Difference between revisions of "Thomas Samuel Kuhn" - New World Encyclopedia
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Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and his wife Minette Stroock Kuhn. His 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, his parents moved with him to New York City, and the young Kuhn attended progressive schools there and later in the upstate New York area. | Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and his wife Minette Stroock Kuhn. His 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, his parents moved with him 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. From 1948 until 1956 he taught a course in the history of science there at the suggestion of | + | 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 he came to tthe attention of and under the sponsorship of then Harvard president James Bryant Conant. From 1948 until 1956 he taught a course in the history of science there at the suggestion of Conant. Conant would also be extremely influential in Kuhn’s career, encouraging him to write the book that would become ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'', (first. ed. pub. in 1962). |
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| + | After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California at Berkeley in both the philosophy department and the history department, 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 moveable categories. | 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 moveable categories. | ||
Sometime about 1947 Kuhn began teaching what had before been Conant’s course “Understanding Science.” 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 “Eureka moment” – maybe better called an “Aristotle moment” – in the summer of 1947. As a 1991 article in ''Scientific American'' put it, Kuhn “was working toward his doctorate in physics at Harvard …when 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 ‘wrong’ it was...[understood in Newtonian terms]. Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out of the window of his dormitory room... when suddenly Aristotle ‘made sense.’” | Sometime about 1947 Kuhn began teaching what had before been Conant’s course “Understanding Science.” 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 “Eureka moment” – maybe better called an “Aristotle moment” – in the summer of 1947. As a 1991 article in ''Scientific American'' put it, Kuhn “was working toward his doctorate in physics at Harvard …when 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 ‘wrong’ it was...[understood in Newtonian terms]. Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out of the window of his dormitory room... when suddenly Aristotle ‘made sense.’” | ||
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Concerning what he found in Aristotle, Kuhn wrote, “How could [Aristotle’s] 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 Aristotle’s, I asked myself. Perhaps his words had not always meant to him and his contemporaries quite what they meant to me and mine.” (''The Road Since Structure'', 16) | Concerning what he found in Aristotle, Kuhn wrote, “How could [Aristotle’s] 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 Aristotle’s, I asked myself. Perhaps his words had not always meant to him and his contemporaries quite what they meant to me and mine.” (''The Road Since Structure'', 16) | ||
Kuhn reports that, in his window-gazing, “Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together.” As the Scientific American article put it, “Kuhn … 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 ‘wasn't just bad Newton,’ Kuhn says; it was just different.” This insight would go on to underlie most of his subsequent work in history and philosophy of science. | Kuhn reports that, in his window-gazing, “Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together.” As the Scientific American article put it, “Kuhn … 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 ‘wasn't just bad Newton,’ Kuhn says; it was just different.” This insight would go on to underlie most of his subsequent work in history and philosophy of science. | ||
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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 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. | ||
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In his lifetime, Kuhn published more than a hundred papers and reviews and five books. His first book – he had already published a few papers and reviews in various journals – was ''The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought'' (Harvard University Press, 1957), with a Forward by James Bryant 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 many of the points that will be further developed there.. | In his lifetime, Kuhn published more than a hundred papers and reviews and five books. His first book – he had already published a few papers and reviews in various journals – was ''The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought'' (Harvard University Press, 1957), with a Forward by James Bryant 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 many of the points that will be further developed there.. | ||
| − | Kuhn emphasizes that the Copernican Revolution “event was plural. Its core was a transformation of mathematical astronomy, but it embraced conceptual changes in cosmology, physics, philosophy, and religion as well.” ( | + | Kuhn emphasizes that the Copernican Revolution “event was plural. Its core was a transformation of mathematical astronomy, but it embraced conceptual changes in cosmology, physics, philosophy, and religion as well.” (vii) The Copernican revolution, Kuhn clams, shows “how and with what effect the concepts of many different fields are woven into a single fabric of thought.” (vii) And “…filiations between distinct fields of thought appear in the period after the publication of Copernicus’ work. …[This work] could only be assimilated by men able to create a new physics, a new conception of space, and a new idea of man’s relation to God. …Specialized 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.” (vii) |
| − | Kuhn claims that this effort to show the Copernican Revolution’s plurality is “probably the book’s most important novelty.” ( | + | Kuhn claims that this effort to show the Copernican Revolution’s plurality is “probably the book’s most important novelty.” (viii) But also it is novel in that it “repeatedly violates the institutional boundaries which separate the audience for ‘science’ from the audience for ‘history’ or ‘philosophy.’ Occasionally it may seem to be two books, one dealing with science, the other with intellectual history.” |
The seven chapters of ''Copernican Revolution'' deal with what Kuhn calls “The Ancient Two-Sphere Universe,” “The Problem of the Planets [in Ptolemaic cosmology],” “The Two-Sphere Universe in Aristotelian Thought,” “Recasting the Tradition: Aristotle to Copernicus,” “Copernicus’ Innovation,” “The Assimilation of Copernican Astronomy,” and “The New Universe.” | The seven chapters of ''Copernican Revolution'' deal with what Kuhn calls “The Ancient Two-Sphere Universe,” “The Problem of the Planets [in Ptolemaic cosmology],” “The Two-Sphere Universe in Aristotelian Thought,” “Recasting the Tradition: Aristotle to Copernicus,” “Copernicus’ Innovation,” “The Assimilation of Copernican Astronomy,” and “The New Universe.” | ||
