Thomas Kuhn on the Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Thursday 18 July 2024 is the 102nd anniversary of the birth of Thomas Kuhn (18 July 1922 – 17 June 1996), who was born in Cincinnati on this date in 1922.
Kuhn isn’t remembered as a philosopher of history, but rather as a philosopher and an historian of science. However, if all histories embody some philosophy of history, whether or not this philosophy is made explicit—and this is an argument that has been made by Hayden White, another others—then Kuhn’s history of science is, at the same time, a philosophy of history. We can find a hint of the philosophical problems of historiography in one of Kuhn’s essays in his book The Essential Tension, the first chapter of that book, titled, “The Relations between the History and the Philosophy of Science”:
“During my days as a philosophically inclined physicist, my view of history resembled that of the covering law theorists, and the philosophers in my seminars usually begin by viewing it in a similar way. What changed my mind and often changes theirs is the experience of putting together a historical narrative. That experience is vital, for the difference between learning history and doing it is far larger than that in most other creative fields, philosophy certainly included.”
Kuhn is here referring to Carl Hempel’s covering law model of historical explanation, which was, in the middle of the twentieth century, the reigning analytical philosophy of history. Kuhn says that it was the experience of actually assembling a historical narrative that changed his view of the covering law model. Kuhn’s conversion away from the covering law model employs a distinction between learning history and doing history, and the gap between the two. What exactly is doing history, and how does this differ from learning history? Presumably doing history would be writing history, or teaching history… it could even mean studying history, though the latter would also seem count as learning history. Certainly there is some ambiguity as to whether the study of a discipline is the same as learning it or the same as doing it, or a bit of both. In the above, for Kuhn doing history is “putting together a historical narrative.”
In several episodes I have remarked how much analytical philosophy of history was changed by the work of Arthur Danto, who made the logic of narrative sentences central to his analytical philosophy of history. But even before Danto, as with Morton White, and, independently of Danto, as with Haskell Fain, others in the analytical philosophy community were beginning to converge on narrative as the essential feature of history. I could argue that this had to happen because one of the reasons that it has been argued that history is not a science, and cannot be a science, is that it is formulated as a prose narrative, and not as mathematically expressed laws of history. If analytical philosophy were to have it own philosophy of history, then someone had to offer a theory of the narrative structure of history. The alternative is to abandon history entirely, as in the Cartesian tradition, and to follow Quine’s dictum that philosophy of science is philosophy enough. Not only does that impoverish philosophy, but it also leaves unanswered the status of valid claims of historical knowledge now utterly disconnected from science.
Continuing the above quote from Kuhn,
“From it I conclude, among other things, that an ability to predict the future is no part of the historian’s arsenal. He is neither a social scientist nor a seer. It is no mere accident that he knows the end of his narrative as well as the start before he begins to write. History cannot be written without that information. Though I have no alternate philosophy of history or of historical explanation to offer here, I can at least outline a better image of the historian’s task and suggest why its performance might produce a sort of understanding.”
Kuhn here explicitly disavows having formulated any philosophy of history. At the same time he suggests that doing history may produce a sort of understanding. Is this the sort of understanding that we derive (or can hope to derive) from a philosophy of history, or is it something entirely different? Is a philosophical understanding of history best to be had from putting together an historical narrative, or critiquing how historians go about assembling an historical narrative? Is Kuhn’s better image of the historian’s task a source of this understanding?
What is Kuhn’s better image of the historian’s task? In another essay from The Essential Tension, “The Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery,” Kuhn tells us that we need new terms and new concepts to do justice to this history of science:
“…we need a new vocabulary and new concepts for analyzing events like the discovery of oxygen. Though undoubtedly correct, the sentence ‘Oxygen was discovered’ misleads by suggesting that discovering something is a single simple act unequivocally attributable, if only we knew enough, to an individual and an instant in time. When the discovery is unexpected, however, the latter attribution is always impossible and the former often is as well… we can, for example, safely say that oxygen had not been discovered before 1774; probably we would also insist that it had been discovered by 1777 or shortly thereafter. But within those limits any attempt to date the discovery or to attribute it to an individual must inevitably be arbitrary.”
What exactly is going on here in this discussion of the discovery of oxygen? What motivates Kuhn’s desire to show us the complexity behind what has often been considered to be a relatively straight-forward question about the discovery of oxygen? Historians have reacted badly to criticism of past history of science as being an heroic narrative. The idea that Lavoisier discovered oxygen or that Newton discovered the laws of gravitation is considered problematic, because a fine-grained account of scientific discovery is more complicated than that. Telling the story of the history of science as a narrative of great men like Lavoisier or Newton is now derided as “scientific hagiography,” as though scientist’s biographies were being written like saints lives.
