Summary
Critics have said that Kuhn's account of scientific revolutions represents them as subjective and irrational processes, in which mystical conversions and community pressures rather than good reasons determine choices between theories. Kuhn rejects the charge, insisting that there is partial communication among proponents of competing paradigm candidates and their arguments are rational though not coercive. The critics reply that in fact Kuhn's position entails total non-communication and irrationality. A Kuhnian account of “partial communication” is thus necessary. Kuhn's attempt to give one, based on the notion that the “good reasons” advanced in paradigm debates function asvalues, fails. But a more satisfactory account can be given if it is recognized that paradigm-debaters will, in one or both of two ways, share paradigmsother than the ones at issue. Further, Kuhn's position both should and can accommodate a notion of theory reduction; his unqualified rejection of reduction is an unnecessary weakness, even apart from questions about the rationality of revolutions. The paper concludes with a brief examination of the contrast between Kuhn's and Feyerabend's strategies for the advancement of science.
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References
Various forms of this charge appear in Israel Scheffler,Science and Subjectivity (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967); in Dudley Shapere, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”,Philosophical Review, vol. 73, 1964, pp. 383–394, and “Meaning and Scientific Change” in R. G. Colodny (ed.),Mind and Cosmos (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966), pp. 41–85; and in the articles by Imre Lakatos, Sir Karl Popper, Stephen Toulmin, and John Watkins in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.),Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 1970).
Thomas S. Kuhn,The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition (University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 94. All quotations from this book, hereafter referred to as SSR, are from the second edition.
The formulations, quoted with pain by Kuhn in “Reflections on my Critics” in Lakatos and Musgrave,op. cit., p. 211, are due respectively to Shapere and Scheffler. “Only philosophers”, Kuhn says (SSR, p. 198), have misinterpreted him on these matters. He is especially pained by such charges because he agrees with his critics that science is our best example of rational and objective knowledge. (See his statements in Lakatos and Musgrave, pp. 20, 235, 264). He concludes (p. 264) that insofar as they do not fit the realities of successful scientific practice, “existing theories of rationality are not quite right”, but he does not mean to propose a sweeping reinterpretation that would transform the notion of rationality beyond recognition.
Scheffler,op. cit., p. 89; Shapere, “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, p. 392.
“Reflections on my Critics”,op. cit., p. 250.
SSR, pp. 182 ff.
SSR, pp. 199 f.
“Reflections on my Critics”, p. 253.
SSR, p. 205.
SSR, pp. 148, 157 f.
In most cases one of the candidates will be the current (crisis-ridden) paradigm — up for re-election, so to speak — so he will already be quite familiar with it. But the argument applies equally well if A and B are two new contenders.
SSR, p. 85.
SSR, pp. 114 f. In discussing the problems that would arise if scientists could switch back and forth, he reminds us that “the period during which light was ‘sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle’ was a period of crisis”. He further argues that “looking at the moon, the convert to Copernicanism does not” — as the Gestalt subject might — “say, ‘I used to see a planet, but now I see a satellite’”. Instead he would say he had previously been mistaken. But only the convert, not the man still making up his mind, would say this, so presumably Kuhn's irreversible Gestalt switch has not taken place until the crisis is over and the new paradigm enthroned.
It might be added that if the Gestalt-switch metaphor is deployed in such a way as to rule out this possibility, it will also rule out Kuhn's current suggestion (SSR, pp. 202 ff.) that a man trying to understand what people working under a different paradigm are doing is like atranslator. So presumably either the metaphor was never meant to exclude the possibility I suggest, or else its use will now have to be restricted so as not to do so.
SSR, p. 162. The quotation in the text is incomplete, but in the present context the full quotation could be misleading. He says “the members... work from a single paradigm or from a closely related set”. But by a “closely related set” he probably means a set of similarexemplars for the same models and symbolic generalizations, not a hierarchy.
SSR, pp. 13 f.
Kuhn does speak in another context (SSR, p. 105) of “the corpuscular paradigm”.
SSR, p. 50.
SSR, pp. 101 f.
It is odd (anomalous?) that Kuhn defends the practice of working within “dogmatic” paradigms and hanging on to them fairly tenaciously in the face of difficulties, yet slights the tendency to preserve them (as far as possible) within the new order of things when it comes. And it is odd that, while recognizing that “the new paradigm must promise to preserve a relatively large part of the concrete problem-solving ability that has accrued to science through its predecessors” (SSR, p. 169), he does not consider the role played by reductions or quasi reductions in assuring such preservation.
T. S. Kuhn, “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research”, in A. C. Crombie (ed.),Scientific Change (New York: Heinemann, 1963), p. 368. See also “The Essential Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Scientific Research”, in Calvin W. Taylor and Frank Barron (ed.),Scientific Creativity: Its Recognition and Development (New York: Wiley, 1963), pp. 341–354.
SSR, p. 192.
Paul K. Feyerabend, “Problems of Empiricism”, in R. G. Colodny (ed.),Beyond the Edge of Certainty (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 153. See also Feyerabend's “Consolations for the Specialist” in Lakatos and Musgrave,op. cit., and the bibliography thereto.
Kuhn wants it clearly understood (see Lakatos and Musgrave, p. 245) that he has proposed no strategy for turning non-sciences or proto-sciences into mature sciences. A paradigm cannot be legislated into existence. The question we have been concerned with is whether, once a paradigm has appeared, it is wise to encourage proliferation of alternatives before crisis strikes.
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Austin, W.H. Paradigms, rationality, and partial communication. Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 3, 203–218 (1972). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01800750
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01800750