Concerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be prepared at the start to find that natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those they themselves bring from home. And they must take as their object the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language.
Interpretation
Historians must approach past ideas with an open mind, recognizing cultural differences in language and categorization.
In this quote, Thomas Kuhn emphasizes the importance for historians to engage with past ideas and cultures in a manner akin to anthropologists studying unfamiliar societies. This requires historians to be aware of their own conceptual frameworks, as the people from the past may have had entirely different ways of categorizing their experiences and communicating them through language. To truly understand historical contexts, historians must diligently seek to uncover and embrace these differing perspectives, allowing for a more authentic interpretation of history.
In practice
In a lecture on historiography, I might use this quote to illustrate the need for sensitivity to different cultural contexts.
To turn Karl [Popper]'s view on its head, it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition of science. Once a field has made the transition, critical discourse recurs only at moments of crisis when the bases of the field are again in jeopardy. Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.
All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules for normal research. .. Or finally, the case that will most concern us here, a crisis may end with the emergence of a new candidate for paradigm and with the ensuing battle over its acceptance.
Crisis alone is not enough. There must also be a basis, though it need be neither rational nor ultimately correct, for faith in the particular candidate chosen.
The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.
Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.
All significant breakthroughs are break -βwithsβ old ways of thinking.
I'd worked on leprosy and malaria in India [at the World Bank] and asked myself the question: Why do we let 2 million children die every year around the world for not having clean water? Because they're faceless and nameless. So, for me, Facebook looked like it was going to solve the problem of the invisible victim.
I often think that could we creep behind the actor's eyes, we would find an attic of forgotten toys and a copy of the Domesday Book.
I walk up and down the rows. The heads look like rubber halloween masks. They also look like human heads, but my brain has no precedent for human heads on tables or in roasting pans or anywhere other than on top of a human bodies, and so I think it has chosen to interpret the sight in a more comforting manner. - Here we are at the rubber mask factory. Look at the nice men and woman working on the masks.
I was raised to believe that other people's suffering was my responsibility.
What tender and devoted mother wouldn't be dismayed and ill with terror at her son's or daughter's stepping even one hair's breath off the beaten track. No, better let him be happy and live in comfort without originality, is what every mother thinks when she rocks the cradle. The only person among us who can fail to reach the general's rank is the original man - in other words, the man who won't be quiet.
The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.
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