The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

There's a comic strip showing a chick breaking out of its shell, looking around, and saying, "Oh, wow! Paradigm shift!" Blame the late Thomas Kuhn. Few indeed are the philosophers or historians influential enough to make it into the funny papers, but Kuhn is one.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is indeed a paradigmatic work in the history of science. Kuhn's use of terms such as "paradigm shift" and "normal science", his ideas of how scientists move from disdain through doubt to acceptance of a new theory, his stress on social and psychological factors in science--all have had profound effects on historians, scientists, philosophers, critics, writers, business gurus, and even the cartoonist in the street.

Some scientists (such as Steven Weinberg and Ernst Mayr) are profoundly irritated by Kuhn, especially by the doubts he casts--or the way his work has been used to cast doubt--on the idea of scientific progress. Yet it has been said that the acceptance of plate tectonics in the 1960s, for instance, was sped by geologists' reluctance to be on the downside of a paradigm shift. Even Weinberg has said that "structure has had a wider influence than any other book on the history of science". As one of Kuhn's obituaries noted, "We all live in a post-Kuhnian age." --Mary Ellen Curtin

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Mumbo-jumbo works best when least understood. - Rated
Kuhn's ideas are not new, he references Fleck's seminal monographs, but this is an aside. The point is that both Fleck AND Kuhn are just WRONG. The world does go around the sun: this is NOT a paradigm, it is what sensible people refer to as TRUE. As for pre-Copernican's; they were WRONG. If facts are socially constructed, then construct this: No real world-no Kuhn! Worth reading if one wants to understand how garbage manages to pass itself off as intelligent discourse.

Small and perfectly formed: one of the greats of 20th Century Philosophy - Rated
A true classic of twentieth century literature, this wonderful little book, which argues for the contingency of scientific knowledge, deserves space on the bookshelf next to The Wealth of Nations (identifying the contingency of economic wellbeing and value), Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (causal scepticism), The Origin of Species (the contingency of biological development) and Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (the contingency of language) - along with those perennially confusing continental stalwarts Freddie Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as representing the fundamental underpinnings of modern Relativist thought.

Thanks to the Chomskies, Dawkinses and Sokals of this world, who have cunningly bound perfectly sensible Cognitive and Ethical Relativism to silly Post-Structuralism, proper Relativism has become a dirty word these days.

It may be unfashionable but it's also powerful, and if you want to understand it, and its power, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - as short and beautifully written a classic of philosophy as you could possibly ask for - is as good a place as any to start.

Following publication of "Structure", Kuhn had a famous public debate with Karl Popper over what counts as science and the way in which science develops over time. Popper had, in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, made the invaluable observation that "verification" as a standard for science is too high, since as a matter of logic an argument based on induction ("since the sun has risen on every day in recorded history, therefore it will rise tomorrow") can never be proven true. The sun rising is a very good example: for all our folksy expectations, current cosmology predicts that there will be a point at some time in the distant future when the sun will explode, and therefore will not rise tomorrow.

In lieu of verification as the scientific gold standard, Popper asserted (seemingly plausibly) that valid scientific theory could be assessed by the lack of any falsifying evidence among the data. The requirement for scientific statements to be "falsifiable" is a useful contribution to the debate: To be of any use, a scientific theory must narrow down from the list of all possible outcomes a set of predicted ones, and rule the rest out. Statements which cannot be falsified by any conceivable evidence don't do that, so fail at science's fundamental task.

Thomas Kuhn's insight was to offer a historian's perspective, and to note that, while that might be theory, that's simply not what science does in practice. Scientific theories are absolutely never thrown out the moment contradictory evidence is observed: the dial is tapped, the experiment re-run, and "numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory" are devised to eliminate any apparent conflict. Indeed, when the data won't do what it's meant to, sometimes it is the question which is rejected as being irrelevant, and not the answer predicted by the theory.

All this activity takes place inside what Kuhn describes (somewhat inconsistently) as a "paradigm" - a "particular coherent tradition of scientific research". The paradigm governs not only the theory but the education, instrumentation, rules and standards of scientific practice, and is the basis on which the scientific community decides which kinds of questions are and are not relevant to the development of scientific research. A paradigm claims exclusivity over the adjudication of its own subject matter, and one only has authority to pronounce on a scientific problem once one has been fully inducted: evolutionary biologists will not take seriously the biological assertions of fundamentalist Christians, for example. Fundamentalist Christians who take biology exams will fail, and thereby will never be able to authoritatively comment on biological matters.

Paradigms are generally a useful thing for the jobbing scientist, since to her they provide a pre-agreed framework - what Dan Dennett would describe as a "crane" - on which additional scientific research can be undertaken without having, literally, to re-invent the wheel. Kuhn characterises this sort of "normal scientist" as being involved in "puzzle solving" in exactly the sense that one solves a crossword puzzle. You have a framework of rules for how to solve the puzzle; you have problems (the blank spaces on the puzzle) and you empirically obtained evidence (clues) which you manipulate using the rules to produce predictions (or answers), and each newly discovered answer then acts as an additional clue to solve the remaining problems.

