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Not to be confused with Thomas Kuhn (Michigan politician).
American philosopher of science (1922–1996)
Thomas Samuel Kuhn ( ; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.
Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon "objectivity" alone. Science must account for subjective perspectives as well, since all objective conclusions are ultimately founded upon the subjective conditioning/worldview of its researchers and participants.
Early life, family and education
[edit]
Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Minette Stroock Kuhn and Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, both Jewish.[9]
From kindergarten through fifth grade, he was educated at Lincoln School, a private progressive school in Manhattan, which stressed independent thinking rather than learning facts and subjects. The family then moved 40 mi (64 km) north to the small town of Croton-on-Hudson, New York where, once again, he attended a private progressive school – Hessian Hills School. It was here that, in sixth through ninth grade, he learned to love mathematics. He left Hessian Hills in 1937. He graduated from The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, in 1940.[10]
He obtained his BSc degree in physics from Harvard College in 1943, where he also obtained MSc and PhD degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949, respectively, under the supervision of John Van Vleck. [11] As he states in the first few pages of the preface to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his three years of total academic freedom as a Harvard Junior Fellow were crucial in allowing him to switch from physics to the history and philosophy of science.
Career
[edit]
Kuhn taught a course in the history of science at Harvard from 1948 until 1956, at the suggestion of university president James Conant. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department, being named Professor of the history of science in 1961. Kuhn interviewed and tape recorded Danish physicist Niels Bohr the day before Bohr's death.[12] At Berkeley, he wrote and published (in 1962) his best known and most influential work:[13] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. He served as the president of the History of Science Society from 1969 to 1970.[14] In 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
[edit]
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) was originally printed as an article in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, published by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. In this book, heavily influenced by the fundamental work of Ludwik Fleck (on the possible influence of Fleck on Kuhn see[15]), Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called "paradigm shifts" (although he did not coin the phrase, he did contribute to its increase in popularity),[16] in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. In general, science is broken up into three distinct stages. Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. This is followed by "normal science", when scientists attempt to enlarge the central paradigm by "puzzle-solving".[6]: 35–42 Guided by the paradigm, normal science is extremely productive: "when the paradigm is successful, the profession will have solved problems that its members could scarcely have imagined and would never have undertaken without commitment to the paradigm".[6]: 24–25
In regard to experimentation and collection of data with a view toward solving problems through the commitment to a paradigm, Kuhn states:
The operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not "the given" of experience but rather "the collected with difficulty." They are not what the scientist sees—at least not before his research is well advanced and his attention focused. Rather, they are concrete indices to the content of more elementary perceptions, and as such they are selected for the close scrutiny of normal research only because they promise opportunity for the fruitful elaboration of an accepted paradigm. Far more clearly than the immediate experience from which they in part derive, operations and measurements are paradigm-determined. Science does not deal in all possible laboratory manipulations. Instead, it selects those relevant to the juxtaposition of a paradigm with the immediate experience that that paradigm has partially determined. As a result, scientists with different paradigms engage in different concrete laboratory manipulations.[6]: 126
During the period of normal science, the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher, contra Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science. The difference between the normal and revolutionary science soon sparked the Kuhn-Popper debate.
In SSR, Kuhn also argues that rival paradigms are incommensurable—that is, it is not possible to understand one paradigm through the conceptual framework and terminology of another rival paradigm. For many critics, for example David Stove (Popper and After, 1982), this thesis seemed to entail that theory choice is fundamentally irrational: if rival theories cannot be directly compared, then one cannot make a rational choice as to which one is better. Whether Kuhn's views had such relativistic consequences is the subject of much debate; Kuhn himself denied the accusation of relativism in the third edition of SSR, and sought to clarify his views to avoid further misinterpretation. Freeman Dyson has quoted Kuhn as saying "I am not a Kuhnian!",[17] referring to the relativism that some philosophers have developed based on his work.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the single most widely cited book in the social sciences.[18] The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides "paradigm shift", Kuhn popularized the word paradigm itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics and the work of Georg Lichtenberg to its current broader meaning, coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term "scientific revolutions" in the plural, taking place at widely different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single scientific revolution in the late Renaissance. The frequent use of the phrase "paradigm shift" has made scientists more aware of and in many cases more receptive to paradigm changes, so that Kuhn's analysis of the evolution of scientific views has by itself influenced that evolution.[citation needed]
Kuhn's work has been extensively used in social science; for instance, in the post-positivist/positivist debate within International Relations. Kuhn is credited as a foundational force behind the post-Mertonian sociology of scientific knowledge. Kuhn's work has also been used in the Arts and Humanities, such as by Matthew Edward Harris to distinguish between scientific and historical communities (such as political or religious groups): 'political-religious beliefs and opinions are not epistemologically the same as those pertaining to scientific theories'.[19] This is because would-be scientists' worldviews are changed through rigorous training, through the engagement between what Kuhn calls 'exemplars' and the Global Paradigm. Kuhn's notions of paradigms and paradigm shifts have been influential in understanding the history of economic thought, for example the Keynesian revolution,[20] and in debates in political science.[21]
A defense Kuhn gives against the objection that his account of science from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions results in relativism can be found in an essay by Kuhn called "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice."[22] In this essay, he reiterates five criteria from the penultimate chapter of SSR that determine (or help determine, more properly) theory choice:
Accurate – empirically adequate with experimentation and observation
Consistent – internally consistent, but also externally consistent with other theories
Broad Scope – a theory's consequences should extend beyond that which it was initially designed to explain
Simple – the simplest explanation, principally similar to Occam's razor
Fruitful – a theory should disclose new phenomena or new relationships among phenomena
He then goes on to show how, although these criteria admittedly determine theory choice, they are imprecise in practice and relative to individual scientists. According to Kuhn, "When scientists must choose between competing theories, two men fully committed to the same list of criteria for choice may nevertheless reach different conclusions."[22] For this reason, the criteria still are not "objective" in the usual sense of the word because individual scientists reach different conclusions with the same criteria due to valuing one criterion over another or even adding additional criteria for selfish or other subjective reasons. Kuhn then goes on to say, "I am suggesting, of course, that the criteria of choice with which I began function not as rules, which determine choice, but as values, which influence it."[22] Because Kuhn utilizes the history of science in his account of science, his criteria or values for theory choice are often understood as descriptive normative rules (or more properly, values) of theory choice for the scientific community rather than prescriptive normative rules in the usual sense of the word "criteria", although there are many varied interpretations of Kuhn's account of science.
Post-Structure philosophy
[edit]
Years after the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn dropped the concept of a paradigm and began to focus on the semantic aspects of scientific theories. In particular, Kuhn focuses on the taxonomic structure of scientific kind terms. In SSR he had dealt extensively with "meaning-changes". Later he spoke more of "terms of reference", providing each of them with a taxonomy. And even the changes that have to do with incommensurability were interpreted as taxonomic changes.[23] As a consequence, a scientific revolution is not defined as a "change of paradigm" anymore, but rather as a change in the taxonomic structure of the theoretical language of science.[24] Some scholars describe this change as resulting from a 'linguistic turn'.[25][26] In their book, Andersen, Barker and Chen use some recent theories in cognitive psychology to vindicate Kuhn's mature philosophy.[27]
Apart from dropping the concept of a paradigm, Kuhn also began to look at the process of scientific specialisation. In a scientific revolution, a new paradigm (or a new taxonomy) replaces the old one; by contrast, specialisation leads to a proliferation of new specialties and disciplines. This attention to the proliferation of specialties would make Kuhn's model less 'revolutionary' and more "evolutionary".
[R]evolutions, which produce new divisions between fields in scientific development, are much like episodes of speciation in biological evolution. The biological parallel to revolutionary change is not mutation, as I thought for many years, but speciation. And the problems presented by speciation (e.g., the difficulty in identifying an episode of speciation until some time after it has occurred, and the impossibility even then, of dating the time of its occurrence) are very similar to those presented by revolutionary change and by the emergence and individuation of new scientific specialties.[28]
Some philosophers claim that Kuhn attempted to describe different kinds of scientific change: revolutions and specialty-creation.[29] Others claim that the process of specialisation is in itself a special case of scientific revolutions.[30] It is also possible to argue that, in Kuhn's model, science evolves through revolutions.[31]
Polanyi–Kuhn debate
[edit]
Although they used different terminologies, both Kuhn and Michael Polanyi believed that scientists' subjective experiences made science a relativized discipline. Polanyi lectured on this topic for decades before Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Supporters of Polanyi charged Kuhn with plagiarism, as it was known that Kuhn attended several of Polanyi's lectures, and that the two men had debated endlessly over epistemology before either had achieved fame. After the charge of plagiarism, Kuhn acknowledged Polanyi in the Second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.[6]: 44 Despite this intellectual alliance, Polanyi's work was constantly interpreted by others within the framework of Kuhn's paradigm shifts, much to Polanyi's (and Kuhn's) dismay.[32]
Honors
[edit]
Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963,[33] elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1974,[34] elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1979,[35] and, in 1982 was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. He also received numerous honorary doctorates.
In honor of his legacy, the Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award is awarded by the American Chemical Society to speakers who present original views that are at odds with mainstream scientific understanding. The winner is selected based on the novelty of the viewpoint and its potential impact if it were to be widely accepted.[36]
Personal life
[edit]
Thomas Kuhn was married twice, first to Kathryn Muhs with whom he had three children, then to Jehane Barton Burns (Jehane B. Kuhn).
In 1994, Kuhn was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in 1996.
Bibliography
[edit]
Kuhn, T. S. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. ISBN 0-674-17100-4
Kuhn, T. S. The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science. Isis, 52 (1961): 161–193.
Kuhn, T. S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. ISBN 0-226-45808-3
Kuhn, T. S. "The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research". pp. 347–369 in A. C. Crombie (ed.). Scientific Change (Symposium on the History of Science, University of Oxford, July 9–15, 1961). New York and London: Basic Books and Heineman, 1963.
Kuhn, T. S. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977. ISBN 0-226-45805-9
Kuhn, T. S. Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ISBN 0-226-45800-8
Kuhn, T. S. The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0-226-45798-2
Kuhn, T. S. The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
References
[edit]
Further reading
[edit]
Hanne Andersen, Peter Barker, and Xiang Chen. The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0521855754
Alexander Bird. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press and Acumen Press, 2000. ISBN 1-902683-10-2
Steve Fuller. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0-226-26894-2
Matthew Edward Harris. The Notion of Papal Monarchy in the Thirteenth Century: The Idea of Paradigm in Church History.' Lampeter and Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7734-1441-9.
Paul Hoyningen-Huene Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ISBN 978-0226355511
Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Meaning Changes: A Study of Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy. AV Akademikerverlag, 2012. ISBN 978-3639444704
Errol Morris. The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-226-51384-3
Sal Restivo, The Myth of the Kuhnian Revolution. Sociological Theory, Vol. 1, (1983), 293–305.
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KUHN, THOMAS S.KUHN, THOMAS S. (1922–1996), U.S. historian and philosopher of science. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Kuhn was educated at Harvard University, earning his bachelor's degree in 1943, his master's degree in physics in 1946, and his Ph.D. in the history of science in 1949. He remained at Harvard as a junior fellow, becoming an assistant professor of general education and the history of science in 1952. Source for information on Kuhn, Thomas S.: Encyclopaedia Judaica dictionary.
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KUHN, THOMAS S. (1922–1996), U.S. historian and philosopher of science. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Kuhn was educated at Harvard University, earning his bachelor's degree in 1943, his master's degree in physics in 1946, and his Ph.D. in the history of science in 1949. He remained at Harvard as a junior fellow, becoming an assistant professor of general education and the history of science in 1952. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1956 to 1964, and at Princeton University from 1964 to 1979. Kuhn was named professor of the philosophy and history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979, becoming professor emeritus in 1984.
Kuhn's first book, The Copernican Revolution (1957), was a study of the development of the heliocentric theory of the solar system. His second work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), has become one of the most influential books in the philosophy of science, the social sciences, and the humanities. In this work, Kuhn argued against the conventional view of science as a gradual acquisition of knowledge, based on experimental data, which develops over time. Instead, Kuhn maintained that scientific theory has been defined by "paradigms," or worldviews, which consist of both theories and experimental methods. The acceptance of a paradigm by scientists influences all subsequent experimental work as scientists seek to refine its theories; the paradigm determines not only the type of experiments performed but also the interpretation of their results. Puzzling results are considered to result from flawed methodology. Eventually, however, an accumulation of difficult results and insoluble problems may cause a crisis that must be resolved by an intellectual revolution – in other words, by the creation of a new paradigm. Though initial reviews of the work were mixed, it was later considered to have revolutionized its field. Its influence has been considerable in areas beyond the history and philosophy of science, as Kuhn's concept of paradigm shifts was extended to political science, sociology, economics, and other fields.
Kuhn received many honors during his lifetime. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954 and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science from 1958 to 1959. He served as director of the project Sources for the History of Quantum Physics, sponsored by the American Physical Society and the American Philosophical Society, from 1961 to 1964. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1972 to 1979. He received the Howard T. Behrman Award from Princeton in 1977, the George Sarton Medal from the History of Science Society in 1982, and the Bernal Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science in 1983.
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In Thomas S. Kuhn
…thought are defined by “paradigms,” or conceptual world-views, that consist of formal theories, classic experiments, and trusted methods. Scientists typically accept a prevailing paradigm and try to extend its scope by refining theories, explaining puzzling data, and establishing more precise measures of standards and phenomena. Eventually, however, their efforts…
Read More
In philosophy of science: The work of Thomas Kuhn
…pursuing it—they follow the “paradigm.” Commitment to the approach begins a tradition of normal science in which there are well-defined problems, or “puzzles,” for researchers to solve. In the practice of normal science, the failure to solve a puzzle does not reflect badly on the paradigm but rather does…
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Read More
In philosophy of science: The work of Thomas Kuhn
…pursuing it—they follow the “paradigm.” Commitment to the approach begins a tradition of normal science in which there are well-defined problems, or “puzzles,” for researchers to solve. In the practice of normal science, the failure to solve a puzzle does not reflect badly on the paradigm but rather does…
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Thomas Khun.edited - Free download as Word Doc (.doc / .docx), PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. Thomas Kuhn was born in 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1962, he wrote his groundbreaking work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" which introduced the concepts of scientific paradigms and challenged the view that science advances through a linear progression. The book transformed the philosophy of science by explaining how social and psychological factors shape science. Kuhn revised the book in 1970 to address criticism. When Kuhn died in 1996, he left a lasting legacy through his concepts of paradigm shifts and how scientific communities develop, which still guide discussions about science and society today.
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Lived 1922 – 1996. Thomas Kuhn introduced the paradigm shift into our language and culture. His initial impulse to do so came when, although a physicist, he could not understand the physics of Aristotle from over two millennia earlier. He realized that Galileo and Newton had built an entirely new intellectual framework within which the
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Lived 1922 – 1996.
Thomas Kuhn introduced the paradigm shift into our language and culture. His initial impulse to do so came when, although a physicist, he could not understand the physics of Aristotle from over two millennia earlier. He realized that Galileo and Newton had built an entirely new intellectual framework within which the physics of motion was contained. Aristotle had worked within the confines of an earlier framework, alien to modern minds.
Kuhn described the change of intellectual frameworks within which facts are interpreted as a paradigm shift.
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Beginnings
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA into an affluent family. His parents called him Tom. His younger brother Roger was born three years later.
