Kuhn, Condorcet, - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Kuhn, Condorcet,
and Comte: On the
Justification of the “Old”
Historiography of Science

J.. C. Pinto de Oliveira
Department of Philosophy, IFCH,
State University of Campinas, Brazil

Despite the importance of the “historiographical revolution” in Kuhn’s work,
he did not carry out a speciﬁc study about it. Without a systematic investi-
gation into it, he even afﬁrms that the “old” historiography of science (OHS)
is unhistorical, suggesting its summary disqualiﬁcation in the face of his “new
historiography” of science (NHS). My wider project, of which this paper is a
part, is to better discuss the issue of the justiﬁcation of the NHS. In this paper,
I discuss the justiﬁcation (and the genesis) of the OHS, focusing on Condorcet
and Comte and resorting especially to Koyré. This will allow us to under-
stand that the relation between the OHS and the NHS is a new instance of
inter-theoretical incommensurability. Et, en effet, that the NHS is not stric-
to senso a new historiography. It is the same historiography used for other
disciplines (art, philosophy), which in the twentieth century begins to be ap-
plied to science as well.

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Introduction

1.
Kuhn said that The Structure of Scientiﬁc Revolutions (thereafter Structure) de-
pends on the “new historiography” of science (Kuhn, 1977, p. xv, 1970un,
p. 3). Despite its importance in his work, the change from the “old”
historiography of science to the new historiography of science did not

I am grateful to all those who read and commented on earlier drafts of this paper. I thank
especially Amelia J. Oliveira and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, ainsi que
the editor Alex Levine. I would like to thank also Baruana Calado for translations and
revisions.

Perspectives on Science 2020, vol. 28, Non. 3
©2020 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00344

375

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376

Kuhn, Condorcet, and Comte

deserve a speciﬁc study from Kuhn.1 Without a systematic investigation
into it, he even afﬁrms or insinuates in Structure, as well as in other texts,
that the “old” historiography of science would be unhistorical (see Kuhn
1970un, p. 1, 1970b, p. 67, 1977, p. 150).

This idea is also present in other authors’ writings. Helge Kragh, pour
example, echoing the Kuhnian critique, writes that Sarton’s view “was,
at least by modern standards, somewhat naive and surprisingly ahistori-
cal.” He cites Rupert Hall who asks, “with all respect” regarding Sarton,
“if he was ever an historian at all,” and also Herbert Butterﬁeld, OMS
speaks of Whig historiography as “unhistorical history writing” (Kragh
1987, pp. 18, 93, 198n43).2

The suggestion that the OHS would be unhistorical leaves another in-
accurate idea “in the air”: that the change from the OHS to the NHS
would have simply been a change from an unhistorical to a historical his-
toriography. More than an explanation of what would have happened in
the historiography of science, this idea seems to be an indicator that the
topic of moving from the OHS to the NHS deserves more attention.

This is very clear if one takes into account another and very different
Kuhn’s suggestion on the subject, which I will follow here. He refers to
the shift from the OHS to the NHS as an “historiographical revolution”
(Kuhn 1970a, p. 3, Kuhn 1970b, pp. 67, 69), which points to a more
complex relationship between the two historiographies. Separated by a rev-
olution, the OHS and the NHS would be incommensurable.

My wider project, of which this paper is a part, is to discuss better the
issue of the change from the OHS to the NHS and the justiﬁcation of the
NHS. What this article seeks to do is try to make explicit a justiﬁcation for
the OHS, for the way to write the history of science that Kuhn himself
identiﬁes with a tradition, which he says goes from Condorcet and Comte
to Dampier and Sarton.

The article then focuses on Condorcet and Comte, the earliest authors,
as a reference for understanding the genesis and justiﬁcation of this con-
ception. OHS is sketched from direct authors’ references on how to write
the history of science (with emphasis on progress) or through the way they
write it (Section 2). En gardant cela à l'esprit, I then try to identify more pre-
cisely Kuhn’s critiques of the OHS, which lead him to propose a “new
historiography” (Section 3). In the last section, I draw some conclusions

1. Kuhn employs the expression “new historiography” of science (par exemple., Kuhn 1970a,
p. 3) as referring to the historiography opposed to the traditional historiography of science,
which I name “old” historiography of science. Throughout the text I refer to them as NHS
and OHS, respectivement.

Sarton may be considered one of the main representatives of OHS or of Whig his-

tory of science. See note 3 below.

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Perspectives on Science

377

and raise some questions, from what has been considered, lequel, I believe,
will pave the way and contribute to the future discussion of the NHS
justiﬁcation. Aussi, an explanation for Kuhn’s own attitude of disqualifying
the OHS as unhistorical is outlined.

Condorcet, Comte, and the Justiﬁcation of the OHS

2.
Curiously, although the entire work is permeated by the issue, none of the
OHS adepts’ names are mentioned in Structure. But one can ﬁnd Kuhn’s
direct reference in The Essential Tension. He speaks of “an almost continuous
tradition from Condorcet and Comte to Dampier and Sarton,” which
“viewed scientiﬁc advance as the triumph of reason over primitive super-
stition, the unique example of humanity operating in its highest mode”
(Kuhn 1977, p. 148; see also p. 106).3

Ainsi, Kuhn signals the eighteenth century with Condorcet as the mo-
ment of emergence of the OHS and at such point I will initially concen-
trate my attention. Condorcet’s main work in this regard, Outlines of an
Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind, was published posthu-
mously in French in 1795. Condorcet divides his historical frame into
ten periods, covering the remote past, the present, and even the future.
At the same time a protagonist and a victim of the French Revolution,
he announces his optimistic message in these terms:

