Last week, I finally submitted an epistemology paper for publication that I’ve been working on for several years. It’s very ambitious and I can’t wait to share it when/if it gets accepted. But in the meantime, I have some thoughts to share on a couple of books that I read during the research on that project. The first is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Kuhn starts by saying he “is one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, perhaps the most influential. His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time.” In it, Kuhn distinguished between “normal science”—which simply grows the dominant “paradigm” in its field—and “revolutionary science”—which upends paradigms so thoroughly that scientists on each side of the divide can no longer understand one another. This is Kuhn’s controversial “incommensurability thesis”, which posits that theories from differing periods suffer from deep failures of comparability.
Mountains of criticism have been written about this, which you can quickly see summarized in the SEP entry, as well as in Wikipedia. In a postscript written seven years after TSoSR was first published, Kuhn himself admits that his definition of paradigm is “intrinsically circular”. (“A paradigm is what the members of a scientific community share, and, conversely, a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm.”) But the most damning criticism to me was that “the philosophical reception was…hostile. For example, Dudley Shapere’s review (1964) emphasized the relativist implications of Kuhn’s ideas, and this set the context for much subsequent philosophical discussion. Since the following of rules (of logic, of scientific method, etc.) was regarded as the sine qua non of rationality, Kuhn’s claim that scientists do not employ rules in reaching their decisions appeared tantamount to the claim that science is irrational.”
Boooo! Yes, there are countless examples to share of scientists behaving badly and any good scholar can unearth them. But these are all failures of individual scientists, not a feature of the scientific method. The very reason Kuhn and other critics of science point them out is because they go against what science demands. The stories are certainly not held up as exemplars of what future scientists should do.
I also don’t honestly understand how Kuhn could have put forth a theory about the incommensurability of ideas pre- and post- a “scientific revolution” while at the same time explaining them in such detail that he and the reader can understand why the ideas changed so much. If he can write about all of this, then surely expert scientists can grasp the differences too! Wittgenstein already helped us decide that purely private language is not possible. So incommensurable scientific theories are out too.
And yet, despite these criticisms, much of TSoSR contains incredibly admirable scholarly work on the history of science. Kuhn profiled many major and minor theories that have been developed over the past several centuries. And for that, TSoSR is still worth the read. But I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing a post about this book except for the fact that Kuhn ended TSoSR with a comparison to evolution. And “in 1995 Kuhn argued that the Darwinian metaphor in the book should have been taken more seriously than it had been.” Well, that’s just begging for this blog to take a look and weigh in.
Here, then, are the main evolutionary points that Kuhn made. All quotations below are from the second edition of TSoSR.
Ugh! The evolution of organisms and the evolution of scientific ideas are extremely different things. They are not “very nearly perfect” for analogous analysis. Biological life has emerged and evolved into the vacuum of a non-living universe. Random mutations, scarce resources, and eons of natural selection have created “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful” (as Darwin famously described). Life has immense freedom to create survival mechanisms within this space of possibilities. But scientific ideas are not like this at all. They are highly constrained truth-seeking hypotheses that evolve via empirically-driven imaginations (not random mutations), which compete to be the best rationally-selected predictions. This is not at all like brute, unthinking, goalless, natural selection.
As I wrote in the epistemology paper that I recently finished (see a draft sketch here), there are plenty of skeptical arguments that have come down to us through the ages (e.g. Socrates, Pyrrho, Descartes, Hume, Gettier, Putnam, Bostrom), which show us why the evolution of scientific ideas never actually reach “a permanent fixed scientific truth.” But that is indeed the goal, despite what Kuhn would argue. The question of why scientific communities are able to reach consensus is easily answered when we posit that our universe (not multiverses) is an objective, knowable, thing that we keep trying to grasp through our subjective lenses. Only a very twisted view of science as a mere relativistic construction of ideas would see it otherwise. But that view doesn’t hang together at all and can therefore be dismissed.
One of the most cited academic books of all time? What a shame.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Kuhn starts by saying he “is one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, perhaps the most influential. His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time.” In it, Kuhn distinguished between “normal science”—which simply grows the dominant “paradigm” in its field—and “revolutionary science”—which upends paradigms so thoroughly that scientists on each side of the divide can no longer understand one another. This is Kuhn’s controversial “incommensurability thesis”, which posits that theories from differing periods suffer from deep failures of comparability.
