The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
November 2002
Steve Fuller
Thomas Kuhn: A
Philosophical History of Our Times
VIII Conclusions
Index
Web Page 1
1. The Canonization of
2. A Career of Lucky Accidents and Studied Avoidance
3. Getting over Kuhn: The Secularization of
Paradigms as Movements
4. High and Low Church Secularizations of
Science
5. Reinventing the University by Rediscovering
the Contexts of Discovery and Justification
6. Final Strategic Remarks
1. The Canonization of
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions was one of the most influential academic books of
the second half of the twentieth century, and arguably the one that has done
the most to shape both academic and public perceptions of science.
However, Structure was the
product of a particular context and its influence has been of a particular
kind. The context may be roughly
divided into personal and situational factors.
The key personal factor was Kuhn’s
membership in a generation trained in physics who came of age at the dawn of
World War II. During that time, the
discipline that had attracted Kuhn and others as the continuation of natural
philosophy by experimental means was rapidly transformed into the paradigm
case of the sociotechnical behemoth, “Big Science.”
Like others of that generation, Kuhn
found this transformation profoundly disillusioning.
The key situational factor that enabled Kuhn to
channel his disillusionment productively was the General Education in Science
curriculum, designed by Harvard president and
Kuhn and Conant were clearly using the General
Education curriculum for somewhat different, yet overlapping, ends.
Kuhn was given the opportunity to
articulate the ideal of scientific inquiry that had originally
379
motivated him to pursue a career in physics,
while Conant had found a reliable medium for normalizing science’s role in
contemporary society. What they shared
was an interest in promoting a normatively desirable understanding of science
that was grounded, in some sense, in its history.
However, this story is complicated by the exact
way Kuhn attempted to ground his normative ideal, namely in three hundred
years of the history of European physical sciences, while at the same time
refusing to comment on the failure of those very sciences (not to mention the
biological and social sciences) to conform to his ideal for most of the
twentieth century. Kuhn’s response to
the chord that his book struck - his silence and increasing withdrawal from
the communities that embraced him - is at least partly explained by his
awareness of a double-truth doctrine in the writing of history of science,
which he himself called “Orwellian”: on the one hand, a heroic history to
motivate scientists in their daily activities; on the other, a messy,
dispiriting, yet more down-to-earth history that the professional historian
uncovers mainly for consumption by other historians.
Ironically, what Kuhn presented as the
“real” history of science in Structure itself turned out to be a myth,
not only because its own empirical basis was suspect, but more importantly its
narrative was used uncritically by social scientists and other inquirers to
legitimate their activities as paradigms on the same footing as those of the
physical sciences.
The overall effect has been that Structure
diverted emerging tendencies in the 1960s to question the role of Big
Science in the academy and society at large, while reinforcing the ongoing
fragmentation and professionalization of academic disciplines.
Both developments marked a decisive
turn away from the ideal of a unified science that probably motivated Kuhn’s
original interest in physics as the continuation of natural philosophy by more
exact means. The net social
conservatism of Structure’s impact could well have pleased Conant, but
not its support for an intensified division of academic labor.
However, the latter explains the
book’s appropriation by a broad church ranging from “normal scientists” to
self-avowed “postmodernists.” The
point of my book has been to explore the background social, philosophical, and
historical conditions that have allowed this strange turn of events, in the
hope that we may still be in a position to remedy whatever damage has been
caused by an unreflective acceptance of the account of science given in
Structure.
Although I have been chiefly concerned with the
career of a book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the contexts
in which I have embedded the book’s origins and impacts, and especially the
normatively charged language I have occasionally used to explain these
developments, suggest that I wish to pass judgment on its author, Thomas Kuhn.
To be sure, it is
380
difficult not to do so.
Historical figures so close to our own
time invite consideration of their suitability as role models, and the more I
learned the less I approved. I admit
to favoring figures who display an awareness of the sociohistorical setting in
which they stake their claims to knowledge. In
this respect, James Bryant Conant and Alexandre Koyre, in rather different but
equally reflexive ways, appear more exemplary figures than their protége,
Thomas Kuhn. Indeed, reading
Structure in light of his two mentors easily leaves the impression that
their value choices constitute taken-for-granted premisses for Kuhn’s account
of scientific change.
Nevertheless, I have neither the interest nor
the evidence to deliver a verdict on Kuhn’s life, let alone indict the man of
crimes of the intellect. As far as
intellectual personalities are concerned, my main interest is in evaluating
“Kuhn” as an ideal type of how academics respond to their social environment -
indeed, the sense in which Kuhn was “there,” as raised in the article that
originally motivated my inquiries, as recounted in the preface to this book.
It will become clear in what follows
that Kuhn’s mode of response to his environment marks a profound transition in
the nature of academic life. In short,
what did it mean to be someone in Kuhn’s position?
In the anglophone outposts of French social theory, it is nowadays fashionable to speak of habitus, the set of attitudes and expectations one acquires through the successive forms of discipline that constitute one’s upbringing, which are subsequently reinforced by others over the course of a lifetime
. 1 In this book, there have been occasional glimpses into Kuhn’s habitus, especially his lengthy incubation period at Harvard, which encompassed undergraduate and graduate training, as well as his induction into the newly created Society of Fellows and ultimately his first regular teaching post. In his last major interview, Kuhn left little doubt that his years at Harvard were the most formative in his life. His father and uncles had attended Harvard. Harvard was where Kuhn first found a circle of friends and felt he fitted in. Failure to achieve tenure at Harvard also nearly caused Kuhn to have a nervous breakdown. Last but not least, Kuhn met Conant, whom Kuhn regarded as the brightest person he had ever known - a judgment that forced him to shift his father, a clever and energetic engineer-turned-businessman, down to the second position. 21. The concept of habitus is developed in Bourdieu 1977, 72-95.
