Thomas Samuel Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 â June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions and innovations in the philosophy of science. More than a million copies of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, were printed, and it became the most studied and discussed text in philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had far reaching impacts on diverse fields of study beyond the philosophy of science, particularly on social sciences. Key concepts Kuhn presented in this work, such as "paradigm" and "incommensurability," became popular beyond academics.
Life
Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and his wife Minette Stroock Kuhn. The family was Jewish on both sides, although they were non-practicing. His father had been trained as a hydraulic engineer and had gone to Harvard. When he was six months old, the family moved to New York City, and the young Kuhn attended progressive schools there, and later in the upstate New York area.
Kuhn entered Harvard University in 1940 and obtained his bachelor's degree in physics after three years in 1943, his master's in 1946 and Ph.D. in 1949. While there, primarily because of his editorship of the Harvard Crimson, he came to the attention of then Harvard president James Bryant Conant, and eventually gained Conant's sponsorship for becoming a Harvard Fellow. Conant would also be extremely influential in Kuhnâs career, encouraging him to write the book that would become The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first ed. published in 1962).
After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California at Berkeley in both the philosophy and the history departments, being named Professor of the History of Science in 1961. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1979, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991.
Kuhn had entered Harvard as a physics major, intending to study theoretical physics. He did go on to get his degrees in physics. But as an undergraduate he took a course in philosophy and, although this was completely new to him, he was fascinated with it. He especially took to Kant. Later he would say that his own position was Kantian, but with movable categories.
Sometime around 1947 Kuhn began teaching what had before been Conantâs course, âUnderstanding Science.â This course could be thought of as an elementary course in the history and philosophy of science. This led Kuhn to begin focusing on the history of science. He also had his âEureka momentââmaybe better called an âAristotle momentââin the summer of 1947. As a 1991 article in Scientific American put it, Kuhn âwas working toward his doctorate in physics at Harvard âŚwhen he was asked to teach some science to undergraduate humanities majors. Searching for a simple case history that could illuminate the roots of Newtonian mechanics, Kuhn opened Aristotle's Physics and was astonished at how âwrongâ it was [when understood in Newtonian terms]⌠Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out of the window of his dormitory room⌠when suddenly Aristotle âmade sense.ââ
Concerning what he found in Aristotle, Kuhn wrote, âHow could [Aristotleâs] characteristic talents have deserted his so systematically when he turned to the study of motion and mechanics? Equally, if his talents had so deserted him, why had his writings in physics been taken so seriously for so many centuries after his death? Those questions troubled me. I could easily believe that Aristotle had stumbled, but not that, on entering physics, he had totally collapsed. Might not the fault be mine, rather than Aristotleâs, I asked myself. Perhaps his words had not always meant to him and his contemporaries quite what they meant to me and mineâ (The Road Since Structure, 16).
Kuhn reported that, in his window-gazing, âSuddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together.â As the Scientific American article put it, âKuhn ⌠realized that Aristotle's views of such basic concepts as motion and matter were totally unlike Newton's⌠Understood on its own terms, Aristotle's Physics âwasn't just bad Newton,â Kuhn says; it was just different.â This insight would go on to underlie most of his subsequent work in history and philosophy of science.
Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954, and in 1982 was awarded the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science. He was also awarded numerous honorary doctorates.
Kuhn suffered cancer of the bronchial tubes for the last two years of his life and died Monday, June 17, 1996. He was survived by his wife Jehane R. Kuhn, his ex-wife Kathryn Muhs Kuhn, and their three children, Sarah, Elizabeth, and Nathaniel.
The Copernican Revolution (1957)
In his lifetime, Kuhn published more than a hundred papers and reviews, as well as five books (the fifth published posthumously). His first bookâhe had already published a few papers and reviews in various journalsâwas The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Harvard University Press, 1957), with a forward by Conant. This book began out of lectures he had given to the students at Harvard, and was completed after he went to Berkeley. It may be seen as a prolegomena to his later and most important, and far more influential, book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in that in Copernican Revolution Kuhn introduced a number of the points that would be further developed in the later book.
