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 voice: (403) 679-1517 fax: (403) 679-1129 e-mail: [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask] URL: http://www.augustana.ab.ca/~emmettr