This picture, donc, is historical; since subjected as it will be to
perpetual variations, it is formed by the successive observation of
human societies at the different eras through which they have passed.
It will accordingly exhibit the order in which the changes have taken
place, explain the inﬂuence of every past period upon that which
follows it, and thus show, by the modiﬁcations which the human
species has experienced, in its incessant renovation through the
immensity of ages, the course which it has pursued, and the steps
which it has advanced towards knowledge and happiness. From these
observations on what man has heretofore been, and what he is at
présent, we shall be led to the means of securing and of accelerating
the still further progress, of which, from his nature, we may indulge
the hope. Such is the object of the work I have undertaken (…)
(Condorcet 2011, pp. 9-dix)

Kuhn merely mentions Condorcet’s and Comte’s names, which leads us to
resort to Koyré’s work in order to summarize the perspective of the Outlines

3. Here I investigate Condorcet and Comte. On Sarton, at the other end of the spec-

trum, see Pinto de Oliveira and Oliveira 2018.

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378

Kuhn, Condorcet, and Comte

et, as a matter of fact, as a reference throughout this paper. His work on the
Scientiﬁc Revolution is comprehensive and very important to the twentieth
century’s historiography of science, directly inﬂuencing Kuhn’s thought.
Besides, Koyré is a critic of Comte and has a very suggestive paper on
Condorcet, which might have been Kuhn’s source given that it was pub-
lished in English in 1948. Koyré properly contextualizes Condorcet’s
work and the very Enlightenment historiography, and it is through him
that we can begin to outline a justiﬁcation for the OHS.4

According to Koyré, histoire, in the conception of the eighteenth-

century Enlightenment,

is not something which makes us, but something which we make,
which is the entirety of things which man has made, which he is
making, and which he is going to—or can—make. Donc, et
this follows from this activistic attitude, the historian does not look
to the past but to the future; and what he has to relate, what he ﬁnds
most precious in history, is nothing else but the history of progress,
that is to say, the story of the progressive liberation of the human
spirit, the story of its ﬁght against the forces—ignorance, prejudice,
etc., etc.—which oppress and which have oppressed it, the story of
the gradual conquest by man of his Enlightenment—of his liberty in
the truth. (Koyré 1948, p. 134; compare Kuhn 1970a, pp. 1–2,
quoted below.)

And Koyré continues, directly refering to Condorcet:

The philosophy of the eighteenth century—a meritorious feature—
not only wanted to explain the world; it wanted also to transform it.
It even believed that it could transform the world by explaining it, dans
autres mots, that it was necessary only to show men what was true
and what was false—they would invariably tend toward the truth.
But it felt that history supported this faith in the power of truth and
of reason: isn’t it true, as Condorcet writes, that in spite of all the
obstacles which have blocked its advance, humanity, in its sum total,
has achieved an almost constant ascent? (…) Thus the optimism of
Condorcet is a reasoned optimism, et, as a matter of fact, un
empirical one. Progress is by no means inevitable and fatal. But the
history of humanity shows that it is real. (Koyré 1948, pp. 134–135)

4. On Kuhn and Koyré see Pinto de Oliveira 2012. Also see the chapter on Kuhn and
Sarton in the book on Koyré (Pinto de Oliveira and Oliveira 2018). It can be said that
Koyré regarding Sarton has the same concerns with tolerance and contextualization he
demonstrates with respect to the Enlightenment historiography.

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Perspectives on Science

379

Still according to Koyré, Condorcet, as a philosophe actively involved with
the French Revolution, does not separate intellectual progress from moral
progress. More than that, “he believes that intellectual progress implies
and conditions moral progress” (Koyré 1948, p. 140; see also Condorcet
2011, p. 112). And the whole eighteenth century is delighted with Newton’s
progress in knowledge. Not only the philosophers of the French Enlight-
enment, such as Condorcet himself, Diderot, D’Alembert, and Voltaire
(who wrote a successful work of disseminating Newton’s Principia), mais
also Locke, Hume, and Kant. À cet égard, Koyré writes elsewhere:

No wonder that (in a curious mingling with Locke’s philosophy)
Newtonianism became the scientiﬁc creed of the eighteenth century,
and that already for his younger contemporaries, but especially for
posterity, Newton appeared as a superhuman being who, once and
for ever, solved the riddle of the universe. (…) En effet, as Lagrange
somewhat wistfully put it, there being only one universe to be
explained, nobody could repeat the act of Newton, the luckiest of
mortals.

Small wonder that, at the end of the eighteenth century, the century
that witnessed the unfettered progress of Newtonian science, Pope
could exclaim: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said,
Let Newton be! and all was light.” (Koyré 1965, pp. 18–19)5

It is in this historical context, the context of its genesis, that the OHS
would be justiﬁed. Given the way science was then understood, the OHS
would be justiﬁed as the general historiography of the eighteenth century
is justiﬁed to Koyré, and even more since the “history of progress”
precisely focuses on science (See Koyré 1948, p. 135, quoted above).

Autrement dit: If, as Koyré says, the eighteenth century’s historiogra-
phy is justiﬁed as a way of writing history that takes into account the prog-
ress observed in society, the historiography of science would be justiﬁed in
the same way, and a fortiori given the fact that it is particularly in science
that the most expressive progress, cumulative progress, occurs. This seems
to be the justiﬁcation core of the OHS. Faced with the cumulative progress
which was then observed in science, and upon which there was broad con-
sensus, the historiography of science becomes the way of writing history of
science that takes this cumulative progress as its leitmotif, its guiding
principle.

5. Bien sûr, Koyré does not fail to observe Newton’s difﬁculties with his theory, tel
as with action at a distance (he does this even in the pages immediately preceding the
passage quoted). The same is true regarding Kuhn (voir, par exemple., Kuhn 1970a, pp. 104–5).

