Abstract
What were the historical conditions of possibility for Structure’s naturalism about science and its mode of change? Kuhn’s book was remarkable in its time in setting aside the celebration of science and– despite its skepticism about the place in science of Reason, Method, Truth, and Progress—any note of criticism as well. The naturalistic impulse to describe, interpret, and explain, rather than to evaluate and justify, was not a notable feature of commentary about science before Kuhn’s work, and I trace this new naturalism to historical changes in the institutional and cultural conditions of science itself in post-World War II America. The possibility of naturalism about the nature of science, I argue, flowed partly from its new institutional security and its strengthened ties with political power.
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Notes
- 1.
Robert Merton similarly pointed to Harvard’s “microenvironments,” allowing Kuhn, or indeed anyone so placed in the institution, serendipitously to stumble on resources and to acquire perspectives which they might not otherwise encounter (Merton 1977, pp. 76–109; Merton and Barber 2004, pp. 263–266).
- 2.
“Naturalism” in these matters is, of course, a notoriously disputed notion. Here I use it in a deflationary sense routinely deployed by such sociologists of scientific knowledge as Barry Barnes and David Bloor (Barnes et al. 1996, pp. 3, 106, 173, 182, 185, 202, 208; Bloor 1991, pp. 77–81, 84–106, 177–179), where a naturalistic account of science as it actually proceeds is juxtaposed to its celebration, defense, rational reconstruction, or essentialization.
- 3.
Alexandre Koyré’s work (1939), aimed at displaying the intellectual coherence and intelligibility of past science, drifted into the consciousness of Anglophone historians during and after the War, and Kuhn’s excitement at that project is evident in Structure and elsewhere. One can see Koyré’s historical sensibilities as naturalistic, but he did not offer a theory of science and some of his historian-followers would have been appalled at the very idea.
- 4.
Eisenhower noted (1961/1972, p. 207) that the organization of science had experienced a “revolution”: the traditional individualistic picture of a “solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop” had quite recently been replaced by “task forces” of scientists, lavishly funded by government contracts and orientated not to the search for truth but to securing even more money to pay for even more expensive equipment. The American scientific community was shocked both at this depiction of their institutional circumstances and at the idea that they should be thought so powerful, and Eisenhower’s scientific advisor George Kistiakowsky (1961; see also Price 1965, p. 11) had to reassure them that Eisenhower really meant only to criticize military-orientated research.
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Shapin, S. (2015). Kuhn’s Structure: A Moment in Modern Naturalism. In: Devlin, W., Bokulich, A. (eds) Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions - 50 Years On. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 311. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13383-6_2
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