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I have been rather stunned by the easy identification Wade Hands and now 
John Davis have made between the work of Thomas Kuhn and self-identified 
workers in SSK.  In a host of ways Kuhn's work is very far from either 
traditional or SSK sociology .. and Kuhn and a number of others have been 
very clear in rejecting the account of his work provided by sociologists 
and traditional philosophers of science. Yet just this version of Kuhn -- 
the version of the sociologists and traditional analytic philosophers of 
science seems to be the one adopted by economists working on the problems 
of the advance of science.  Like the work of Wittgenstein, Hayek, and 
Polanyi, Kuhn's work cuts against the traditional 'theoretical' categories 
of traditional 'atomic' & 'holistic' social science as provided by most 
economists and sociologists.  As a scientific explanatory framework Kuhn's 
work really can be modeled as an invisible hand process which combines 
elements of the sort of invisible hand processes found in the work of 
Darwin, Hayek, and Wittgenstein.  I demonstrate this in several working 
papers (now available on the internet at 
http://members.aol.com/gregransom/ransom.htm).  These processes are at once 
'institutional', embodied, and included selective elements, while as 
explanations they reject or are not dependent on traditional 'rational 
choice' or 'holistic causal factors' of the kind reified in traditional 
neo-classical economics and holistic sociology.  Work of this kind, 
developing aspects of Kuhn's own work, can be found in the writings of 
Walter Weimer and Don Lavoie, among others. 
 
The problem with reading Kuhn through the lens of the traditional 
sociologist and philosopher of science is that the significance of the 
insight that science is not ahistorical or that science has a social 
dimension becomes something else again than what can be found in Kuhn's own 
account.  In fact, you loose the most substantive contributions found in 
Kuhn on the nature of science, and the process of its development and 
advance -- you end up steam rolling over the substantive insights found in 
Kuhn regarding the primacy of training with examples -- an element of 
science with an inherently universalizing dimension. But this is only one 
example among a host of them. 
 
REFERENCES 
 
Don Lavoie, _National Economic Planning:  What is Left?_, 1985. 
 
Walter Weimer, _Notes on Methodology of Scientific Research_, 1979. 
 
Walter Weimer, "For and Against Method:  Reflections on Feyerabend 
and the Foibels of Philosophy",  _Pre/Text_, Vol. 1-2, 1980, 161-203. 
 
Walter Weimer, "Beyond Suppe in Methodology", _New Ideas Psychol._, 
Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 115-118. 
 
Greg Ransom 
Dept. of Philosophy 
UC-Riverside 
 
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