Tom’s father, Samuel Louis Kuhn, was a Cincinnati-born industrial engineer and investment consultant. A graduate of Harvard and MIT, he had fought in World War 1. Tom’s mother, Minette Kuhn (née Strook), came from a wealthy New York family. A graduate of Vassar College, she wrote unpaid articles for progressive organizations, worked as a freelance editor, and was a patron of the arts. Both of Tom’s parents were active in left-wing politics and both were of Jewish descent, although neither of them practiced their religion.
When Tom was a few months old, the family moved to New York.
School
From kindergarten through fifth grade, Tom was educated at Lincoln School, a private progressive school in Manhattan where independent thinking rather than learning facts and subjects was practiced. His father grew impatient when, age seven, his son could still not read or write. With a little coaching from his father, however, Tom was soon reading.
The family moved 40 miles north to the small town of Croton-on-Hudson where, once again, Tom attended a progressive private school – Hessian Hills School. It was here that, in sixth through ninth grade, he learned to love mathematics. Influenced by radical teachers, he also hoped to join the leftist American Student Union. Before joining it, members had to swear an oath never to fight for America. After agonizing over this, and talking to his father, he decided he could not sign. He left Hessian Hills in 1937.
For tenth grade, Tom moved to Solebury School, a private boarding school in Solebury Township, Pennsylvania.
His final school was another private boarding school, Taft School, in Watertown, Conneticut.
A straight-A student, he was admitted to Harvard University, his father’s alma mater. He believed this was a great honor, and it was only years later he learned that nearly everyone who applied when he did was admitted to Harvard.
He knew he would eventually have to make a choice between majoring in Mathematics or Physics. His father told him it would be easier to get a job as a physicist, so even before leaving for Harvard, Tom decided he would major in Physics.
Undergraduate at Harvard
Arriving in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the fall of 1940, 18-year-old Tom Kuhn experienced a happy improvement in his social life. In his final prep school years, he had started to feel like an outsider looking in. His frequent moves between high schools must have been unsettling. At Harvard, he felt like he belonged.
However, physics proved harder than he expected, and he scored a C in his first exam. Worried, he asked a professor if he had any future in the subject. The professor told Kuhn he needed to spend time plowing through more problems, making sure he could do them. Kuhn took the advice and scored A at the end of his freshman year.
In his sophomore year, America entered World War 2. Kuhn decided to speed up his degree by attending classes in summer. He graduated with a BS in Physics summa cum laude (with highest honor) in 1943. In addition to studying Physics, he spent his final year as head of the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson, the college newspaper.
War Work
In the summer of 1943, Kuhn joined the Radio Research Laboratory’s theoretical group. Based at Harvard, his group was tasked with devising countermeasures against enemy radar. He was soon sent to work in a laboratory in the United Kingdom.
Later he traveled with a Royal Air Force officer to France for a few weeks to study recently captured German radar installations, then carried on into Germany itself.
Back to Harvard
Kuhn returned to Harvard after the war in Europe ended and graduated with a master’s degree in Physics in 1946 and doctorate in 1949. His PhD thesis was The Cohesive Energy of Monovalent Metals as a Function of the Atomic Quantum Defects.
Even before he returned to America, his enthusiasm for physics had been dwindling. He continued studying it though, because it was the most convenient way for him to get a doctorate.
Making Sense of Absurdity
As a matter of fact, Kuhn was increasingly fascinated by philosophy, believing that in his personal search for ‘Truth’ it offered better prospects than physics.
In 1947, he was invited to deliver a History of Science course for undergraduates at Harvard. He had an epiphany while trying to make sense of the ideas of motion described by Aristotle in his Physics, ideas that had persisted from 350 BC – 1600 AD.
Kuhn realized he could not understand Aristotle’s ideas of motion because his modern physics education was getting in the way. Kuhn was studying Aristotle’s ideas from the perspective of a physicist familiar with Isaac Newton’s much later ideas. When Kuhn took account of the underlying science and philosophy of the Ancient Greeks, Aristotle’s Physics began to make much more sense.
History of Science
In the fall of 1948, while still working on his physics doctorate, Kuhn embarked on a three-year program as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. With no teaching duties, he focused entirely on developing his ideas as a science historian and philosopher. He became preoccupied with understanding the mechanisms of scientific progress; he saw this as a more fruitful approach than following conventional historical timelines and worrying about discovery dates.
As a former physicist, he observed that science textbooks at introductory level tended to present their subjects in a highly polished way, as indisputable facts; moreover, the creative processes that produce scientific discoveries were ignored in these books.
At the end of his fellowship, Harvard appointed Kuhn as an instructor, teaching general courses. A year later, he was promoted to assistant professor. He began giving an advanced undergraduate History of Science course looking at the development of mechanics from Aristotle to Newton. He enjoyed this immensely.
Kuhn’s Take on Nicolaus Copernicus’ Revolution
One of the courses Kuhn offered students was The Copernican Revolution, which he used as the basis for his first book, published in 1957. He scrutinized Nicolaus Copernicus’s famous book De revolutionibus with its bold claim that the earth orbits the sun.
Kuhn came to the conclusion that De revolutionibus was:
“a revolution-making rather than a revolutionary text.”
He claimed, with some justification, that Copernicus’s model was no more accurate and no simpler in its portrayal of heavenly bodies than the previous system devised by Claudius Ptolemy 1,400 years earlier. Kuhn believed Copernicus’s model was ultimately preferred because it was more pleasing to its audience – in other words for aesthetic reasons rather than scientific reasons. Certainly the fact that in Copernicus’s model there was no need for Ptolemy’s equant was aesthetically appealing. (The equant was an extremely clever mathematical improvisation Ptolemy devised to make his theory of planetary movements work.)
Scholars such as Richard Hall have pointed out that Copernicus’s model actually does have some scientific advantages over Ptolemy’s, such as those concerning the maximum elongation of Venus and Mercury, the explanation of retrograde motion, and the frequency of retrogressions.
Written for a general rather than a narrow specialist readership, Kuhn’s book has proven to be a keeper. The copy in front of me is from the twenty-fourth printing in 2003.
Berkeley & the Center for Advanced Study
In 1956, Harvard had still not offered Kuhn tenure. He accepted an offer from the University of California at Berkeley, where he became an assistant professor in both the Philosophy and History Departments.
In 1958, he was promoted to associate professor and given tenure. In the fall of that year, he began a one-year fellowship at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study. It was here he wrote a significant part of his most influential work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
In 1961, he was promoted to full professor of the History of Science at Berkeley. This actually infuriated him, because he wanted to be a professor of Philosophy. In the end, however, he agreed to accept the position in History.
The Paradigm Shift
The concept of the paradigm shift made Kuhn’s name. The term became widely used in all disciplines, not just science.
Kuhn first described the paradigm shift in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The concept had been in his mind for many years, starting when he asked himself how an intelligent man like Aristotle could have harbored absurd ideas about motion. It dawned on him that the framework of science in which Aristotle interpreted facts was entirely different from the framework of science (or to be more specific, the framework of basic mechanics) we use today, courtesy of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. The change of framework was the paradigm shift.
Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus provided Kuhn with another example of a paradigm shift. Before De revolutionibus, all facts were interpreted within a framework that said our planet lies at the center of the universe. Within a few decades, all facts were being interpreted within a new framework, which said the earth is actually a planet orbiting the sun.
Normal Science
After a paradigm shift has taken place, Kuhn said, scientists can begin building up facts again, perhaps studying different problems and searching for facts in different places suggested by the new paradigm. He described this period between paradigm shifts as normal science or puzzle solving.
Incommensurability
Kuhn also discussed the concept of incommensurability.
The word itself is not a common one. Ancient Greeks described a triangle whose hypotenuse’s length is an irrational number as incommensurable.
While a whole number such as 1 and a fraction such as 1/3 are on a common scale (you need three of one to exactly equal the other) there is no common scale between a whole number and an irrational number like √2.
Kuhn used the word incommensurable to describe paradigms that represent wholly different world views of the same subject – for example, the mechanics of Aristotle vs Newton, which differ so drastically that there is little common ground between them.
Princeton and MIT
In 1964, Kuhn moved to Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1979, he became Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The Impact of Kuhn’s Work on Science
Most scientists are only vaguely aware of Kuhn’s work, although like most people are familiar with the idea of a paradigm shift. Humanities students are generally more familiar Kuhn’s work.
Some Personal Details and the End
By ancestry Kuhn was Jewish. By choice he was an agnostic.
While studying for his PhD, Kuhn became rather isolated from other people, repeating the experience of his final high school years. Working in an almost all-male setting, he worried his mother by not dating women. He agreed to undergo psychoanalysis. Looking back on the experience, he said he hated the psychiatrist, who would fall asleep during sessions. The psychoanalysis ended because the psychiatrist left town and Kuhn got married.
He married Kathryn Muhs in 1948. His wife, like his mother, was a graduate of Vassar College. She typed his PhD thesis. They had two daughters and a son – Sarah, Elizabeth, and Nathaniel. The couple divorced in 1978.
In 1981, age 59, Kuhn married Jehane Barton Burns.
He retired from MIT in 1991, age 69.
Thomas Kuhn died, age 73, of cancer on June 17, 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had been suffering from throat and lung cancer for two years.
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Cite this Page
Please use the following MLA compliant citation:
"Thomas Kuhn." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 12 Jun. 2017. Web. <www.famousscientists.org/thomas-kuhn/>.
Published by FamousScientists.org
Further Reading
Thomas S. Kuhn
The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought
Harvard University Press, 1957
Richard J. Hall
Kuhn and the Copernican Revolution
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 21 No. 2: pp. 196-197, 1970
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Today is the 101st anniversary of the birth of Thomas Kuhn (18 July 1922–17 June 1996), who was born in Cincinnati on this date in 1922. Kuhn is not remembered as a philosopher of history, but as a…
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Today is the 101st anniversary of the birth of Thomas Kuhn (18 July 1922–17 June 1996), who was born in Cincinnati on this date in 1922.
Kuhn is not remembered as a philosopher of history, but as a philosopher and an historian of science, yet the influential work he produced has had profound implications for how we understand history, and in particular for how we understanding the history of science. You could call Kuhn’s work, if you liked, a philosophy of the history of science. And given the outsize role that science plays in the history of industrialized civilization, a philosophy of the history of science is a large part of a philosophy of the history of industrialized civilization. That is no small contribution.
A reductionist account of Kuhn’s philosophy is that scientific progress is not cumulative, but proceeds in fits and starts, with many losses along the way. There is an ongoing debate among Kuhn’s heirs as to whether theory change in science is ultimately a rational process, even if non-linear, or if it is ultimately an irrational process, essentially arbitrary, and without deeper meaning. If this is reflected upward to the history of industrialized civilization, which is predicated upon science, and the technology that science makes possible, then the ongoing debate is about whether the history of our civilization is ultimately rational, even if it jumps around in the short term, or whether it is ultimately irrational and arbitrary.
That’s just the disputed portion of Kuhn’s interpretation, about which one can be hopeful or despairing. The undisputed portion of Kuhn’s interpretation, again, reflected upward, is that a civilization based on science and technology is not cumulative, but more like Gould and Eldridge’s punctuated equilibrium: institutions that have been stable for a long period of time, perhaps over the longue durée, can suddenly be upended in the paradigm shift when old principles are abandoned, and new principles eventually take their place. Come to think of it, this is pretty much how modern industrialized civilization came into being: the nearly static medieval world endured for about a millennium, but then when things started to change, they changed rapidly and drastically. Old certainties that seem to have stood the test of time were abandoned forthwith, and new uncertainties had to take their place.
Of course, Kuhn doesn’t say what I have written above; generally speaking, he doesn’t project from his history of science to the history of civilization, but he does touch briefly upon civilization in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
“Inevitably those remarks will suggest that the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character of Orwell’s 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the powers that be. Furthermore, that suggestion is not altogether inappropriate. There are losses as well as gains in scientific revolutions, and scientists tend to be peculiarly blind to the former. On the other hand, no explanation of progress through revolutions may stop at this point. To do so would be to imply that in the sciences might makes right, a formulation which would again not be entirely wrong if it did not suppress the nature of the process and of the authority by which the choice between paradigms is made. If authority alone, and particularly if non-professional authority, were the arbiter of paradigm debates, the outcome of those debates might still be revolution, but it would not be scientific revolution. The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community. Just how special that community must be if science is to survive and grow may be indicated by the very tenuousness of humanity’s hold on the scientific enterprise. Every civilization of which we have records has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws, and so on. In many cases those facets of civilization have been as developed as our own. But only the civilizations that descend from Hellenic Greece have possessed more than the most rudimentary science. The bulk of scientific knowledge is a product of Europe in the last four centuries. No other place and time has supported the very special communities from which scientific productivity comes.”
Kuhn explicitly addresses philosophy of history in one of the essays in The Essential Tension, more or less to disavow that he has any philosophy of history:
“During my days as a philosophically inclined physicist, my view of history resembled that of the covering law theorists, and the philosophers in my seminars usually begin by viewing it in a similar way. What changed my mind and often changes their’s is the experience of putting together a historical narrative. That experience is vital, for the difference between learning history and doing it is far larger than that in most other creative fields, philosophy certainly included. From it I conclude, among other things, that an ability to predict the future is no part of the historian’s arsenal. He is neither a social scientist nor a seer. It is no mere accident that he knows the end of his narrative as well as the start before he begins to write. History cannot be written without that information. Though I have no alternate philosophy of history or of historical explanation to offer here, I can at least outline a better image of the historian’s task and suggest why its performance might produce a sort of understanding.”
While Kuhn had no explicitly formulated philosophy of history, there is much in the understanding of history that is implicit in Kuhn, for example, in the above passage, there is the distinction between learning history and doing history. What exactly is doing history? Presumably this could be writing history, or teaching history… it could even mean studying history, though the latter would certainly also count as learning history. In the above, for Kuhn doing history is “putting together a historical narrative.” He also suggests that doing history may produce a sort of understanding. Is this the sort of understanding that we derive (or hope to derive) from a philosophy of history? Is a philosophical understanding of history best to be had from putting together an historical narrative?
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Prof. Thomas S. Kuhn of MIT, Noted Historian of Science, Dead at 73
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MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Professor Emeritus Thomas S. Kuhn of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the internationally known historian and philosopher who made seminal contributions to understanding how scientific views are supported and discounted over time, died Monday, June 17, at his home in Cambridge. He had been ill for the last two years with cancer of the bronchial tubes and throat. He was 73.
Professor Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), an enormously influential work on the nature of scientific change, was widely celebrated as the central figure in contemporary thought about how the scientific process evolves.
Earlier this month, for example, Vice President Albert Gore, delivering the June 7 commencement address at MIT, spoke of the relationship "between science and technology on the one hand and humankind and society on the other," and referred to "the great historian of science, Thomas Kuhn."
Mr. Gore said Professor Kuhn "described the way in which our understanding of the world properly evolves when faced with a sudden increase in the amount of information. More precisely, he showed how well-established theories collapse under the weight of new facts and observations which cannot be explained, and then accumulate to the point where the once useful theory is clearly obsolete. As new facts continue to accumulate, a new threshold is reached at which a new pattern is suddenly perceptible and a new theory explaining this pattern emerges. It is an important process, not only at the societal level, but for each of us as individuals as we try to make sense of the growing mountain of information placed at our disposal."
More than one million copies of Professor Kuhn's famous 1962 book have been printed. It exists in more than a dozen languages and continues to be a basic text in the study of the history of science and technology.
From 1982 to 1991, when he became an emeritus professor, Dr. Kuhn held the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professorship in Philosophy. He was the chair's first holder.
Jed Z. Buchwald, the Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and director of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, said Professor Kuhn "was the most influential historian and philosopher of science or our time. He instructed and inspired his students and colleagues at Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton and MIT, as well as the tens of thousands of scholars and students in his own and other fields of social science and the humanities who read his works."
