Never Throw an Ashtray at Your Student

From Kieran Healy over to Crooked Timber we find that Errol Morris is thinking like a historian again. He offers, in 3 parts of a 5 part post, a discussion of Kuhn's notion of incommensurable as it relates to paradigm shifts in the history of science. The last time I read Morris thinking like a historian it was an equally long and equally interesting discussion of the charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War.  In both cases, he shows how to follow a well framed question to if not a conclusive conclusion at least a reasonable and persuasive one. It is, in other words, way better than cant about low-hanging fruit and 1848. It is somewhat ironic, however, that the post begins with an event that appears to have no evidence of it ever occurring.