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 -“withs” old ways of thinking.
Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public.
When I think about life on Earth, there should not be a species like us. And if there was, we should be out in the jungle killing each other in small groups. That's what you should expect.
I did not do it. Yet now I wish I had.’ He turned to face the hall, that sea of pale faces. ‘I wish I had enough poison for you all. You make me sorry that I am not the monster you would have me be, yet there it is. I am innocent, but I will get no justice here.
I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .
He had opened his heart to the sublime indifference of the universe
This living, this living, this living Was never a project of mine.
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