In my previous episode on Walter Benjamin I mentioned Nietzsche’s three kinds of history, the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical. Benjamin’s history was critical, and he was especially critical of historicism, which I characterized as being something like what Nietzsche called antiquarian history. Traditional history of science, in contrast, is monumental history, which builds up great figures of science as models to emulate—heroes of science as it were, to be revered. Kuhn was part of the reaction against this. In the previously quoted passage, Kuhn was effectively deconstructing the traditional narrative of the discovery of oxygen, and showing how this discovery might be credited not to Lavoisier, but to Carl Scheele or Joseph Priestley. Kuhn also discusses this example in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Continuing with the quote,
“Furthermore, it must be arbitrary just because discovering a new sort of phenomenon is necessarily a complex process which involves recognizing both that something is and what it is. Observation and conceptualization, fact and the assimilation of fact to theory, are inseparably linked in the discovery of scientific novelty. Inevitably, that process extends over time and may often involve a number of people. Only for discoveries in my second category—those whose nature is known in advance—can discovering that and discovering what occur together and in an instant.”
This is true, of course, and monumental histories of science give us a simplified version of history because the simplified version is the easy one to hold in mind. We always understood that if we wanted to get the details, then we would go to the monographic literature, and there we could find it spelled out in excruciating detail of the kind for which most of us do not possess the patience. Histories of science starting in the second half of the twentieth century wanted to put the details of the monographic literature front and center, so that no one mistakes a complex problem for a simpler problem. In this way, Kuhn is part of what we may call the complexification of the history of science, not cutting corners, and not making any concessions of convenience of exposition.
Kuhn is also part of the relativization of science and the history of science. This is not unrelated to the rejection of a monumental history of science. Monumental histories of science not only give us larger-than-life heroes of science, they also give us an edifying ideal of scientific knowledge to which to aspire. That ideal, which is part of the positivist legacy, is that, after humanity had been bumbling and fumbling around in the dark for millennia, finally modern science appeared, and for the first time in history we have positive knowledge of the world—not mere theological claims about the world that we got from religion from the earliest days of human societies, and not metaphysical claims about the world that we got from philosophy. Positive science finally gave us positive knowledge of the world, and this was a creed that could inspire further triumphs in scientific knowledge. This was the gospel of positivism, and monumental histories of science gave us this gospel not only as a possession for the ages, but also that we might also go forth and do the good work of science.
When this 19th century doctrine of the positive knowledge of science was being formulated by Auguste Comte, there were already rumblings elsewhere of heresies against this gospel. In the 19th century, Russian philosopher Nikolay Danilevsky argued that different cultural-historical types had distinct scientific traditions. In the early twentieth century, Oswald Spengler went further than Danilevsky and argued that different civilizations had wholly different sciences that are incommensurable (like Kuhnian paradigms).
Later in the twentieth century, Kuhn argued that different sciences belong not to different cultures or different civilizations or different regions, but to different ages, to different periods of our history. These periods are separated by paradigm shifts, in which our conception of what counts as evidence, what counts as a valid argument, what phenomena we ought to account for in an explanation changes. Between these paradigm shifts, science drifts downstream without any great changes. Kuhn calls this normal science. The practice of normal science comes close to being what we have conventionally understood to be the history of science. It is slow and painstaking research that cumulatively builds up results. Kuhn called normal science an exercise in puzzle solving:
“Bringing a normal research problem to a conclusion is achieving the anticipated in a new way, and it requires the solution of all sorts of complex instrumental, conceptual, and mathematical puzzles. The man who succeeds proves himself an expert puzzle-solver, and the challenge of the puzzle is an important part of what usually drives him on.” (p. 36)
Normal science is also the elaboration of what Kuhn calls a paradigm. In the sequent literature on Kuhn the idea of a paradigm has been very influential, but it has also been controversial. Even philosophers and historians who liked Kuhn’s book and wanted to extend his work were troubled by Kuhn’s various uses of “paradigm,” which seemed to suggest different meanings in different contexts. Here is an exposition of the paradigms from the very beginning of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
“Aristotle's Physica, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Newton's Principia and Opticks, Franklin's Electricity, Lavoisier’s Chemistry, and Lyell’s Geology—these and many other works served for a time implicitly to define the legitimate problems and methods of a research field for succeeding generations of practitioners. They were able to do so because they shared two essential characteristics. Their achievement was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity. Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.” (p. 10)
But a change in perspective can turn a puzzle that we try to solve within the existing paradigm into a problem, a counter-example to the paradigm. This is an anomaly, and as anomalies build up, it pushes the paradigm into a model crisis. What happens when a paradigm is assailed by unsolved anomalies? Kuhn says that science without a paradigm isn’t science at all, so the crisis for one paradigm becomes an opportunity for another paradigm:
“The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other.” (p. 77)
Thus we arrive at the famous “paradigm shift” which found its way into popular culture not long after Kuhn formulated the idea. Paradigm change then makes it possible for us to go back to the workaday business of normal science, except that now we are elaborating a new paradigm instead of the old, now abandoned paradigm. This sequence of steps in the history of science is now called the Kuhn cycle. Since Kuhn has been so influential, the idea of the Kuhn cycle has been taken over by any number of expositors and commentators, who have smoothed out the rough spots and made the sequence more schematic. In its most schematic form the Kuhn cycle has been glossed as consisting of: normal science, model drift, model crisis, model revolution, paradigm change, and normal science again.