2. On these Harvard-related details, see Kuhn et
al. 1997, 46-48, 163, 170. Conant’s
displacement of Kuhn’s father invites further psychoanalytic exploration.
In the interview, Kuhn contrasts his
father, a quick-witted man of action, and his mother, a socially inept
intellectual. Kuhn identifies with the
latter but admires the former.
However, Kuhn also observes that his father failed to fulfill his potential,
in part because his efforts came to be dispersed after World War I, where his
talents had been concentrated in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
[Generally speaking, the need
for achievement figures prominently in Kuhn’s interview.
In fact, he associates his discovery of the power of normal science
puzzle solving with a watershed moment in his education, namely when he
realized that the unstructured setting of his “progressive” primary school
days had prepared him poorly for solving physics problems in high school,
thereby undermining his “straight A” average.
See Kuhn et al. 1997, 148.
Those interested in pursuing the psychoanalytic
dimension of Kuhn’s thought should find two features of the interview of note.
First, as a young man, Kuhn underwent psychoanalysis for his difficulty
in relating to women, though his description of the relationship to his father
and Conant may well strike the psychoanalytically inclined as “feminized.”
My thanks to Stephanie Lawler for talking me through this
psychoanalytic possibility.
Second, he claims that his interest in “climbing into people’s heads” was
triggered by this experience in psychoanalysis.
See Kuhn et al. 1997, 163.
The latter point bears an intriguing relationship to Jacques Lacan’s
admission that his own distinctive approach to psychoanalysis was triggered by
Koyré’s interpretation of Galileo. See chapter 1, note 65.]
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Conant’s style of recruitment politics reflected an aristocratic orientation to the social order, one to which Kuhn acquiesced, albeit without ever having engaged in its active promotion. 3 Kuhn’s passive acceptance was probably facilitated by the different values that Conant and Kuhn assigned to Conant’s actions toward Kuhn. For example, Kuhn reports being very impressed that Conant wanted him to do a case history on mechanics for Natural Sciences 4, given the significance of mechanics for the history of science
.4 No doubt, for his part, Conant appreciated the efficiency of having the case history done by someone with the relevant knowledge at his fingertips.
Moreover, Harvard’s willingness to deny Kuhn
tenure shortly after Conant’s departure from the presidency testifies to a
general impression that Kuhn was beholden, however passively, to Conant’s
patronage and the vision of the world with which it was associated.
This vision assigned to elite American
universities the unique role of consolidating and protecting the heritage of
Western civilization, especially as it underwent the twin twentieth-century
threats of Nazism and Communism. More
specifically, like C. P. Snow’s depiction of the “two cultures” divide in
3. On “recruitment politics,” see the
underrated Cook 1991,65-66.
4. Kuhn et al. 1997, 159.
5. Although Kuhn studiously refrained from
acknowledging any specifically intellectual debts to Conant, he nevertheless
admitted that he found it hard to cope when Conant’s various administrative
duties forced him to turn over the lecturing of Natural Sciences 4 to Kuhn,
which suggests how much he had relied on Conant’s intellectual (and other)
leadership in the [course. Kuhn
wrote out all his lectures, a compensatory reaction that, by his own account,
inhibited his subsequent efforts at writing.
See Kuhn et al. 1997, 166.
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Conant’s sense of science’s world-historic
mission did not especially endear him to Harvard’s doyens, most of whom still
operated with a liberal arts college model of the university in which the
humanities reigned supreme and even the natural sciences were viewed more as
teaching than research subjects. Indeed,
resentment periodically surfaced in the minutes of the General Education
meetings at how the liberal arts were becoming subordinated to the needs of
Big Science research, be it the special deals that researchers negotiated on
teaching loads or the way in which Conant himself generally saw teaching as a
conduit for promoting the aims and products of research.
The formative experiences in Kuhn’s
professional life occurred in the midst of this particular culture war.
This point comes out very clearly in
the protracted debate over his tenure, which centered on Kuhn’s drift from the
sciences to the humanities without having made a clear mark in any field.
In Whiggish hindsight, we maybe tempted to conclude that the doyens were unduly harsh or downright obtuse in their judgment of The Copernican Revolution as a good teaching text but not much more
. 6 However, without a clearly established history of science profession in the
6. Remarks by Edwin Kemble and Leonard Nash, in
Minutes,
7. In the lengthy deliberations over Kuhn’s
tenure, this point was explicitly raised by Harry Levin, who eventually became
the Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard.
Levin said he sat on many university
committees over the years in which Kuhn’s lack of performance was repeatedly
justified by extenuating circumstances. See
Minutes,
In these self-professed democratic times it is
awkward to invoke an aristocratic ethic that revolves around the exchange of
privilege and obligation. Indeed,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary, when the expression
noblesse oblige was coined in 1837, it was already meant ironically.
Nevertheless, the injection of an
elitist dimension into normative discourse suggests that some people, in
virtue of their social position, deserve to be held accountable to
[a somewhat different standard from that
of the run of humanity. Modern
moralists are uncomfortable with this idea because it presupposes that we
cannot all be judged by a common standard, be it deontological or utilitarian,
that marks us as children of the same God or ape.
In other words, to accept “privilege” and “obligation” as reciprocal
terms of moral appraisal is to acknowledge the failure, or at least the
shortfall, of the democratic project whereby people are judged entirely on the
basis of their own intentions and actions, without factoring the cultural
burden they have inherited and acquired.
