Normal Science and Tradition in the Non-West: Divergence in Adherence in West and East Asia

Thomas Kuhn’s theory of normal science provides important insights into premodern Asian intellectual traditions. Separating Kuhnian normal science from revolutions and extraordinary science transforms the concept into a useful heuristic to study other traditions. To demonstrate how to do so, this study takes medicine in the non-West to demonstrate how adherence to normal science necessitated not a continuity of orthodoxy but, instead, a form of orthopraxy or exemplary practice. It examines the cross-cultural traditions of Greco-Roman and Sino-Korean medicine in their new homes of the early Islamicate and Japanese worlds. It employs textbooks to explore how to understand these cross-cultural traditions in these new local contexts. Finally, it shifts to focus on medical compilers from each cultural context, Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. 925/932) and Tanba no Yasuyori (d. 995), to discuss their compilatory activities, their relationship to the larger traditions, and how adherence to such practices led to divergence from tradition.