Professor Kuhn joined MIT in 1979 from Princeton University where he had been the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of the History of Science and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. At MIT, his work has centered on cognitive and linguistic processes that bear on the philosophy of science, including the influence of language on the development of science.
Born in Cincinnati in 1922, Professor Kuhn studied physics at Harvard University, where he received the SB (1943), AM (1946) and PhD (1949). His shift from an interest in solid state physics to the history of science, was traceable to a "single 'Eureka!' moment in 1947," according to a 1991 Scientific American article. Professor Kuhn, the article says, "was working toward his doctorate in physics at Harvard University when he was asked to teach some science to undergraduate humanities majors. Searching for a simple case history that could illuminate the roots of Newtonian mechanics, Kuhn opened Aristotle's Physics and was astonished at how 'wrong' it was. How could someone so brilliant on other topics be so misguided in physics? Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out of the window of his dormitory room . . .when suddenly Aristotle 'made sense.' Kuhn realized that Aristotle's views of such basic concepts as motion and matter were totally unlike Newton's. Aristotle used the word 'motion,' for example, to refer not just to change in position but to change in general. . . . Understood on its own terms, Aristole's physics 'wasn't just bad Newton,' Kuhn says; it was just different."
Professor Kuhn taught at Harvard and at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining Princeton in 1964. From 1978 to 1979 he was a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities.
His honors included the Howard T. Behrman Award for distinguished achievements in the humanities (1977), the History of Science Society's George Sarton Medal (1982) and the Society for Social Studies of Science's John Desmond Bernal Award (1983). He became a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 1990 and was given honorary degrees by several universities throughout the world.
He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Philosophy of Science Association (president, 1988-90), and the History of Science Society (president, 1968-70). Professor Kuhn is survived by his wife, Jehane (Barton) Kuhn; two daughters, Sarah Kuhn-La Chance of Framingham, Mass., and Elizabeth Kuhn of Los Angles, and a son, Nathaniel Kuhn of Arlington, Mass.
The service is private. A memorial service will be held at MIT in the fall.
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http://scihi.org/thomas-kuhn-scientific-revolutions/
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On July 18, 1922, American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born. He is most famous for his controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term “paradigm shift“, which has since become an English-language idiom.
“Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.”
— Thomas Kuhn, Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research? (1970)
Thomas Kuhn – Early Years
Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Samuel L. Kuhn, who was trained as a hydraulic engineer at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and his wife Minette. He attended the Hessian Hills School in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, a liberal school that encouraged students to think independently, and graduated from The Taft School in Watertown, CT, in 1940, where he became aware of his serious interest in mathematics and physics. He obtained his B.S. degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943 with summa cum laude. After graduation, he worked on radar for the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard and later for the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development in Europe. He returned to Harvard at the end of the war, obtained his master’s degree in physics in 1946, and worked toward a PhD degree in the same department, which he obtained in 1949 under the supervision of John Van Vleck. According to his autobiographical notes, his three years of total academic freedom as a Harvard Junior Fellow were crucial in allowing him to switch from physics to the history and philosophy of science.
“Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion.”
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Seeing through the Eyes of the Author
From 1948 to 1956, Kuhn taught a course in the history of science at Harvard at the suggestion of university president James Conant. His encounter with classical texts, especially Aristotle’s Physics, was a crucial experience for him. He realized that it was a great mistake to read and judge an ancient scientific text from the perspective of current science and that one could not really understand it unless one got inside the mind of its author and saw the world through his eyes, through the conceptual framework he employed to describe phenomena. This understanding shaped his later historical and philosophical studies.[2]
“Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense… that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way.”
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
The History of Science
This led Kuhn to concentrate on history of science and in due course he was appointed to an assistant professorship in general education and the history of science. During this period his work focussed on eighteenth century matter theory and the early history of thermodynamics. Kuhn then turned to the history of astronomy, and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution.[3] After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department, being named Professor of the History of Science in 1961. Kuhn interviewed and tape recorded Danish physicist Niels Bohr the day before Bohr’s death.[4] At Berkeley, he wrote and published (in 1962) his best known and most influential work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. He served as the president of the History of Science Society from 1969-70. In 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. In 1994 Kuhn was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in 1996 in Cambridge, Massachussetts, at age 73.[8]
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The central idea of his extraordinarily influential — and controversial — book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that the development of science is driven, in normal periods of science, by adherence to what Kuhn called a ‘paradigm’. The functions of a paradigm are to supply puzzles for scientists to solve and to provide the tools for their solution. A crisis in science arises when confidence is lost in the ability of the paradigm to solve particularly worrying puzzles called ‘anomalies’. Crisis is followed by a scientific revolution if the existing paradigm is superseded by a rival. Kuhn claimed that science guided by one paradigm would be ‘incommensurable’ with science developed under a different paradigm, by which is meant that there is no common measure for assessing the different scientific theories.[3]
Paradigm Shift
The enormous impact of Kuhn’s work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides “paradigm shift“, Kuhn popularized the word “paradigm” itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics and the work of Georg Lichtenberg to its current broader meaning,[5] coined the term “normal science” to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term “scientific revolutions” in the plural, taking place at widely different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single “Scientific Revolution” in the late Renaissance. The frequent use of the phrase “paradigm shift” has made scientists more aware of and in many cases more receptive to paradigm changes, so that Kuhn’s analysis of the evolution of scientific views has by itself influenced that evolution.
The Process of Scientific Change
Kuhn explains the process of scientific change as the result of various phases of paradigm change.
Phase 1: It exists only once and is the pre-paradigm phase, in which there is no consensus on any particular theory. This phase is characterized by several incompatible and incomplete theories. Consequently, most scientific inquiry takes the form of lengthy books, as there is no common body of facts that may be taken for granted.
Phase 2: Normal science begins, in which puzzles are solved within the context of the dominant paradigm. As long as there is consensus within the discipline, normal science continues. Over time, progress in normal science may reveal anomalies, facts that are difficult to explain within the context of the existing paradigm.
Phase 3: If the paradigm proves chronically unable to account for anomalies, the community enters a crisis period. Crises are often resolved within the context of normal science. However, after significant efforts of normal science within a paradigm fail, science may enter the next phase.
Phase 4: Paradigm shift, or scientific revolution, is the phase in which the underlying assumptions of the field are reexamined and a new paradigm is established.
Phase 5: Post-Revolution, the new paradigm’s dominance is established and so scientists return to normal science, solving puzzles within the new paradigm.
Impact
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time. Kuhn’s contribution to the philosophy of science marked not only a break with several key positivist doctrines, but also inaugurated a new style of philosophy of science that brought it closer to the history of science. Years after the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn dropped the concept of a paradigm and began to focus on the semantic aspects of scientific theories. In particular, Kuhn focuses on the taxonomic structure of scientific kind terms. As a consequence, a scientific revolution is not defined as a ‘change of paradigm’ anymore, but rather as a change in the taxonomic structure of the theoretical language of science
Philosophy of Science: Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, lecture 1, [12]
References and Further Reading:
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn
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Assessment | Biopsychology | Comparative | Cognitive | Developmental | Language | Individual differences | Personality | Philosophy | Social |
Methods | Statistics | Clinical | Educational | Industrial | Professional items | World psychology |
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American intellectual who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions in the philosophy of science.
Life[]
Descendant of a [Jewish family, Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He obtained his bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943, his master's in 1946 and Ph.D. in 1949, and taught a course in the history of science there from 1948 until 1956 at the suggestion of Harvard president James Conant. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley in both the philosophy department and the history department, being named Professor of the History of Science in 1961. In 1964 he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991.
Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954, and in 1982 was awarded the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science. He was also awarded numerous honorary doctorates.
He suffered cancer of the bronchial tubes for the last two years of his life and died Monday June 17 1996. He was survived by his wife Jehane R. Kuhn, his ex-wife Kathryn Muhs Kuhn, and their three children, Sarah, Elizabeth and Nathaniel.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)[]
Thomas Kuhn is most famous for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) (1962) in which he presented the idea that science does not evolve gradually toward truth, but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he calls "paradigm shifts." The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the revolution it brought about even in the vocabulary of the history of science: besides "paradigm shifts," Kuhn raised the word "paradigm" itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics to its current broader meaning, coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term "scientific revolutions" in the plural, taking place at widely different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single "Scientific Revolution" in the late Renaissance.
In France, Kuhn's conception of science has been related to Michel Foucault (with Kuhn's paradigm corresponding to Foucault's episteme) and Louis Althusser, although both are more concerned by the historical conditions of possibility of the scientific discourse - which Judith Butler calls "the limits of acceptable discourse". Thus, they do not consider science as isolated from society as they argue that Kuhn does. In contrast to Kuhn, Althusser's conception of science is that it is cumulative, even though this cumulativity is discontinuous (see his concept of "epistemological break") whereas Kuhn considers various paradigms as incommensurable.
Bibliography[]
The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957)
Kuhn, T.S. (1961). The function of measurement in modern physical science. ISIS, 52, 161-193.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) (ISBN 0226458083)
The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977)
Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 (Chicago, 1987) (ISBN 0226458008)
The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) (ISBN 0226457982)
See also[]
Important publications in philosophy of science
History and philosophy of science
[]
Thomas Kuhn (Biography, Outline of Structure of Scientific Revolutions)
Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm (obituary by Lawrence Van Gelder, New York Times, 19 June 1996)
Thomas S. Kuhn (obituary, The Tech p9 vol 116 no 28, 26 June 1996)
Thomas Kuhn at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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Who was Thomas Kuhn?
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Thomas Kuhn 1922-1996 was an American philosopher who introduced
cultural relativism after he discovered that the ancient physics of
someone like Plato wasn't wrong but just a description of a
completely different perception of reality.
Such perceptions he called 'paradigms'
Kuhn didnot realize (?) that 'rational science' is a paradigm
itself, and that made his 'thoughts about paradigms inconsistent
and confusing.
Thomas Kuhn attacked the western paradigm from within, and that
way did not challenge the basics. Like swimming around in a
swimming pool and filtering the water.
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/favicon.ico
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Answers
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https://www.answers.com/philosophy/Who_was_Thomas_Kuhn
|
Thomas Kuhn 1922-1996 was an American philosopher who introduced cultural relativism after he discovered that the ancient physics of someone like Plato wasn't wrong but just a description of a completely different perception of reality.
Such perceptions he called 'paradigms'
Kuhn didnot realize (?) that 'rational science' is a paradigm itself, and that made his 'thoughts about paradigms inconsistent and confusing.
Thomas Kuhn attacked the western paradigm from within, and that way did not challenge the basics. Like swimming around in a swimming pool and filtering the water.
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dbpedia
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9745714/
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Thomas Kuhn and Science Education
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Beginning 60 years ago, Thomas Kuhn has had a significant impact across the academy and on culture more widely. And he had a great impact on science education research, theorising, and pedagogy. For the majority of educators, the second edition ...
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9745714/
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Sci Educ (Dordr). 2022 Dec 13 : 1–70.
doi: 10.1007/s11191-022-00408-1 [Epub ahead of print]
PMCID: PMC9745714
PMID: 36531747
Thomas Kuhn and Science Education
Learning from the Past and the Importance of History and Philosophy of Science
Michael R. Matthews
School of Education, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052 Australia
Find articles by Michael R. Matthews
School of Education, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052 Australia
Michael R. Matthews, Email: ua.ude.wsnu@swehttam.m.
Corresponding author.
Copyright © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2022, Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic.
Abstract
Beginning 60 years ago, Thomas Kuhn has had a significant impact across the academy and on culture more widely. And he had a great impact on science education research, theorising, and pedagogy. For the majority of educators, the second edition (1970) of his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1970a) articulated the very nature of the science, the discipline they were teaching. More particularly, Kuhn’s book directly influenced four burgeoning research fields in science education: Children’s Conceptual Change, Constructivism, Science-Technology-Society studies, and Cultural Studies of Science Education. This paper looks back to the Kuhnian years in science education and to the long shadow they cast. The discipline of science education needs to learn from its past so that comparable mistakes might be averted in the future. Kuhn’s influence was good and bad. Good, that he brought HPS to so many; bad, that, on key points, his account of science was flawed. This paper will document the book’s two fundamental errors: namely, its Kantian-influenced ontological idealism and its claims of incommensurability between competing paradigms. Both had significant flow-on effects. Although the book had many positive features, this paper will document how most of these ideas and insights were well established in HPS literature at the time of its 1962 publication. Kuhn was not trained in philosophy, he was not part of the HPS tradition, and to the detriment of all, he did not engage with it. This matters, because before publication he could have abandoned, modified, or refined much of his ‘revolutionary’ text. Something that he subsequently did, but this amounted to closing the gate after the horse had bolted. In particular, the education horse had well and truly bolted. While educators were rushing to adopt Kuhn, many philosophers, historians, and sociologists were rejecting him. Kuhn did modify and ‘walk back’ many of the head-turning, but erroneous, claims of Structure. But his retreat went largely unnoticed in education, and so the original, deeply flawed Structure affected the four above-mentioned central research fields. The most important lesson to be learnt from science education’s uncritical embrace of Kuhn and Kuhnianism is that the problems arose not from personal inadequacies; individuals are not to blame. There was a systematic, disciplinary deficiency. This needs to be addressed by raising the level of philosophical competence in the discipline, beginning with the inclusion of HPS in teacher education and graduate programmes.
Keywords: Thomas Kuhn, Relativism, Idealism, Constructivism, Philosophy
Introduction
Thomas Kuhn’s impact on science education has been immense. This is reflected in the opening sentence of a 2022 article by David Treagust, one of Australia’s foremost science educators:1
Perhaps one of the major influences on our understanding of how scientific research and scientific knowledge evolves and develops was the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This small book really changed the way we look at the enterprise that is science. (Treagust, 2022, p.16)
Treagust spoke for the science education research community. In Peter Fensham’s landmark study of the discipline of science education, leading science educators repeatedly identify Kuhn’s Structure as the main influence on their understanding of science (Fensham, 2004). Richard Duschl, in 1990, described Structure as ‘the most acclaimed book in history of science’ (Duschl, 1990, p.36).2
The immediate educational impact of Structure was on educators’ understanding of the nature of science (NOS) which is, increasingly, a stand-alone inclusion in worldwide national and provincial science curricula.3 An explicit or implicit view of NOS informs curricular decisions, pedagogical practices, and wider national policies about the extent, duration, and funding of science in schools and beyond. It is widely agreed that students learning science should learn what science is, how it works, and what it accomplished. In brief, they should learn the nature of science. This is a truism, but its implication, namely, that science students and teachers need to learn the history and philosophy of science (HPS), has been less recognised and followed through. The seldom faced question is: How is it possible to learn about NOS without knowledge of HPS?
Many educators who, after the publication of the second edition of Structure in 1970, did look for history and philosophy of science, saw just Kuhnianism, more particularly Kuhn-inspired constructivism. It is important to distinguish Kuhn’s understanding of NOS from the many versions of Kuhn-inspired NOS. At many points, Kuhn was at pains to separate his views from those being advanced in his name. ‘Kuhnianism’ is an appropriate inclusive label for the latter. It includes Kuhn’s genuine views but also those mistakenly advanced in his name. In education, Kuhnian NOS not only informed, but it also underpinned Science-Technology-Society (STS) curricula and Cultural Studies in Science Education research and framed the narrative about inclusion of indigenous science within school science programmes.