However much we may wish academia to be
constituted as a democracy in the sense presupposed by modern ethical theory,
it is not now and it certainly was not in Kuhn’s lifetime.
By pretending otherwise, we may salvage the honor of those who have
occupied Kuhn’s position, but we do our nonelite colleagues a severe injustice
in the process. If someone
groomed to rule fails to provide the expected form of leadership, then that is
prima facie grounds for believing that such a person has morally failed.
The most articulate and systematic challenge to modern ethical
individualism is still Bradley 1927. Bradley’s
conception of one’s “station and its duties” should be read as the
philosophical counterpart to Bourdieu’s sociology of habitus.
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would later publish a book, Structure,
that accomplished much of what the committee had wanted - indeed, with the
help of the cultural investment that constituted Kuhn’s habitus (specifically
his stint as a General Education instructor), but without Kuhn’s deliberate
involvement.
We face a subtle interpretive problem here, one that reflects the historical transition from an aristocratic to a capitalistic field of play in academia. Perhaps most indicative of this problem is what Robert Merton (b. 1910) has called “the principle of cumulative advantage,” which we first encountered in chapter 1, note 1, under its nickname the “Matthew effect.” According to this principle, the more benefits one receives, the more one will continue to receive. In what sense does this characterize Kuhn’s rise to prominence? Merton, himself a Harvard man somewhat older and less privileged than Kuhn, recognized Conant’s style of recruitment politics for what it was
. 8 However, Merton tends to give the principle a much stronger capitalist spin than would seem appropriate in Kuhn’s case, which leaves the principle’s general normative implications radically unclear. Kuhn, the product of an aristocratic culture, provides Merton’s most elaborate illustration of the Matthew effect at work, yet Merton’s principle is usually associated with a capitalized scientific environment, where one’s academic credentials clearly prove to be a good predictor of the quantity and quality of both one’s own and one’s students’ long-term research productivity. 9
In this context, the principle is normally read
as marking an invisible-
8. Perhaps the reader will not be surprised to
learn that Merton’s own professional progress did not exhibit Kuhn’s
streamlined trajectory. Though himself
a Harvard graduate, upon completing his Ph.D. in 1936, a tight job market
forced Merton to the backwater of
9. The contrast in Merton’s presentation of the
principle of cumulative advantage may be seen in the Kuhn-oriented Merton
1977, 71-108 and Merton 1973, esp. 439-59, which focuses on the natural
sciences.
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hand process, the uncanny ability of the
scientific community to pick its winners without explicit criteria or external
supervision. However, those generally
skeptical of invisible-hand arguments immediately pounce on the word
“uncanny.” They question whether the
predictions are sufficiently independent of the outcomes at successive stages
of the process - who gets into graduate school, who gets a job, who gets an
article published, who gets tenured and promoted, etc. - to constitute a
series of fair tests. In an ideal
capitalist environment of perfect competition, they would.
The people making the predictions
(admissions officers, personnel committees, editorial boards) would literally
place bets (in the form of scholarships, grants, salaries, and journal space)
on particular players. But these
bettors do not control the outcomes of the game.
The outcomes emerge from interaction
of the players themselves, depending on who turns out to make the most
brilliant advances, as seen through the eyes of their peers.
What sort of evidence would one seek to
demonstrate that the principle of cumulative advantage is, indeed, the result
of the capitalist process just described? Two
facts stand out as very relevant to the natural sciences (and increasingly
relevant to the other academic disciplines). The
first is that, in the game outlined above, the vast majority of players -
including those with prestigious pedigrees - lose in the long run.
That the winners are most likely to
come from prestigious backgrounds is certainly compatible with the fact that
most of those with prestigious backgrounds drop out of the game after a
certain point: they fail to complete their degrees, they fail to get and keep
good jobs, they fail to publish, or finally, if they publish, they fail to be
recognized for having published. In
short, the amount of waste in individual human talent tolerated by the science
game speaks to a process that is not subject to the designs of any human
agency.
The second relevant fact is that the players
must demonstrate their skill as soon as they enter the field of play,
endlessly showing that they can provide return on investment, so as to
continue to enjoy the affections of future investors.
The combination of these two facts can
leave the impression that the science game is not rigged.
Promise must be quickly backed by
product. It is tough to win simply
because of the scarcity of prizes relative to the pool of contestants.
Such an understanding of the
environment invites the ascription of credit and blame to the skills and
efforts of individuals, both on the field and in the betting parlors, so to
speak. Scientists can only blame
themselves for not making the most of their cultural capital, and similarly
university officials can only blame themselves for having invested their
institution’s cultural capital on the wrong scientists.
Such is the individualized moral
universe of the capitalist field.
In contrast, someone in Kuhn’s position is most
naturally understood as
385
having operated in an aristocratic field of
play, one in which cumulative advantage incurs cumulative obligations.
The normative presuppositions here are
markedly different from the capitalist ones just enumerated.
(However, determining that Harvard and other elite American
universities from the early 1940s to the late 1950s operated in an
aristocratic, rather than a capitalist, field of play would require
demonstrating that they could have reliably placed their recruits in
influential academic - not to mention non-academic - posts.
Certainly, Conant and Harvard’s
humanist doyens acted as if they could.) The
basic scheme is that each generation of academic leaders is actively recruited
by those in a realistic position to select them.
Thus, while the aristocrat and the
capitalist concur on the highly stratified nature of academic success, they
explain it in radically different terms: the former by design, the latter by
effect.
Aristocratic recruitment typically involves a period of incubation during which recruits are not expected to produce any independent work, but rather are to become imbued with the doctrine that they will spend the rest of their lives extending and defending. But there come moments of truth, when recruits must do something that reveals their induced capacity to lead. For example, they may spontaneously rally to a defense of the realm when it comes under attack, even when the realm is the notional one of “academia” or “science.”
