Thomas Kuhn, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
My work licensed but does not equal the constructivist sociology of science that has gone under the name of Kuhnianism in the last forty years. The Strong Programme of David Bloor and Barry Barnes adopted a methodological neutralism on truth and rationality that was congenial to my account of normal science as governed by community standards rather than by external rational compulsion; on that point we are allies.
Where we diverge is the metaphysical extension of the methodology: Bloor and his successors have read me as denying that science has any significant contact with an independent reality, and I have not denied this. *I am not suggesting, let me emphasize, that there is a reality which science fails to get at. My point is rather that no sense can be made of the notion of reality as it has ordinarily functioned in philosophy of science.* These are different claims, and the difference is not subtle.
Latour, Woolgar, Knorr-Cetina, and Shapin push much further than Bloor: theory choice as politics and power; scientific facts as the manufactured outputs of laboratory practice; truth and knowledge and fact as social-construction-all-the-way-down. That is not what I held, and 'The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science' (1992) was written specifically to say so. I had a caricature of the Strong Programme in mind whereby all theory choice is down to politics and power, and that which gets called knowledge are just the beliefs of the winners. Whether the caricature is fair to Bloor specifically is a separate question; the position the caricature describes is one I repudiate, and the post-modern excesses of the constructivist sociology are not consequences of my account properly understood.123
What causes the parties to the negotiation to reach 110 CHAPTER FIVE different conclusions are, as I've indicated, things like differences in individual history, research agenda, personal interest. These are the sorts of differences that might be eliminated by retraining or brainwashing, but they are not in principle accessible to reasoned argument or negotiation.The Road Since Structure, pp. 117–118
That's a transition for which I get far more credit, and also more blame, than I have coming to me. I was, if you will, present at the creation, and it wasn't very crowded. THE ROAD SINCE STRUCTURE on But others were present too: Paul Feyerabend and Russ Hanson, in particular, as well as Mary Hesse, Michael Polanyi, Stephen Toulmin, and a few more besides.The Road Since Structure, pp. 98–99
Of course, the view that Karl Popper calls historicism does not belong in this category. By historicism Popper means the view that historical development is inevitable and goal-directed; historical actors can choose to be on the side that will ultimately win, or to oppose it, but they cannot change the predetermined, teleological historical development. Popper was a strong opponent of historicism, so understood.The Last Writings, pp. 328–329
The repudiation is on the record in 1992 and was reaffirmed in the Road Since Structure address (1990) and 'Afterwords' (1993). I do not regret writing Structure in the way I did. I do regret that the term paradigm became an empty cliché and that the more original idea of perceiving similarity through training with exemplars was lost in the reception. The constructivist sociology took a methodological stance from my work and built a metaphysics on top of it that I never licensed. The metaphysics is not mine.