From: David Bromwich, "The Case of Literary Theory," Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking, (Yale University Press, 1992) pp. 185-6 © Yale University

[This] history properly begins with a book in the philosophy of science that has had tremendous impact elsewhere, Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued that the usual Enlightenment story about the progress of science, which pictured a series of amalgamating discoveries that enlarged the domain of knowledge, could be recounted more accurately to show a sequence of discontinuous revolutions each rejecting certain plausible discoveries for the sake of certain others along the path it happened to favor; and each sometimes valuing, as the case demanded, such pragmatic virtues as testability (with respect to a hypothesis) and conservatism (with respect to established evidence). Kuhn thus appeared to say that at moments of crisis the very shape of knowledge changed; and that, in a given revolution, the knowledge won or lost was decided by the interests of the discoverer.

This way of looking at science, in the light of the sociology of knowledge rather than the facts of the universe, was by some readers taken to imply that our most secure assumptions about the world were conditioned as much by consensus, or what Kuhn calls "the psychology of research," as by a disinterested pursuit of truth apart from commonplace motives. Kuhn himself, it later became clear, actually thinks it is a fact that there are facts: he credits science with finding some of them, and agrees that much of the knowledge gained in this way will eventually be transformed without being destroyed. He is a believer in at least a version of scientific progress. But these elaborations of his view did not often survive a moral that many casual readers imputed to his story. As it came through to them, it sounded rather like this: "All knowledge, even the knowledge we once imagined to be 'hard,' is partly defined by context, including above all social context. Truth does not issue naturally in a right perspective on the subjects of learned inquiry. Truth itself is a product of someone's choice of a perspective. Further, since the dominant perspective may change quickly, and several often contend at once for preeminence, there is no idiom of justification that will assure the claims of one perspective over those of any other."

The scientist in this view began to look a good deal like the more adventurous sort of literary theorist. Did it follow that the literary theorist was a good deal like the more adventurous sort of scientist?

Even in a more scrupulous view of Kuhn's argument than I have just sketched, it could easily lead to two quite different thoughts about the relation between knowledge in the sciences and in the arts and letters. From his findings, one might come to see that the motives and conditions of scientific discovery were more similar than anybody had thought to the motives and conditions of, say, literary interpretation. Let us call this leveling downward--downward, I mean, only on a scale that runs from certainty to uncertainty. But one might also abstract from his general thesis a reassurance that the methods and procedures of humanistic scholarship were more rational than anybody had thought, because they looked more like the motives and procedures of natural scientists, once the ideal of "pure" truth had been eliminated. Let us call this leveling upward. Now a curious feature of the development of literary study in the 1980s was the way the self-image of scholars passed through both kinds of leveling at once. In departments of literature, there is a widespread sense today that the scholar-theorist is adding to hard knowledge: the vogue of such words as tracking, rigor, and determination testifies to this. Yet accompanying the same sense is a suspicion that the terms of discourse could change very quickly and leave stranded all one's previous interests, findings, rigors, and determinations. But then (goes the consoling thought) that is just what happens to all knowledge. The result of this new self-image among theorists and critics has been a weird combination of arrogances-glib adaptability--with a world-weary irony once confined to the sort of libertine who was played out before the age of thirty.