55Variations and Theories of Excellence
process of thinking up an idea and the logical process of justifying its claim to truth) and his
emphasis on incommensurability—the claim that certain kinds of comparison between theories is
impossible. The negative response among philosophers was exacerbated by an important natural-
istic tendency in The Structure of Scientic Revolutions that was then unfamiliar. A particularly
signicant instance of this was Kuhn’s insistence on the importance of the history of science for
philosophy of science.
In The Structure of Scientic Revolutions, Kuhn paints a picture of the development of science
quite unlike any that had gone before. According to the traditional account of scientic change, sci-
ence develops ...