10 For better or worse, Kuhn never actively engaged in this strategy. Lest we forget, Kuhn was ultimately judged a failure by those who managed the aristocratic recruitment process, and it is only once more strictly capitalistic criteria are introduced that the overall impact of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions can be explained, namely, in terms of what I described in section 7 of the introduction as the book’s “servant narrative” status, which attracted a wide range of intellectual consumers.
However, the question remains why such a success
of the marketplace, which depends entirely on the use that others make of a
work, should then serve to confer attributions of profundity on its author.
Here Kuhn’s habitus
10. The ideal type for this sense of
aristocratism is provided by the Japanese samurai, who successfully translated
the unconditional loyalty and discipline demanded of their warrior ethic from
feudal administration to research management in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. See Fuller 1997d,
123-29. However, similar
precedents can be found among some European aristocrats, especially during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See
Bauman 1987, 25-34. Closer to
Kuhn is the career of his rival, Gerald Holton (b. 1922), who has
mitigated the tensions between science and its social environment for the
better part of a half-century. Holton’s
guardianship of scientific virtue extends at least to 1958, when he was asked
to turn the Proceedings of the
386
plays a crucial role: it was much easier to take
Kuhn out of Harvard than Harvard out of Kuhn.
I mean this in two senses. The
first relies on a very perceptive attempt to understand the aristocratic
mentality as an ideal type of political action.
In the case of fallen aristocrats,
saintliness is often the interpretation that nonaristocrats have projected
onto the chosen one’s alternative lifestyle. The
second sense in which Harvard could not be taken out of Kuhn, which will be
discussed in the next section, concerns Kuhn’s propensity to find himself at
the right place at the right time to be led in directions that turn out to be
fruitful, or at least suggestive, for his research.
Terrence Cook has analyzed not only those who adhered to their elite calling but also those who, in one way or another, strayed from the appointed path
. 11 Among the many ways in which saints reveal their aristocratic bearing is their ability to endure, evade, and exit from disagreeable social situations without their own status becoming diminished in the process. Saints typically ignore criticism and stoically suffer injustice because they believe that a more active response would compound damage that has been already done. Only those with considerable control over their own fate who also believe in the larger significance of their actions are entitled to think in such terms. Lesser mortals have no choice but to respond, regardless of the consequences for either themselves or others. This point can be illustrated with Kuhn’s response to the perversion of normal science that accompanied the atomic age. As we saw in chapter 4, section 6, the uncritical pursuit of highly technical work that enables paradigmatic puzzle solving to proceed apace has also enabled scientists to be easily co-opted into projects where their prowess is subserved to often dubious military-industrial ends. Yet, instead of reflecting critically on the ends of their inquiries, Kuhn would seem to have scientists either stick to their work or, as Kuhn himself did, withdraw from it entirely.Saints are perceived as leaders in direct proportion to their rejection of the obligations imposed by their aristocratic habitus. Usually this rejection is deliberate but it can also be unselfconscious, which then leads saints to spurn their followers. Often this serves only to encourage the followers to apply and develop the saint’s ideas, as if to prove their own worthiness
. 12
11. Cook 1991, esp. chaps. 4-5.
12. At the risk of courting charges of cynicism,
I have observed that attributions of saintliness are most easily made by those
who have never experienced the aristocratic lifestyle and hence have only
witnessed the freedom - but not the constraints - that such a lifestyle
entails. In other words, the sense
that a saint’s followers have of their own imagined inability to resist the
temptations of aristocracy contributes significantly to the aura of holiness
that surrounds the fallen aristocrat. Because
this sense is based more on ignorance than knowledge of the aristocrat’s
actual situation, very personal forms of resistance that, were they made by
someone in a less exalted setting, would be regarded as simple expressions of
irritation, inconvenience, and avoidance can be easily interpreted as bold
political gestures, if the person experiencing [these feelings has an
aristocratic background. In
recent public consciousness, the career of Lady Diana Spencer, the late
princess of
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387
Whether the followers are justified in this
course of action depends on the hold that the aristocratic imperative has on
the rest of society. One
indicator is a widespread belief that good can arise only from pure motives.
Thus, if change is unlikely to occur
without an initiative from a disaffected aristocrat, then it is not surprising
that saintliness is attributed to that person.
With the decline of hereditary monarchies in politics, academia may be
the only globally pervasive institution that still has pockets of aristocracy
in this sense. In that case, the
aristocrat’s purity of motives applies to inquiry.
Given Kuhn’s personal disdain for
ideological extensions of his views, it is not far-fetched to interpret Kuhn’s
actions as those of a saint, albeit a rather unselfconscious and secular one.
At least, I shall assume this
diagnosis in what follows.
2. A Career of
Lucky Accidents and Studied Avoidance
It is clear from interviews conducted with him
over the years that Kuhn turned away from a career in theoretical physics
after becoming profoundly disaffected by the routine and destructive uses to
which science was put in World War II. Conant’s
curriculum seemed to provide a way of reinstating his original interest in
science. But as the years passed, Kuhn
distanced his concerns from those of the historians and sociologists of
science who had derived inspiration from his work, many of whom were overtly
concerned with understanding the changing contemporary scene, even when the
past was their nominal topic.
