Scientific school of historical source studies: an alternative view

The author deconstructs the constituting of the scientific school of source studies in the texts of M. F. Rumyantseva, showing how the internalist approach to the study of scientific cognition determines this process. The use of typologies that summarize the “essential” characteristics of the change in scientific rationality allows M. F. Rumyantseva to place this school within the “mainstream” of the historical epistemology development over the past century. At the same time, the classification method she uses does not add any new knowledge about the scientific school phenomenon, but only leads to its renaming using the name of the class to which this phenomenon belongs. Accordingly, the basic element of the school remains unchanged, since the object of source studies becomes defined at the starting point. Ignoring the externalist approach allows M. F. Rumyantseva to bypass such inconvenient but important problems as the specifics of humanitarian knowledge (including the historical one); pragmatic conditionality of the researcher’s activity; changing the role of theory in research; the value of non-source knowledge in the study of the past; historicization of both the actors of the past and those who explore it. Taking those problems into account would make it possible to avoid the absolutization of the truth of the fundamental idea of the scientific school about the object of source studies, which requires concretization and, therefore, relativization.