Kuhn’s Structure not only dealt with revolutions in the history of science but also painted a revolutionary account of the nature and practice of science. But did Kuhn give a correct account? Many in HPS thought he did not. For the million-plus who bought the book,4 reading Structure was a Rorschach test. Kuhn recognised this. In 1969, at a large Frederick Suppe-organised symposium on ‘The Structure of Scientific Theories’ Kuhn, reflecting on the reception of the first edition, wrote:
I have sometimes found it hard to believe that all parties to the discussion had been engaged with the same volume. Part of the reason for its success is, I regretfully conclude, that it can be too nearly all things to all people. (Kuhn, 1977c, p.459)
He regretted the book’s ‘excessive plasticity’, particularly blaming his casual introduction of the term ‘paradigm’ (ibid). He should, more to the point, have regretted writing unclear and sloppy sentences about vital subjects. Philosophers, above all, need be cognisant of the importance of clarity in writing.
The argument of this paper is that the most important lesson to be learnt from the problems of science education’s wholesale embrace of Kuhnianism is the pressing need to raise the level of philosophical competence in the discipline, beginning with the inclusion of both history and philosophy of science, and philosophy of education, in science-teacher education programmes, and in education doctoral programmes.
Kuhn’s Status
It is oft claimed that Thomas Kuhn was the twentieth century’s most influential historian of science. This can hardly be disputed. He was a Harvard-trained physicist5 who published a great deal over a 55-year span.6 However, his global reputation was based upon one book—The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—which was first published in 1962 as a monograph in a little-read Vienna Circle-inspired International Encyclopedia of Unified Science,7 and then, eight years later, republished as a stand-alone second edition by University of Chicago Press (Kuhn, 1970a). The second edition precipitated the Kuhnian tsunami. Structure was quickly translated into two-dozen languages and sold over a million copies. In Australia’s Arts and Humanities Citation Index, it was the most cited book on any subject through the 1970s and 1980s. In the USA, the Social Science Citation Index listed 4970 Kuhn citations in just the decade 1971–1981 (Brush, 2000, p.54). Doubtless, it held much the same position in comparable indexes in other countries, both English-speaking and otherwise. Google Scholar, in October 2022, listed 71 versions of the book, having 143,303 citations.
For a combination of philosophical, sociological, and cultural reasons, the book had stratospheric sales and influence; sales way beyond that of almost any other HPS book published in the twentieth century; and probably beyond all HPS books. David Hull observed: ‘All the wrong people seemed attracted to his book for all the wrong reasons’ (Hull, 1988, p.112). There have been efforts to give a sociological or naturalist account of the explosion of Kuhnianism: Why was the book such a huge publishing success, and why did the constellation of ideas it contained spread so widely and quickly while its components had sat in isolation for decades?8
Some regard Kuhn as ‘the most influential philosopher writing in English since 1950, even the most influential academic’ (Sharrock & Read, 2002).9 For others, he is ‘one of the historically most significant philosophers of the twentieth century’ (Bird, 2000, p.vii). Kuhn’s vocabulary (‘paradigm’, ‘paradigm shift’, incommensurability’, ‘gestalt’) and thought-to-be Kuhnian ideas (scepticism, relativism, subjectivism, science as power play) have become a part of everyday culture. As recently as 8 October 2022, a correspondent writing on a local political issue, in The Age, a major Australian newspaper, confidently related that:
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions … exposed the influence of inertia, interests and the irrational on scientific explanation and understanding. (p.34)
And this is 60 years after the book’s publication. Countless readers of the newspaper would be nodding their heads. Most of them not asking: What is the extent and degree of such influences? Were the influences determinate, or otherwise, of scientific explanations and understandings? Were they were brought to light and corrected? Science educators also nodded their heads, and very few followed through with the obvious questions. Gerald Doppelt gave an accurate, and neutral, account of Kuhn’s impact:
Putting the merits of Kuhn’s philosophical claims to one side, it is still undeniable that his work has reshaped the terms of debate, and much research, in philosophy. In short, his work had given a new centrality and relevance to the history of science, and the examination of specific scientific practices, for philosophers. (Doppelt, 2001, p.160)
This paper does not put Kuhn’s philosophical merits to one side: It appraises them, recognising the positives, but detailing its key demerits and their deleterious educational, and cultural, influence.
There are many informative accounts of Kuhn’s personal, educational, and academic life.10 And, of course, there are many more accounts of his achievements, real and contested. Separating Kuhn’s real from his imagined achievements has, for 60 years, engaged legions of scholars.11 In 2012, the 50-year anniversary of publication of Structure was marked by numerous celebratory conferences in many countries.12 A large international centenary conference celebration of Kuhn’s life and work, held in July 2022, is witness to his enduring interest among historians, philosophers, and other scholars.13
Kuhn’s philosophy, his account of the nature of science, and the conditions for, and mechanisms of, theory change in science have been exhaustively appraised by historians and philosophers.14 Richard Duschl and Richard Grandy are of the opinion:
The most recent movements in philosophy of science can be seen as filling in some of the gaps left by Kuhn’s demolition of the basic tenets of logical positivism. (Duschl & Grandy, 2008, p.8)
This is an orthodox, majority account of Kuhn’s influence. And it is generous. An alternative reading would be to describe recent movements as ‘correcting mistakes in’ or ‘clarifying ambiguity about’, rather than ‘filling in gaps’, and further, pointing to how much he, and more generally Kuhnians, shared, rather than demolished, some of the basic tenets of logical positivism.15
Different Structures: Ernest Nagel’s Structure (1961) and Thomas Kuhn’s Structure (1962)
In successive years, two HPS books part-titled Structure were published. Ernest Nagel’s (1901–1985) 600 + page The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation was published in 1961 (Nagel, 1961). Kuhn’s 170 + page The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962. Beginning with his choice of title, Kuhn took aim at Nagel’s book and largely displaced it from academic discussion. Kuhn’s Structure opened a new chapter in the history of HPS. It sold a million-plus copies in at least 18 languages; Nagel’s sold the smallest fraction of that in a handful of languages. Kuhn sold to the masses and Nagel to captive philosophy students, including the current author. The Nagel/Kuhn contrast is an informative background for the arguments of this paper.
Nagel’s was a widely adopted philosophy text giving a detailed exposition of the logical empiricist ‘picture’ of science. This encapsulated the dominant philosophical, cultural, and educational understanding of science of the era.16 The book was the received view’s manual. Its Preface encapsulates post-war, progressive society’s hopes for science. Nagel speaks of science as an ‘institutionalized art of inquiry’ that has yielded precious fruit. Foremost among these are:
The achievement of generalized theoretical knowledge concerning fundamental determining conditions for the occurrence of various types of events and processes; the emancipation of men’s minds from ancient superstitions in which barbarous practices and oppressive fears are often rooted. (Nagel, 1961, p. vii)
He proceeds down a long list of social and cultural achievements, concluding:
Despite the brevity of this partial list, it suffices to make evident how much the scientific enterprise has contributed to the articulation as well as the realization of aspirations generally associated with the idea of a liberal civilization. (ibid)
This was a restatement of core Enlightenment convictions. The book was to be the first of three volumes laying out Nagel’s philosophical reflections on science.17 He rightly observed that: ‘there are few notable figures in the history of Western philosophy who have not given serious thought to problems raised by the sciences of their day’ (Nagel, 1961, p. viii).18 He recognises there are many problems occasioned by science that warrant philosophical attention, but:
… the present book is controlled by the objective of analyzing the logic of scientific inquiry and the logical structure of its intellectual products. (Nagel, 1961, p.viii)
Nagel’s Structure had a very low profile, if any, in science education. However, the discipline enthusiastically embraced Thomas Kuhn, especially after publication of the 1970s edition of Structure. But, as shown in the following sections, Kuhnianism was more embraced than appraised by educators. This indicates a fundamental deficiency in the discipline: The failure to incorporate history and philosophy of science into teacher education or graduate programmes.
Unheralded Birth of Kuhn’s Structure
The first edition of Structure appeared in 1962 in the Vienna Circle-inspired, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (Volume 2 Number 2). It had been founded by Otto Neurath and subsequently edited in the USA by Rudolf Carnap and Charles Morris. The Encyclopedia was the post-war flagship of logical empiricism; it had an almost entirely philosophical readership. The first edition was hardly noticed outside of philosophy departments, and not at all outside the academy.
An exception to the general neglect was a famed panel discussion titled ‘Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge’ at the July 1965, London International Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science. The contributors were Thomas Kuhn, John Watkins, Stephen Toulmin, L. Pearce Williams, Karl Popper, Margaret Masterman, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend. This was a sort of ‘HPS fights back’ event. The papers were published as a book in 1970, and enjoyed huge sales, becoming a basic text in upper-level philosophy of science courses (Lakatos & Musgrave, 1970). It was published the same year as the second edition of Structure.
The first edition was not noticed by science educators. John Robinson’s The Nature of Science and Science Teaching (Robinson, 1968) was the first book whose title brought together philosophy of science and science teaching. Kuhn is nowhere mentioned in its 150 pages (Matthews, 1997). In 1968, there was an important panel discussion on ‘Philosophy of Science and Science Teaching’ at the annual US National Association for Research in Science Teaching conference. Contributors included John Robinson, Michael Connelly, and Marshall Herron. The papers were published the following year in Volume Six of The Journal of Research in Science Teaching. Kuhn is not mentioned.
In 1969, Hans O. Andersen published Readings in Science Education for the Secondary School (Andersen, 1969). It was a collection of 60 research papers informed by commitment to the principle:
Science instruction should be based on a series of principles selected for their value in projecting science as a process of inquiry designed to discover new facts, improve quantitative descriptions of known facts, and organize these facts into conceptual schemes which more adequately describe the phenomena of the universe and beyond. (Andersen, 1969, p.2)
And:
The only way to succeed in increasing science enrolments without a subsequent loss of positive attitude is to make the course offerings so interesting and so valuable to the student that he will demand more. (Andersen, 1969, p.2)
Kuhn does not appear in the anthology’s 430 pages, and 60 readings. In 1974, Michael Connelly commented of the post-Sputnik curricular boom that:
While this activity began with philosophical concerns for knowledge and for enquiry, it was largely dominated by the works of a few psychologists, notably, Bruner, Ausubel, Gagne, Piaget. (Abimbola, 1983, p.182)
A few rare commentators in the 1960s, who were familiar with both the philosophical and the educational literature, noted this neglect of ‘new’ philosophy by science educators. Yehuda Elkana (1934–2012) observed that science education during the 1950s, and leading up to the Sputnik era, was formed in the image of ‘inductivist-realist’ philosophy of science (Elkana, 1970, p.3). He said of post-Sputnik PSSC and BSCS curricula and teaching material, that they ‘reflect the positivistic-Instrumentalist philosophy of science [logical empiricism], which was at the height of its influence in the early days of space travel’ (Elkana, 1970, p.8).
Elkana lamented that two important books—Kuhn’s Structure and Joseph Schwab’s The Teaching of Science (Schwab, 1960)—were published at the same time yet shared no common literature. They were: ‘two very important books, both highly influential in their own fields, both relying on two traditions and two bibliographies which completely ignore each other’ (Elkana, 1970, p.15). Elkana sketched out the ‘practical implications for the teaching of science’ that Kuhn’s new philosophy of science generated.
Michael Martin (1932–2015), a Boston University philosopher, a few years later surveyed the same literature as Elkana. He paid particular attention to the rush of ‘inquiry’ and ‘discovery’ curricula and recommendations put into Western educational orbit by Sputnik. Martin drew attention to the important 1966 Educational Policies Commission report, Education and the Spirit of Science (EPC, 1966), and charted the myriad ways in which it, and other curricula as well, reproduced simplistic, mistaken, inductivist understanding of scientific inquiry (Martin, 1972, 141–147). The homely inductivism of Education and the Spirit of Science had the imprimatur of the highest office in US education.
Much had happened in HPS in the decade leading up to the EPC report. It was published eight years after Norwood Russell Hanson’s Patterns of Discovery (Hanson, 1958) which received wide philosophical attention for its ‘theory dependence of observation’ thesis; seven years after Popper’s anti-inductivist work The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Popper, 1934/1959) was translated into English and also given wide philosophical attention; and four years after the publication of Feyerabend’s essay ‘Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism’ that shook the foundations of inductivist accounts of science (Feyerabend, 1962). Science educators, especially those at the highest levels advising Federal Government curricular and education-funding bodies, should have had an inkling of the shifting ground in HPS and should have recognised its relevance to its report on the ‘Spirit of Science’.
In 1974, Martin opined:
a great deal has been written on the philosophy of science; perhaps even more has been written in science education. However, surprisingly little has been written on the relation between the two areas. (Martin, 1974, 293)
The era’s unfortunate divide between HPS and science education was well documented in a study by Richard Duschl titled ‘Science Education and Philosophy of Science: Twenty-five Years of Mutually Exclusive Development’ (Duschl, 1985).19
Embrace of the Second Edition
The second edition (1970), unchanged except for addition of a Postscript,20 took Kuhn to the world. Kuhn was enthusiastically taken into education and into nigh on all other academic disciplines. In 1985, Derek Hodson reported that of 22 research articles published, and theses submitted, in the field of ‘Philosophy of Science, Science and Science Education’, in the period 1974–1984, fourteen addressed Kuhnian themes (Hodson, 1985).
In 2000, Cathleen Loving and William Cobern conducted a citation analysis of two major science education journals—Science Education and Journal of Research in Science Teaching—for the 13-year period 1985–1998 and, not surprisingly, found that there were numerous citations of Kuhn covering such Kuhnian themes as: paradigms (30 articles), conceptual change theory (12 articles), constructivist epistemology, incommensurability, authenticity of textbooks, the social components of science, and also the philosophical comparison of Kuhn and other methodologists of science (Loving & Cobern, 2000).
Clearly, there were many Kuhn enthusiasts in the science education community. It was close to being a Kuhnian cheer-squad (Matthews 2004a).
The embrace of Kuhn is demonstrated in one of the first science education articles to engage with Kuhn’s theory, namely, Ted Cawthron and Jack Rowell’s ‘Epistemology and Science Education’ (Cawthron & Rowell, 1978). They drew parallels between Piaget’s theory of knowledge and his psychological account of the constructive knowing subject, and what they found in Kuhn. For them, Kuhn established that:
We see things not just as they are but also partly as we are, and this is not due simply to differences in interpretation of otherwise stable facts or data. The “objective” real world becomes merged with its “subjective” interpretation and the Cartesian Dichotomy is replaced by a dialectic epistemology with distinctly relativistic implications. (Cawthron & Rowell, 1978, p.45)
What they are identifying as Kuhn’s ‘dialectic epistemology with distinctly relativistic implications’ is Kuhn’s embryonic and unsophisticated, Kantianism, something he picked up in a Harvard General Education course.