Thus, when asked explicitly whether the story presented in Structure
would need to be altered in light of the changing character of science in the
twentieth century, Kuhn had this to say:
I see no reason to suppose that the things I think I have learned about the nature of knowledge are going to be disturbed by the need to change the theory of science. I could be all wrong with respect both to science and to the nature of knowledge, but I would make this separation to explain why I’m less concerned about the question, “Is science changing?” than I might be if studying the nature of science weren’t in the first instance simply a way of looking at the picture of knowledge
. 13
Interestingly, Kuhn did not treat the question
as a provocation either to modify his model (for failing to match the
contemporary scene) or to condemn the contemporary scene (for failing to live
up to his model). Instead, he
respecified his project at a level of abstraction that escaped having to
decide between the two. Moreover,
Kuhn’s retreat to the “nature of
12. Sigurdsson 1990, 24 (italics in the
original).
388
knowledge” invited scrutiny in just those
features of his work that philosophers have found most objectionable:
questions of meaning and reference, especially in relation to how scientists
come to acquire a specific orientation to the world.
But from the standpoint of the
anti-Whig historiographies discussed in the introduction to this book, Prig
and Tory, this strategy made perfect sense, as it effectively shifted the
salient epistemological difference from the forward-looking “true vs. false”
(i.e., how scientific claims are ultimately received) to the backward-looking
“understood vs. misunderstood” (i.e., how those claims were originally
intended). Thus, whereas philosophers
of science structured their arguments around alternative sets of criteria
(e.g., “realist vs. instrumentalist”) that can justify more or less the same
set of more or less progressively correct theory choices in the history of
science, Kuhn took exactly the reverse tack of showing how the same set of
criteria can justify quite different theory choices depending on how the
criteria are interpreted and applied at specific moments.
On that basis, incommensurability between paradigms appeared
inevitable. 14
No matter how much Kuhn recanted his more
radical rhetoric about scientists in different paradigms inhabiting different
worlds, his own research agenda always kept this possibility open - certainly
more so than the possibility that science may exhibit some normatively
desirable sense of “progress.” A
typically Kuhnian line of reasoning that attempted to put some distance
between himself and his radical admirers was to grant the plausibility of the
underdetermination of theory by data or the theory-ladenness of observation,
and then wonder why self-styled “Kuhnians” would want to conclude that the
validity of scientific claims is relative to the social conditions of their
production or that nature plays a negligible role in scientific theory choice.
15 Kuhn was correct to
observe that these conclusions do not deductively follow from their premisses.
16 Yet Kuhn’s own failure
to address exactly how nature makes itself felt in a socially conditioned
science hardly set a good example for his would-be disciples. 17
14. Credit for making this point explicit goes to
Doppelt 1978.
15. Sigurdsson 1990, 22-23; Kuhn 1992, 8-9.
16. After all, the validity of scientific claims
may be relative to the social conditions of their distribution, which
would require looking at the political-economic relations in which they
figure, such as the spread of capitalism, imperialism, democracy, etc.
This is the view I happen to hold.
Alternatively, there maybe limits to the human condition - be they
Kantian or Darwinian in nature - such that, presented with the same evidence
and background information, humans will respond within a relatively narrow
range of possibilities.
17. The most philosophically sophisticated
defense of bracketing considerations of an external reality from sociological
accounts of knowledge remains Barnes and Bloor 1982, which argues that
reality plays a negligible role in sociological explanations precisely
because it is presupposed by all such explanations, and hence it offers no
way of explaining the differences that arise in people’s beliefs.
The type of argument represents strategy B social epistemology, as I
called it in chapter 6, note 46.
389
Of course, Kuhn could not have foreseen all the
ways his readers would interpret what he did and did not say in Structure.
Nevertheless, on several occasions
after the book’s publication, he was invited to reflect on these matters.
But more than that, as I observed in
chapter 1i, section 5, Kuhn was actually afforded a clear opportunity to
anticipate the consequences of his book, namely in response to Paul
Feyerabend’s prescient remarks on the 1960-61 draft of Structure, which
led him to deem the manuscript “ideology covered up as history.” 18
Kuhn characteristically failed to
understand how Feyerabend’s concerns bore on his own project.
As Kuhn saw it, “The
quasi-sociological elements of my approach were overwhelmed by [Feyerabend’s]
desires for society in the ideal.” 19
Undeterred by Kuhn’s obtuseness,
Feyerabend once again raised this objection at Imre Lakatos’s famous 1965
conference where Feyerabend’s mentor, Karl Popper, formally confronted Kuhn in
debate. 20
That Kuhn had so rapidly risen to the rank of
Popper’s debating opponent on Popper’s home turf surprised British observers
at the time. 21
18. For the context and correspondence relating
to Feyerabend’s remarks, see HoyningenHuene 1995.
19. Kuhn et al. 1997 187.
20. Feyerabend 1970, esp. 202-3.
21. In personal communication, several
professional philosophers - who, as students, traveled from
The substance of Kuhn’s own views was seen from
Among Kuhn’s earliest British defenders was Mary
Hesse (b. 1924), who eventually held the first chair in history and philosophy
of science at
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390
Nevertheless, it reflected the Popperian
perception that Kuhn had been anointed by Conant to provide a philosophical
defense of the Big Science initiatives that increasingly characterized
American research in the Cold War era. 22
Yet given Kuhn’s ostracism from Harvard in 1956 and the
dismantling of Conant’s General Education curriculum shortly after the launch
of Sputnik (see chapter 4, section 7), the view from London seemed to be
nearly ten years out of date. In
1965, Kuhn probably did not warrant such exalted treatment.
Nevertheless, the star billing helped
convert the Popperian conjecture about Kuhn’s status into a self-fulfilling
prophecy - a most ironic fate, considering Popper’s own heightened awareness
of the havoc that publicly promoted predictions can wreak on the reliability
of our knowledge of human beings. 23 The
irony is only compounded by Kuhn’s failure to realize, until after
Structure was already in press, that logical positivism had moved on from
its extreme
A curious feature of Kuhn’s self-understanding
was the ease with which he acknowledged the accidental character of what
turned out to be decisive influences in his intellectual development.