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| + | ==''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' (1962)== | ||
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| + | In ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions''(1962) Kuhn claimed that science does not evolve gradually toward truth, but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he calls "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 circle – the logical positivists. It is ironic because Kuhn was an arch anti-positivist. The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the revolution it brought about even in the vocabulary of the history and philosophy of science. Besides “paradigm” and “paradigm shifts,” 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 “scientific revolutions” 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. | ||
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| + | Kuhn begins this book by declaring that there should be a role for history in theory of science, and that this can produce a “decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” Moreover, the textbooks used to teach the next generation of scientists, offer “a 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 text.” (p. 1) He also declares that “methodological directives” are insufficient “to dictate a unique substantive conclusion to many sorts of scientific questions.” (3) | ||
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| + | Next, Kuhn introduces his notion of “normal science” and says that it “means 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 practice.” (10) These achievements can be called “paradigms,” a term that is much used by Kuhn and that is a central point of Kuhn’s theory – for better or worse. Paradigms, according to Kuhn, are essential to science. “In 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 relevant.” (15) Moreover, “no 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 criticism.” (16-17) “Paradigms 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.” Normal science, then, is a puzzle-solving activity (Ch. IV) consisting of mopping-up activities, guided by the reigning paradigm. “Rules derive from paradigms, but paradigms can guide science even in the absence of rules.” (42) “Normal 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) | ||
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| + | Over time, however, new and unsuspected phenomena – anomalies – are uncovered by scientific research, things that cannot be fitted into the reigning paradigm. (Ch. VI) When a sufficient failure of normal science to solve the emerging anomalies occurs, a crises results, and this leads eventually to the emergence of a new scientific theory – a revolution. (Ch. VII – IX) A reorientation occurs that breaks with one tradition and introduces a new one. Kuhn states that the new paradigm is incompatible with and incommensurable with the old one. Such “scientific revolutions are … non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one.” (92) This crisis and its accompanying revolution leads 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. “That difference [between competing paradigms] could not occur if the two were logically compatible. In the process of being assimilated, the second must displace the first.” (97) Moreover, proponents of the two cannot really speak with each other, for “To 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 paradigms.” (109) Scientific revolutions amount to changes of world view. (Ch. X) | ||
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| + | Scientific revolutions, Kuhn claims, tend to be invisible because they “have customarily been viewed not as revolutions but as additions to scientific knowledge.” (136) This is primarily because of textbooks, which “address 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.” (136) Textbooks, popularizations, and philosophy of science all “record the stable outcome of past revolutions” and are “systematically misleading.” (137) “Textbooks … are produced only in the aftermath of a scientific revolution. They are the bases for a new tradition of normal science.” (144) Moreover, “depreciation of historical fact is deeply, and probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession.” (138) | ||
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| + | 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. (Ch. XII) Instead, something resembling religious conversion happens. A new paradigm first needs a few supporters – usually younger people who are not committed or beholden to the older one. “Probably 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 crisis.” (153) The main issue in circumstances of competing paradigms is “which paradigm will in the future guide research on problems many of which neither competitor can yet claim to resolve completely. (157) Because of that “a decision is called for” (157) and “in the circumstances that decision must be based less on past achievement than future promise.” (157-158) But Kuhn denies that “new paradigms triumph ultimately through some mystical aesthetic.” (158) | ||
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| + | The remaining central question for growth of scientific knowledge is, Kuhn acknowledges, “Why should the enterprise [he sketches in his theory] … move steadily ahead in ways that, say, art, political theory, or philosophy does not?” (160) He suggests that the answer is partly semantic because “To a very great extent the term ‘science’ is reserved for fields that do progress in obvious says.” This is shown” in the recurrent debates about whether one or another of the contemporary social sciences is really a science.” (160) Kuhn declares that “we tend to see as science any field in which progress is marked.” (162) “It is only during periods of normal science that progress seems both obvious and assured.” (163) But, he asks, “Why should progress also be the apparently universal concomitant of scientific revolutions?” He answers that “Revolutions 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 right.” (166) “The very existence of science,” he writes, “depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community.” (167) And, “a group of this sort must see a paradigm change as progress.” (169) But Kuhn denies that a paradigm change of the kind he describes leads toward the truth. “We may … have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes in paradigms carry scientists and those who learn from them closer to the truth.” (170) But this is no great loss because, he asks, “Does 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 process.” (171) Moreover, “the 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 example.” (172-173) | ||
==Understanding of Kuhn's Work in Europe== | ==Understanding of Kuhn's Work in Europe== | ||
Revision as of 22:59, 18 August 2006
Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian of science and philosopher of science who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions 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.
