Kuhn's Legacy

Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, and Pragmatism

Bojana Mladenović

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231520744
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Historiography

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most important books of the twentieth century. Its influence reaches far beyond the philosophy of science, and its key terms, such as "paradigm shift," "normal science," and "incommensurability," are now used in both academic and public discourse without any reference to Kuhn. However, Kuhn's philosophy is still often misunderstood and underappreciated. In Kuhn's Legacy, Bojana Mladenovi? offers a novel analysis of Kuhn's central philosophical project, focusing on his writings after Structure.

Mladenovi? argues that Kuhn's historicism was always coupled with a firm and consistent antirelativism but that it was only in his mature writings that Kuhn began to systematically develop an original account of scientific rationality. She reconstructs this account, arguing that Kuhn sees the rationality of science as a form of collective rationality. At the purely formal level, Kuhn's conception of scientific rationality prohibits obviously irrational beliefs and choices and requires reason-responsiveness as well as the uninterrupted pursuit of inquiry. At the substantive, historicized level, it rests on a distinctly pragmatist mode of justification compatible with a notion of contingent but robust scientific progress. Mladenovi? argues that Kuhn's epistemology and his metaphilosophy both represent a creative and fruitful continuation of the tradition of American pragmatism. Kuhn's Legacy demonstrates the vitality of Kuhn's philosophical project and its importance for the study of the philosophy and history of science today.

1

AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Kuhn’s main contribution to the philosophy of science was not merely to give novel answers to the central questions posed by the tradition of thought that immediately preceded him—although he did give such answers, sometimes in great detail1—but rather to provide a dramatic break with the past. His true originality was to mount a serious, sustained, and largely successful attempt to revolutionize the whole field of the philosophy of science.

Kuhn’s revolution involved a number of significant shifts. He asked new questions about previously neglected aspects of scientific practice and set out new criteria for a successful philosophy of science. This led him to reflect on a metaphilosophical level about the proper relation of the philosophy of science to epistemology and metaphysics, on the one hand, and to history and the sociology of science, on the other. Although his metaphilosophical position changed over the years, it remained opposed to the received view’s metaphilosophy. Kuhn’s philosophy and metaphilosophy jointly shaped the contours of the new philosophy of science as well as its central questions. This reorientation of the discipline is Kuhn’s most important philosophical legacy. We may find some of Kuhn’s answers and positions untenable, but as contemporary philosophers of science we still often ask his questions.

Pre-Kuhnian philosophy of science focused on products of scientific activity, such as scientific hypotheses, theories, explanations, and laws. On the assumption that science was uniquely progressive in a cumulative, goal-directed way, proponents of the received view sought to discern and fully articulate the methodological principles to which science owes its spectacular success. The relationship between theory and evidence in confirmation and falsification was treated in a formal manner,2 with the aim of providing epistemic justifications for scientific reasoning and choice that were independent of their actual use in science. The received view’s philosophy of science was therefore formal, precise, and normative and was pursued to a large extent as a form of applied epistemology. The history and the sociology of science as well as of ethics and political philosophy were considered irrelevant for a properly philosophical understanding of scientific knowledge. This narrowly circumscribed, detail-oriented, and often technical philosophical work required a focus on simplified, almost schematic representations of scientific reasoning and choice. The resulting image of science was static, idealized, and unnaturally clear.

Kuhn’s image is different. He does not focus on the products of scientific work but rather on the processes through which science emerges, changes, and grows. He is interested in patterns of scientific agreement and disagreement as well as in the ways in which scientific communities resolve internal tensions generated by the need for continuity within research traditions and the countervailing need for innovation. Kuhn eschews all formal and abstract reconstructions of scientific reasoning and offers instead a synoptic view of the historical development of science, supplemented by careful, close observations of actual scientific practice.

Kuhn’s philosophy of science is thus diachronic, dynamic, and practice rather than theory oriented. It posits descriptive accuracy as its central desideratum. If there are larger epistemic lessons to be learned from the success of science, they will emerge from a careful examination of the norms and values that govern scientific practice in all its complexity. The history of science thus becomes indispensable for the philosophy of science,3 which seeks in turn to discover characteristic patterns of scientific development.

