Arthur Lovejoy's history of unit‐ideas and the history of concepts are often criticized for being historically insensitive forms of history‐writing. Critics claim that one cannot find invariable ideas or concepts in several contexts or times in history without resorting to some distortion. One popular reaction is to reject the history of ideas and concepts altogether, and take linguistic entities as the main theoretical units. Another reaction is to try to make ideas or concepts context‐sensitive and to see their histories as dynamic processes of transformation. The main argument in this paper is that we cannot abandon ideas or concepts as theoretical notions if we want to write an intelligible history of thought. They are needed for the categorization and classification of thinking, and in communication with contemporaries. Further, the criterion needed to subsume historical concepts under a general concept cannot be determined merely on the basis of their family resemblances, which allows variation without an end, since talk of the same concepts implies that they share something in common. I suggest that a concept in history should be seen to be composed of two components: the core of a concept and the margin of a concept. On the basis of this, we can develop a vocabulary for talking about conceptual changes. The main idea is that conceptual continuity requires the stability of the core of the concept, but not necessarily that of the margin, which is something that enables a description of context‐specific features. If the core changes, we ought to see it as a conceptual replacement.
The narrativist turn of the 1970s and 1980s transformed the discussion of general history. With the rejection of Rankean historical realism, the focus shifted to the historian as a narrator and on narratives as literary products. Oddly, the historiography of science took a turn in the opposite direction at the same time. The social turn in the historiography of science emphasized studying science as a material and practical activity with traceable and documentable traits. This empirization of the field has led to an understanding that history of science could be directly describable from scientific practice alone without acknowledging the role of the historian as a constructor of narratives about these practices. Contemporary historians of science tend to be critical of science's ability to describe its object—nature, as it is—but they often are not similarly skeptical of their own abilities to describe their object: past science, as it is. I will argue that historiography of science can only gain from a belated narrativist turn.
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