Structure: An Outline
As it was Kuhn’s Structure, and almost Structure alone, that impacted science education, that book will be the focus of this paper’s argument. More particularly, the book’s anti-realist and incommensurability claims will be examined as these had the most enduring impact in science education. They are still, for example, centre stage in important debates in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere, about whether indigenous science should be included in a science programme or a social science programme.21
Key elements of Structure can be seen in Kuhn’s, 1951 Lowell Lectures delivered in the Boston Public Library—The Quest for Physical Theory. These ‘adult education’ or ‘university outreach’ lectures remained unpublished until 2021 when they were edited by George Reisch and published by the MIT Library (Kuhn, 1951/2021). In criticism of Karl Pearson’s popular empiricist account of science which embodied the ‘orthodox’ logical empiricist view of the time (Pearson, 1892/1937), Kuhn averred:
I should like to suggest that the impartial, dispassionate observation of nature is impossible, that there are no “pure facts” from which alone valid theories can be derived, and that the effort toward “self elimination” which Pearson proposes as the scientist’s goal, would, in practice, result in the abolition of productive research. (Kuhn, 1951/2021, p.3)
The core argument of Structure is well known and could be summarised as follows.22 All communities seek knowledge and understanding of nature. This can amount to pre-science, pseudoscience, protoscience, or science. Normal science is heralded by the appearance of a common paradigm, or exemplar, that dictates methods of inquiry and constrains the kind of entities, or ontology, that can be appealed to in scientific explanations. The paradigm provides theoretical and practical puzzles that scientists work away at solving. When some pressing practical or theoretical puzzles resist solution with tools and concepts provided by the paradigm, then science enters a crisis period, and either drastic renovation is done (maybe new rooms added or boarders taken in) or scientists embrace a new paradigm (move house). This is revolutionary science. Crucially, while decisions within a paradigm are rule regulated, as evidenced in processes of journal review, decisions about how extensive a renovation should be—whether a particular addition is permissible, or whether to pick up and move house—are not rule regulated.
For Kuhn, values and interests, including personal ones, determine those decisions; they are an unavoidable part of science; and values are embedded within paradigms. Productive paradigms, and theories within them, unavoidably embody standards (values) of accuracy, consistency, breadth, simplicity, and fruitfulness. These are qualities that scientists, with good reason, prefer for their theories (McMullin 2008). And these values are common across paradigms, even incommensurable ones. As Kuhn later elaborates:
such values as accuracy, scope, and fruitfulness are permanent attributes of science …. (Kuhn, 1977b, p.335)
But he advises that:
the relative weights attached to them have varied markedly with time and also with the field of application. (Kuhn, 1977b, p.335)
So subjectivity is built into science.
Purple Passages
In the first edition, and remaining unchanged in the second, there were many ‘purple passages’ as Kuhn later labelled them (Kuhn, 1970a). These were head-turning claims that threatened the orthodox logical empiricist, and widespread cultural, understanding of science, understandings that were codified by Nagel:
‘…once current views of nature were, as a whole, neither less scientific nor more the product of human idiosyncrasy, than those current today’ (p.2).
viewing all fields together science ‘is a rather ramshackle structure with little coherence between its various parts’ (p.49).
‘Like the choice between competing political institutions, that between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life’ (p.94).
‘What occurred [when paradigms changed] was neither a decline nor a raising of standards, but simply a change demanded by the adoption of a new paradigm’ and ‘it could be reversed’ (p.108).
‘I have so far argued that paradigms are constitutive of science. Now I wish to display a sense in which they are constitutive of nature as well’ (p.110).
‘after discovering oxygen Lavoisier worked in a different world’ (p.118).
transition to a new paradigm occurs ‘not by deliberation and interpretation, but by a relatively sudden and unstructured event like a gestalt switch’ (p.122).
‘the competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs’ (p.148), and … ‘in these matters neither proof nor error is at issue’.
‘the proponents of different paradigms practice their trades in different worlds … the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction’ (p.150).
‘The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced’ (p.151).
‘a man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the evidence provided by problem solving. … A decision of that kind can only be made on faith’ (p.158).
‘the phrases “scientific progress” and even “scientific objectivity” may come to seem in part redundant’ (p.162).
‘with respect to normal science … progress lies simply in the eye of the beholder’ (p.163).
‘we may have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth’ (p.170).
And so on and on.
Kuhn would later regret writing some of these passages, but he held on to others. In 1969, he wrote: ‘I now recognize aspects of its initial formulation that create gratuitous difficulties and misunderstandings’ (Kuhn, 1970a, p.174). Steven Shapin generously called such passages ‘Kuhn’s sound-bites’ (Shapin, 2015, p.11). He could equally have called them ‘ill thought out’, ‘careless’, or ‘irresponsible’ claims. In 1969, in the Postscript to Structure, Kuhn wrote ‘I now recognize aspects of its initial formulation that create gratuitous difficulties and misunderstandings’ (Kuhn, 1970a, p.174). A year later, in distancing himself from charges of ‘irrationality’, ‘mob rule’, and ‘relativism’, with which he had rightly been charged, Kuhn admitted that his ‘own past rhetoric is doubtless partially responsible’ (Kuhn, 1970b, p.260).
Kuhn does not regret his lack of training in philosophy; on the contrary, he thought the lack advantageous as it did not give him a certain, but not spelt out, philosophers’ ‘cast of mind’. But if the above passages had been written into a graduate, or even undergraduate, philosophy thesis in most decent programmes, they would have been struck out: ‘this work cannot be presented, take it away and clarify’. Such guidance in 1960 would have made a seismic difference to subsequent philosophical and cultural thought.
Anticipations of Structure
The central philosophical ideas in Structure were not novel, something Kuhn often acknowledged.23 Many elements of his philosophy of science were extant; indeed, many elements were in residence just along the Harvard corridors. But these were barely, if at all, acknowledged, much less engaged with when the first edition of Structure was published in 1962. The intellectual ground for the Kuhnian ‘revolution’ had been well prepared. Simple empiricist, individualist, logical positivist understandings of science—the knower confronting the world—had been challenged on many fronts; the time was ripe for a philosophical upheaval, if not revolution.24
Marx’s 1852 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte could have been, and by a few was, appealed to by opponents of the orthodox empiricist account of science. Marx memorably wrote:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please … they make it under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. (Tucker, 1978, p.595)
This is an early statement of the sociology of knowledge, and was acknowledged as such by Karl Mannheim, the founder of that discipline (Mannheim, 1936/1960). It denies all ‘Robinson Crusoe’, individualist, observer-confronts-the-world epistemologies. It lays out how the ‘we think’ determines, or at least constrains, the ‘I think’. Marx’s observation was consistent with Kuhn’s epistemological programme and might be reformulated as ‘the paradigms of all the dead generations weighs like ….’.
In the 1930s, Ludwik Fleck wrote on the social construction of facts and on the necessity of an historical component for understanding (Fleck, 1935/1979, Cohen & Schnelle, 1986). At the same time, Gaston Bachelard wrote on epistemological ruptures in the history of science and on the impact of epistemological obstacles on cognition (Bachelard, 1934/1984).
In the 1930s and 1940s, Alexandre Koyré extensively documented the centrality of metaphysics in the science of Galileo and Newton (Koyré, 1957, 1968). In the 1940s, R.G. Collingwood elaborated how particular periods in the history of science had different metaphysical presuppositions which were fundamental assumptions about the constituents of the world and their properties that were not given directly in experience (Collingwood, 1940, 1945).
James Conant (1893–1978), while President of Harvard and the director of Kuhn’s own General Education course, had written popular books pointing to ‘conceptual schemes’ as the skeleton of science, and their transformation as the consequence of ‘scientific tactics and strategy’ (Conant, 1947, pp.104–111). Kuhn, with enthusiasm and gratitude, embraced Conant’s ‘conceptual schemes’ as a means to elucidate the nature of science and its history (Wray, 2016).25
Philipp Frank (1884–1966), a Harvard physics professor and a major exponent of logical empiricism, had been since the 1930s publishing accounts of science that shared a great deal with Kuhnian views. In the opening chapter of his The Law of Causality and its Limits (1932), he observes:
The more a physicist or biologist refuses to concern himself with ‘philosophy’, respectfully or contemptuously, the more we can be sure that he adopts the views of the oldest traditional scholastic philosophy in good faith, because he has not given careful thought to the fundamental concepts of his science. In the elementary textbooks of purely experimental physics, the most astonishing metaphysical claims can be found. (Frank, 1932/1998, p.25)
This is a constant theme in his work. In the Preface to his Philosophy of Science, he says ‘the deeper we dig into actual science the more its links with philosophy become obvious’ (Frank, 1957, p.iv). Further, he is well aware of the need for concrete historically based analysis, warning that:
Presentations of this field have very often started from a concept of science that is half vulgar and half mystical. Other presentations have linked science with a philosophy that has actually been a mere system of logical symbols without contact with historical systems of philosophy. (Frank, 1957, p.iv)
The ‘historical turn’ in philosophy of science did not have to await the Kuhnian revolution. Consequently, Frank’s Philosophy of Science contains analyses of the scientific and philosophical contributions of Aristotle, Bacon, Copernicus, Descartes, Einstein, Foucault, and pretty much down the rest of the alphabet to Whewell and Young. In all of his writing, Frank stresses the importance of extant conceptual frameworks for science and relentlessly examines grounds for choosing frameworks and for changing frameworks. Herbert Feigl provides an accurate summary of Frank’s philosophical orientation, saying that it:
combines informal logical analysis of the sciences with a vivid awareness of the psychological and socio-cultural factors operating in the selection of problems, and in the acceptance or rejection of hypotheses, and which contribute to the shaping of styles of scientific theorizing. In a sense this is a genuine sequel to the work of Ernst Mach. (Feigl, 1956, pp.4-5)
All of this was grist for the Kuhnian mill, but Frank’s name appears in Structure only as the biographer of Einstein. Kuhn’s failure to engage with the work of such an eminent Harvard colleague is the more surprising as Frank had explicitly written on education. In 1947, he published an article in the American Journal of Physics titled: ‘The Place of Philosophy of Science in the Curriculum of the Physics Student’ (Frank, 1947/2004).
Gerald Holton, a Harvard colleague and fellow contributor to the General Education programme, had in the 1950s written on the role of organising principles, or ‘themata’, in science (Holton, 1952/1984, 1973/1988).26 Holton acknowledges Frank as the person who opened his eyes to the intimate connection of physics with philosophy:
… the interaction between science and epistemology was at the center of attention in discussions over many years with Philipp Frank, that most humanistic and conciliatory of logical empiricists, and biographer of Albert Einstein. (Holton, 1973, p.25)
Holton’s Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought (Holton, 1952/1984) was published in 1952, eight years before the first edition of Structure, but is not mentioned in either the first or second edition. Had Kuhn made clear the commonalities and differences between his paradigms (or disciplinary matrices, as he would relabel them in the 1970 ‘Postscript’)27
In response to criticisms of his notion of paradigm, Kuhn changed terminology to ‘disciplinary matrix’. A matrix had four components: symbolic mathematised generalisations and formulae; metaphysical interpretations of basic models and analogies; epistemic and non-epistemic values shared by all practitioners; and exemplars showing productive puzzle generation and solutions (Kuhn, 1970a, pp.182–187). These have obvious connections to Holton’s themata. Science education would have gained if educators had paid as much attention to Thematic Origins as they did to Structure.28
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000), Harvard’s most eminent philosopher, in 1951 published his famed ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (Quine, 1951). His argument was widely acknowledged to have dissolved the analytic/synthetic distinction so fundamental to the empiricist tradition with which Kuhn was battling. For Quine, theoretical statements never confront experience or experiment in isolation, but always as part of a constellation including methodological and metaphysical commitments, and where adjustments can be made elsewhere to reconcile theory and observation.Beliefs were not isolated; they were always part of a web.29
Hilary Putnam (1926–2016), yet another distinguished Harvard colleague, recognised Kuhn as ‘one of the most ingenious contemporary philosophers and historians of science’ (Putnam, 1990, p.123). In 1962, Putnam, in a much-cited paper, engaged with, and criticised, Quine’s supposed dissolution of the analytic/synthetic distinction. In doing so, he wrote:
It has been necessary to consider problems connected with physical science (particularly the definition of ‘kinetic energy’, and the conceptual problems connected with geometry) in order to bring out the features of the analytic-synthetic distinction that seem to me to be the most important. (Putnam, 1962, p.358)
In defending analyticity as a genuine, realistic, and informative category in the science of energy, Putnam gives, in the publication year of Structure, an almost mirror account of a Kuhnian paradigm without using the word:
If a physicist makes a calculation and gets an empirically wrong answer, he does not suspect that the mathematical principles used in the calculation may have been wrong (assuming that those principles are themselves theorems of mathematics) nor does he suspect that the law ‘F = ma’ may be wrong. Similarly, he did not frequently suspect before Einstein that the law ‘E = 1/2mv2’ might be wrong or that the Newtonian gravitational laws might be wrong (Newton himself did, however, suspect the latter). These statements, then, have a kind of preferred status. They can be over-thrown only if someone incorporates principles incompatible with those statements in a successful conceptual system. (Putnam, 1962, pp.371-372)
Putnam and Kuhn, though in the same Harvard ‘corridor’, did not, in print, publicly engage. This is more than peculiar as one of Kuhn’s most substantial historical studies was his ‘Law of Energy Conservation’ (Kuhn, 1959b). Kuhn saw himself as a philosopher and, outside Harvard, was widely seen to be one. But in writing Structure, he engaged very little with the arguments and analyses of the top-flight philosophers who were literally all around him. Putnam is not even in the index of The Essential Tension which was Kuhn’s selection of his own HPS studies (Kuhn, 1977b), and he does not appear in the collection of Kuhn’s 1970–1993 philosophical essays (Conant & Haugeland, 2000).
The foregoing amounted to Kuhn’s missed local opportunities for philosophical engagement.30 But sympathetic philosophers had been writing in many other places on topics germane to Structure. Stephen Toulmin (1922–2009) wrote on how discoveries in the physical sciences consisted, in part, of finding fresh ways of looking at phenomena, and advocated the importance of history when doing philosophy of science (Toulmin, 1953). A little later, Norwood Russell Hanson (1927–1964) famously wrote on the theory dependence of observation and on the contested nature of the facts in scientific disputes (Hanson, 1958). In Hanson’s work, two of the foundations of logical empiricism were cut adrift. Ludwig Wittgenstein had made philosophers attentive to the distinctions between seeing and seeing as; between looking and noticing; and between object perception and propositional perception. The last requires language and judgement and hence varying degrees of theory (Wittgenstein, 1958).
Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), in his book Personal Knowledge (Polanyi, 1958) and elsewhere, wrote on the place of tacit, assumed, ‘subterranean’ knowledge in science; the corrective function of the scientific community; and the importance of initiation into accepted methodologies and practices for the conduct of science. In 1961, in a conference commentary on a pre-Structure paper of Kuhn’s, Polanyi wrote:
A commitment to a paradigm has thus a function hardly distinguishable from that which I have ascribed (Polyani, 1958, chaps.5,6,7) to a heuristic vision, to a scientific belief, or a scientific conviction. (Polyani, 1963, p.375)
Rom Harré (1927–2019) in the early 1960s wrote on the centrality and necessity of general conceptual schemes in science, their impacts, how they were modified, and on the ubiquity of metaphor and metaphysic in science (Harré, 1960, 1964). He recognised, as most did, that:
Empirical investigations do not exhaust the kinds of question raised by a conceptual crisis. There are also questions of a more metaphysical kind. Empirical investigations are not immediately relevant to these, nor do empirical facts provide conclusive answers. (Harré, 1964, p.65)
Max Black (1909–1988) had written extensively on the role of metaphor and analogy in scientific thinking and had rejected the notion of language as a mirror of nature (Black, 1962). Mary Hesse (1924–2016), a historically informed philosopher, argued in different publications that in neither science nor history of science are there ‘bare uninterpreted facts; all facts, whether experimental or historical, are interpreted in the light of some theory’ (Hesse, 1961 p.v).
