Abstract
In the paper I consider how empirical material, from either history or sociology, features in Kuhn’s account of science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and argue that the study of scientific practice did not offer him data to be used as evidence for defending hypotheses but rather cultivated a sensitivity for detail and difference which helped him undermine an idealized conception of science. Recent attempts in the science studies literature, appealing to Wittgenstein’s philosophy, have aimed at reducing philosophy to multifaceted empirical research in relation to science. I discuss how this turn which is at odds with Wittgenstein’s philosophy, cannot be a continuation of Kuhn’s project which bears similarities to Wittgenstein’s.
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Notes
“Kuhn's work has not remained at the centre of the philosophy of science” (Bird 2011).
Alexander Bird (2011) cites two reasons for this: “First, Kuhn's picture of science appeared to permit a more liberal conception of what science is than hitherto, one that could be taken to include disciplines such as sociology and psychoanalysis. Secondly, Kuhn's rejection of rules as determining scientific outcomes appeared to permit appeal to other factors, external to science, in explaining why a scientific revolution took the course that it did.”.
“The Structure is full of holes” says John Heilbron (1998, p. 514) who is trying to understand why, despite this, Kuhn’s book had such a great impact.
“Tom’s contributions to the field over the last four decades have been absolutely formative” (Fox Keller 1998, p. 15).
“[T]here is no characteristically Kuhnian school that carries on his positive work.” (Bird 2011). John Ziman, however, thought that in science studies, they try to follow Kuhn’s example. In introducing Kuhn as the recipient of the John Desmond Bernal Award in 1983, Ziman announced that “We are all Kuhnians” (Ziman 1983, p. 24). What he meant was that they try to bring together various disciplines in the manner that Kuhn did it in his work. He calls Kuhn a unifier in opposition to being a revolutionary. “The deep message of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was that these jurisdictional disputes [of the different disciplines] were futile. A scientific theory can only be grasped metascientifically as an entity with intertwined philosophical, historical, and sociological characteristics” (ibid.).
Bird’s ‘theoretical history’ ought to be distinguished from speculative historical accounts of the type offered by Hegel. Feyerabend, however, credited Kuhn with a Hegelian-like philosophy of history (Hoyningen-Huene 1995, p. 353).
Bird (forthcoming) combines the two empirical approaches and calls this merging the historical-sociological strand of Kuhn’s naturalism. He identifies another naturalistic strand, namely the cognitive-psychological, since Kuhn makes references to psychological findings and experiments that are brought to bear on revolutionary scientific change.
Kuhn makes virtually the same point in his long autobiographical interview (Kuhn 2000a, p. 286). Kuhn remembers that Koyré, shortly before he died, sent him a letter in which he said “you have brought the internal and external histories of science, which in the past have been very far apart, together.” Kuhn says in the interview that “he had not seen this coming” but when he thought about it he understood that Koyré was right. When one of the interviewers asked him how he failed to realize it, Kuhn replied: “I hadn’t thought of it [Structure] as doing that. I mean, I saw what he [Koyré] meant … I thought of it as pretty straight internalist” (ibid., p. 287). Cf. Kuhn (1983, p. 27): “My principal efforts have, that is, been directed towards what I have sometimes called ‘dynamic interrelationships of pure ideas’”.
C. P. Snow in his essay “The Two Cultures: A Second Look” also assigns the social sciences (social history, sociology, demography, political science, economics, government, psychology, medicine and social arts) a mediating role but, this time, between the sciences and the humanities. Unlike Kuhn who is interested in understanding science in a rich way and not solely in terms of idealized scientific theories, C.P. Snow is interested in establishing contact and communication between the practitioners of the two fields. He does not, however, explain how the social sciences can play this role of intervening to improve intelligibility between the divided cultures (Snow 1998, pp. 69–71).
It should be noted in fairness to R. Westman that his references to a fictive speech and a hypothetical character in Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution (1957), as well as his claims that certain of Kuhn’s theses are at odds with historical fact (Westman 1994, p. 82), are not meant to reflect negatively on Kuhn. Westman’s point was that The Copernican Revolution and the Structure had different orientations, the latter being more theoretical, and therefore, more philosophical, rather than historical or anthropological (ibid., p. 114).
Sharrock and Read wanted to show that Kuhn was not acting as a scientist but rather as a philosopher of a Wittgensteinian therapeutic spirit. They argued that Kuhn was not in the business of offering empirical generalizations but rather in the business of deflating, of bringing down the received image of science dominant in standard normative philosophy of science.
In fact, Sharrock and Read in their book (p. 107) wonder “why sociologists did not demand of Kuhn at least as high a standard as they would demand from any piece of work submitted to one of their own professional journals?”.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was very well received by scientists (see Kuhn 2000a, p. 282) in comparison to standard philosophy of science texts.
In an essay entitled “Scientific experiences of a European scholar in America” (1968) Adorno made a pertinent comment. Recounting his days in the United States, he remembers that certain judgments of his about music and musical preferences were taken by his colleagues in relevant sociological research projects to be “unproven”, “idle speculations”. “I provoked the objection”, he says, “that I was not to hear for the last time: ‘Where is the evidence?’” Adorno’s judgments were relegated to mere subjective reactions to the stimulus of music, which was the object of the investigation, or treated as ingenious prophesies that were miraculously confirmed (Adorno 1968, pp. 349–350). “My very friendly colleague”, said Adorno remembering one occasion where he judged correctly that jazz fans are more commonly found in the city rather than in the country, “preferred to regard me as a medicine man rather than make room for something that lay under the taboo of speculation” (ibid., 350).
This interpretation of the use of imaginary examples by Wittgenstein is contested by other scholars who argue that Wittgenstein did not use these examples to show their meaninglessness but rather to show that alternative concepts to the familiar ones are possible (see Forster 2004, p. 159).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Rogier De Langhe and the two anonymous referees for their insightful criticism and much valued help.
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Kindi, V. The Structure’s Legacy: Not from Philosophy to Description. Topoi 32, 81–89 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-012-9137-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-012-9137-8