt.
Less admirable is the vituperative and somewhat breathless style of
Agassi's attack on those whose writings are presented as violating his
own canons, and thus call forth his wrath and contempt. Now this is a
pity. Since Agassi is a philosopher, one might have hoped for a slightly
more systematic exposition of the new critical historiography than is to
be found in the book by Kuhn whose methodological disquisitions are
only very loosely tied to the broad streams of philosophical categories.
True, this is precisely what Agassi has attempted to do. Instead of
offering us his own methodological key (as Kuhn attempts with his concept
of the paradigm), Agassi tries to link the different methodological theories
lying behind the different scientific histories and ways of regarding
science, to a concise set of different philosophical doctrines. These
schools, in Agassi's opinion, have played an important part in influencing
scientists' and historians' views, and he singles out three among them
which seem to have exerted a predominantly destructive and perverting
influence upon the different historians. A fourth school, falsificationism
(or systematic "experimental criticism", a variant of Popper's view,
cf. p. 49), not unexpectedly receives positive marks, although its rather
vague characterisation in this volume fails (with one or two exceptions,
cf. p. 64, where it is used to explain the advent of unexpected "new facts")
to show that it could be productive of any significantly novel develop-
ments in historiography, except by supplying the historian with some
useful occasional advice.
The three schools whose effects have been mainly negative are labelled
"inductivism", "conventionalism", and the adherents of the "continuity
theory and the emergence technique". The trouble is that the doctrines
sketched under these labels by and large bear very little resemblance to
anything that can be found in the histories of philosophical thought.
What we get instead is a certain amount of biased selection, caricature
and occasional aperfus, sharp but not invariably fair. So that, after all,

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66 HISTORY OF SCIENCE

the programme of systematically relating historiographic doctrine to a

philosophical viewpoint (such as one gets in the writings of men like
Hegel, Dilthey, Rickert and Collingwood) becomes sorely blurred. Of
our three schools, the most pernicious villains are the inductivists. This
is due to the simple device of charging them with most of the putative
faults to which historians of science have been prone. Inductivists
believe that theories can be "scientifically deduced from solid facts"
(p. 2); they believe it to be their main task to be "recorders of facts-as-
they-happened" (p. I), and to indulge in "chronology" (p. 7). They
believe that laws can be "conclusively verified", in the sense of being
incapable of subsequent modification or even falsification (cf. p. 8);
they believe that "complex facts" can be reduced by a series of experi-
ments to simple laws (instead of realising that many laws are arrived at
by "a priori reasoning") (p. IS). Above all, the inductivists tend to
"ignore the existence of scientific schools of thought, intellectual climates,
trends" and the like; and they fail to realise that the history of science
is primarily a series of a "contending schools of thought" (p. 23). They
entirely underrate the place of thinking; indeed, believing that theories
emerge from facts, and that the latter verify the former, inductivism
even "denies the usefulness of thinking in the discovery of facts" (p. 42)!
Now not only is it true (as Agassi himself eventually admits, p. 39) that
few historians of science manage to satisfy this picture of inductivism;
it must be said with some firmness that this picture of inductivism is a
pretty breathless conflation of a number of totally heterogeneous forces
selected without any regard to significance or context from pure logic
and the methodology and history of science. Take a philosopher of
science like Charles Peirce: no one could have been more prominent in
emphasising the importance of the movement of scientific discovery
taking place via the formulation of theory and hypothesis. But this was
clearly very different from the question whether the subsequent testing
and provisional adoption of an hypothesis involved an inference rightly
or wrongly. Nor is such a view inconsistent with a belief in the possibility
of subsequent falsification. A glance at any of the writings of even the
most inductivist of philosophers (e.g., Mill) would show that they were
far from ignoring the importance of hypothesis, imagination and argument.
Again, it is true that in many scientific treatises one may find expressions
which assert or imply the belief that laws are deducible from observation
and experiment; but one may wager that in most cases this is a
Pickwickian way of saying that the relevant experimental results are
supporting evidence for the law. No doubt, Agassi might reply that the
notion of supporting evidence is otiose, since he hints here and there that
what is important about scientific facts is that they should be brought up
in the course of attempts to refute scientific theories (cf. p. 64). However,
as we shall see, there is in this book no attempt to offer falsificationism

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 A REVOLUTION IN HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SCIENCE