In his last extended interview,
22. Interview with Jagdish Hattiangadi in
23. The locus classicus for this argument is
Popper 1957.
24. From his final interview, it is clear that,
while writing Structure, Kuhn was working with the conception of logical
positivism he received as a Harvard undergraduate in the early 1940s.
See Kuhn etal. 1997, 183-84.
Curiously, although Kuhn never hid
Quine’s influence on his own thought, he did not seem to recognize the role
that Quine’s long-term engagement with Rudolf Carnap played in modifying the
logical positivist position to one that would enable Carnap, by the early
1960s, to see Kuhn as a kindred spirit, as noted in chapter 6, section 4.
See Creath 1990.
391
Kuhn gave the impression that he was in endless
need of guidance to focus his thoughts. Yet,
he never seemed to appreciate the tension between having a continuous
epistemological project and its particular expression being determined by
chance events. More comprehensively
reflexive thinkers would have incorporated this tension, however abstractly or
symbolically, in the account of knowledge they produced.
For example, the account would
probably not portray the crises that occasion major epistemic change as
internally generated. However, Kuhn
tended to present these fortuitous episodes more as signs that he was already
on the right track, what in more religious times would have been associated
with signs from “above,” especially given that these “accidents” have been
largely responsible for defining Kuhn’s project in his interpreters’ minds.
Thus, in Kuhn’s last interview, we learn the following:
1. A footnote in Hans Reichenbach’s
Experience and Prediction led Kuhn to Ludwik Fleck’s The Genesis and
Development of a Scientific Fact;
2. A footnote in Robert Merton’s Harvard
Ph.D. thesis, “Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth Century
England,” led Kuhn to Jean Piaget’s The Child’s Conception of Movement and
Speed;
3. James Bryant Conant led Kuhn to
Britain, where he learned about history and philosophy of science as a field
of inquiry and met Mary Hesse, who would turn out to be his strongest British
champion;
4. I. B. Cohen led Kuhn to Alexandre Koyre’s
Galileo Studies and thereafter the man himself;
5. Alexandre Koyre led Kuhn to Gaston Bachelard;
6. Karl Popper led Kuhn to Emile
Meyerson’s Identity and Reality. 25
Of all these chance encounters, I believe that
the last left the most indelible impression in Kuhn’s intellectual
orientation. This claim calls for
substantial comment, since it implies that the person normally seen as Kuhn’s
most formidable antagonist - Karl Popper - actually provided him with the
principal resource to bolster his position. To
be sure, fifteen years separated the time that Kuhn first met Popper as
William James lecturer at Harvard (1950), when Kuhn was told of Meyerson’s
work, and then confronted Popper on his own turf in
Meyerson (1859-1933) was no less than
25. All of these fortuitous contacts are
mentioned in Kuhn eta!. 1997, 162-68.
392
inaugurated a role that was subsequently usurped
by Gaston Bachelard, discussed in chapter 7, section 4.
An industrial chemist by training and
a man of letters by disposition, Meyerson was the darling of antipositivists
across the European Continent. 26 Popper’s
recommendation of Meyerson to Kuhn was prescient in at least two respects.
First, it drew attention to the hidden
French roots of modern anglophone philosophy of science.
As I observed in chapters 1 (note 136)
and 6 (note 32), Popper’s conception of science as the open society and of
reality as an open-ended process were indebted to Henri Bergson, whom Meyerson
took to be his main academic rival. Here
we need to recall when Kuhn first met Popper, namely the latter’s invitation
to deliver a set of lectures in honor of a philosopher - William James - whose
compatibilist attitudes toward religion and science and popular touch made him
America’s answer to Bergson. As
Bergson and James had regarded thought in general, Popper located the essence
of scientific inquiry in an endless quest for self-transcendence.
In terms of this process, established
facts and theories are little more than way stations that potentially obscure
the course of inquiry if they are taken as final products in their own right.
Popper told Kuhn to read Meyerson
precisely because he had already detected in the young Kuhn disagreements on
this point.
Meyerson never hid his debts to Leibniz and
Kant, both of whom were inclined to treat established facts and theories as
direct evidence for the processes by which they were - indeed, had to be -
produced. Thus, according to Meyerson,
the best way to understand the nature of science is not to observe the actual
conduct of science, as social constructivists subsequently would, because that
could lead to so many dead ends and unscientific directions.
Rather, one should start with
unproblematic scientific achievements, because they provide the threshold for
what it is that competing scientific theories have historically tried to
achieve. 27 This point is
26. Meyerson was plugged into the major
scientific networks of his day, regularly corresponding with Einstein and de
Broglie. Nevertheless, he remains a
neglected figure, even in
27. A good example of Kuhn’s attachment to this
Meyersonian doctrine is his response to Shapin and Schaffer 1985, the most
influential social constructivist history of science.
Kuhn accuses them of not knowing, or
ignoring, the technical details of hydrostatics that “everybody now learns in
high school” in their explanation of why Boyle’s account of the air-pump was
preferred to Hobbes’s (Kuhn et al. 1997, 192).
Here Kuhn takes what is now a long-standing scientific finding as the
goal toward which both Boyle and Hobbes were aiming in their
seventeenth-century dispute, clearly abstracting what Kuhn presumes to be the
common goal of their scientific inquiry from whatever other personal and
political goals distinguished them in their day.