Kuhn emphasized that the Copernican Revolution âevent was plural. Its core was a transformation of mathematical astronomy, but it embraced conceptual changes in cosmology, physics, philosophy, and religion as well.â The Copernican revolution, Kuhn clamed, shows âhow and with what effect the concepts of many different fields are woven into a single fabric of thought.â And ââŚfiliations between distinct fields of thought appear in the period after the publication of Copernicusâ work. âŚ[This work] could only be assimilated by men able to create a new physics, a new conception of space, and a new idea of manâs relation to God. âŚSpecialized accounts [of the Copernican Revolution] are inhibited both by aim and method from examining the nature of these ties and their effects upon the growth of human knowledge.â
Kuhn claimed that this effort to show the Copernican Revolutionâs plurality is âprobably the bookâs most important novelty.â But also it is novel in that it ârepeatedly violates the institutional boundaries which separate the audience for âscienceâ from the audience for âhistoryâ or âphilosophy.â Occasionally it may seem to be two books, one dealing with science, the other with intellectual history.â
The seven chapters of Copernican Revolution deal with what Kuhn called âThe Ancient Two-Sphere Universe,â âThe Problem of the Planets [in Ptolemaic cosmology],â âThe Two-Sphere Universe in Aristotelian Thought,â âRecasting the Tradition: Aristotle to Copernicus,â âCopernicusâ Innovation,â âThe Assimilation of Copernican Astronomy,â and âThe New Universeâ as it came to be understood after the revolution in thinking.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first ed. 1962), Kuhn claimed that science does not evolve gradually toward truth, but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he called "paradigm shifts." Ironically, this book was originally printed as a volume in the International Encyclopedia for Unified Science, which was conceived and published by the Vienna circleâthe logical positivists. It is ironic because Kuhn seemed to be an arch anti-positivist (although that claim about him came to be doubted in the 1990s). The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured by the revolution it brought about even in the vocabulary of the history and philosophy of science. Besides âparadigmâ and âparadigm shifts,â Kuhn coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term âscientific revolutionsâ in the plural, taking place at different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single "Scientific Revolution" in the late Renaissance.
Kuhn began this book by declaring that there should be a role for history in theory of science, and that this can produce a âdecisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.â Moreover, the textbooks used to teach the next generation of scientists, offer âa concept of science ⌠no more likely to fit the enterprise that produced them than an image of a national culture drawn from a tourist brochure or a language textâ (p. 1). He also declared that âmethodological directivesâ are insufficient âto dictate a unique substantive conclusion to many sorts of scientific questionsâ (3).
Next, Kuhn introduced his notion of ânormal scienceâ and said that it âmeans research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practiceâ (10). These achievements can be called âparadigms,â a term much used by Kuhn and a central point of Kuhnâs theoryâfor better or worse. Paradigms, according to Kuhn, are essential to science. âIn the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevantâ (15). Moreover, âno natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticismâ (16-17). âParadigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute.â Normal science, then, is a puzzle-solving activity consisting of mopping-up activities, guided by the reigning paradigm. âRules derive from paradigms, but paradigms can guide science even in the absence of rulesâ (42). âNormal research, which is cumulative, owes its success to the ability of scientists regularly to select problems that can be solved with conceptual and instrumental techniques close to those already in existence" (96).
Over time, however, new and unsuspected phenomenaâanomaliesâare uncovered by scientific research, things that will not fit into the reigning paradigm. When a sufficient failure of normal science to solve the emerging anomalies occurs, a crises results, and this eventually leads to the emergence of a new scientific theory, a revolution. A reorientation occurs that breaks with one tradition and introduces a new one. Kuhn stated that the new paradigm is incompatible and incommensurable with the old one. Such âscientific revolutions are ⌠non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new oneâ (92). This crisis and its accompanying revolution lead to a division of camps and polarization within the science, with one camp striving to hold onto and defend the old paradigm or institutional constellation, while the other upholds and seeks to have the new one replace the old one. âThat difference [between competing paradigms] could not occur if the two were logically compatible. In the process of being assimilated, the second must displace the firstâ (97). Moreover, proponents of the two cannot really speak with each other, for âTo the extent ⌠that two scientific schools disagree about what is a problem and what is a solution, they will inevitably talk through each other when debating the relative merits of their respective paradigmsâ (109). Scientific revolutions amount to changes of world view.