Kuhn’s failure to engage with Rudolf Carnap’s (1891–1970) philosophy is especially noteworthy.31 In the mid-late 1950s, while Kuhn was teaching in the General Education Programme and when Structure was being penned, Carnap was at the height of his powers and academic standing (Schilpp, 1963). He was a doyen of logical empiricism, the ‘system’ that Kuhn’s work was consciously directed against. He was co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Unified Science that commissioned Kuhn’s Structure essay. In that editor’s capacity, Carnap wrote to Kuhn in 1960 and again in 1962 commending the manuscript, and saying in 1962 when accepting the manuscript for publication, that:
In my own work on inductive logic in recent years I have come to a similar idea: that my work and that of a few friends in the step for step solution of problems should not be regarded as leading to “the ideal system”, but rather as a step for step improvement of an instrument. (Reisch, 1991, p.267)
And Carnap addressed in 1963 (originally in German in 1935) ‘revolutionary’ change in science when theories finally cannot be reconciled with observation. He writes that the scientist has two options:
a change in the language, and a mere change in or addition of, a truth-value ascribed to an indeterminate statement.... A change of the first kind constitutes a radical alteration, sometimes a revolution, and it occurs only at certain historically decisive points in the development of science. (Reisch, 1991, p.270)
Michael Friedman, in his article ‘Kant, Kuhn and the Rationality of Science’, wrote on the unexpected comparability of Carnap’s and Kuhn’s account of science:
Thus Kuhn’s central distinction between change of paradigm or revolutionary science, on the one side, and normal science, on the other, closely parallels the Carnapian distinction between change of language or linguistic framework and rule-governed operations carried out within such a framework. (Friedman, 2002, p.181)
John Earman, writing as ‘a distant student of Carnap and a close student of Kuhn’ (Earman, 1993, p.32), says:
Although I am no apologist for logical positivism, it does seem to me that many of the themes of the so-called postpositivist philosophy of science are extensions of ideas found in the writings of Carnap and other leading logical positivists and logical empiricists. (Earman, 1993, p.9)
For Carnap, the choice of a particular linguistic framework is not driven by rules; but moves within the framework are so driven or governed. This is close to Kuhn’s choosing between paradigms, and working within paradigms. But for science, nature comes into the picture. Here was common ground that could have been explored with Kuhn’s own academic sponsor, but this did not happen.32
In Kuhn’s biographical interview, he confesses that he:
read a little bit of Carnap, but not the Carnap that people later point to as the stuff that has real parallels to me. … I have confessed to a good deal of embarrassment about the fact that I didn’t know it. (Baltas et al., 1997/2000, p.305-306)
Disarmingly, he proceeds to say:
On the other hand, it is also the case that if I’d known about it, if I’d been into that literature at that level, I probably would never have written Structure. (Baltas et al., 1997/2000, p.306)
This is likely a true conjecture, and what a momentous one it is: The post-1960 scholarly and cultural worlds would be very different if Kuhn had spent his time reading, understanding, and engaging with Carnap, and other extant literature, rather than writing Structure. His decision to write rather than read had a butterfly effect. An avalanche of publications and book sales followed upon the decision. Other physicists did do the ‘hard yards’ in philosophy and so they better served the long-term philosophical and educational purposes that Kuhn himself sought to serve, though they did not have his sales or citation figures.33
In brief, by 1960, much had been written on the intellectual complexity of science, on the challenging junction of science and metaphysics,34 and on the ‘embeddedness’ of science in society and culture. Much of this had been written on under the heading of ‘Internal versus External History of Science’ (Basalla, 1968). A good deal of these noteworthy elements of Structure had been written about by Kuhn’s own Harvard colleagues—Frank, Conant, Quine, Scheffler, Putnam, and Holton. In the first edition (1962), Kuhn recognised few of these antecedents and engaged with only a subset of those. There was some engagement in the Postscript of the second edition (1970), but not much. Engagement with philosophers picked up in his subsequent philosophical writing,35 but only the smallest proportion of the million-plus readers of Structure read his later essays.
Alexander Bird, in his biography of Kuhn, gives an accurate, but understated, account of the degree to which Kuhn’s positions had already been voiced:
There are the seeds of Kuhn’s own revolution in such historians and sociologists as Ludwick Fleck, Karl Mannheim and Robert Merton, as well as philosophers such as Toulmin and Hanson. (Bird, 2000, p.2)
To Kuhn’s credit, his Structure brought all these contra-empiricist elements together within a seemingly coherent narrative that could be easily read, though not always understood, by many.
A good deal of what educators found attractive and engaging in Structure was out there and public in earlier books by other philosophers and historians. Unfortunately, there was no tradition, or expectation, that science educators, teachers, or students would read and engage with such literature. Philosophy, or HPS more specifically, was not part of teacher education or seen to be an essential part of a science teacher’s professional responsibility. And HPS was not an expected part of an education-researcher’s repertoire.
Interpreting Kuhn
Before appraising the claims and arguments of an author, the first task is the exegetical one of laying out just what are the author’s claims and then determining if they are consistent over time or change with maturation and criticism. For Kuhn, exegesis is uncommonly difficult. He was not a disciplined writer, or at least not as disciplined as his subject matter—the history, processes, methods, and achievements of science—deserved. In a delightfully revealing and lengthy 1995 interview conducted in Athens less than a year before his death, Kuhn relates how he attended an undergraduate seminar at Princeton where, in response to audience enthusiasm for ‘Kuhnian’ ideas, he objected:
I kept saying ‘But I didn’t say that! But I didn’t say that! But I didn’t say that! (Baltas et al., 1997/2000, p.308)
In his 1991 Rothschild Harvard lecture—‘The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science’—he said of the hugely popular Edinburgh-based sociology of scientific knowledge programme36 that it:
Frequently troubles me, not least because it was initially emphasized and developed by people who often called themselves Kuhnians. I think their viewpoint damagingly mistaken, have been pained to be associated with it, and have for years attributed that association to misunderstanding. (Kuhn, 1991/2000, p.106)
This refrain of ‘I did not say that’, or ‘you have misunderstood me’ is common. Kuhn does not pause to reflect on why senior scholars such as David Bloor, Harry Collins, Trevor Pinch, John Henry, and Barry Barnes, to say nothing of multiple hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lesser scholars and students, could misunderstand what he wrote. He attributes this to their lazy reading, not to his careless writing. Slow, tedious, sometimes page-by-page exegesis is a bugbear, but a necessary one in analysis of Kuhn and Kuhnian argument. Philosophers resented having to do this; they expected clearer, less ambiguous writing.
The deficiency of Kuhn’s ‘soft-focus’, or undisciplined, writing was shown in an early review of Structure. Dudley Shapere, who acknowledged the ‘vast amount of positive value in Kuhn’s book’, focused, as so many did, on Kuhn’s introduction of ‘paradigm’. At the very outset paradigm was defined as:
a set of “universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners”. (Kuhn, 1962/1970 p. viii)
Shapere went on to argue that Kuhn’s truly revolutionary account of theory changes in the history of science:
… is made to appear convincing only by inflating the definition of ‘paradigm’ until that term becomes so vague and ambiguous that it cannot easily be withheld, so general that it cannot easily be applied, so mysterious that it cannot help explain, and so misleading that it is a positive hindrance to the understanding of some central aspects of science; and then, finally, these excesses must be counterbalanced by qualifications that simply contradict them. (Shapere, 1964, p.393)
None of these considerations prevented ‘paradigm’ appearing, like Spring blossoms (to use a generous simile), across the scholarly, social, and cultural worlds after Structure’s publication in 1962. For Kuhn, Hume’s ‘slow, lingering method’ of philosophical analysis was alien. It is something that requires schooling, and Kuhn repeatedly acknowledges that he did not have it.
Margaret Masterman, at the important 1965 London conference session on Structure, identified 21, ‘or was it 23’, different meanings of ‘paradigm’ in the book’s first edition (Masterman, 1970). Kuhn was in the conference audience and, thirty years later, commented:
And I sat there, I said, my God, if I had talked for an hour and a half, I might have gotten these all in, or I might not have. But she's got it right! And the thing I particularly remember, and I can't make it work quite but it's very deeply to the point: a paradigm is what you use when the theory isn't there. And she and I interacted then, during the rest of my stay, quite a lot. (Baltas et al., 1997/2000, p.299-300)
Scholars do change, or refine, their positions in response to criticism and upon further reflection. This is commendable and Kuhn did so (Hoyningen-Huen, 2015). In 1993, he wrote:
Whatever I may have believed when I wrote the Copernican Revolution [1957], I would not now assume … ‘that the simpler, the more beautiful [astronomical] models are more likely to be true’. (Kuhn, 1993, p.331)
He changed his mind on this point simply because he gave up altogether on truth as a realisable goal of science.
Abandoning truth was a seismic change. Less seismic was his discarding of ‘paradigm’ which soon enough became a mixture of ‘lexical structure’ plus ‘exemplar’ (Kuhn, 1993, p.326). This construction did not catch on; it did not have the ring of ‘paradigm’ which lived on enjoying a life of its own long after its creator abandoned it. Exegesis details where and when change occurs. Further attention, beyond exegesis, might reveal why the change occurs, and whether it was justified.
Philosophers on Kuhn
Philosophers did not entirely ignore the first edition of Structure. Most notably, and publicly, Paul Feyerabend, Imre Lakatos, Margaret Masterman, Stephen Toulmin, and Karl Popper engaged with it at the 1965 London Philosophy of Science Congress (Lakatos & Musgrave, 1970). Many other philosophers, including those mentioned below, rose to the Kuhnian challenge.
John Searle, a philosopher, points to the need for externalist, sociological, or naturalist, rather than internalist, epistemic explanations for the embrace of Kuhnianism:
… the remarkable interest in the work of Thomas Kuhn on the part of literary critics did not derive from a sudden passion in English departments to understand the transition from Newtonian Mechanics to Relativity Theory. Rather, Kuhn was seen as discrediting the idea that there is any such [objective] reality. If all of ‘reality’ is just a text anyway, then the role of the textual specialist, the literary critic, is totally transformed. (Searle, 1994, p.38)
Kuhn’s ‘novel’ ideas were taken out of the philosophy corridor and broadcast in the marketplace. The Kuhnian wave broke over philosophy departments, and in quick succession of other humanities, social science, and education departments. There have been many substantial monographs and collections on Kuhn’s real and imagined philosophy.37
Kuhn cites just a handful of philosophers in the first edition: Wittgenstein, Braithwaite, Polanyi, Whewell, Popper, Goodman, Quine, Nagel, and Hanson. And these, with the notable exception of Hanson, are mentioned only in passing. Kuhn regarded Structure primarily as a contribution to philosophy. Yet only 10% of its sources are philosophical.38 There is no prolonged analysis or evaluation of any philosophical argument, excepting a three-page analysis of arguments about perception, and what contributions the observer makes to the object as perceived.
In Structure, what philosophical arguments there were amounted to empiricism in new clothes: Theory dependence of observation still took observation as fundamental for a theory of knowledge. But debate about the theory dependence, or otherwise, of observation was just an in-house empiricist family-squabble; it occurred within an empiricist ‘paradigm’, as some would say, or within an empiricist ‘problematic’ as others might say. Wallis Suchting (1931–1997) commented:
The central deficiency of empiricism is one that it shares with a wide variety of other positions, namely, all those that see objects themselves, however they are conceived, as having epistemic significance in themselves, as inherently determining the ‘form’, as it were, of their own representation. (Suchting, 1995, p.13)
Mario Bunge (1919–2020), a physicist and philosopher who published significant work in both fields (Matthews, 2019c), recounts in his autobiography that in 1966 he attended an influential colloquium on causality convened in Geneva by Jean Piaget. Kuhn, an admirer of Piaget, was a participant. Bunge observed:
Kuhn’s presentation impressed no one at the meeting, and it confirmed my impression that his history of science was second-hand, his philosophy confused and backward, and his sociology of science non-existent. (Bunge, 2016, p.181)
This is a harsh judgement, but it was made in 1966 after the first edition of Structure (1962), but before publication of the second edition’s Postscript (1970) and Kuhn’s ‘Response to My Critics’ in the Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge collection (Lakatos & Musgrave, 1970). At the time, Kuhn’s most widely known historical work was his book The Copernican Revolution (Kuhn, 1957). He acknowledged that this was entirely derivative and put together from secondary sources for the benefit of his Harvard General Education classes.39
David Stove (1927–1994), an Australian philosopher, wrote of Kuhn:
his entire philosophy of science is actually an engine for the mass-destruction of all logical expressions … [he] is willing to dissolve even the strongest logical expressions into sociology about what scientist’s regard as decisive arguments. (Stove, 1982, p.33)
Stove maintained that Kuhn’s confusion of sociology with epistemology is the reason why:
Kuhn can, and must, sentence all present and future philosophers of science to the torments of the damned: that is, to reading the sociology of science. (Stove, 1982, p.19)
This seems an ‘over the top’ charge, but, in its mitigation, David Bloor, who recognised Kuhn as his philosophical inspiration, published a piece titled: ‘The Sociology of Reasons: Or Why “Epistemic Factors” are really “Social Factors”’ (Bloor, 1984, 295–324). So logical expressions—‘inconsistent with’, ‘entails’, ‘subset’, ‘contradiction’, etc.—only function as such in as much as people believe them. The validity of an argument depends on people thinking it is valid. The effect of this is to replace logic by psychology; the latter substitutes for the former. A consequence is that the important psychological study of poor and aberrant reasoning cannot be conducted, as correct reasoning cannot be identified independently of convictions. Separating ‘good’ psychology from ‘mob’ psychology is otiose.
Israel Scheffler (1923–2014), who had joint appointments in the Harvard Philosophy and Education departments, responded to the first edition of Structure, arguing that Kuhn’s charge of irrationality in paradigm choice:
fails utterly, for it rests on a confusion. It fails to make the critical distinction between those standards or criteria which are internal to a paradigm, and those by which the paradigm is itself judged. (Scheffler, 1966, p.84).
Jan Golinski, a historian, wrote:
I see Kuhn as having little positive influence on philosophers and almost none (directly) on historians. His most significant influence within science studies was mediated by sociologists, whose reading of his work he specifically repudiated. (Golinski, 2012, p.15)
Alexander Bird concluded a sympathetic appraisal of Kuhn with the qualification:
Kuhn’s treatment of philosophical ideas is neither systematic nor rigorous. He rarely engaged in the stock-in-trade of modern philosophers, the careful and precise analysis of the details of other philosophers’ views, and when he did so the results were not encouraging. (Bird, 2000, p. ix)
Consequently, Bird stated:
Structure is not primarily a philosophy text. Rather it is a work in what I call ‘theoretical history’. (Bird, 2000, p.vii)
Abner Shimony (1928–2015), a Boston University physicist and philosopher with substantial publications in both fields (Myrvold & Christian, 2009), said of the key Kuhnian move of deriving methodological lessons from scientific practice that:
His work deserves censure on this point whatever the answer might turn out to be, just because it treats central problems of methodology elliptically, ambiguously, and without the attention to details that is essential for controlled analysis. (Shimony, 1976, p.582)
The ‘controlled analysis’, to which Shimony refers, is a controlled and competent ‘philosophical’ analysis.40
Wolfgang Stegmüller (1923–1991), an Austrian philosopher, opined that the crux of Kuhn’s theory of science was ‘a bit of musing by a philosophical incompetent’ (Stegmüller, 1976, p.216). This was a harsh judgement, but Kuhn was candid in admitting that he had no training in philosophy and was an ‘amateur’ in the discipline (Kuhn, 1991/2000, p.106). And, to a point, he thought that having no formal training was advantageous. This because as he was not schooled in ‘old thinking’, he did not develop a certain ‘cast of mind’ that characterised academic philosophy. This is a pity, as this cast of mind traditionally espoused clear and coherent writing; the cast was uncomfortable with ‘purple passages’ and endeavoured not to compose them.
