Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn. By Joel Isaac. Pp. 314, Cambridge/London, Harvard University Press, 2012, £36.95 (original) (raw)

2013, The Heythrop Journal

As every good student of science or science education knows, Thomas Kuhn's (1970), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, proposes an account of science that impugns positivism by suggesting a decidedly more contextualized and humanistic view of the progression of science. Joel Isaac's, Working Knowledge-Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn, however, argues that rather than representing Kuhn as an epistemological slayer of positivism, Kuhn can best be interpreted as a product of local culture having been raised in what Isaac refers to as "interstitial academies" (p. 60) at Harvard. These interstitial academies consisted of informal groups that met outside the boundaries of established academic departments and allowed Kuhn to interact with mentors and colleagues who were already espousing post-positivist epistemologies. Isaac's book offers an intellectual historian's account of the influence of these collaborative, interdisciplinary, ad hoc groups on human sciences; specifically, he claims that these incubators of knowledge focused not on epistemological debates but, rather, on the contextualized ways of knowing within their fields that when shared and allowed to blossom, resulted in a legitimization of knowledge making in the human sciences. Legitimizing human sciences was indeed an important goal of many of the luminaries of social sciences at Harvard during the first half of the 20th century, including Kuhn, James Bryant Conant, Robert K. Merton, W. V. Quine, B. F. Skinner, and Talcott Parsons. At that time, the human sciences were marginalized at the university, subordinated to the "hard sciences" and professional studies in law and medicine. Isaac provides a detailed history of the interpersonal and institutional conditions that created a ripe environment for consolidation of knowledge making that combined the everyday methods and mindsets utilized in teaching, research, and professional judgment in specific fields. This "working knowledge" coalesced into a respectable heuristic for epistemology in the social sciences. In discussing the community of scholars and scientists at Harvard in the first half of the 20th century, Isaac suggests that These figures came to identify the creation of knowledge not with the abstract cogitation of "pure reason" or with the iron laws of induction, but with the working knowledge and craftlike skill that typified the education and practical investigations of professional scientists. Knowledge in the human sciences, these thinkers asserted, was to be "made" in a similarly artisanal fashion. (p. 5)