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In a somewhat oblique but economical way, a review of Thomas Kuhn's influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,¹ helps to identify the current state of the methodology of the social and human sciences. Kuhn himself, of course, is very much interested in applying his theory to these sciences, though he has yet to pursue the matter in a sustained way. He has attracted a good deal of sanguine interest among the practitioners of the human sciences, of course. But the point, frankly, of beginning with Kuhn (and of pursuing at some length the promise of his well-known theory) is to show that the effectiveness with which he breached the canonical picture of the physical sciences does not really depend on his own favored notions of paradigm shifts and incommensurability (which are in any case not at all strongly defended or fully defensible) but on certain subterranean themes, somewhat displaced by his own notions, that do force a review of the methodological features of the physical sciences — either to justify a functional division between them and the human sciences or to confirm the dependence of the first on the second in a respect the canon has traditionally resisted or ignored (at least since it assumed its characteristically modem form).

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-3444-8_9

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