Michael Devitt agrees with some of Kuhn’s epistemology concerning theory-ladenness and revolutionary theory change, but does not think such agreement requires abandoning truth, or even abandoning the correspondence theory of truth. He regards Kuhn’s ‘semantic and vaguely ontological doctrines as largely, if not entirely, mistaken’ (Devitt, 1991, p.155). And says later: ‘Constructivism is prima facie absurd, a truly bizarre doctrine’ (Devitt, 2001, p.147). The ‘absurd’ doctrine has traction because:
Constructivists typically vacillate between talk of theories or experience and talk of the world. This vacillation is important to the appeal of their message. For, although it is false that we construct the world by imposing concepts on the world, it is plausible to suppose that we construct theories of the world by imposing concepts on experience of the world. The vacillation helps to make the falsehood seem true. (Devitt, 2001, p.148)
It is noteworthy that Kuhn’s long, and charming, 1997 autobiographical interview with Aristides Baltas, Kostas Gavroglu, and Vasso Kindi is, significantly, titled: ‘A Physicist who became a Historian for Philosophical Purposes’.41 Kuhn relates:
I had made that attempt to investigate going into philosophy immediately after the war when I first came back and got into [Harvard] graduate school and I decided I wasn’t going to go back to fulfill undergraduate philosophy. And in certain respects, I’m extremely glad I didn’t, because I would have been taught things that would have given me a cast of mind which would have, in many ways, helped me as a philosopher, but they’d have made me into a different sort of philosopher. So, I had decided, when I applied to the Society [Harvard Society of Fellows], to do history of science. My notion was, and my application indicated, that there was important philosophy to come out of it; but I needed first to learn more History. (Baltas et al., 1997, p.166)
In the light of the philosophical critiques of the first and second editions of Structure, Kuhn did, in a number of important publications, attempt to ‘walk back’ and refine his claims;42 hence, the accepted differentiation between Kuhn I and Kuhn II, or between Radical Kuhn and Mild Kuhn. For the most part, educators and social scientists did not attend to this walking back; they were not aware it had happened. After the blinding relativist and idealist flash of Structure, few recovered their philosophic vision. Although Kuhn’s walk back was applauded by many philosophers, realists thought that he did not walk back far enough. Kuhn’s reality was still too dependent upon the views of the scientist and scientific community; his ontology remains wedded to subjectivity.
Kuhn did not become a professional philosopher. When he was denied tenure in the Harvard General Education Department, there was no question that the Philosophy Department, in which Rawls, Quine, Putnam, and others were in residence, would give equal standing to someone untrained in philosophy. After Harvard, he went to University of California, Berkeley, and had appointments and teaching duties in both the History and the Philosophy departments. At tenure time, the Acting Chancellor called him into his office, and relayed:
The recommendation for your promotion has now gone all the way through, it’s favourable, and I have it on my desk. There is just one thing. The senior philosophers voted unanimously for your promotion – in History. (Baltas et al., 1997, p.182)
For Kuhn:
I was extraordinarily angry … and very deeply hurt, I mean that’s a hurt that has never altogether gone away. (Baltas et al., 1997, p.182)
Kuhn was deeply hurt, and intellectually troubled, telling interviewers in October 1995, less than a year before his death, that he was an ‘anxious neurotic’. In the same interview, he recognised, perhaps with regret, that ‘I’ve never directed a philosophy graduate student’ (Baltas et al., 2000, p.319). He admitted in 1995 that his treatment of the orthodox philosophical tradition was ‘irresponsible’ (Conant & Haugeland, 2000, p.305). This was not a good admission for someone seeking a position in a philosophy department. And elsewhere he confessed: ‘I should never have written the purple passages.’ He was surprised at their impact:
To my dismay, … my ‘purple passages’ led many readers of Structure to suppose that I was attempting to undermine the cognitive authority of science rather than to suggest a different view of its nature. (Kuhn, 1993, p.314)
And it was not just the ‘purple passages’ that were irresponsible; at many points, he advanced ill-considered philosophical and historical arguments. For example, he dismissed Joseph Priestley as an ‘elderly holdout who had ceased to be a scientist’ (Kuhn, 1970a, p.159). This was an assertion that, unjustifiably, blackened Priestley’s name for the million-plus readers of Structure who themselves who had never, and probably would never, read Priestley.43 Many other philosophers and historians pointed to problems and errors in Kuhn’s account of both normal science and the processes of revolutionary change in science.44
Kuhn’s Reach and Overreach
Kuhn’s impact was felt in nearly all disciplines—economics, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, education, and feminism, for starters—and beyond academia into society and culture.45 But his disciplinary impact was in inverse relation to his training and qualifications; he pressed the right buttons and raised important questions, but he disastrously overreached. From the beginning, his impact on HPS puzzled him and should have puzzled many others.
Kuhn is rightly seen as putting ‘paradigm’ and ‘paradigm change’ into the philosophical and social science vocabulary. The word, and expression, is a commonplace in newspaper opinion pieces, political debates, sports reporting, and much else. Its occurrence in the Google Book Ngram Viewer jumped 26-fold between 1960 and 2020.46 Other now-commonplace words and concepts owe their currency to Kuhn: ‘incommensurability’ is oft heard in political and religious debate, ‘theory dependence’ is ubiquitous in social science, ‘gestalt switch’ is now as common in history of science as it has long been in psychology, ‘conversion experience’ moved out of Evangelical sermons into history of science debates, ‘alternative reality’ is not just part of modern US politics but underpins a great deal of educational debate about the teaching of indigenous science, and many other expressions moved out of their Kuhnian home into wider discourse.
There are significant disciplinary and cultural lessons to be learnt from the phenomenon of Kuhnianism. Kuhn had no training in history, philosophy, or sociology; he modestly described himself as an amateur in all three fields. As related in his 1991 Rothschild lecture:
Though most of my career has been devoted to the history of science, I began as a theoretical physicist with a strong avocational interest in philosophy and almost none in history. Philosophical goals prompted my move to history; it’s to philosophy that I’ve gone back in the last ten or fifteen years. (Kuhn, 1991/2000, p.106)
History of Science
Charles Gillispie (1918–2015), a major figure in the history of science community, reviewed Structure in 1962 and wrote: ‘Thomas Kuhn is not writing history of science proper. His essay is an argument about the nature of science’ (Gillispie, 1962, p.1251). But disarmingly, in as much as articulating the nature of science is a philosophical endeavour, Kuhn keeps saying he had no training in philosophy. Outside physics, Kuhn’s education fell between disciplinary stools.
Thomas Nickles, a philosopher sympathetic to Kuhn’s programme of historically informed philosophy, wrote:
Kuhn was always something of an amateur, largely self-taught in philosophy and even in history of science. (Nickles, 2003, p.9)
Kuhn may not have taken a PhD in history of science, but he did take his own teaching of history seriously. Stephen Brush, who took a Harvard General Education course of Kuhn’s, recalls:
In Kuhn’s seminar we learned that the history of science must be studied by careful reading of original sources. That means reading them in the original language, not relying on translations; it also means becoming aware of the precise meaning of technical terms by reading other works by the same author and works by other authors on the same subject at that time. One must be careful not to read modern meanings into older writings. (Brush, 2000, p.40)
This is the pedagogy of normal science in a history classroom. There was a lot to learn and be mastered before inquiry and negotiation began. And, as with science, doing the latter without the former was whistling in the dark.
Kuhn’s, 1978 Black-Body Theory and Quantum Discontinuity (Kuhn, 1978) is regarded by all commentators as his most substantial, archive-informed, and focussed historical work. The book, among other things, traces in detail Planck’s initial resistance to the new discontinuity theory of atomic radiation and the quantum effects, advanced by Einstein and others. It documents the tenacity with which Planck held on to the classical, continuous view of radiating energy. Trevor Pinch (1952–2021) a prominent ‘new wave’ sociologist of science, praised Kuhn’s ‘penetrating analysis’ of the relationship between Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics and quantum theory but, tellingly, points out that the book makes no mention of Structure. Further, none of the historiographic ‘apparatuses’ of Structure are utilised. Pinch remarked: ‘Kuhn has disregarded almost all the issues that grip current sociology and philosophy of science’ (Pinch, 1979, p.440) and has provided a ‘largely internal history of how discontinuity emerged at the turn of the century’ (Pinch, 1979, p.437). Pinch suggests that ‘it is quite possible’ that Kuhn’s indifference to his own ambiguous formulations meant that he was ‘unaware’ of the radical implications of Structure, and so could not carry them through in his serious historical study.
This is a problem for educators and others: The conceptual apparatus of the supposed blinding new Kuhnian light on our understanding of science is not even used by its author in his ‘display’ work. Further, Abner Shimony, the philosopher-physicist, in reviewing Kuhn’s book, wrote:
On the whole, the intellectual processes of the few physicists immersed in blackbody research seems to me to have been wonderfully rational. (Shimony, 1979, p.436)
Sociology of Science
Nickles, above, does not mention sociology which was at the core of Structure’s argument about the conduct of science and of scientific revolutions. From the beginning, Kuhn was sensitive to sociological factors in science. In 1952, he wrote to Philipp Frank:
It would seem to me that for any sociologist of science, it would be more fruitful to example the ubiquitous role of the sociology of the professional group than to concentrate solely on those factors (like government, church, etc.) which at this time and place have relatively little impact upon decisions made by professional scientists about problems arising within their own sciences. (Reisch, 2017, p.242)
This sensitivity meant he was attentive to the formative, educational influences, including textbooks, on the professional group and how that group’s dynamics bore upon research decisions. But this was sensitivity, not research. Arrestingly, Kuhn admitted that, when writing Structure, he ‘knew very little about sociology’ and further ‘he proceeded to make up the sociology of [scientific] communities as he went along’.47 In 1983, when receiving the John D. Bernal Award, he wrote:
Structure is sociological in that it emphasizes the existence of scientific communities, insists that they be viewed as the producers of a special product, scientific knowledge, and suggests that the nature of that product can be understood in terms of what is special in the training and values of those groups. (Kuhn, 1983, p.28)
But Kuhn continued:
Having insisted upon those points, however, I proceeded to make up the sociology of such communities as I went along, or rather to draw it from my experience with the interpretation of scientific texts supplemented by my experience as a student of physics. (ibid)
And admits:
That is an abominable way to do sociology, and it did not occur to me that its outcome would, qua sociology, have a claim on the attention of members of that profession. (ibid)
Kuhn made little, if any, effort to master extant literature in sociology of science. The argument of Structure seems not to have benefited from engagement with either J.D. Bernal’s work (Bernal, 1939) or that of Robert Merton, the founder of sociology of science (Merton, 1938/1973, 1942/1973). These fundamental works had been published 20 years before Structure. Merton’s, 1942 claim about the universality of scientific knowledge is assuredly something that Kuhn might have, for the benefit of everyone, profitably engaged with:
The cultural context in any given nation or society may predispose scientists to focus on certain problems … But this is basically different from the second issue: the criteria of validity of claims to scientific knowledge are not matters of national taste and culture. Sooner or later, competing claims to validity are settled by universalistic criteria. (Merton, 1942/1973, p.271)
Kuhn neither conducted nor oversaw empirical research studies on laboratory practice or any other scientific practice. His repeated admissions of ‘little training’ are striking and exemplify the argument of this paper: Kuhn consistently made claims about matters of which he, confessedly, knew little. Kuhn simply did no empirical sociology of science; he did not examine laboratories, research funding, political constraints or support, or control of journals. Barry Barnes, a founder of the powerful Edinburgh school of sociology of science, pointed to Kuhn’s superficial grasp of the practice of science:
In general, Kuhn’s work reveals little sensitivity to the highly differentiated structure of science and the importance of competition and mobility between different ‘schools’ or specialities. It leaves us unprepared for the finding that a combination of the skills of several specialties led to the elucidation of the structure of DNA and hence the creation of a new basic model for biological investigators. (Barnes, 1974, p.95)
A psychologist and a biologist, in a co-authored paper, drew attention to Kuhn’s distance from ‘coal face’ science and his subsequent misconceptions and underestimations of normal science:
Although Kuhn was trained as a physicist, he writes in the most general and vague terms about the scientific process and conveys little familiarity with the nuts and bolts of conducting research. Consequently, much of Kuhn’s analysis amounts to abstract speculation that bears little relation to how scientists normally think and what scientists normally do. (Sanbonmatsu & Sanbonmatsu, 2017, pp.134-135)
Some have thought that Kuhn’s account of normal science missed so much of its creativity, value commitments, and personal judgement that he was writing about something better described as ‘sub-normal’ science (Mody, 2015, p.99).
Science Classrooms
If Kuhn spent little time researching laboratory practice, he spent even less time researching science classrooms where, supposedly, the paradigms of science were being incubated and reproduced. Kuhn had been a student in physics classrooms and had taught in General Education classrooms, and so had inklings and intuitions about the impact of such instruction, but no education ‘research data’. Few sociology journals would publish any claim about purported scientific practice if there was no supporting empirical evidence. Yet founders of the Edinburgh Strong Programme in sociology of science consistently, as shown below, cite ‘evidence-free’ Kuhn as their inspiration, indeed their authority on the subject. Just the unpaginated citation ‘Kuhn’ was deemed sufficient to establish many contentious points.
The Limits of Overreach
That Kuhn had no immediate empirical evidence for his claims about the conduct of normal science, or for the processes whereby revolutions in science were initiated and accepted, does not mean that his claims are without warrant. Speculation in advance of evidence is standard scientific practice, but whether the speculation is correct, or justified, is something for the disciplines of philosophy, history, sociology, and perhaps social psychology to ascertain. Some did so and supported Kuhn; others did the same and rejected the Kuhnian picture. Thus the ‘Science Wars’ were constituted.48 It is a peculiar situation that so many professionals in these disciplines, including education, so lightly took Kuhn’s word for the book’s many philosophical, historical, and sociological claims. They adopted and promulgated the Kuhnian picture even when their interpretations were being rejected by Kuhn himself.
John Ziman (1925–2005), a physicist and educator, was sympathetic to Kuhn’s cross-disciplinary excursions. He saw this as a strength of Kuhn:
The deep message of THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS was that these jurisdictional disputes were futile. A scientific theory can only be grasped metascientifically as an entity with intertwined philosophical, historical, and sociological characteristics. … That is why we are all Kuhnians nowadays. (Ziman, 1983, p.24)
Doing research across the disciplinary board is as commendable as it is rare, but it does not mean that standards need not be reached; it just means that more of them need to be reached.
Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, in their careful and sympathetic study of Kuhn, are decisive: ‘To say it again, Kuhn is a philosopher above all’ (Sharrock & Read, 2002, p.110). And it is as such that he needs ultimately to be understood and appraised. For them:
Kuhn, we have argued, neither provides a general and true theory of science, nor a set of normative prescriptions for how to pursue science correctly. (Sharrock & Read, 2002, p.210)
These two caveats take a large ‘bite’ out of Kuhnianism as a guiding educational, or any other, light. And should cause pause when reading David Treagust’s claim about Structure that opened this essay: ‘This small book really changed the way we look at the enterprise that is science’ (Treagust, 2022, p.16). What are the consequences of something so described by Sharrock and Read having such impact? What does it say about the science education community and its influence on public understanding of science?
Steven Weinberg (1933–2021), a physicist, historian, and Nobel laureate, observed that:
But even when we put aside the excesses of Kuhn's admirers, the radical part of Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions is radical enough. And I think it is quite wrong. (Weinberg, 1998)
Elaborating, he writes:
It is important to keep straight what does and what does not change in scientific revolutions, a distinction that is not made in Structure.There is a “hard” part of modern physical theories … that usually consists of the equations themselves, together with some understandings about what the symbols mean operationally and about the sorts of phenomena to which they apply. Then there is a “soft” part; it is the vision of reality that we use to explain to ourselves why the equations work. The soft part does change; we no longer believe in Maxwell’s ether, and we know that there is more to nature than Newton's particles and forces. (Weinberg, 1998)
There are important lessons to be learned about the academy, and culture more generally, from how Kuhn, untrained in any meta-scientific discipline, could have such an international impact and influence. Outside of science, this phenomenon is, depressingly, common. It is the mainstay of political and religious movements and associated rallies.49 Building HPS into teacher training programmes could mitigate it.