Superficially, this all sounds fine, but there are brutal, jagged corals just below the water's surface: Once inside a paradigm it informs your view of the world so thoroughly it is not possible to conduct research outside it. To solve a crossword puzzle, there must first be *some* pre-determined rules of engagement (the same puzzle can be solved, differently, with different sets of rules: a "cryptic" crossword yields different answers for the same boxes, and perhaps even the same clues, to a "quick" crossword. But to solve it one needs to use one or the other). Unlike a crossword, Mother Nature doesn't come with a label saying "cryptic" or "quick". So how do we know which paradigm to use? Can the truth or falsity of the paradigm to be judged, other than in terms of the paradigm itself?

Kuhn says no. This is an immensely powerful idea. Not only does it undermine the certitude many people have about their own ways of life, it seems to opens the door to all the whacky alternatives, with no objective means of choosing between them. So can we really not choose between Radiotherapy and Healing Crystals?

That this might be the case terrifies a lot of people, especially scientists, and Kuhn gets a lot of the blame for this state of unease. Post-Modernism: It's all Kuhn's fault.

But this is surely to shoot the messenger: Kuhn's great contribution is not to say that healing crystals are in (he says nothing of the sort) but to say that the sacred and immutable link between science and truth is out, and we owe it to ourselves to keep an open mind about whatever we believe. After all, the history of science (which is what Kuhn started out writing about) is a long history of frequent revolution. Either all the theories scientists have ever believed up to the current day are baloney, always were, never really counted as science and we're just lucky to be around when the human race has finally got it right - which, to put it mildly, is wishful thinking - or the revolutionary history of science, which no-one disputes, tends to back up what Kuhn is saying.

Science does evolve, through the great algorithm of human discourse, and the dominating theories through time will tend to be the ones which most of us are persuaded work the best for us (whether we're right or not is really beside the point). What persuades in Tehran may differ from what persuades in Texas. All Thomas Kuhn cautions against is either side taking its own position as a given.

His enterprise is therefore fundamentally democratic - placing epistemological legitimacy in the hands of the entire community, as contingent and random as it may be from time to time, and not a self-selecting, self perpetuating elite.

One thing economic theory tells us is that concentrating economic control in a small part of the population (as in a monopoly) generally works out worse for everyone except the monopolist. There's no reason to suppose that concentrating intellectual authority should be any different.

In the Western Hemisphere - outside the Grateful Dead tour circuit, at any rate - intellectual authority mostly resides with established science, but it has to work - literally - to earn our respect.

The anti-Kuhn brigade like Richard Dawkins may not like that sort of accountability but, not being a scientist, I do.

Olly Buxton

Good, but be prepared to read between the lines. - Rated
Hi,

As anyone who invests the time to study the customer responses below will see, Kuhn has a lot of fans. I myself read the Structure of Scientific Revolutions back in my early student days, and at the time I was inclined to look on it quite favourably. Recently however, I decided to reread it, and now am no longer sure that I holds any philosophical water. Personally I would still say read this book - but do not accept everything it says uncritically - much of the underlying philosophical basis of the argument (the incommensurability of paradigms, the relationship between observation and theory, etc) is open to question.

Kuhn is also subject to multiple interpretations as a quote from below demonstrates:

(Gdyas) "Kuhn is NOT arguing that anything that silly socio-psychobabble that all science is colored by personal perspective, and therefore faulty. What Kuhn doing is making the essential connection between the immutable fact and the people discovering and interpreting it. Scientists collect facts and build from them an idea of how things work as a whole. This is what he calls a paradigm. It thoroughly describes our reality as we have thus far been able to describe it. BUT: when a fact is discovered that does not fit this paradigm, the reality itself is discarded, and after a bit of chaos, a new paradigm is installed. Thus, science uses fact to produce a way of interpreting the world that more and more closely approximates reality"

From my reading of Kuhn, I would regard the last sentence in particular as highly questionable as a summary of his views. Kuhn himself wrote:

"One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to it's ontology, to the match, that is, betwen the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is 'really there' ... There is I think no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like 'really there'. The notion of match between the ontology of a theory and its 'real' counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle."

Many philosophers have commented after studying his work that there seem to be two Kuhn's - a moderate Kuhn who merely wishes to point out the extent to which our preconceptions can influence scientific theory choice and a more radical Kuhn who wishes to argue that our preconceptions are all there are. The problem of determining which Kuhn is the real Kuhn strikes me as a somewhat thankless task - I certainly would not like to attempt it. I do however, know that there are a number of points where I would disagree with the latter Kuhn - an instance of which being the degree to which the paradigm you are in shapes your perception of theory. Tom Maudlin expresses it better than I could,

"If presented with a moon rock, Aristotle would experience it as a rock, and as an object with a tendency to fall. He could not fail to conclude that the material of which the moon is made is not fundamentally different from terrestial material with respect to its natural motion. Similarly, ever better telescopes revealed more clearly the phases of venus, irrespective of one's preferred cosmology, and even Ptolemy would have remarked on the apparent rotation of a Foucault pendulum. The sense in which one's paradigm may influence one's experience of the world cannot be so strong as to guarentee that one's experience will always accord with one's theories, else the need to revise theories would never arise."