as a methodological panacea; nor is there on the other hand any discussion

of the logical status of "scientific facts" as such, e.g., in connection with
the critical distinction between "theory" and "fact". In the end one is
bewildered as to where the real nerve of the attack on the inductivists is
supposed to lie. In Agassi's account of the phlogiston controversy, for
instance, the inductivist cannot grant the possibility of an ad hoc
hypothesis (like that of Macquer) in order to save Stahl's original theory
(p. 43). But why should this be so? Surely only if one is given the
caricature of an inductivist as the man who considers history of science
(and science itself) to be no more than an activity of deriving generalisa-
tions from data, preferably by 'simple enumeration'. But is it not time
methodologists of history began to apply their admirable precepts
concerning the writing of the history of ideas to the history of philosophy
also?
Having dismissed the view of theories as derived from facts, Agassi
looks next for a philosophy which apparently presents theories as
insulated from factual considerations, and thus hits upon "convention-
alism" as a candidate. Kant, .Whewell, Poincare are numbered among
such conventionalist theorists--once again a fairly rough classification
which betrays the author's besetting sin of forcing philosophers into
arbitrary groups and of missing one of the most important aspects of
philosophical writing: its vagueness and ambiguities, its shades of grey,
rather than the "black or white" theorising of the philosophical popular-
iser. This is surprising considering the author's passionate appeal to the
historian of science to make allowance for the "grey in his pictures" of
the scientific past (p. 29). Conventionalists apparently believe that
scientific theories are neither true nor false, but adopt those "mathematical
systems" (considered as "pigeon-holes" for "empirical information")
which are the simplest among competing theories.
I have already commented on this one-sided picture of conventionalism
above (p. 63). Dare one remind the author that Poincare, although
regarding the basic principles of mechanics as conventions, also believed
that they were the "natural and direct generalization of ... experimental
and particular principles"; that we adopt them "because certain experi-
ments have shown us that it would be convenient" to do so? (Science and
hypothesis, conclusion of part iii). As for Kant, that philosopher expressly
insisted that "to obtain any knowledge whatsoever of the special laws of
nature, we must resort to experience" (cJ. Critique of pure reason, znd
original ed., p. 165; the "laws imposed on nature", referred to in the
passage from the Prolegomena quoted by Agassi, are in that work (§ IS)
expressly said to be only very general principles like those of substance,
causality, etc.). In short, although at first it looks as though Agassi had
undertaken the interesting task of promoting guiding lines for the
methodology of history of science by using the insight gained from the

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68 HISTORY OF SCIENCE

techniques of the fundamental schools of philosophy, his classification

though interesting is pretty impressionistic, and his archetypes find only
approximately some response from those whom he quotes in support.
The chapters on the "continuity and emergence technique" are less
rewarding and rather muddled; here Duhem is claimed to be the central
proponent, but although his philosophical and historical theories are in
fact fairly complex, we are here presented with a very limited picture
of a writer whose chief aim, theoretical and practical, was only to show
that every idea had a predecessor, and to indicate the smoothest transition
possible between the two.
But what are Agassi's own positive methodological proposals? His
silence on the issue of the distinction between theory and fact implies
that he does not apparently wish to destroy the line that divides them-
for which we may be truly thankful. But this is partly because he places
overwhelming emphasis upon theoretical activity, and particularly upon
controversy, by way of criticism of older theories. In its application to
the writing of history itself, this is presented as the invitation to the
historian to treat his writings as a series of conjectures. Now mention
of this term reminds one again of Popper's thesis that conjectures cannot
be "verified"; that at best they can only prove themselves against
persistent attempts at refutation. Surprisingly, Agassi's requirements
are far less stringent. There is, it now seems, no need for an historian
himself to test his conjectures. Indeed, there is not even the require-
ment that such conjectures should be testable at all, at least at the time
when they are first propounded (p. 75).
Does this mean that history is to become story-telling? That would
be to misread Agassi's intentions. Naturally, any conjecture must "not
often [sic] violate factual information easily accessible to its author";
and the historian must be scrupulous not to present his conjectures as
though they were themselves pieces of factual evidence (p. 74). Such a
vague programme, it must be said, is compatible with- any of the schools
discussed in this volume, including "inductivism". Agassi adds that it
is of course preferable that a conjecture should eventually become testable,
and be tested, through the work of future historians. Search for
historical material to inaugurate such tests if recommended; on the other
hand, the central thesis does seem to be that what matters most is that
the "historical data" (not Agassi's term) should be incorporated in mutually
antagonistic critical programmes. As in general history, "any chapter in
history is improved only by being written and re-written by a few authors
who try to criticize each other and provide alternative views" (p. 75).
This (though very general) is a refreshing view of the history of science,
where such methodological subtleties-eommonplace in general history-
have not hitherto been very prominent. On the other hand, it is no more
than a proposal for general historical practice; it is neutral to the deeper

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 A REVOLUTION IN HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SCIENCE 69
logical problems of historiography which the author raises by implication
through his criticism of opposing schools, but which he does little to
answer.
Perhaps the true lessons are meant to be drawn from some of the
superb sketches of historical controversies to be found in this volume,
and from the scholarly notes, making up almost a third of its body. One
only wished that the logical framework in which all this scholarship is
embedded had been a little more sinewy in order to carry more conviction.
The feeling we have after studying and pondering these two provocative
works is that they "ring a bell to call the wits together"; they register
our conviction that history of science as it has been written needs a total
re-evaluation. They apply to the latter a critique which has indeed for
many a day been current coin in the hands of at least several philosophers
of general history, from Hegel to Rickert and Collingwood. Besides, the
general epistemological scheme behind the efforts of our authors only
repeats the criticism of empiricist philosophy that is as old as Kant-
which is not to say that it is not worth making again, particularly when
expressed in more modern terms. It is pleasant to see historiography of
science thus allowing itself to be exposed to philosophical attitudes for
which little sympathy would have been found in the more perfunctory
writings of positivist or quasi-positivist writers on philosophy of science
of quite recent vintage. Whether the right categories in terms of which
to carry out this task have been found, is another question. But
however many scientific revolutions there have been in the history of
science-many, or one, or none-both Kuhn and Agassi have surely
made it plain that we are finding ourselves at present in a revolution of
the historiography of science.
REFERENCES
I. Philosophy of science, the Deleware seminar, ii (New York, 1963), section 5, 22-25.
2. Cf. Whewell's "Inductive table of astronomy", in The philosophy of the inductive
sciences, ii (London, 1840), 282.
3. Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science, iii, ed. H. Feigl and G. Maxwell (I962),
"Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism", 28-97.

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