The relation of Thomas S. Kuhn’s ideas to the contextualist account of the history of geography

Abstract

The philosophy and history of scientific knowledge is indispensable in understanding the pluralism of human geography’s epistemologically different approaches in contemporary international literature. Without a clear and precise interpretation of these approaches, the reigning philosophical identity crisis in Hungarian human geography in its supposedly post-socialist condition is likely to intensify. The meeting of Thomas S. Kuhn and human geography is a good case study to introduce a contextualist approach to the historiography of geography. Kuhn’s ideas had been constantly reinterpreted out of context in a contested scientific discourse and were instrumentalised for particular scholarly interests. With the “quantitative revolution” a positivist narrative was constructed drawing on Kuhn’s idea of “scientific revolutions” and the skeletal body of the “Kuhnian model” of shifting paradigms was used to govern the history of the past in light of present views. Later on, through critical recollections of the “revolution”, the model’s relevance to the history of the discipline was mainly dismissed despite Kuhn’s relatively anti-positivist and very critical ideas in the historiography of science. But amongst the same critical evaluations contextualist ideas emerged resembling Kuhn’s original concepts on the heuristic importance of analogies, the incommensurability of epistemologies, the role of pedagogy and training in the scientific community, but above all his harsh critique of presentist historiography. The idea of this paper is to redraw Kuhn’s textual, epistemological and historical context through critically engaging his Anglo-American and Hungarian reception in human geography in order to introduce a contextualist and sociological approach to Hungarian geographers for historiographical purposes.