History, Community and Theory

In the postscript to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn makes an important remark that allows his concept of a "disciplinary matrix" to be used to foster reflexivity within a discipline. He points out that the phenonoma he investigates (the sciences) by historical means are nothing other than what "scientists themselves" (i.e., scientists when they are working within their paradigm: when they are being themselves as scientists), would simply call "theories". He blames philosophy for limiting the sense of this word, and "would be glad if the term can ultimately be recaptured" for his purposes (SSR, PS[2]).

These purposes require a recognition that "theorising" amounts to struggling with a "constellation of group commitments", i.e., elements to which the given scientific community is committed in its "normal" practices, and is therefore not a purely abstract activity.

The relevant elements are precisely those that we have been learning how to describe. Since Kuhn is keen to distinguish between "communities" (community structures) and "paradigms" (disciplinary matrices) analytically, however, it is important to keep in mind that a struggle with the community is not necessarily an instance of theorising. We know someone is theorising when they are engaging with very specific elements, and we characterise the specifically "theoretical" struggle by describing engagements with them.

Paradigms are abstractions of scientific practice, and while they are contingent on historical forces, they mark a "here and now" of this practice that we are able to describe independently of the history that formed it. Describing a disciplinary matrix allows us to see more clearly how the things of immediate experience "look" to researchers working in a particular field (theories, said Pierre Bourdieu, are programmes of perception). But they do not yet explain how things came to look that way, i.e., the history of a way of seeing things.

This way of putting it may seem a bit at odds with Kuhn's historical approach (and suggests his nascent sociological orientation) so it should be added that Kuhn would encourage us to learn the history as well. The reason to stress the "abstract" and "ahistorical" nature of paradigms is that it answers the important question, "A history of what?" when looking at the sciences. We are not interested in the complete social and political history of particular communities that call themselves scientific. We are interested in the history of precisely those aspects of practice in these communities that may be considered "knowledge bearing", i.e., those aspects that shape, form or "gestalt" experience in ways that allow us to make sense of it. The specific sense we are able to make of what goes on is contingent on the current paradigm. And it is that contingency we are trying to understand.

The orthodox description of a disciplinary matrix, then, brings us into the "presence" of research, i.e., allows us to understand how objects can emerge in experience in their "immediate reality". This immediacy, or rather this sense of immediacy is always itself a mediated affair, and the components of the disciplinary matrix are crucial characteristics of this medium. Since it is always impossible to appropriate a complete understanding of one's own history while one is involved in it, disciplinary reflexivity depends more on detaching the historically contigent paradigm from its historical contingencies than on connecting it to them. The descriptive task that will now be outlined is an exercise in producing a suitable occasion to reflect upon how one knows what one knows. It does not yet call any of that knowledge into doubt.