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380

Kuhn, Condorcet, and Comte

The justiﬁcation core would comprise the emergence and consolidation
of the Newtonian theory, a period of about 100 years in the Enlightenment
perspective. As Condorcet himself writes about Newton:

Thus we see man has at last become acquainted, for the ﬁrst time,
with one of the physical laws of the universe. Hitherto it stands
unparalleled, as does the glory of him who discovered it. A hundred
years of labour and investigation have conﬁrmed this law, to which all
the celestial phenomena are subjected, with an accuracy which may
be said to be miraculous. Every time in which an apparent deviation
has presented itself, the transient uncertainty has soon become a
subject of new triumph to the science. (Condorcet 2011, p. 104,
my emphasis)6

This process (this “incontestable and even spectacular” progress) is tra-
ditionally associated with the autonomy of science and, par conséquent, de son
own history and historiography, as Koyré points out. According to him, it
is under the inﬂuence of eighteenth-century philosophy that history be-
comes a history of progress and so must be told:

In his beautiful account of the development of history—I refer again
to the history of historians—Mr. Guerlac draws our attention to the
widening scope of this subject in modern times, especially since the
eighteenth century. (…) Under the inﬂuence of the philosophy of
the enlightenment, history becomes that of “the progress of the
human mind”: let us remind ourselves of Condorcet whom,
curiously, Mr. Guerlac has omitted to mention. Thus it is natural
that it should have been during the eighteenth century that history
of science, a ﬁeld in which this progress was incontestable and even
spectacular, constitutes itself as an independent discipline (Koyré
1963, p. 849; see also Koyré 1965, p. 19)7

And could one not think of an entirely natural expansion of the justi-
ﬁcation core, accompanying the very development of Newtonian science?
Condorcet, as we have seen, writing at the end of the eighteenth century,

6. And D’Alembert writes that “le vrai système du monde a été connu, développé et
perfectionné” (“the true system of the world has been known, developed and perfected”)
(D’Alembert 1986, p. 10. See the entire passage).

In an added note to this passage, Koyré writes: “Contrary to widespread opin-
ion which regards it as anti-historical, it is the eighteenth century that gave birth to
our historiography.” On the idea of autonomy of science in the Enlightenment see
Condorcet 2011, pp. 94, 111–112; Voltaire 1967, p. 194, 1977, pp. 1246–47 (letter
1028); D’Alembert 1986, pp. 38, 48–49. See also Casini 1983, chaps. II, IV.

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Perspectives on Science

381

speaks of 100 années. In the same sense, Koyré speaks about the more than
200 years of success in the Newtonian Studies:

Besides, all of us, or if not all still most of us, have been born and
bred (…) in the Newtonian or, at least, a semi-Newtonian world,
and we have all, or nearly all, accepted the idea of the Newtonian
world machine as the expression of the true picture of the universe
and the embodiment of scientiﬁc truth—this because for more than
two hundred years such has been the common creed, the communis
opinio, of modem science and of enlightened mankind. (Koyré 1965,
p. 4)

En effet, in the mid-nineteenth century, Auguste Comte refers to New-
ton with the same fervor as the Enlightenment thinkers, comme, Par exemple:

…the ultimate perfection of the positive system would be (if such
perfection could be hoped for) to represent all phenomena as
particular aspects of a single general fact—such as gravitation, pour
instance. (…) We say that the general phenomena of the universe are
explained by it, because it connects under one head the whole
immense variety of astronomical facts; exhibiting the constant
tendency of atoms towards each other in direct proportion to their
masses, and in inverse proportion to the squares of their distances.
(Comte 1989, pp. 36 et 39)

Ainsi, the justiﬁcation core of the OHS would comprise about 200
années: le 100 years of success—spoken of by Condorcet and other Enlight-
enment thinkers at the end of the eighteenth century—plus another 100
years of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the OHS does not present
itself exclusively as the historiography of these 200 years of success. Mais
if one can admit the core justiﬁcation of the OHS based on the extraordi-
nary success of Newton’s theory in 200 années, how then could one assess
the adequacy of the OHS beyond that period, both for the future and for
the past?

Kuhn’s reference to Comte, alongside Condorcet, can be considered
here as a clue to understanding the expansion of the OHS and its in-
tended justiﬁcation. Comte, less historian than philosopher8, presents

8. As Cohen writes on Sarton and Comte: “Although he expressed an enormous ad-
miration for Auguste Comte, founder of the positivist philosophy, and the man who—in
Sarton’s opinion—ﬁrst conceived the subject of the history of science, he was also careful to
point out that Comte did not really know science well and that his knowledge of the his-
tory of science was poor” (Cohen 1957, p. 298; see also Sarton 1948, p. 31).

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Kuhn, Condorcet, and Comte

in the nineteenth century his well-known law of the three stages. Enchanted
with Newton, as pointed out, Comte seeks an emulation of the universal
gravitation theory, presenting his philosophical conception as a general
law of the historical development of knowledge (and of society). As Pietro
Redondi writes:

Condorcet placed his philosophy of progress in a historical decor, mais
he did not elaborate the laws of progress (…). Comte had constructed
a philosophical system which aspired to offer at the same time a
philosophy of history and a logical coordination of the progress of
scientiﬁc knowledge. (…) With Auguste Comte the history of
science thus appeared as logical reconstruction, a rationale of
scientiﬁc development based on a philosophy of history of an
anachronic and ﬁnalist kind. (Redondi 1989, pp. 16–17)

Comte summarizes his own “law of the three stages” in these terms:

