...I tend to agree with [Paul] Gottfried that historicism, far from being a “heresy,” is actually compatible with a conservative outlook. In fact, a historicist reading of the past can empower conservatives in this day and age, when the managerial states of the West seek to curtail human freedoms in the name of “science,” as they infamously did during the recent coronavirus pandemic.
...the main reason for conservatives to consult Kuhn’s book is its subversive, historicist reading of the history of science. Kuhn made a distinction between how science ought to develop and how it has actually evolved over time. He argued that the history of science did not unfold incrementally or progressively towards a greater and greater understanding of nature’s laws. Instead, he asserted that science developed discontinuously. It underwent revolutions, when one paradigm was replaced by another. Just as Copernican astronomy supplanted the theories of Ptolemy, Newtonian mechanics replaced Aristotelian physics, and so on.
...The implicit critique in Kuhn’s book of the fallibility of science became more powerful in the following years....
...It is all the more surprising, then, that once the pandemic started, Kuhn’s critique of scientific knowledge fell into a memory hole. All of a sudden, public health researchers and officials were viewed as the custodians of expert knowledge that was beyond question....
...Kuhn’s historicist critique of science ought to have made the talking heads of the mainstream media, as well as Democratic political operatives, more humble about invoking the authority of science. If Kuhn taught anything, it’s that when we talk about “science,” we are actually talking about the fallible beliefs of scientists, flesh-and-blood men and women who hold the biases typical of a professional community embedded in a particular moment in history.
...Kuhn, in the words of his former student Jed Buchwald, did not think that “there was much meaning to asserting that science evolves more closely to Truth, for he did not consider such a thing to be accessible.” Yet Kuhn still believed in a kind of “progress,” which held that over the course of time, successfully solved problems did multiply in number. For instance, while entirely different paradigms divide medieval Aristotelian physicists from scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today, the latter still benefit from the accumulated trial-and-error of their forebears.
...For conservatives living under a Joe Biden presidency, historicism is an invaluable tool for interrogating what the state and its institutions tell us to believe.
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Originally Posted by RMNIXON