In contrast, a social constructivist
would refuse to grant any clear distinction between scientific, political, and
personal goals, until a canonical account of the episode is constructed,
whereby the various goals would be disentangled for purposes of vindicating
the dominant research trajectory. Thus,
from Shapin and Schaffer’s standpoint, it would not have [made sense to
mention matters currently settled in hydrostatics, since it was the resolution
of the Hobbes-Boyle dispute that helped to settle them.
In these terms, Popper may be seen as having
agreed with social constructivists about the actual nature of science; hence,
his insistence on interpreting the “basic observation statements” of the
logical positivists as revisable “conventions” for the conduct of inquiry, not
indubitable foundations of knowledge.
However, Popper differed from the social constructivists in his
insistence on an explicit normative standard, against which such ongoing
developments in science may be judged.
My own social epistemology agrees with Popper on both scores, though I
am more explicit than Popper about the political character of the means by
which this normative standard is determined.
See Fuller 1999b, but also chapter 6, section 1, above.]
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393
easily overlooked because, like today’s social
constructivists, Meyerson himself invoked the distinction between what
scientists say and do - but he meant what scientists do once it had been
done, not as they were doing it. Historically,
this mentality is closely associated with the argument from design in
theology. It capitalizes on the
psychological fact that after an event has occurred it is harder to imagine
equally probable alternatives than before it occurs.
This post facto perspective, in turn,
suggests that the event was caused for a reason; hence, the need for a
rational agent behind the scenes. 28
The argument from design is most persuasive when
the world is seen as both rational and complex, since taken together, these
two factors diminish the probability that sheer chance could explain why
things are as they are. Thus, whereas
Bergson read history back to front, so that at any point in the past the
future appeared indefinitely open, Meyerson read it front to back, so that the
present appears to be the logical culmination of the past.
Methodologically, Bergson shadowed the
stream of consciousness, while Meyerson diagnosed the textual trace.
That Kuhn stood with Meyerson on this
point is demonstrated by his own method of research (noted in chapter 4,
section 2), which privileged finished works in the public domain over draft
manuscripts in the archives. 29
Given Meyerson’s exclusive interest in proven
scientific achievements, it would be easy to conclude that he regarded his
theory of scientific change as normative rather than descriptive.
However, this would clearly mistake
the spirit of his enterprise, as Meyerson’s most heated polemics were directed
against the logical positivists and behaviorists, both of whom
28. Far from being anomalous, Meyerson’s
design-oriented approach to the history of scientific achievement finds good
company in the history of scientific reasoning, especially the Reverend Thomas
Bayes (1702-61), whose eponymous theorem aimed to formalize inductive
(or in Charles Sanders Peirce’s more precise terms, “retroductive” or “abductive”)
inference in order to show that the probability of a divine intelligence
increased as science revealed just how well-ordered nature is.
See Hacking 1975, esp. chap.
18. Whewell’s interest in putting the
“theos” back in scientific theorizing also fits in this tradition (see chapter
1, section 6, above).
29. See Lecourt 1975, 53, who wisely
places Kuhn closer to Meyerson than to Bachelard, despite superficial
resemblances.
394
he accused of normative heavy-handedness.
Meyerson understood the expression “the nature of science” very
literally to mean that science is an activity having intrinsic ends, no mere
means for predicting, controlling, or even representing something outside
itself, called “Nature.” Indeed, in
response to Moritz Schlick of the
Meyerson- and Kuhn after him - perceived a much
harder boundary between science and Nature than his interlocutors.
For example, whereas a positivist,
behaviorist, or Popperian would equate the “self-correcting” character of
scientific inquiry with how it responds to phenomena in Nature, Meyerson saw
science’s self-correction more strictly as a purging of its own past, the
ongoing conversion of empirical findings into logical deductions, which placed
under continual erasure any evidence for science’s existence in a world
outside its own rationalizing tendencies. Philosophers
of science may see here an attempt to turn the distinction between the
contexts of discovery and justification into a two-stage developmental
process. Speaking more fashionably, we
might say that Meyerson had an “autopoietic” conception of scientific inquiry,
as did Kuhn. Meyerson himself invoked
the term “conservation” - as of number, matter, and energy - to identify the
principles that have historically functioned as the transcendental basis for
knowledge of the physical world: to wit, that whatever happens in this world
is the result of something else that happens in the same world.
For Meyerson, the one great
revolutionary moment in intellectual history came when the pre-Socratic
philosophers abandoned the appeal to supernatural agency and grounded their
inquiries in a generalized conservation principle. 31
Alexandre Koyré also shared this suspended view
of science. Koyre was one of several
Jewish émigrés from the Russian borderlands of
30. This debate is outlined in La Lumia 1966,
11-12.
31. The point comes out most clearly in
Meyerson’s magnum opus, Identity and Reality (1908).
395
appreciate the Platonic hermeticist precedent of
the perspective that Meyerson brought to bear in the salons he conducted from
his home, which were the talk of
Take Koyré’s portrayal of Galileo, previously
raised in chapter 4, section 4. The
principal rupture occurred between the underlying structures of reality that
were available only to the intellectually adept and the realm of empirical
phenomena that made the art of experiment a suitable foil to the commonsense
forms of observation underwriting Aristotelian science.
In Galileo’s day, Scholastic
scientists, with one eye on spiritual governance, favored empirically based
forms of knowledge that smoothed over the epistemic differences between the
governors and the governed. In fact,
those harboring a more strictly Platonic concern for ensuring the integrity of
knowledge over time sought protection from such contamination through
practices that admit of esoteric interpretations.
The great breakthrough that
constituted Galileo’s approach to experimentation was that it met the Platonic
need, while at the same time enabling the conversion of those who are moved
only by their senses. The former is
illustrated by the potential access that experimental intervention allows to
the mechanisms that underwrite empirical regularities; the latter by the
import attached to an experimental observation that confirms a prediction.