Scientific revolutions, Kuhn claied, tend to be invisible because they âhave customarily been viewed not as revolutions but as additions to scientific knowledgeâ (136). This is primarily because of textbooks, which âaddress themselves to an already articulated body of problems, data, and theory, most often to the particular set of paradigms to which the scientific community is committed at the time they are written.â Textbooks, popularizations, and philosophy of science all ârecord the stable outcome of past revolutionsâ and are âsystematically misleadingâ (137). âTextbooks ⌠are produced only in the aftermath of a scientific revolution. They are the bases for a new tradition of normal scienceâ (144). Moreover, âdepreciation of historical fact is deeply, and probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology of the scientific professionâ (138).
Although it may superficially resemble or mimic them, neither verification, as claimed by the positivists, nor falsification, as propounded by Popper, are the methods by which theory change actually occurs. Instead, Kuhn claimed, something resembling religious conversion happens. A new paradigm first needs a few supportersâusually younger people who are not committed or beholden to the older one. âProbably the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm is that they can solve the problems that have led the old one to a crisisâ (153). The main issue in circumstances of competing paradigms is âwhich paradigm will in the future guide research on problems many of which neither competitor can yet claim to resolve completely (157). Because of that âa decision is called forâ (157) and âin the circumstances that decision must be based less on past achievement than future promiseâ (157-158). But Kuhn denied that ânew paradigms triumph ultimately through some mystical aestheticâ (158).
The remaining central question for growth of scientific knowledge is, Kuhn acknowledged, âWhy should the enterprise [he sketches in his theory] ⌠move steadily ahead in ways that, say, art, political theory, or philosophy does notâ (160). He suggested that the answer is partly semantic because, âTo a very great extent the term âscienceâ is reserved for fields that do progress in obvious ways.â This is shown "in the recurrent debates about whether one or another of the contemporary social sciences is really a scienceâ (160). Kuhn declared that âwe tend to see as science any field in which progress is markedâ (162). âIt is only during periods of normal science that progress seems both obvious and assuredâ (163). But, he asked, âWhy should progress also be the apparently universal concomitant of scientific revolutions?â He answered that âRevolutions close with a total victory for one of the opposing camps. Will that group ever say that the result of its victory has been something less than progress? That would be rather like admitting that they had been wrong and their opponents rightâ (166). âThe very existence of science,â he wrote, âdepends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of communityâ (167). And, âa group of this sort must see a paradigm change as progressâ (169). But Kuhn denied that a paradigm change of the kind he describes leads toward the truth. âWe may ⌠have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes in paradigms carry scientists and those who learn from them closer to the truthâ (170). But this is no great loss because, he asked, âDoes it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal? If we can learn to substitute evolution-from-what-we-do-know for evolution-toward-what-we-wish-to-know, a number of very vexing problems may vanish in the processâ (171). Moreover, âthe entire process may have occurred, as we now suppose biological evolution did, without benefit of a set goal, a permanent fixed scientific truth, of which each stage in the development of scientific knowledge is a better exampleâ (172-173).
Criticism of Kuhn
Many people responded to Kuhnâs work, and the responses ranged from extremely favorable to highly critical. Dudley Shapere gave a harshly critical review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in Philosophical Review 73 (1964). W.V.O. Quine wrote that Kuhn's work contributed to a wave of âepistemological nihilism.â Quine continued, "This mood is reflected in the tendency of ⌠Kuhn ⌠to belittle the role of evidence and to accentuate cultural relativism"(Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, p. 87). Some people praised Kuhnâs opening to consideration of the sociology and psychology of science. OthersâKarl Popper, for an important exampleâcondemned this as a prostitution, or at least severe misrepresentation, of science. Some claimed that Kuhnâs work was progressive in that it opened the door to a new and fresh understanding of what science is and how it operates. But Steve Fuller, in Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, claimed that Kuhnâs work is reactionary because Kuhn tried to remove science from public examination and democratic control.