The Kuhn cycle is an example of a speculative philosophy of the history of science. The idea of a speculative philosophy of the history of science I take from Haskell Fain. In my episode on Haskell Fain I quoted Fain from his 1970 book Between Philosophy and History: The Resurrection of Speculative Philosophy of History Within the Analytic Tradition:
“What positivism lacked, I contend, was a penetrating speculative philosophy of the history of science, the encouragement to fashion story-lines upon which better histories of science could be constructed. Just as there is more to history than orthodox political history, so is there more to speculative philosophy of history than Hegel’s philosophy of history, which is, essentially, a speculative philosophy of political history. Each kind of history requires its own kind of speculative philosophy of history.”
This book appeared in the same year as the second edition of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn is mentioned in Fain’s Suggestions for Further Reading, but Kuhn’s work is not discussed in the book. In effect, Fain was predicting work like Kuhn’s even as Kuhn’s work had already appeared.
A reductionist account of Kuhn’s philosophy is that scientific progress is not cumulative, but proceeds in fits and starts, with many losses along the way. There is an ongoing debate among Kuhn’s heirs as to whether theory change in science is ultimately a rational process, even if non-linear, or if it is ultimately an irrational process, essentially arbitrary, and without deeper meaning or coherent directionality. Another way to put this, perhaps a more tendentious formulation, is that Kuhn was denying that there is progress in science. As we have seen in many episodes, progress has been a particular point of contention in modern history. Condorcet’s Enlightenment history of human thought was entirely constructed around the progress of the human mind.
During the twentieth century, the idea of progress came under sustained attack, until no one dared to suggest that progress of any kind characterizes history. Not only, then, is Kuhn part of the critique of the monumental history of science, and part of the relativization of scientific knowledge such as was earlier seen in Danilevsky and Spengler, Kuhn was also a part of the critique of progress. So although Kuhn’s work came as a great shock to many when it was published, especially to historians of science, we can see that the shock value of Kuhn’s philosophy consisted not in saying what had never before been said, but rather in making these ideas fully explicit and offering detailed historical and philosophical arguments for his positions.
On the last page of the book Kuhn places his work in the context of some of the larger questions that it engages, some of which he suggests are partially resolved by this approach, and some of which remain open:
“What must nature, including man, be like in order that science be possible at all? Why should scientific communities be able to reach a firm consensus unattainable in other fields? Why should consensus endure across one paradigm change after another? And why should paradigm change invariably produce an instrument more perfect in any sense than those known before? From one point of view those questions, excepting the first, have already been answered. But from another they are as open as they were when this essay began. It is not only the scientific community that must be special. The world of which that community is a part must also possess quite special characteristics, and we are no closer than we were at the start to knowing what these must be. That problem—What must the world be like in order that man may know it?—was not, however, created by this essay. On the contrary, it is as old as science itself, and it remains unanswered.” (p. 173)
So Kuhn leaves us with a very open-ended conclusion, and even those who accept his innovations in the history of science have before them the task of answering this questions from the point of view from which they remain unanswered. This isn’t actually how Kuhn scholarship has developed since the book was published, but it remains open as a potential avenue of contribution for anyone who wanted to take up the burden where Kuhn laid it down.
Video Presentation
https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/thomas-kuhn-on-the-structure-of:7
https://rumble.com/v57f0ph-thomas-kuhn-on-the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions.html
Podcast Edition
https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/L5I4QSdpkLb