Mountains of criticism have been written about this, which you can quickly see summarized in the SEP entry, as well as in Wikipedia. In a postscript written seven years after TSoSR was first published, Kuhn himself admits that his definition of paradigm is “intrinsically circular”. (“A paradigm is what the members of a scientific community share, and, conversely, a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm.”) But the most damning criticism to me was that “the philosophical reception was…hostile. For example, Dudley Shapere’s review (1964) emphasized the relativist implications of Kuhn’s ideas, and this set the context for much subsequent philosophical discussion. Since the following of rules (of logic, of scientific method, etc.) was regarded as the sine qua non of rationality, Kuhn’s claim that scientists do not employ rules in reaching their decisions appeared tantamount to the claim that science is irrational.”
Boooo! Yes, there are countless examples to share of scientists behaving badly and any good scholar can unearth them. But these are all failures of individual scientists, not a feature of the scientific method. The very reason Kuhn and other critics of science point them out is because they go against what science demands. The stories are certainly not held up as exemplars of what future scientists should do.
I also don’t honestly understand how Kuhn could have put forth a theory about the incommensurability of ideas pre- and post- a “scientific revolution” while at the same time explaining them in such detail that he and the reader can understand why the ideas changed so much. If he can write about all of this, then surely expert scientists can grasp the differences too! Wittgenstein already helped us decide that purely private language is not possible. So incommensurable scientific theories are out too.
And yet, despite these criticisms, much of TSoSR contains incredibly admirable scholarly work on the history of science. Kuhn profiled many major and minor theories that have been developed over the past several centuries. And for that, TSoSR is still worth the read. But I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing a post about this book except for the fact that Kuhn ended TSoSR with a comparison to evolution. And “in 1995 Kuhn argued that the Darwinian metaphor in the book should have been taken more seriously than it had been.” Well, that’s just begging for this blog to take a look and weigh in.
Here, then, are the main evolutionary points that Kuhn made. All quotations below are from the second edition of TSoSR.
- p.171 “All the well-known pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories—those of Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, and the German Naturphilosophen—had taken evolution to be a goal-directed process.”
- p.172 “For many men the abolition of that teleological kind of evolution was the most significant and least palatable of Darwin’s suggestions. The Origin of Species recognized no goal set either by God or nature.”
- p.172 “The analogy that relates the evolution of organisms to the evolution of scientific ideas can easily be pushed too far. But with respect to the issues of this closing section it is very nearly perfect.”
- pp.172-3 “the entire [scientific] process may have occurred, as we now suppose biological evolution did, without benefit of a set goal, a permanent fixed scientific truth, of which each stage in the development of scientific knowledge is a better exemplar.”
- p.173 “Why should scientific communities be able to reach a firm consensus unattainable in other fields? Why should consensus endure across one paradigm change after another? And why should paradigm change invariably produce an instrument more perfect in any sense than those known before? …those questions…are as open as they were when this essay began. It is not only the scientific community that must be special. The world of which that community is a part must also possess quite special characteristics, and we are no closer than we were at the start to knowing what these must be. …it need not be answered in this place.”
Ugh! The evolution of organisms and the evolution of scientific ideas are extremely different things. They are not “very nearly perfect” for analogous analysis. Biological life has emerged and evolved into the vacuum of a non-living universe. Random mutations, scarce resources, and eons of natural selection have created “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful” (as Darwin famously described). Life has immense freedom to create survival mechanisms within this space of possibilities. But scientific ideas are not like this at all. They are highly constrained truth-seeking hypotheses that evolve via empirically-driven imaginations (not random mutations), which compete to be the best rationally-selected predictions. This is not at all like brute, unthinking, goalless, natural selection.
As I wrote in the epistemology paper that I recently finished (see a draft sketch here), there are plenty of skeptical arguments that have come down to us through the ages (e.g. Socrates, Pyrrho, Descartes, Hume, Gettier, Putnam, Bostrom), which show us why the evolution of scientific ideas never actually reach “a permanent fixed scientific truth.” But that is indeed the goal, despite what Kuhn would argue. The question of why scientific communities are able to reach consensus is easily answered when we posit that our universe (not multiverses) is an objective, knowable, thing that we keep trying to grasp through our subjective lenses. Only a very twisted view of science as a mere relativistic construction of ideas would see it otherwise. But that view doesn’t hang together at all and can therefore be dismissed.
One of the most cited academic books of all time? What a shame.