From the study of the development of human intelligence, in all
instructions, and through all times, the discovery arises of a great
fundamental law, to which it is necessarily subject, and which has a
solid foundation of proof, both in the facts of our organisation and in
our historical experience. The law is this: that each of our leading
conceptions—each branch of our knowledge—passes successively
through three different theoretical conditions; the theological, ou
ﬁctitious; the metaphysical, or abstract; and the scientiﬁc, ou
positive. Autrement dit, the human mind, by its nature, employs in
its progress three methods of philosophising, the character of which
is essentially different, and even radically opposed: namely, le
theological method, the metaphysical, and the positive. Ainsi
arise three philosophies, or general systems of conceptions on the
aggregate of phenomena, each of which excludes the others. The ﬁrst
is the necessary point of departure of the human understanding, et
the third is its ﬁxed and deﬁnitive state. The second is merely a state
of transition. (Comte 1989, pp. 35–6)

Such “great fundamental law,” which Comte claims to be as universal as
Newton’s law of gravitation, has given the traditional historian of science,
or at least the positivist historian, a generalization, a basis for the extension
in time of what I have called the justiﬁcation core of the OHS.9

9. As Koyré says, according to Condorcet the history of humanity shows that progress

is real but it “is by no means inevitable and fatal” (Koyré 1948, pp. 134–5).

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Perspectives on Science

383

Concluding this section, one can say that the Newtonian physics’ ex-
traordinary success has led to the idea of autonomy of science in relation
to philosophy, by delimitating a territory of its own and a concept of sci-
ence, which was identiﬁed with Newton’s science. And this idea of auton-
omy of science ended up promoting the constitution of the history of
science itself as an autonomous discipline (See Koyré 1963, p. 849, quoted
au-dessus de). This discipline, which we now identify as OHS, tells the story of
how the extraordinary conquest of science happened. A science that, avec
Newton, as it was believed, “once and for ever, solved the riddle of the
universe” (Koyré 1965, p. 18, in passage quoted above).

The OHS tells the story of the process known as the Scientiﬁc Revolu-
tion, the “history of progress” (Koyré), the history of man’s struggle to
conquer science against ignorance and superstition, as Kuhn said in Struc-
ture (Kuhn 1970a, pp. 1–2, quoted in the next section). Or the history of
overcoming the stages of religion and metaphysics, in Comte’s terms, avec
emphasis on the episodes that contributed to the achievement of the sci-
entiﬁc or positive stage, which he regarded as excluding and deﬁnitive.10
The OHS would be questioned by a competing historiography, le
NHS, only at a time when Newtonian science would not be seen with
the same eyes, due to a rupture as represented by the theory of relativity.
But it is necessary to remember, as Kuhn does in Structure, that classical
physics at that time was still considered by some interpreters as a special
case of contemporary physics (see below). This is to say that these
interpreters did not conceive a rupture between Einstein’s physics and
Newton’s—which would extend the reach of OHS by also including the
twentieth century as part of the cumulative development of science.

3. Kuhn’s Critiques of OHS
One can say that Kuhn proposes his NHS essentially as a positive counter-
position to two negative aspects he saw in the OHS. Firstly, whiggism or
anachronism. Secondly, what can be called, for lack of a better denomina-
tion, false reduction or false compatibility between theories.11

With regard to whiggism or anachronism, Kuhn writes in Essential
Tension that the aim of the older histories of science “was to clarify and
deepen an understanding of contemporary scientiﬁc methods or concepts

9. As Koyré says, according to Condorcet the history of humanity shows that progress

is real but it “is by no means inevitable and fatal” (Koyré 1948, pp. 134–5).

10. For an interpretation from the NHS perspective, voir, Par exemple, Koyré 1971,

p. 254.
11.

I do not include here Kuhn’s considerations that I have associated in Pinto de
Oliveira 2012 with the genesis of the NHS. They will be discussed in a further paper
on the justiﬁcation of the NHS.

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384

Kuhn, Condorcet, and Comte

by displaying their evolution.” To this end, the historian “described when,
où, and how the elements that in his day constituted its subject matter
and presumptive method had come into being” (Kuhn 1977, p. 107; voir
also Hoyningen-Huene 2012). And Kuhn is even more explicit in a
well-known passage of Structure:

If science is the constellation of facts, theories, and methods collected
in current texts, then scientists are the men who, successfully or not,
have striven to contribute one or another element to that particular
constellation. Scientiﬁc development becomes the piecemeal process
by which these items have been added, singly and in combination, à
the ever growing stockpile that constitutes scientiﬁc technique and
connaissance. And history of science becomes the discipline that
chronicles both these successive increments and the obstacles that
have inhibited their accumulation. (Kuhn 1970a, pp. 1–2; see the
entire paragraph)

In opposition to this, the NHS would naturally offer a non-whiggish
approche, a contextualized reading of historical texts. Kuhn directly com-
pares the two approaches in another well-known passage of Structure:

Rather than seeking the permanent contributions of an older science
to our present vantage, they attempt to display the historical
integrity of that science in its own time. They ask, Par exemple, pas
about the relation of Galileo’s views to those of modern science, mais
rather about the relationship between his views and those of his
group, c'est à dire., his teachers, contemporaries, and immediate successors in
the sciences. En outre, they insist upon studying the opinions of
that group and other similar ones from the viewpoint—usually very
different from that of modern science—that gives those opinions the
maximum internal coherence and the closest possible ﬁt to nature.
(Kuhn 1970a, p. 3)12

With respect to what I consider Kuhn’s second main critique of the
OHS—the critique to false reduction or false compatibility between
theories—Kuhn expresses it directly through the relations between
Newton and Einstein’s theories. He writes in Structure that the logical
positivist interpretation

12. And that is, according to Kuhn, what Koyré exemplarily does (Kuhn 1970b, p. 68,
1970un, p. 3). On Kuhn and Koyré, see Pinto de Oliveira 2012, especially sections 3 et 4.

