Although Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions was first published in 1962, its entries to Taiwan are rather late and curious. Taiwan's martial law rule was long (thirty-eight years) and lifted only in 1987; thus, her academic and intellectual ecologies are naturally quite different before and after that. This short account first describes Taiwan's intellectual environment before Structure's entries. Then it considers the intellectual and social changes immediately after the publication of Structure's Taiwan translation in 1985, which would constitute Taiwan's first development of a field known as history and philosophy of science (HPS), along with related fields like Foucauldian and feminist research. The third part of this essay briefly describes an expanded constellation of academic disciplines grown from the intellectual soil before the end of twentieth century, plus the new governance of science and society initiated from Taiwan's Ministry of Education, which together push forward an active development of Taiwan's contemporary STS.
