ON THE SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL OF HISTORICAL SOURCE STUDIES: ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW

The author deconstructs the constituting of the scientific school of source studies in the texts ofM. F. Rumyantseva, showing how the internalism in the historiography of science determines this process. The use oftypologies that summarize the “essential” characteristics of the change in scientific rationality allows her to place theschool in the “mainstream” of the development of historical epistemology over the past century. At the same time, theclassification method used by her does not add new knowledge about the phenomenon of the scientific school, but onlyleads to its renaming using the name of the class to which this phenomenon belongs. Accordingly, the basic element ofthe school remains unchanged, since the object of source study becomes defined at the starting point. Ignoring the exter-nalist approach allows M. F. Rumyantseva to bypass such inconvenient for her, but important problems as the specificsof humanitarian, including historical, cognition; pragmatic conditionality of the researcher’s activity; changing the roleof theory in research; the value of non-source knowledge in the study of the past; historicization not only of the actors of the past, but also of the subject who explores it. Taking them into account would make it possible to avoid absolutization of the truth of the fundamental idea of the scientific school about the object of source study, which requires concretization, and, consequently, relativization.

internalism and externalism in the historiography of science, scientific school, historical source studies, A S Lappo-Danilevsky, O M Medushevskaya