In Atlanta at the annual meeting Tom's name came up more than once. On the very first evening at the plenary session Charles Rosenberg began the proceedings with the observation that Tom had not anticipated in 1962 nor did he approve in 1996 the "science wars" and polarized antipathies that emerged in the wake of his success. Yet it is undeniable that after the Structure was published science had been brought, as Charles put it, "into the realm of the temporal, the contingent, the negotiated." The Pandora's Box of epistemological and social privilege scientists enjoyed prior to Kuhns time had been opened. Yes, Charles continued, science had been moved from the timeless to the mundane. Yes, few scientists remained noble and disinterested seekers after truth in their ethnographer's account. And yet nowhere did Tom Kuhn assume that he had forced historians or anyone else to declare that the human circumstances of a scientific discovery were more important than the discovery itself, as if one had to choose between mutually exclusive factors.

Another plenary session participant, Angela Creager, was particularly unhappy with what she called the "dichotomous misrepresentation" of the fields of science and science studies by media bent on sensationalizing. Actual exchanges among scientists reveal a variety of diverse opinions about the status of scientific knowledge just as among science studies scholars there is and has been a spectrum of views about relativism. But all these differences have been flattened into "science wars" by protagonists on both sides and the result has been that the relationship between scientists and historians has too often of late been determined by media and their interests. The testimony of all four participants in the plenary session betrayed that their experience of interaction between historians and scientists has been and remains nothing like what has been depicted in the attacks that make headlines.

The last two speakers in the session stressed the pragmatic benefits of constructive interaction. Evelyn Fox Keller suggested that historians and philosophers of science might even play a facilitating role for scientists who have become overly invested in existing theory, provided there is mutual respect between the scientists and historians and provided the latter possess technical competence necessary to understand the science in question. Sylvan Schweber reminded us of the key role scientists played in transforming the university after World War II into places where research and scholarship flourished in relative freedom. He drew a parallel between scientists then and intellectuals today, urging us in the present to be wary of an ominous new transition that threatens to commercialize research. Should we abandon our responsibility as Kulturtruger by becoming Kulturkampfer we become expressions of the very forces that threaten the academy.

No one, it would seem, found anything good at all in the extreme positions that have been trumpeted about in public. And neither, I am convinced, would Tom Kuhn. So what was it that Tom brought to an end? Why did I have the sense that the end of something had been marked? The answer, for me, is that after Kuhn's work science could never again be captured by any simple or even homogeneous set of categories. That means that no individuals, including scientists and historians, can any longer claim to be the true spokespersons for science and/or its history. It is really just a matter of learning how to have mutual respect.

This page last modified: 4 December, 2001