Betsey Price indicated in an earlier message that she would be interested  
in collecting comments regarding Kuhn's influence in the history of  
economics and the social sciences. I would be interested in people sharing  
such comments with the entire HES list. 
 
After posting the Kuhn obituary from the NY Times, I decided to forward  
you my own brief remarks about Kuhn: 
 
Kuhn's influence on my own work has been substantial, although not always 
explicitly acknowledged. As a high school student, I was taught by my 
father and my other teachers to treat different philosophical systems, and 
different approaches to the social sciences, as different "ways of seeing" 
the world -- "worldviews" was the word we used back then. When I 
encountered Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ in an 
undergraduate intellectual history course, it immediately struck me as 
being "right" because it re-inforced the perspectival approach I had 
already developed. Eventually I decided to pursue grad. work in economics 
because I was interested in immersing myself in the economist's "way of 
thinking" in order to understand the important role that economics had 
come to play in the modern world. Despite the outcome of discussions of 
possible paradigm shifts within economics (was Keynesianism--or 
marginalism, rat.expections, etc.--a revolution?), I have always 
interpreted Kuhn first and foremost in terms of the perspectival approach 
to scientific ideas that I first appreciated in his work. [I realize now 
that my reading of Kuhn was strongly influenced by my own phenomenological 
views.] 
 
Kuhn's work has been foundational for my work, but not always definitive. 
For example, I remember long discussions with my philosophy of science 
counterparts in graduate school over whether there was any sense of 
progress in a Kuhnian framework. I said then what I would say now: it 
seemed to me that Kuhn (and I, by extension) was more interested in the 
differences between paradigms than in the possibility of constructing an 
account of movement between them that constituted progress (toward what?). 
But today I would add two things: (i) an account of scientific ideas which 
ignores scientific practice is at best lop-sided (from his later work, I 
think Kuhn would agree); and (ii) scientific activity provides a set of 
"resistances and accomodations" between ideas and practices that makes 
the transition between paradigms less "revolutionary" or at least less 
cataclysmic than the popular image of Kuhnian philosophy of science 
suggested. 
 
Kuhn's work has also informed my teaching. My history of economic thought  
class is primarily an exercise in Kuhnian philosophy and history of  
science: my purpose is to get students to "see" the different perspectives  
that past thinkers have brought to their study of economic activity, and  
begin to interpret the transitional periods (understood now in less  
"revolutionary" terms). 
 
Ross 
 
Ross B. Emmett                Editor, HES and Co-manager CIRLA-L 
Augustana University College 
Camrose, Alberta CANADA   T4V 2R3 
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