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Originally Posted by Scientific American's Chet Raymo, Stonehill College, Massachusetts
Thomas Kuhn (1922-96) is known best, and almost exclusively, for a slim volume published in 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The book is widely acclaimed to be the most influential academic work of the second half of the 20th century. It has sold nearly a million copies and has been translated into 20 languages. With undiminished regularity, it is cited by scholars in fields as diverse as political science and art history. Al Gore has mentioned Structure as his favorite book.
I read Structure in 1964, in its first paper edition, and like many of my scientific cohort I was much taken by Kuhn's analysis of science. To be sure, the sources of Kuhn's thought were in the air at the time: Piaget's work on how children acquire knowledge, Whorf's studies of language and worldviews, Gestalt psychology, Koyré's groundbreaking interpretations of the history of science, and so on. It was a heady time to be thinking about the history and philosophy of science, and Kuhn plugged into the prevailing culture with uncanny precision.
According to Kuhn, the authority of science resides in the community of scientists practicing what he called "normal science." Normal science is defined by a "paradigm," a kind of shared worldview, or, as Kuhn described it, "universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners." Within normal science, anomalies are generally ignored. Eventually, however, difficulties within a paradigm become unsustainable, and a revolution occurs. A new paradigm is established, incorporating social and cultural influences of the time, and work goes on.
What Kuhn had going for him (or against him) was a dazzlingly simple schematic (with that magic word "paradigm") embedded in an inchoate epistemic stew. This made him easy to latch onto by almost anyone, regardless of philosophical or political predilections. Indeed, Kuhn has been taken to heart by scholars espousing almost directly opposite views about the nature of science. Combatants on both sides of the infamous "science wars" between scientists and sociologist critics of science regularly use Kuhn to buttress their respective positions or whack each other over the head.
Now along comes Steve Fuller to put Kuhn into a historic and philosophical context and to excoriate Structure for its presumed baleful influence on the authority and practice of science. Fuller is an American sociologist, currently professor at the University of Warwick, formerly of the University of Durham. His prolonged British residence is evidenced in the scrappy, iconoclastic, take-on-all-comers spirit of his work (one can find Fuller giving and taking his licks in the Internet lists). Nothing here of the sometimes wearisome pomposity of American academics who inhabit that obfuscated discipline called science studies.
Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times is a heavily footnoted and almost impenetrably dense insider's account of 20th-century sociology of knowledge. Fuller marshals an astonishingly detailed grasp of recent intellectual history to argue that science as we know it has outlived its usefulness. [Well, science as Kuhn knew it, anyway.] The paradigms of normal science are not the ideal form of science, he says, but rather "an arrested social movement in which the natural spread of knowledge is captured by a community that gains relative advantage by forcing other communities to rely on its expertise to get what they want." [I don't know of any scientists with such an agenda.]
Fuller is especially effective at reconstructing the debates between Ernst Mach and Max Planck about the nature of science at the beginning of the 20th century, which he takes as emblematic of all such debates since. In Fuller's dichotomous scheme, Mach championed an instrumentalist philosophy of science; Planck was a realist. Mach lodged science in everyday psychological experience; Planck reduced everyday experience to the ultimate constituents of physics. Mach exalted technology; Planck promoted abstract problem solving. Mach was the liberal democrat, intent on empowering "citizen scientists"; Planck was the state corporatist, who thought ordinary folks had no claim on "real" science.
Kuhn is squarely on the side of Planck, Fuller says. The paradigms of normal science, Fuller goes on to assert, confer a phony legitimacy and autonomy on scientific practice. Alternative versions of the "truth" are delegitimized, and establishment science (with its consumerist-military alliances) becomes the only game in town. Young scientists are acculturated within the paradigm and spend the rest of their careers tweaking theories. Dissent is frowned upon. The real problems of society are ignored in the pursuit of the next decimal place. [I think this rather overplays the point.]
Fuller, of course, comes down on the side of Mach, espousing a vaguely defined "citizen science." His democratizing instincts are admirable, but as he storms the Bastille of normal science he will find himself in the teeming company of those who believe in creationism, alien abductions, parapsychology and other nonparadigmatic citizen sciences. He does not seem to cringe at the prospect of postestablishment intellectual anarchy. [Oh, please! Raymo goes WAY over the edge here!]
Kuhn wrote: "The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community." Fuller has confidence in the intelligent good sense of ordinary folks and properly calls for "the right to be wrong." But do statements such as "the universe is light-years wide," "the earth is billions of years old," "all life is related by common descent," "organisms are composed of cells that contain double-helix DNA," and so on really have no greater claim on "reality" than the Genesis stories of creationists or the popular consolations of astrology? If the answer is no, as Fuller comes dangerously close to asserting, then most scientists would throw in the towel and get jobs flipping burgers. [Not sure why Raymo lost it so bad here. (?)]
Fuller underestimates the highly evolved "fitness" of the methodologies, sociologies and conceptual paradigms of normal science. The deprofessionalization of science and the establishment of a citizen marketplace of ideas are not likely to happen without the sociopolitical equivalent of an asteroid impact, and no such potential upheaval looms on our intellectual radar screens. Certainly, science studies lacks the weight to do it. [So Raymo is FOR the military-industrial complex's complete hijacking of science?]
At the same time, it would behoove scientists to pay close attention to Steve Fuller's sprawling, brawling and gloriously provocative book. He is perhaps more friend than enemy, and by nipping at our heels he reminds us that science might in fact do a better job serving a socially and ecologically responsible agenda, empowering citizen science-kibitzers to live purposefully and with exalted spirit in the science-revealed world of galaxies and DNA. [Well, that's a little better. ;^)]
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