Kuhn articulated such a view in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and then supplemented, refined, and sometimes even modified it in subsequent writings. The central idea remains, however, remarkably stable throughout his work: scientific development is not uniform but consists of two major phases, normal science and revolutionary science. Normal science is marked by consensus within the scientific community on all fundamental matters. This consensus forms the basis on which normal science is able to produce coherent, cumulatively progressive results. When the consensus breaks down under the pressure of accumulated anomalies, the scientific community enters a period of revolutionary science, marked by competition among proponents of rival paradigms, or theoretical and practical frameworks for doing science. Rival paradigms are incommensurable, and the choice among them is not forced by either logic or empirical evidence. Scientific revolutions are thus disruptive episodes of fundamental reconfiguration through which scientific knowledge develops in a noncumulative way.

The first section in this chapter offers a brief overview of Kuhn’s developmental model of science; I then address some of the more frequent misunderstandings of his key ideas. The interpretive and philosophical problems of Kuhn’s philosophy of science are discussed in subsequent chapters.

KUHN’S MODEL OF SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT

Early Science

Most sciences have their roots in general attempts to understand and control nature. Myth, ritual, philosophy, early observations of nature, and practical crafts such as traditional medicine, agriculture, and navigation are a few among the historical sources of the kinds of highly specialized and technical scientific research with which we are now familiar. This process of development was slow and gradual. During the earlier stages in the development of a science, different inquirers unsystematically collect different readily observable facts, which they tend to structure and interpret differently. This process eventually gives rise over time to the formation of numerous rival scientific schools investigating roughly the same aspect of the world. Each school proceeds differently from its rivals, and communication among them is rare and imperfect, mainly because the schools differ in the implicit metaphysical commitments that ground their taxonomic systems. For example, Kuhn points out that before Sir Isaac Newton, the nature of light was understood differently by competing scientific schools; these schools were “espousing one variant or another of Epicurean, Aristotelian, or Platonic theory.”4 Each school generates its own well-defined questions and methods for answering them. The precise boundaries of a given field of inquiry vary from school to school, as do the central problems and the criteria for the evaluation of proposed solutions. Numerous rival research traditions thus compete against one another without being able to agree even about the fundamental aspects of their inquiries. Debates about fundamentals are frequent and spirited but futile. They distract from detailed, collaborative scientific work, and they do not ultimately lead to consensus. Scientists of different schools cannot fruitfully communicate with one another, nor are they capable of relying on one another’s successful research results. This kind of uneasy coexistence among rival schools of thought effectively isolated from one another has always been characteristic of philosophy—and, in Kuhn’s view, of contemporary social science as well. In the natural sciences, however, mature scientific work becomes possible once scientists in a given field have reached consensus on their fundamental assumptions and methods.

Normal Science

Critical discussions about fundamentals come to an end when one of the early schools produces an achievement impressive enough to attract so many adherents from rival schools that all the rivals effectively disappear. This achievement then serves as the model for further problem-solving activity and is especially attractive if it opens up many new questions and puzzles that are capable of challenging subsequent generations of scientists. This is the focal point for the emergence of a paradigm—a constellation of assumptions, theories, techniques, and instruments shared by all the members of the scientific community. At this point, the fledgling science’s internecine debate is replaced with consensus—reinforced by institutionally sanctioned dogmatism—about all fundamental aspects of scientific work. Kuhn calls this period “normal science,” characterized principally by detailed, puzzle-solving work conducted under the guidance of a single paradigm.5

Kuhn illustrates what he means by “paradigm” by writing about Aristotelian, Cartesian, Newtonian, and Einsteinian paradigms in physics and about Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestly as offering rival paradigms in chemistry. A paradigm is what a community of scientists shares. It organizes all aspects of research during normal science. It presupposes a metaphysical worldview and an ontology6 as well as certain disciplinary boundaries among different branches of science. It selects, categorizes, and arranges the phenomena to be investigated through its lexical structure and basic laws. Above all, it provides the framework necessary for precise technical work, including criteria for selecting legitimate scientific problems and a range of accepted methods for their solution. It thus structures the space of scientific questions and provides shared standards for the evaluation of answers and results.