Life
Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and his wife Minette Stroock Kuhn. His 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, his parents moved with him 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 he came to tthe attention of and under the sponsorship of then Harvard president James Bryant Conant. From 1948 until 1956 he taught a course in the history of science there at the suggestion of Conant. Conant would also be extremely influential in Kuhn’s career, encouraging him to write the book that would become The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (first. ed. pub. in 1962).
After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California at Berkeley in both the philosophy department and the history department, 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 moveable categories.
Sometime about 1947 Kuhn began teaching what had before been Conant’s course “Understanding Science.” 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 “Eureka moment” – maybe better called an “Aristotle moment” – in the summer of 1947. As a 1991 article in Scientific American put it, Kuhn “was working toward his doctorate in physics at Harvard …when 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 ‘wrong’ it was...[understood in Newtonian terms]. Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out of the window of his dormitory room... when suddenly Aristotle ‘made sense.’”
Concerning what he found in Aristotle, Kuhn wrote, “How could [Aristotle’s] 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 Aristotle’s, I asked myself. Perhaps his words had not always meant to him and his contemporaries quite what they meant to me and mine.” (The Road Since Structure, 16)
Kuhn reports that, in his window-gazing, “Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together.” As the Scientific American article put it, “Kuhn … 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 ‘wasn't just bad Newton,’ Kuhn says; it was just different.” 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 and five books. His first book – he had already published a few papers and reviews in various journals – was The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Harvard University Press, 1957), with a Forward by James Bryant 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 many of the points that will be further developed there..
Kuhn emphasizes that the Copernican Revolution “event was plural. Its core was a transformation of mathematical astronomy, but it embraced conceptual changes in cosmology, physics, philosophy, and religion as well.” (vii) The Copernican revolution, Kuhn clams, shows “how and with what effect the concepts of many different fields are woven into a single fabric of thought.” (vii) And “…filiations between distinct fields of thought appear in the period after the publication of Copernicus’ work. …[This work] could only be assimilated by men able to create a new physics, a new conception of space, and a new idea of man’s relation to God. …Specialized 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.” (vii)
Kuhn claims that this effort to show the Copernican Revolution’s plurality is “probably the book’s most important novelty.” (viii) But also it is novel in that it “repeatedly violates the institutional boundaries which separate the audience for ‘science’ from the audience for ‘history’ or ‘philosophy.’ Occasionally it may seem to be two books, one dealing with science, the other with intellectual history.”
The seven chapters of Copernican Revolution deal with what Kuhn calls “The Ancient Two-Sphere Universe,” “The Problem of the Planets [in Ptolemaic cosmology],” “The Two-Sphere Universe in Aristotelian Thought,” “Recasting the Tradition: Aristotle to Copernicus,” “Copernicus’ Innovation,” “The Assimilation of Copernican Astronomy,” and “The New Universe.”
