968 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
the second reaction bothered him more—as "favorable" (p. 207) to his work but, in
his view, "not quite right" in granting him too much credit. He states that, whereas
he had certainly hoped to catch the attention of scientists, he cannot understand
why scholars in nonscientific disciplines should have found his work enlightening.
After all, he claims (p. 208), he had only tried to explain the classical punctuational
views of the arts and humanities to practitioners of another field—science—where
social and philosophical tradition had long clouded this evident point. (The word
"punctuated" appears in this passage):
To one last reaction to this book, my answer must be of a different sort. A
number of those who have taken pleasure from it have done so less because
it illuminates science than because they read its main theses as applicable to
many other fields as well. I see what they mean and would not like to
discourage their attempts to extend the position, but their reaction has
nevertheless puzzled me. To the extent that the book portrays scientific
development as a succession of tradition-bound periods punctuated by
noncumulative breaks, its theses are undoubtedly of wide applicability. But
they should be, for they are borrowed from other fields. Historians of
literature, of music, of the arts, of political development, and of many other
human activities have long described their subjects in the same way.
Periodization in terms of revolutionary breaks in style, taste, and
institutional structure have been among their standard tools. If I have been
original with respect to concepts like these, it has mainly been by applying
them to the sciences, fields which had been widely thought to develop in a
different way.To this passage, I can only respond that I see what be means, but I also think
that Kuhn undercuts the range of his own originality and influence by misreading
the very social context that inspired his work. Indeed, the ethos of science—the
conviction that our history may be read as an ever closer approach to an objective
natural reality obtained by making better and better factual observations under the
unvarying guidance of a timeless and rational procedure called "the scientific
method"—does establish the most receptive context imaginable for mistaken
notions about gradualistic and linear progressionism in the history of human
thought. Indeed also, the traditions of disciplines that practice or study human
artistic creativity—with their concepts of discrete styles and revolutionary breaks
triggered by "genius" innovators—should have established punctuational models
as preferable, if not canonical.
But, as Kuhn acknowledges, his book enjoyed a substantial vogue among
artists and humanists, who also felt surprised and enlightened by his punctuational
theory for the history of ideas. I think that Kuhn underestimated the "back
influence" of science upon preexisting fields in humanistic study. Eiseley (1958)
labeled the formative era of evolutionary theory as "Darwin's century," and we
must never underestimate the influence of the Darwinian revolution, and of other
19th century notions, particularly the uniformitarian