Paradigms are holistic. The meanings of scientific terms within a paradigm (such as planet, temperature, phlogiston, mass, and charge) are interconnected. They are learned in clusters and through use in scientific work. So the received view’s distinction between observational and theoretical terms has no place in Kuhn’s philosophy. He insists that all scientific observation is paradigm guided and, in that sense, theory laden. The dominant paradigm specifies what the relevant phenomena to be observed are as well as what their expected behavior is; all scientific observation is thus guided by the gestalt imposed by the paradigm. For example, where an Aristotelian scientist saw constrained fall, a Galilean scientist saw a pendulum; Lavoisier saw oxygen where Priestley had seen dephlogisticated air—and, Kuhn adds wryly, “where others had seen nothing at all.”7 Scientific work must rely on empirical observations, but to make those observations scientists are trained to see the phenomena as phenomena of a certain scientific kind. Scientific kinds in mature natural sciences typically differ from the kinds available in ordinary natural languages. Scientific facts are thus already saturated with paradigm-specific classifications and interpretations: they cannot be collected or interpreted without the training that the paradigm provides.

For this reason, a paradigm is never simply falsified by empirical results or rejected on the grounds of internal inconsistencies. On the contrary, all results of individual research must conform to the canons and expectations set by the paradigm; when they do not, it is the researcher who is deemed at fault. Normal science generates puzzles that the scientific community aims to solve, constrained and guided by the community’s paradigm. Scientific knowledge about a particular segment of the world grows through puzzle solving, and the paradigm becomes enriched by new taxonomic categories, regularities, and explanations. Paradigms are thus essentially unfinished objects and therefore in need of further articulation and application.

The further development of a paradigm requires intricate, collaborative work, which thrives only in the absence of serious dissent—that is, only when a shared set of beliefs, procedures, and evaluative standards is in place. Conservatism is thus an inevitable aspect of normal science, but it cannot be sustained without institutional support. To provide it, scientific communities establish relatively rigid systems of education and advancement and are generally intolerant of any radical critique of the existing paradigm. For example, becoming a member of a scientific community is an important achievement, depending on validation from older experts, and is thus a process that encourages work along already accepted lines. Even at later points in their careers, scientists who challenge the fundamentals of normal science are often marginalized or completely excluded, and their work is ignored and thus rendered irrelevant for the scientific community’s ongoing research. A successful career for a normal scientist essentially involves the further articulation, development, and application of the current paradigm, not attempts to put the paradigm to the test or to call it into question by proposing an alternative. A talented normal scientist offers ingenious solutions to intricate scientific puzzles and thereby contributes to the cumulative growth of knowledge.

A paradigm in science is an indispensable but fluid guide to practice. Unlike a paradigm in a grammar book, a paradigm in science typically requires creative adjustments here and there. To a surprising extent, the paradigm is adhered to tacitly.8 Certainly, normal scientists share many beliefs, rely on the same definitions and axioms, and assume the same metaphysical picture of the world, but it is much more important that their unity as a group is marked by their unarticulated knowledge, visible in practical skills for doing science and in the ease with which they collaborate—in a laboratory setting, for example—without having to agree on a number of theoretical issues.9 The consensus found in periods of normal science is thus primarily a consensus on how to do science: how to collect and classify observations, how to set up a laboratory and design experiments, how to produce relevant calculations, use instruments, or repair a piece of equipment. The cumulative growth of knowledge in normal science is driven more forcefully by practice and its problems than by theoretical questions and considerations.

Anomalies, Crisis, and Revolutiona...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. An Overview of Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science
• Part I: History
• Part II: Rationality
• Part III: Pragmatism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index