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions(1962) Kuhn claimed that science does not evolve gradually toward truth, but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he calls "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 circle – the logical positivists. It is ironic because Kuhn was an arch anti-positivist. The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the revolution it brought about even in the vocabulary of the history and philosophy of science. Besides “paradigm” and “paradigm shifts,” 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 “scientific revolutions” 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 begins this book by declaring that there should be a role for history in theory of science, and that this can produce a “decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” Moreover, the textbooks used to teach the next generation of scientists, offer “a 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 text.” (p. 1) He also declares that “methodological directives” are insufficient “to dictate a unique substantive conclusion to many sorts of scientific questions.” (3)
Next, Kuhn introduces his notion of “normal science” and says that it “means 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 practice.” (10) These achievements can be called “paradigms,” a term that is much used by Kuhn and that is a central point of Kuhn’s theory – for better or worse. Paradigms, according to Kuhn, are essential to science. “In 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 relevant.” (15) Moreover, “no 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 criticism.” (16-17) “Paradigms 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.” Normal science, then, is a puzzle-solving activity (Ch. IV) consisting of mopping-up activities, guided by the reigning paradigm. “Rules derive from paradigms, but paradigms can guide science even in the absence of rules.” (42) “Normal 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 phenomena – anomalies – are uncovered by scientific research, things that cannot be fitted into the reigning paradigm. (Ch. VI) When a sufficient failure of normal science to solve the emerging anomalies occurs, a crises results, and this leads eventually to the emergence of a new scientific theory – a revolution. (Ch. VII – IX) A reorientation occurs that breaks with one tradition and introduces a new one. Kuhn states that the new paradigm is incompatible with and incommensurable with the old one. Such “scientific revolutions are … non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one.” (92) This crisis and its accompanying revolution leads 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. “That difference [between competing paradigms] could not occur if the two were logically compatible. In the process of being assimilated, the second must displace the first.” (97) Moreover, proponents of the two cannot really speak with each other, for “To 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 paradigms.” (109) Scientific revolutions amount to changes of world view. (Ch. X)
Scientific revolutions, Kuhn claims, tend to be invisible because they “have customarily been viewed not as revolutions but as additions to scientific knowledge.” (136) This is primarily because of textbooks, which “address 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.” (136) Textbooks, popularizations, and philosophy of science all “record the stable outcome of past revolutions” and are “systematically misleading.” (137) “Textbooks … are produced only in the aftermath of a scientific revolution. They are the bases for a new tradition of normal science.” (144) Moreover, “depreciation of historical fact is deeply, and probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession.” (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. (Ch. XII) Instead, something resembling religious conversion happens. A new paradigm first needs a few supporters – usually younger people who are not committed or beholden to the older one. “Probably 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 crisis.” (153) The main issue in circumstances of competing paradigms is “which paradigm will in the future guide research on problems many of which neither competitor can yet claim to resolve completely. (157) Because of that “a decision is called for” (157) and “in the circumstances that decision must be based less on past achievement than future promise.” (157-158) But Kuhn denies that “new paradigms triumph ultimately through some mystical aesthetic.” (158)
The remaining central question for growth of scientific knowledge is, Kuhn acknowledges, “Why should the enterprise [he sketches in his theory] … move steadily ahead in ways that, say, art, political theory, or philosophy does not?” (160) He suggests that the answer is partly semantic because “To a very great extent the term ‘science’ is reserved for fields that do progress in obvious says.” This is shown” in the recurrent debates about whether one or another of the contemporary social sciences is really a science.” (160) Kuhn declares that “we tend to see as science any field in which progress is marked.” (162) “It is only during periods of normal science that progress seems both obvious and assured.” (163) But, he asks, “Why should progress also be the apparently universal concomitant of scientific revolutions?” He answers that “Revolutions 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 right.” (166) “The very existence of science,” he writes, “depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community.” (167) And, “a group of this sort must see a paradigm change as progress.” (169) But Kuhn denies that a paradigm change of the kind he describes leads toward the truth. “We may … have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes in paradigms carry scientists and those who learn from them closer to the truth.” (170) But this is no great loss because, he asks, “Does 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 process.” (171) Moreover, “the 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 example.” (172-173)
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.) 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.
"Post-Kuhnian" philosophy of science produced extensive responses to and critiques of the apparently relativistic and skeptical implications of Kuhn's work—implications Kuhn himself disowned.
Bibliography
- Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn Princeton and London: Princeton University Press and Acumen Press, 2000.
- Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
- Kuhn, T.S. The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957.
- Kuhn, T.S. The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science. Isis, 52(1961): 161-193.
- Kuhn, T.S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) ISBN 0226458083
- Kuhn, T.S. "The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research". Pp. 347-69 in A. C. Crombie (ed.). Scientific Change (Symposium on the History of Science, University of Oxford, 9-15 July 1961). New York and London: Basic Books and Heineman, 1963.
- Kuhn, T.S. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977)
- Kuhn, T.S. Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ISBN 0226458008
- Kuhn, T.S. The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0226457982
See also
- Important publications in philosophy of science
- History and philosophy of science
- John L. Heilbron
External links
- Thomas Kuhn (Biography, Outline of Structure of Scientific Revolutions)
- Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm (obituary by Lawrence Van Gelder, New York Times, 19 June 1996)
- Thomas S. Kuhn (obituary, The Tech p9 vol 116 no 28, 26 June 1996)
- Thomas Kuhn at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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