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Perspectives on Science

385

would restrict the range and meaning of an accepted theory so that it
could not possibly conﬂict with any later theory that made
predictions about some of the same natural phenomena. The best-
known and the strongest case for this restricted conception of a
scientiﬁc theory emerges in discussions of the relation between
contemporary Einsteinian dynamics and the older dynamical
equations that descend from Newton’s Principia. (…) The gist of
these objections can be developed as follows. Relativistic dynamics
cannot have shown Newtonian dynamics to be wrong, for Newtonian
dynamics is still used with great success by most engineers and,
in selected applications, by many physicists. (…) Par exemple, si
Newtonian theory is to provide a good approximate solution, le
relative velocities of the bodies considered must be small compared
with the velocity of light. Subject to this condition and a few others,
Newtonian theory seems to be derivable from Einsteinian, of which
it is therefore a special case. Mais, the objection continues, no theory
can possibly conﬂict with one of its special cases. (Kuhn 1970a,
pp. 98–9)

This seems to have been the interpretation that prevailed during Kuhn’s
formative years as a physicist at Harvard, or at least until 1947. I say this
because Kuhn states in the introduction to The Essential Tension that he
discovered his “ﬁrst scientiﬁc revolution” that year when investigating,
from a historical point of view, the relationships between Aristotle’s phys-
ics and Galileo’s and Newton’s theories (Kuhn 1977, p. xiii). In Structure,
cependant, he already has a critical perspective on the relationship between
Newton and Einstein and replies:

Though an out-of-date theory can always be viewed as a special case
of its up-to-date successor, it must be transformed for the purpose.
And the transformation is one that can be undertaken only with the
advantages of hindsight, the explicit guidance of the more recent
théorie. En outre, even if that transformation were a legitimate
device to employ in interpreting the older theory, the result of its
application would be a theory so restricted that it could only restate
what was already known. Because of its economy, that restatement
would have utility, but it could not sufﬁce for the guidance of
recherche. (Kuhn 1970a, pp. 102–103)13

13.

See also pp. 139–40 on Galileo-Newton relation.

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386

Kuhn, Condorcet, and Comte

Kuhn explicitly refers only to Philip Wiener, who is not an historian, comme
an example of the traditional conception (Kuhn 1970a, p. 98n2). But he
could also criticize an historian for defending such a position. In a passage
from the preface to the ﬁrst edition (1954) of his book on the Scientiﬁc
Revolution (et, very signiﬁcantly, excluded from the second edition, pub-
léché 30 years later), Rupert Hall writes:

However great the revision of ideas of matter, temps, space and
causality enforced during the last half-century, it was a revision of the
content, not the structure of science. In its progress since 1800 le
later discoveries have always embraced the earlier: Newton was not
proved wrong by Einstein, nor Lavoisier by Rutherford. Le
formulation of a scientiﬁc proposition may be modiﬁed, et
limitations to its applicability recognized, without affecting its
propriety in the context to which it was originally found appropriate.
(Hall 1954, p. xiii).14

Although Hall maintains this position in 1954, Koyré writes in 1951

from a different point of view, closer to Kuhn’s Structure:

We no longer live in the world of Newtonian ideas, nor even of
Maxwellian ideas. That is why we are able to look at them from
within and from outside, to analyze their structures, to perceive the
causes of their insufﬁciencies. We are better equipped to understand
the sense of medieval speculation about the composition of the
continuum and the “latitude of forms”, the evolution of the structure
of mathematical and physical thought over the last century in its
effort to create new forms of reasoning, and the critique of the
intuitive, logical, and axiomatic foundations of its validity. (Koyré
1973, p. 15; see the entire passage, pp. 14–15)15

Reviewing Kuhn’s two critiques of the OHS, we might be inclined to
say that they do not contemplate what I considered the justiﬁcation core of

14. Hall’s work is cited in Structure (p. 67n1), but Kuhn refers to another passage and

to another subject (the Copernican revolution).

15. Nous ne vivons plus dans le monde des idées newtoniennes, ni même maxwel-
liennes, et de ce fait nous sommes capables de les envisager à la fois du dedans et du dehors,
d’analyser leurs structures, d’apercevoir les causes de leurs défaillances comme nous sommes
mieux armés pour comprendre et le sens des spéculations médiévales sur la composition du
continu et la “latitude des formes,” et l’évolution de la structure de la pensée mathématique
et physique au cours du siècle dernier dans son effort de création de formes nouvelles de
raisonnement, et son retour critique sur les fondements intuitifs, logiques, axiomatiques de
sa validité.

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Perspectives on Science

387

the OHS, in the sense that one can say that the OHS, d'un côté, et
the NHS of normal periods, on the other, converge or overlap as a history
of cumulative progress. C'est, Kuhn would reject the projection of the
justiﬁcation core in the past (the ﬁrst critique) and its extension to the fu-
ture (the second critique), but not the core itself.

Condorcet himself may be summoned to a rapprochement between the
justiﬁcation core of the OHS and Kuhn’s concept of normal science. In the
passage quoted above, in which he says that a hundred years of work have
conﬁrmed Newton’s law, Condorcet also points out that “every time in
which an apparent deviation has presented itself, the transient uncertainty
has soon become a subject of new triumph to the science” (Condorcet
2011, p. 104). And ahead he states:

Natural philosophy, gradually delivered from the vague explanations
of Descartes, in the same manner as it before was disembarrassed
from the absurdities of the schools, is now nothing more than the art
of interrogating nature by experiment, for the purpose of afterwards
deducing more general facts by computation. (…) so that philosophy
is not only enriched every day with new truths, but the truths already known
have been more exactly ascertained; so that not only an immense mass of new
facts have been observed and analysed, but the whole has been submitted in
detail to methods of greater strictness. (Condorcet 2011, pp. 105–106, mon
emphasis; see also p. 133)

Kuhn, in his turn, in dealing with normal science in Structure, makes
extensive use of the case of Newtonian theory. According to him, “no
other work known to the history of science has simultaneously permitted
so large an increase in both the scope and precision of research” (Kuhn
1970un, p. 30). This development was a task of Newtonian normal
science, which advanced in the nineteenth century (see Kuhn 1970a,
pp. 30–34).

