Thomas Kuhn, the image of science and the image of art: The first manuscript of structure

Abstract

The first manuscript of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, probably written in late 1958, is available in the Kuhn Archive at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)1. It is the first version of Chapter 1, which is the introduction to the book, and is completely different from the version that was published. In this article, I turn to the manuscript to show that at that time Kuhn considered the comparison between the image of science and the image of art as the most appropriate way to announce his project: to change the image of science by bringing it closer to the image of art. As I try to demonstrate, this appeal to the history of art is not merely occasional. And it allows us to understand Kuhn’s intriguing retrospective statement, according to which Structure was a belated product of his discovery of the parallels between science and art. Some passages from Kuhn’s unpublished manuscript are transcribed in the article.