Together these two aspects
systematically purge scientific thought from extrascientific contaminants.
In one sense, Kuhn helped update the psychology
that informed this perspective by introducing Piaget’s “genetic structuralist”
account of child development in his contribution to Koyré’s Festschrift.
33 Piaget recognized the tension
between science’s overarching interest in what Piaget, following Meyerson,
called the “conservation” of knowledge over time with the periodic
reconfiguration of the terms under which that conservation occurred. 34
According to Kuhn and Piaget,
the resistance that experience
32. See Collins 1998, 1024 n. 20.
33. Kuhn 1977a, 240-65 (originally 1964).
For more on Kuhn’s debt to Piaget and
its bearing on Koyré’s influence, see introduction, note 37, above.
34. Piaget routinely motivated his account
of cognitive development as a reaction to Meyerson.
See Piaget 1952, 13; Piaget 1970, 21,
39, 122. Koyré 1978, 2, cites Meyerson for the classic Piagetian
example of the modern notion of inertia appearing self-contradictory to
ancient and medieval physicists who had failed to abstract the principle from
its empirical realizations. For his
part, Meyerson was attracted to Hermann von Helmholtz’s project of
naturalizing the normative dimension of cognition by translating Kantianism
into experimental psychology.
[However, according to La Lumia 1966,
chap. 9, Meyerson never satisfactorily reconciled the transcendental and
empirical elements of his historical epistemology, a fate perhaps also
suffered by Kuhn. On Helmholtz’s
project, see Hatfield 1990b.]
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396
poses to our conceptual scheme is not simply an
instance of the irrational, as Meyerson thought, but rather marks of a reality
that exists beyond our concepts, to which we must somehow “accommodate,” in
Piagetian terms. However, as the word
“accommodate” suggests, this recognition of an external reality is not
entirely welcomed. Indeed, given his
own experience in psychoanalysis and its admitted influence on other aspects
of his work, Kuhn may have been moved by the Freudian concept of “trauma” when
trying to capture these unwanted contacts with a world beyond one’s reach,
which culminate in a paradigmatic crisis. 35
Had Koyré not died the year his Festschrift
appeared, he probably would have responded to Kuhn’s piece by drawing
attention to the “straightness” of his interpretation of Piaget, which focused
exclusively on how his experiments induced in children the equivalent of
paradigmatic crises, without commenting on how the experiments occluded their
own manipulative character. Indeed, by
failing to account for the role of the Piagetian experimenter in the
constitution of directed epistemic change, Kuhn lost the political side of
Meyerson’s project, which Koyré had uncovered through his deep knowledge of
the history of Platonism. This may be
summed up as the ongoing construction of epistemic continuity and progress, a
process whose significance Kuhn downplayed by discussing only its products,
the histories recounted in postrevolutionary scientific textbooks.
Indeed, Kuhn so minimized the
significance of effort needed to maintain the distinction between the
scientist’s history of science and the historian’s that he made the two appear
to subsist in parallel universes. The
irony here is that shortly before the publication of Structure, Kuhn
had shown that the energy conservation principle, far from being a
transcendentally knowable feature of physical reality, began life as a set of
incommensurable interpretations of ongoing research and only gradually
acquired its current canonical form. 36
So far my account has attributed Kuhn’s
significance largely to things that other people thought and did.
As we have just seen, this extends
beyond the reception of Structure to its actual composition.
This pronounced state of uninvolvement
suggests that he did indeed suffer from a state of diminished cultural
responsibility that makes the sense of “being there”
I raised in the preface to this book
more than just a nasty dig. In any
case, we need a term for the incapacity to do what is expected of someone in a
given
35. See note 2.
36. Kuhn 1977a.
397
social position, a failure to acknowledge from
where one had come and to where one was supposed to go.
Let us call this condition
culturopathy. Culturopaths lack
reflexive engagement with what they say and do.
They go through life as if in a vacuum
or a bubble. Academic training
unwittingly renders its subjects susceptible to this disorder while preparing
a “universal class” of pure inquirers: the so-called Ivory Tower mentality.
The symptoms may range from the
crudely comic to the more subtly pathetic: on the one hand, the proverbial
absent-minded professor; on the other, the scholar who supposes that
publication ipso facto secures readership. The
disorder takes a more specific form in terms of the relationship between
historians and philosophers of history, or “metahistorians” in Hayden White’s
terms.
White uses the expression “cognitive
responsibility” to distinguish the two groups of inquirers. 37
Metahistorians display cognitive
responsibility for their narratives in ways that ordinary historians do not.
They introduce epistemological
complications that historians normally avoid because historians generally do
not refer to the contexts in which their own texts are written and read.
38 By this criterion, both
Conant and Koyré were metahistorians. Conant’s
reflexive engagement appeared in disparate presentations of the nature of
science to disparate audiences; Koyré’s in scholarly works clearly aimed for
highly specialized audiences mentally prepared to receive uncomfortable
truths. These acts of cognitive
responsibility incurred costs: Conant’s message became diffuse and widely
attacked, Koyré’s esoteric and nearly ignored.
Kuhn lacked this sense of responsibility because he took their two
visions as the background conditions for his own seamless narrative for an
audience largely unfamiliar with both the quotidian science policy struggles
that concerned Conant and the transhistorical worries about truth preservation
that concerned Koyré.
37. White 1973, 14 n. 7, 23 n. 12.
White’s source for “cognitive
responsibility” is Stephen Pepper, World Hypotheses (1948).
Pepper, who trained at Harvard under
the critical realist Ralph Barton Perry, was chair of the