Ainsi, Condorcet presents a description that could be considered typical
of the development of a Kuhnian normal science. So Kuhn, at least in prin-
ciple, could not refuse what we have called the justiﬁcation core of the
OHS, about two hundred years of success, corresponding to the develop-
ment of what would be Newtonian normal science.

Cependant, although Kuhn does not expressly refer to it in Structure, it is
possible to show that he also makes serious restrictions to the justiﬁcation
core of the OHS. He seems to reject the idea that it can be understood as
the history or description of Newtonian normal science. Essentially, what
Kuhn writes about Einstein and Newton’s physics in Structure would apply
to the relationship between the NHS and the OHS:

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388

Kuhn, Condorcet, and Comte

In later texts he seems to reject the idea that the justiﬁcation core of the
OHS can be understood as the history or description of Newtonian normal
science. He says in Encounter that for long years the scientiﬁc development
was viewed as the routine result of applying “the scientiﬁc method” (Kuhn
1970b, p. 67). In another text from the same period, reinforcing the quo-
tation marks in “the scientiﬁc method,” Kuhn even speaks of “the myth of
method” (Kuhn 1977, p. 150).16

When he uses this expression, he disqualiﬁes the OHS, not only as be-
ing incapable of dealing speciﬁcally with normal Newtonian science, mais
also because of its inability to account for the development of science as a
whole. He speaks of “the myth of method” precisely to restrict OHS’s idea
that the Scientiﬁc Revolution would mean the ultimate conquest of the
scientiﬁc method. And it would then be necessary to refer explicitly to
the NHS perspective to determine the cut, establish the mutatis mutandis
adequacy limit of traditional historiography. It would apply to normal
Newtonian science only at the given limit and with the constraints deter-
mined by the NHS.

Ainsi, Kuhn’s general critique of the OHS is completed by denial of the
very justiﬁcation core of the OHS. Kuhn denies that the OHS would be a
special case of the NHS, that the core should be viewed simpliciter as the
Newtonian normal science. For Kuhn, the OHS sees the Newtonian sci-
ence superlatively as the science (and the conquest of the scientiﬁc method)
and recognizes it as the culmination of the Scientiﬁc Revolution, not as a
scientiﬁc revolution among others scientiﬁc revolutions.

Final Considerations

4.
Kuhn does not seem to do justice to the OHS when he calls it unhistorical,
suggesting a summary disqualiﬁcation in the face of the NHS, lequel
would be effectively historical. As Cassirer (to whom Koyré refers in his
paper on Condorcet) observes regarding the vision of romanticism about
the eighteenth century:

16. This idea is ampliﬁed in a long passage of The Road since Structure, of which a

partial quotation does not avail (see Kuhn 2000, pp. 107–109, 119).

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Perspectives on Science

389

The common opinion that the eighteenth century was an
“unhistorical” century, is not and cannot be historically justiﬁed.
This opinion is rather a battle cry coined by the Romantic Movement
when it entered the ﬁeld against the philosophy of the
Enlightenment. (…) This movement, which devotes itself so whole-
heartedly to the past in order to grasp its pristine reality, fails to live
up to its ideal when it encounters that past with which it is still in
direct contact. The principle which it establishes for the historically
remote proves unmanageable when applied to the immediate past.
Romanticism was historically blind to the generation of its own
fathers. It never attempted to judge the Enlightenment by its own
normes, and it was unable to view without polemical bias the
conception of the historical world which the eighteenth century had
formulated. (Cassirer 1951, pp. 197–8)

Despite his concerns with contextualization as a historian, Kuhn, ab-
sorbed in his campaign in favor of the NHS, does not seem to give proper
attention to the historical context of OHS. He could be a victim of histor-
ical blindness, as Cassirer puts it, ou, getting to a more speciﬁc diagnosis,
historical presbyopia, which refers to the difﬁculty of seeing up close. Il
himself seems to admit this when he writes about another subject (the iso-
lation of the history of science from general history as disciplines):

My topic is one I have lived with rather than studied. The data I bring
to its analysis are correspondingly personal and impressionistic rather
than systematic (…). Partisanship I shall try to avoid, but without
hope of entire success, for I take up the subject as an advocate, a man
much concerned with some central impediments to the development
and exploitation of his special ﬁeld. (Kuhn 1977, p. 128)

It is not very interesting, in this context, to discuss whether Kuhn is a
romantic or not, as David Bloor suggests (Bloor 1991, p. 62; see also Pinto
de Oliveira 2012, p.121). Both Kuhn and the romantics seem to have a
common, more general type of blindness or historical presbyopia that
would affect all historical agents involved in a debate or who are interested
in the results of the ongoing historical process. They are in direct dispute
with their interlocutors and do not act towards them in a manner consis-
tent with their general discourse.

And more than that, it should be remembered that in Structure Kuhn

writes:

Like the choice between competing political institutions, que
between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between

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Kuhn, Condorcet, and Comte

incompatible modes of community life. Because it has that character,
the choice is not and cannot be determined merely by the evaluative
procedures characteristic of normal science, for these depend in part
upon a particular paradigm, and that paradigm is at issue. Quand
paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice,
their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its own paradigm to
argue in that paradigm’s defense. The resulting circularity does not,
bien sûr, make the arguments wrong or even ineffectual. (Kuhn
1970un, p. 94)

While it may be said that some historical presbyopia has been manifested
in the case of the historiographies of science, I think it is fairer to say that
Kuhn, when he considers the OHS as unhistorical, is in fact pronouncing
himself from the point of view of the NHS. Perfectly inserted in the con-
text of the passage just quoted, Kuhn would only be stating his own “par-
adigm” (as romantics did with theirs). The OHS is unhistorical in the
perspective of the NHS. This means, as we have already pointed out, que
Kuhn disqualiﬁes the anachronism of the projection into the past, le
extension to the future of the justiﬁcation core, and the very core of the
OHS.