One of the most important and influential examinations of Kuhnâs work took place at the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, held at Bedford College, Regentâs Park, London, on July 11-17, 1965, with Popper presiding. The proceedings are gathered in a book entitled Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave. In that colloquium, John Watkins argued against normal science. Steven Toulmin asked whether the distinction between normal and revolutionary science holds water. Margaret Masterman pointed out that Kuhnâs use of âparadigmâ was highly plasticâshe showed more than twenty different usages. L. Pearce Williams claimed that few, if any, scientists recorded in the history of science were "normal" scientists in Kuhnâs sense; i.e. Williams disagreed with Kuhn both about historical facts and about what is characteristic for science. Others then and since have argued that Kuhn was mistaken in claiming that two different paradigms are incompatible and incommensurable because, in order for things to be incompatible, they must be directly comparable or commensurable.
Popper himself admitted that Kuhn had caused him to notice the existence of normal science, but Popper regarded normal science as deplorable because, Popper claimed, it is unimaginative and plodding. He pointed out that Kuhnâs theory of science growing through revolutions fits only some sciences because some other sciences have in fact been cumulativeâa point made by numerous other critics of Kuhn. In addition, Popper claimed that Kuhn really does have a logic of scientific discovery: The logic of historical relativism. He and others pointed out that in claiming that a new paradigm is incommensurable and incompatible with an older one Kuhn was mistaken because, Popper claimed, âa critical comparison of the competing theories, of the competing frameworks, is always possible.â (Popper sometimes called this the "myth of the framework.") Moreover, Popper continued, âIn science (and only in science) can we say that we have made genuine progress: That we know more than we did beforeâ (Lakatos & Musgrave, 57).
Kuhn responded in an essay entitled âReflections on my Critics.â In it he discussed further the role of history and sociology, the nature and functions of normal science, the retrieval of normal science from history, irrationality and theory choice, and the question of incommensurability and paradigms. Among many other things, he claimed that his account of science, notwithstanding some of his critics, did not sanction mob rule; that it was not his view that âadoption of a new scientific theory is an intuitive or mystical affair, a matter for psychological description rather than logical or methodological codificationâ (Lakaos & Musgrave, 261) as, for example, Israel Scheffler had claimed in his book Science and Subjectivityâa claim that has been made against Kuhn by numerous other commentators, especially David Stoveâand that translation (from one paradigm or theory to another) always involves a theory of translation and that the possibility of translation taking place does not make the term âconversionâ inappropriate (Lakatos & Musgrave, 277).
Kuhnâs work (and that of many other philosophers of science) was examined in The Structure of Scientific Theories, ed. with a Critical Introduction by Frederick Suppe. There Kuhn published an important essay entitled âSecond Thoughts on Paradigmsâ in which he admitted that his use of that term had been too plastic and indefinite and had caused confusion, and he proposed replacing it with âdisciplinary matrix.â (Suppe, 463) In an âAfterwardâ to the 1977 Second Edition of this work, Suppe claimed that there had been a waning of the influence of what he dubbed the Weltanschauungen views of science such as that of Kuhn.
Examination and criticism of Kuhn's workâpro and con, with the con side dominant among philosophers, but the pro side tending to be supported by sociologists of science and by deconstructionists and other irrationalistsâcontinues into the twenty first century. Kuhn is frequently attacked as a purveyor of irrationalism and of the view that science is a subjective enterprise with no objective referentâa view Kuhn strongly denied that he held or supported. One problem is that Kuhn tended to complain that his critics misunderstood and misrepresented him and that he did not hold what they represented him as holdingâeven though they could point to passages in which he seemed to say explicitly what they claimed he heldâbut he did not give them much in response that would serve to show that they were wrong or that he actually held to any defensible form of scientific rationalism. Since he gave up the notion of an external referent or âultimate truthâ as the aim or goal of science, it was nearly impossible for him to specify anything except a completely conventionalist account of growth or progress in scientific knowledge.
On the question of Kuhn's relationship to logical positivism (or logical empiricism), George Reischâin a 1991 essay entitled âDid Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?ââargued that Kuhn did not do so because there were two previously unpublished letters from Rudolf Carnap (Carnap was regarded by most observers as being the strongest, most important, or arch-logical positivist) to Kuhn in which Carnap expressed strong approval of Kuhnâs work, suggesting that there was a closer relationship between Kuhn and logical positivism than had been previously recognized.