However for those who disagree with Tom here, I will close with the following enquiry from another good book 'Intellectual Impostures' by Sokal and Bricmont (from which the Maudlin quote was also taken):

"Research in history, and in particular in the history of science, employs methods that are not radically different from those used in the natural sciences: studying documents, drawing the most rational inferences, making inductions based on the available data, and so forth. If arguments of this type in physics and biology did not allow us to arrive at reasonably reliable conclusions, what reason would there be to trust them in history? Why speak in a realist mode about historical categories, such as paradigms, if it is an illusion to speak about scientific concepts (which are in fact much more precisely defined) such as electrons or DNA?"

I liked "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" - I think it is a book everyone should read at some point in their lives. Read, enjoy, and think. But especially the last of these three, and whatever you do don't (as some people who should know better are inclined to do) just name-drop it as some sort of infallible authority.

Cheers.

Good, but be prepared to read between the lines. - Rated
As anyone who invests the time to study the customer responses below will see, Kuhn has a lot of fans. I myself read the Structure of Scientific Revolutions back in my early student days, and at the time I was inclined to look on it quite favourably. Recently however, I decided to reread it, and now am no longer sure that I holds any philosophical water. Personally I would still say read this book - but do not accept everything it says uncritically - much of the underlying philosophical basis of the argument (the incommensurability of paradigms, the relationship between observation and theory, etc) is open to question. Kuhn is also subject to multiple interpretations as a quote from below demonstrates:

(Gdyas) "Kuhn is NOT arguing that anything that silly socio-psychobabble that all science is colored by personal perspective, and therefore faulty. What Kuhn doing is making the essential connection between the immutable fact and the people discovering and interpreting it. Scientists collect facts and build from them an idea of how things work as a whole. This is what he calls a paradigm. It thoroughly describes our reality as we have thus far been able to describe it. BUT: when a fact is discovered that does not fit this paradigm, the reality itself is discarded, and after a bit of chaos, a new paradigm is installed. Thus, science uses fact to produce a way of interpreting the world that more and more closely approximates reality"

From my reading of Kuhn, I would regard the last sentence in particular as highly questionable as a summary of his views. Kuhn himself wrote: "One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approxmate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to it's ontology, to the match, that is, betwen the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is 'really there' ... There is I think no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like 'really there'. The notion of match between the ontology of a theory and its 'real' counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle."

Many philosophers have commented after studying his work that there seem to be two Kuhn's - a moderate Kuhn who merely wishes to point out the extent to which our preconceptions can shape scientific theory choice and a more radical Kuhn who wishes to argue that our preconceptions are all there are. The problem of determining which Kuhn is real Kuhn strikes me as a somewhat thankless task - I certainly would not like to attempt it. I do however, know that there are a number of points where I would disagree with the latter Kuhn - an instance of which being the degree to which the paradigm you are in shapes your perception of theory. Tom Maudlin expresses it better than I could,

"If presented with a moon rock, Aristotle would experience it as a rock, and as an object with a tendency to fall. He could not fail to conclude that the material of which the mon is made is not fundamentally different from terrestial material with respect to its natural motion. Similarly, ever better telescopes revealed more clearly the phases of venus, irrespective of one's preferred cosmology, and even Ptolemy would have remarked on the apparent rotation of a Foucault pendulum. The sense in which one's paradigm may influence one's experience of the world cannot be so strong as to guarentee that one's experience will always accord with one's theories, else the need to revise theories would never arise."

However for those who disagree with Tom here, I will close with the following enquiry from another good book 'Intellectual Impostures' by Sokal and Bricmont (from which the Maudlin quote was also taken):

"Research in history, and in particular in the history of science, employs methods that are not radically different from those used in the natural sciences: studying documents, drawing the most rational inferences, making inductions based on the available data, and so forth. If arguments of this type in physics and biology did not allow us to arrive at reasonably reliable conclusions, what reason would there be to trust them in history? Why speak in a realist mode about historical categories, such as paradigms, if it is an illusion to speak about scientific concepts (which are in fact much more precisely defined) such as electrons or DNA?"

I liked "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" - I think it is a book everyone should read at some point in their lives. Read, enjoy, and think. But especially the last of these three, and whatever you do don't (as some people who should know better are inclined to do) just name-drop it as some sort of infallible authority.

Cheers.

To be read by all 'educated' persons by the turn of 21 centu - Rated
I challenge you to suggest another work which provides a perspective such as this book provides.This book is profound ... and extremely intelligent. 'Structures' will give you a perspective of how to view global scintific paradigm shifts ! Mr. Kuhn must have been an extremely smart individual during his time to have visualised the above.