Ainsi, if the OHS has the right, in its own view, to be “whiggish” (avec
quotation marks, because from its point of view there is a continuity of
past and present, strict cumulative progress in science), Kuhn has the
droite, from the NHS’s point of view, to consider the OHS as unhistorical.
Donc, it would not be a psychological issue, from mere human
fallibility—the inability of the historical agent to elevate reason above
his interests (historical presbyopia)—, but from something broader and
more complex (see Kuhn 2000, p. 108). What happens in science, accord-
ing to Kuhn, is that the use of the paradigm to defend the paradigm is
an inseparable part of the complex situation of choice (between incommen-
surable theories).

And one can observe, in the historiography of science as well, with all
its consequences, a new instance of inter-theoretical incommensurability.17
A critique of Kuhn by the Popperian Gerard Radnitzky reveals the nature
of the inter-theoretical rupture in the historiography of science. He does
not deny the fact that Kuhn does justice to what he calls “obvious sense of
historicity” but maintains that Kuhn does not recognize the historicity
proper to science. Radnitzky writes:

17. Kuhn himself says of a “historiograﬁcal revolution” (see section 1 au-dessus de). On in-
commensurability and Kuhn’s use of the concept out of the context of science see Oberheim
and Hoyningen-Huene 2018 (section 2.2.4) and Pinto de Oliveira 2017.

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391

Like any human activity, scientiﬁc research has a historical
dimension, it is changing and it is contingent (…) This is a trivial
observation. Over and above this obvious sense of historicity science
is a historical phenomenon in a deeper sense, a sense in which art,
literature, political institutions etc. are not. Science aims at cognitive
progress, at the growth and improvement of knowledge, and the idea
of cognitive progress is constitutive of the meaning of science.
Moreover it is the only ﬁeld where there can be no doubt that there
has been and is progress. The relationship between the passage of
time and the growth of knowledge is not a random affair (Radnitzky
1982, pp. 55–56, my emphasis).

Radnitzky respectively speaks of “trivial historicity” and “essential his-
toricity,” a superﬁcial sense and a deeper sense of historicity (pp. 63, 71),
and this conception is counterposed by Kuhn’s following passage in Essen-
tial Tension:

Seen through their writings [new historians’ ones], science is not the
same enterprise as the one represented in either of the older
traditions. For the ﬁrst time it has become potentially a fully historical
entreprise, like music, literature, philosophy, or law. (Kuhn 1977, p. 150,
my emphasis)18

Ainsi, from Kuhn and other new historians’ standpoint, science is not
“superlunary,” to use the picturesque expression of Aristotle’s cosmology,
and should be treated without privilege, in the same way as the other
(“sublunary”) disciplines.19 In fact, the NHS is not stricto senso a new his-
toriography. It is the same historiography used for other disciplines, lequel
in the twentieth century begins to be applied to science as well. En fait, it
is the ‘old’ historiography of science that presents itself as new among the
historical disciplines, deﬁned by a new and very special type of object: sci-
ence. Science would be a privileged discipline from the epistemological
point of view, the natural place of objectivity, rationality and progress,
and thus deserving of an equally special historiography, a special way of
telling its history.

18. About the relation of science to art and other disciplines, see Pinto de Oliveira

2017.
19.

“According to Aristotle, the underside of the sphere of the moon divides the uni-
verse into two totally disparate regions, ﬁlled with different sorts of matter and subject to
different laws. The terrestrial region in which man lives is the region of variety and change,
birth and death, generation and corruption. The celestial region is, in contrast, eternal and
changeless” (Kuhn 1995, p. 91).

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392

Kuhn, Condorcet, and Comte

We must go back to what was exposed in section 2 of this article to un-
derstand this idea in its proper context. We have seen that, given the ex-
traordinary success of Newton’s physics, Condorcet and others speak in the
eighteenth century of an autonomy of science in relation to philosophy. Et
Comte and the positivists, in the following century, speak of the emergence
of the “scientiﬁc or positive stage,” deﬁnitively overcoming, as Comte
stresses, the religious and metaphysical stages of human knowledge.

We can say that for Kuhn the idea of science does not imply that phi-
losophy (or metaphysics) lagged behind, as an outdated stage of the devel-
opment of knowledge. There is no autonomy of science in relation to
philosophy in the face of the success of Newton’s theory. There is a reversal
from this perspective in twentieth-century science. En fait, for Kuhn, sci-
ence is, as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, embedded in
philosophy. Not in its more pragmatic institutional aspects, bien sûr, mais
from an epistemological point of view.20 This is also what Koyré thinks, comme
can be seen in the book by Gérard Jorland, signiﬁcantly named La Science
dans la Philosophie.21 Jorland writes:

The unity of thought, as conceived by Koyré in his study on
scientiﬁc revolution of the seventeenth century, is the meeting or a
mixture of science, philosophy, and theology, c'est, of physics,
metaphysics, and theology. What positivism establishes in history as
stages or states of development of thought, Alexandre Koyré gathers
as a unit. The principle of all his investigations is, donc, un
antipositivist principle. (Jorland 1981, p. 50)

And Koyré himself writes in a text in which he criticizes the positivist
Philip Frank:

the history of scientiﬁc thought teaches us therefore (at least I will try
to sustain this): 1. That scientiﬁc thought has never been entirely
separated from philosophical thought; 2. That the great scientiﬁc
evolutions have always been determined by subversions or changes of
philosophical conceptions; 3. That scientiﬁc thought—I speak of the
physical sciences—does not develop in vacuo, but is always within a

20. Considering the caveat, this is not incompatible with what Kuhn writes in “The
History and the Philosophy of Science”: “Until the end of the seventeenth century, much of
science was philosophy. After the disciplines separated, they continued to interact in often
consequential ways” (Kuhn 1977, p. 10).