"Post-Kuhnian" philosophy of science produced extensive responses to and critiques of the apparently relativistic and skeptical implications of Kuhn's workâimplications Kuhn himself disowned. But, as noted above, Kuhn's disowning of those implications is puzzling and perhaps even disingenuous, given what Kuhn actually wrote on those topics.
Kuhnâs work after Structure
Kuhn published three additional books after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. They were The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977), Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity 1894-1912 (1978; 1984; and reprinted in 1987 with an afterword, âRevisiting Planckâ), and The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview (Ed. by James Conant and John Haugeland, published posthumously, 2000). Subsequent editions of The Copernican Revolution were published in 1959, 1966, and 1985. A second revised edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1970, and a third edition in 1996. Essential Tension and The Road Since Structure were mostly collections of previously published essays, except that Road contains a long and informative interview-discussion with him conducted in Athens, Greece, on October 19-21, 1995, by three Greek interviewers; the occasion was the awarding of an honorary doctorate by the Department of Philosophy and History of Philosophy by the University of Athens and a symposium there in his honor.
Understandably, given the importance of Structure and the enormous outpouring of interest and criticism it provoked, almost all of Kuhn's work after it consisted of further discussions and defenses of things he had written, responses to critics, and some modifications of positions he had taken.
During his professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kuhn worked in linguistics. That may not have been an especially important or productive aspect of his work. But in his response "Reflections on my Critics," especially section 6 entitled "Incommensurability and Paradigms," where he wrote "At last we arrive at the central constellation of issues which separate me from most of my critics," Kuhn wrote about linguistic issues, and that set of problems or issues may have been the focus of his later work at MIT.
Understanding of Kuhn's work in Europe
In France, Kuhn's conception of science has been related to Michel Foucault (with Kuhn's paradigm corresponding to Foucault's episteme) and Louis Althusser, although both are more concerned by the historical conditions of possibility of the scientific discourse. (Foucault, in fact, was most directly influenced by Gaston Bachelard, who had developed independently a view of the history of scientific change similar to Kuhn's, butâKuhn claimedâtoo rigid.) Thus, they do not consider science as isolated from society as they argue that Kuhn does. In contrast to Kuhn, Althusser's conception of science is that it is cumulative, even though this cumulativity is discontinuous (see his concept of Louis Althusser's "epistemological break") whereas Kuhn considers various paradigms as incommensurable.
Kuhn's work has also been extensively used in social science; for instance, in the post-positivist/positivist debate within International Relations.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
Primary Sources
(In chronological order)
- Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957, 1959, 1965.
- âThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
- âThe Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977.
- âBlack-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
- âThe Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993. Ed. by James Conant and John Haugeland Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. (This book contains a complete bibliography of Kuhn's writings and other presentations.)
Secondary Sources
- Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton: Princeton University Press and Acumen Press, 2000.
- Einstein, Albert and Leopold Infeld. The Evolution of Physics New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938.
- Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
- Lakatos, Imre and Alan Musgrave, Eds, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. London: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
- Lakatos, Imre and Paul Feyerabend. For and Against Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
- Quine, W.V. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
- Raymo, Chet. âA New Paradigm for Thomas Kuhn,â Scientific American. September, 2000.
- Reisch, George. âDid Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?â Philosophy of Science 58 (1991).
- Rothman, Milton A. A Physicist's Guide to Skepticism. Prometheus, 1988.
- Sardar, Ziauddin. Thomas Kuhn and the Science Wars. Totem Books, 2000.
- Scheffler, Israel. Science and Subjectivity. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1967
- Shapere, Dudley. âThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions,â Philosophical Review. 73, 1964. (A review of Kuhn's book.)
- Stove, David. Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult. Transaction Publishers, 2001.
- Suppe, Frederick. The Structure of Scientific Theories, Second Ed. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977
- Wolpert, Lewis. The Unnatural Nature of Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
External links
All links retrieved April 30, 2023.
General Philosophy Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. .
- Paideia Project Online.
- Project Gutenberg.
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