21.

See also Larvor 2003, p. 381. One of the anonymous reviewers called my attention
to this text. I was already acquainted with it, but I did not remember some of Larvor’s
remarks about Koyré (which include a reference to Jorland), similar to my own.

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Perspectives on Science

393

framework of ideas, of fundamental principles, of axiomatic evidences
que, in general, were considered as belonging exclusively to
philosophy. (Koyré 1971, p. 256)22

Donc, Kuhn and Koyré reject the supposed independence of sci-
ence, which would have occurred in the eighteenth century from the con-
solidation of the Scientiﬁc Revolution with the work of Newton.23 This
idea of the epistemological emancipation of science was for a long time
a common historical place, suggested as a trace of elementary historical
connaissance. But for Kuhn and Koyré, it is, in fact, a very clear trait of
an enlightened, positivist conception of knowledge, understood as an
overcoming of prejudices and superstition, and also of religion and
philosophy.24

To conclude, let’s turn from science to its historiography. The OHS is
the historiography of an extraordinary epistemological object—science—
supposedly emancipated from metaphysics and producing its equally ex-
traordinary results through the application of the scientiﬁc method. Ce
contributes to the understanding of the isolation of the history of science
from the (général) history that Kuhn observed in the 1970s, and about
which he wrote a speciﬁc article, reproduced in Essential Tension. Là,
he says that historians are victims of

a widespread conviction that scientists discover truth by the quasi-
mechanical (and perhaps not very interesting) application of scientiﬁc
method. Having accounted for the seventeenth-century discovery of
method, the historian may, and indeed does, leave the sciences to
shift for themselves. (…) With their method in hand, the sciences

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22.

“L’histoire de la pensée scientiﬁque nous enseigne donc (du moins essaierai-je de le
soutenir): 1° Que la pensée scientiﬁque n’a jamais été entièrement séparée de la pensée
philosophique; 2° Que les grandes évolutions scientiﬁques ont toujours été déterminées
par des bouleversements ou changements de conceptions philosophiques; 3° Que la pensée
scientiﬁque—je parle des sciences physiques—ne se développe pas in vacuo, mais se trouve
toujours à l’intérieur d’un cadre d’idées, de principes fondamentaux, d’évidences axioma-
tiques qui, habituellement, ont été considérés comme appartenant en propre à la philoso-
phie.” See also Koyré 1971, p. 264, and Koyré 1944, pp. 93–4.

23.

For the relations between science and philosophy, see Pinto de Oliveira 2020

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(forthcoming).

24.

It is present even in an unorthodox logical positivist such as Neurath: “One sci-
ence after another has cut itself loose from philosophy. (…) The last science to have the
umbilical cord connecting it to philosophy severed is psychology. And what remains behind
is a dead, deaf mass. (…) The end of metaphysics is demonstrable precisely in the case of psychology.
Bien sûr, from the fact that a regular science is now possible without any academic philos-
ophy, without any metaphysics, it does not follow that all scientists make use of the pos-
sibility now open to them” (Neurath 1987, pp. 10–11).

394

Kuhn, Condorcet, and Comte

cease to be historical, a perception for which there is no parallel in
the historian’s view of other disciplines. (Kuhn 1977, pp. 137, 155)

And also:

… just because Hermeticism was an avowedly mystical and
irrational movement, recognition of its roles [in the history of
science] should help to make science more palatable to historians
repelled by what many have taken to be a quasi-mechanical
entreprise, governed by pure reason and cold fact. (Kuhn 1977,
p. 159)

Ainsi, the history of science, still represented by the OHS, is supra-
historical or unhistorical for general historians (and also historians of other
disciplines) because they are led to consider science an activity almost me-
chanical, almost entirely due to the mechanical application of the scientiﬁc
method (Kuhn 1977, p, 137). And this, above all, is why these historians
somehow segregate the history of science. After all, what is the interest in
being the historian of an unhistorical activity? An activity in which the
context is practically irrelevant and there is almost no circumstance?
Historian of a single, vast, “normal science”? (see Kuhn 2000, p. 13).

A “new” historiography is opposed to the OHS, a historiography of an
ordinary, “sublunary” object, a trivial historiography (in the expression of
Radnitzky) as those of the other disciplines (art, philosophy), more atten-
tive to vicissitudes and contingencies. But it must be said that the complex
nature of the historiographical choice between the OHS and the NHS as
yet another instance of inter-theoretical incommensurability does not allow
the choice to be solved only on the basis of logical arguments. As in the
case of science for Kuhn, it is necessary to resort to the community—in
this case, the community of historians of science. Donc, what I have
sought to offer here is only an outline of the OHS’s justiﬁcation strategy
(“the required stage setting” as Kuhn says) and the arguments with which
Kuhn seems to have participated in the debate. The debate itself and
the broader historical process of which it is part are subjects for a future
paper.25

25. On the stage setting, see Kuhn 2000, pp. 112, 141, 234. On the social character
of science, see Wray 2011. In the ﬁrst of the Thalheimer Lectures (1984), edited by Pablo
Melogno in Spanish (Kuhn 2017), Kuhn seems particularly clear on this subject. See also
Melogno 2019.

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Perspectives on Science

395

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