Kuhn’s Philosophy I: Undergraduate Encounter with Kant
As a Harvard undergraduate, Kuhn completed an elective ‘History of Philosophy’ course. He admits that not much of the course made an impression, but ‘Kant was a revelation’ (Baltas et al., 1997/2000, p.264).50
I gave a presentation on Kant and the notion of preconditions for knowledge. Things that had to be the case because you wouldn’t be able to know things otherwise.
Fifty years later, reflecting on that undergraduate episode and summarising his philosophy, he said:
Oh, it’s an important story because I go round explaining my position saying I am a Kantian with moveable categories. (Baltas et al., 1997/2000, p.264)
In his 1993 ‘Afterwords’ reflections on his career, Kuhn writes:
Though it is a more articulated source of constitutive categories, my structured lexicon [Kuhn’s new term for paradigm] resembles Kant’s a priori when the latter is taken in its second, relativized sense. Both are constitutive of possible experience of the world, but neither dictates what that experience must be. (Kuhn, 1993, p.331)
Due to the war, his Harvard programme was cut by a year, and so also cut was the possibility of him doing more philosophy courses. More is the pity as his Kantianism might have been refined or abandoned.51
Observation and Perception
Three years after graduating from Harvard with a physics PhD, Kuhn, in 1951, confidently strode into the philosophers’ domain when he wrote:
For scientific observation is always a process of abstraction. One abstracts the length, the color, the texture from a natural object which always provides an infinity of alternate abstractions. Some choice is demanded, and the choice must ultimately rest upon personal prejudice. (Kuhn, 1951/2021, p.17)
Understanding the epistemic function of observation and perception has been central to philosophy since at least Plato who affirmed that ‘we see through the eyeball, not with the eyeball’. Bacon and the British empiricists cemented the centrality of perception for science; Kant built a whole system by underwriting, and fleshing out, the observational foundations of Newtonian theory. The crucial role of observation for science was embraced by Mach and then by logical empiricism. On perception, Kuhn states the truism:
What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. (Kuhn, 1970a, p.113)
And he refers to research on the psychology of perception. Philosophers have also, since Plato, been writing on sensation, perception, and observation, but he largely ignored this tradition.52
Ontological Idealism and Epistemological Relativism
To the end, Kuhn held on to three foundational claims of Kantianism:
(i) Reality as it is (the noumena) is beyond our knowledge.
(ii) The known world, the world of which we can have knowledge (the phenomena), is constructed by us, and depends upon our cognitive machinery.
For Kant, the mind’s cognitive machinery—forms of sensibility and a priori categories, including, space, time, and causality—that it imposes on the noumena, is universal; they are part of having a human mind. Crucially, social constructivists, and cultural theorists in education, remove universality from the second bedrock and substitute cultural plurality. So, they post:
(iii) The concepts used to construct the known world vary among linguist, scientific and social groups. Consequently, they live in different worlds.
This third claim is not the banal truth that different people have different experiences in the same situation. This is so banal as to hardly warrant being called a claim. Consider, for example, a Chinese and an Australian standing in front of a sign:
The Chinese person has propositional perception STOP and behaves accordingly; the Australian simply has, at best, propositional perception SIGN and does not know what to do. The third claim above is the ontological claim that the real world, not the experiential worlds are different for different groups; they live in different real, not experiential, worlds. This is relativistic metaphysical constructivism, the philosophical position that became a best seller in the academy, and beyond.
A popular, and extended, statement of this third, socialised-ontology, position was Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality. There they are adamant that ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’ must be in scare quotes because these supposed realities always ‘pertain to specific social contexts’ (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, p.15). Their failure to distinguish reference from description, and their ontological conjuring, is endemic. At science education conferences, presenters use fingers to indicate that their use of ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, ‘reality’, ‘proven’, and the like is not literal; finger movement shows that the presenter is not simple-minded and is not among the philosophically unwashed.
Observation, more correctly propositional perception, is theory dependent, but it is also nature dependent. Making basic observations has a strong survival value for animals. Science requires, in the way that non-sentient beings do not, that such observations be articulated as propositions—‘I see that p’ where p is some propositional statement.53 For example, ‘I see that there is a magnetic field’, ‘I see that President Biden is on TV’, and ‘I see that the proportion of tall plants is 1:3’. The practice of science requires the communication, and evaluation, of such observations. Propositional perception requires language, hence some level of theory, but there also needs be some state of affairs to be described. Not all communication need be propositional—gestures, pointing, expressions, body language, a whistle, or music can suffice in many circumstances—but not for scientific communication.
Kuhn’s Philosophy II: Separation of Truth from Science
In the 1970 Postscript, Kuhn famously, and for some infamously, said that truth was irrelevant to judgements of scientific progress:
Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?’ (Kuhn, 1970a, p.171)
Separating truth from science was a major break from orthodox understanding. Kuhn repeats his pre-Structure conviction:
We can have no recourse to notions like the ‘truth’ or ‘validity’ of paradigms in our attempt to understand the special efficacy of the research which their reception permits. (Kuhn, 1963, p.358)
This is subsequently elaborated as:
There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its ‘real’ counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. (Kuhn, 1970a, p.206)
The separation is maintained twenty years later, in his ‘Afterwords’ contribution to a 1990 MIT conference dedicated to appraising the gamut of his philosophical and historical claims. There he makes a much-referenced claim with ontological and epistemological dimensions:
On the one hand, I aim to justify claims that science is cognitive, that its product is knowledge of nature, and that the criteria I use in evaluating beliefs are in that sense epistemic. But on the other, I aim to deny all meaning to claims that successive scientific beliefs become more and more probable or better and better approximations to the truth and simultaneously to suggest that the subject of truth claims cannot be a relation between beliefs and a putatively mind-independent or ‘external’ world. (Kuhn, 1993, p.330)
Concerning ontology, his use of scare quotes around ‘external’, and reference to ‘putative’ reality, suggests, if not downright means, that, for Kuhn, there is no such thing as an external, observer-independent world. Otherwise, why use such quotes?
He elaborates puzzle solving, not truth-finding, as the goal of science. Twenty years after publication, and despite all the criticism, he writes that his claim in Structure was the ‘right one’ (Kuhn, 1993, p.338). But Kuhn says his reader has to:
… set aside the notion of a fully external world toward which science moves closer and closer, a world independent, that is, of the practices of the scientific specialties that explore it. (Kuhn, 1993, p.338)
Again, what function and purpose does ‘fully’ play in this claim? Might an external world be partly dependent upon the observer? Seemingly, for Kuhn, this is so. This, at best semi-idealism, was clearly stated in the first edition, and it was not retracted in the second, nor thereafter:
I have so far argued only that paradigms are constitutive of science. Now I wish to display a sense in which they are constitutive of nature as well. (Kuhn, 1970a, p.110)
This is the beginning of an ontological idealist slope that ends, as John Passmore observes, in ‘the French intellectual’s dream … of a world that exists only in so far as it enters into a book’ (Passmore, 1985, p.32). There are many social constructivists, in and out of education, lining the slope, and cheering all who slide down it.
Concerning epistemology, if truth is taken off the science table, then what is progress toward? Economic betterment? Political power? Research funds? All Kuhn offered was better ‘puzzle solving’. In the Postscript, he writes:
Taken as a group or in groups, practitioners of the developed sciences are, I have argued, fundamentally puzzle-solvers. (Kuhn, 1970a, p.205)
And once they are initiated into their puzzle-solving craft:
Whether or not individual practitioners are aware of it, they are trained to and rewarded for solving intricate puzzles be they instrumental, theoretical, logical, or mathematical at the interface between their phenomenal world and their community’s beliefs about it. (Kuhn, 1993, p.338)
As with so much of Kuhn, readers need to pass quickly over clauses such as ‘the interface between their phenomenal world and their community’s beliefs about it’. Staying too long and asking: ‘What does this mean?’ makes for very slow reading without guarantee of any resolution.
Shape of the Earth
Demonstrably, competing theories can be appraised with respect to how adequately or approximately they depict the world. Consider the 2000 + years investigation of the Earth’s shape. Pythagoras’ 500bc claim that the Earth is spherical is closer to the shape of the Earth, and was progressively seen to be so, than competing claims that the Earth was flat. Until the fifteenth century, official Chinese astronomers (and there were no astronomers apart from official ones) were ‘flat earthers’. This is seen in the important early fourteenth-century astronomy book, Ge xiang xin shu, written between 1324 and 1335 by the Daoist priest and astronomer Zhao Youqin. In his version of neo-Confucian cosmology, the earth is likened to a flat board floating on water, with China in its centre, and surrounded by the heavens; the cosmos had a globular or egg structure.
In 1583, Matteo Ricci the Jesuit priest, astronomer, and natural philosopher began his mission to China (Brockey, 2008). He advanced the Copernican system, though it was banned in Rome, against official ‘flat earthers’. His accurate predictions of the 1601 solar eclipse in comparison to the failure of the court astronomers made such an impact on the Ming Emperor Wanli that the Copernican spherical earth theory became official policy.54 Scientific understanding could be, and was, shaped by how the world was.
In the eighteenth century, the spherical theory was adjusted. The realisation that the seconds pendulum was slowing at the equator prompted refined views about the Earth’s supposed spherical shape. Some, the ‘squeezers’, constricted the equator; others, the ‘flatteners’, expanded it. The latter, who included Newton, eventually won a debate that folded metaphysics, theology, mathematics, national interest, and technology into science.55 Thereafter, belief in the spheroidal, oblate Earth became the cultural and scientific norm. Different of Darwin’s theories of evolution might not fully ‘capture’ the natural realities of evolution, but they do better than Special Creation and so on across the landscape of science. Why agree with Kuhn’s denial of any meaning to ‘claims that successive scientific beliefs become more and more probable or better and better approximations to the truth’? Progressively, the true shape of the Earth was ascertained. Contra Kuhn, John Worrall sensibly writes:
It seems difficult to deny, I suggest, that the development of science has been, at least to a very good approximation, cumulative at the observational or experimental level. (Worrall, 2002, p.32)
Pseudoscience
It is of significant philosophical and social importance to distinguish science from pseudoscience. With difficulty, this can be done.56 But if science in its totality is just puzzle solving, as Kuhn would have it, without a voice from the world, then the separation of scientific puzzle solving from pseudo puzzle solving becomes impossible. Any book of pseudoscience is full of solved puzzles; most pseudoscience websites will, for a fee, solve your puzzle. Most pseudosciences have a large or small dash of technology which might well solve puzzles. But technology is not science. In addition, there are personal and social consequences of not distinguishing science from pseudoscience. Why set up ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ commissions if there is no truth to be found?57
Kuhn’s Philosophy III: Anti-Realism
The realism/anti-realism divide is perhaps the longest-running debate in philosophical reflection on science beginning at least when Aristotle asserted his realism against forms of Platonic idealism. The modern form of the debate was initiated when the Protestant scholar Andreas Osiander inserted an unsigned Preface into Copernicus’s 1543 On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres. The instrumentalist preface asserted that Copernicus’s Earth was not really revolving, and it was just said to be so in order to simplify astronomical calculations. Galileo famously upheld the realist reading of Copernicus. Only under inquisitorial pressure did he formally adopt an anti-realist, instrumentalist position.58 Publication of Structure brought this philosophical debate to quarters hitherto unaware of it.
Ernan McMullin (1924–2011) correctly recognised that ‘The radical challenge of Structure is directed not at rationality but at realism’ and went on to observe that ‘Kuhn’s influence on the burgeoning anti-realism of the last two decades can scarcely be overestimated’ (McMullin, 1993, p.71). Kuhn concurred with McMullin’s, and earlier critics’, charges of anti-realism:
Despite my critics, I do not think that the position developed here leads to relativism, but the threats to realism are real and require much discussion, which I expect to provide in another place. (Kuhn, 1990, p.317)
The threats do require more discussion than Kuhn gave them. Some have endeavoured to elaborate, and make consistent, Kuhnian anti-realism. One such interpreter, Michela Massimi, does add the obvious proviso that ‘Kuhn’s view is either relativist or realist; it cannot be both at the same time’ (Massimi, 2015, p.143).
There are a variety of realisms.59 One book, titled Varieties of Realism, has 22 contributions (Agazzi, 2017). In recent decades, three dominant variants have emerged: Structural Realism advanced by John Worrall (Worrall, 1989), Ontic Structural Realism advanced by both Steven French (French, 2017) and James Ladyman (1998), and Selective Realism advanced by Alberto Cordero (Cordero, 2017).
Realism maintains that there exists an observer-independent world, that scientific theories make claims about both observational (compass needle movements) and non-observational (magnetic fields) things in that world, that those claims are approximately true, and that scientific progress occurs and is marked by widening and deepening the pool of such true and approximately true claims. Realist positions share the following commitments:
An ontological commitment to the reality and independence of the world: external things and events, including unobservable and inferred entities, exist independently of cognising subjects.
A semantic commitment to the linkage of scientific claims to external things and events: science makes claims about the world.
An epistemological commitment: namely, that science has made some truthful, or approximately truthful, claims about entities
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1996: The Man Who Explained to Scientists What They're Thinking Dies
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Thomas Kuhn, Philosopher Extraordinaire, Formulated the Concept of 'Paradigm Shift', Which Isn't a Cliché, It's a Paradigm Shift.
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ICYMI
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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Background
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2023-06-20T16:18:16+00:00
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The The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Community Note includes chapter-by-chapter summary and
analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography
and quizzes written by community members like you.
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en
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https://gradesaver-website-prod-tql6r.ondigitalocean.app/the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions
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Thomas Kuhn was an American physicist born on July 18, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was raised in a family that strongly valued science considering his father was an engineer and instilled in him a passion for the subject. After graduating from The Taft School, a private school in Connecticut, he attended Harvard University to study physics. To support himself, Kuhn taught as a professor at various universities, including Harvard, UC Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Princeton. His foray into novel writing began with the publication of his first book, The Copernican Revolution (1957), which explored scientific theory during the Renaissance.
In 1962, Kuhn released his second book entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It discusses the history of scientific thought and how developing theories are altered over time. For example, he references the Ptolemaic system, a model of the Solar System in which the Earth is at the center. It was not until the Copernican Revolution of the 16th century that more people started to accept the Heliocentric model that put the sun at the center of the universe. Kuhn asserts that these watershed moments in science history only occur when individuals challenge what is commonly accepted by society.
Upon its publication, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was not an immediate bestseller, but over the years, it has sold over 1.4 million copies globally. Writer Scott London praised Kuhn for “shattering our conventional way of looking at change” and “representing perhaps the best thinking on how transformation happens, who drives it, why it’s so vehemently resisted, and what it really asks of people.” Thus, Kuhn’s novel remains as one of the best studies of scientific philosophy to this day.
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Scientific Revolutions: Thomas Kuhn's Theories of Science
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The Scientific Revolutions and its Structure  In this essay I am going to discuss what the scientific revolution was and who was of importance at that time. I am also going to discu
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https://us.ukessays.com/essays/sciences/scientific-revolutions-thomas-kuhns-theories-of-science.php
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The Scientific Revolutions and its Structure
In this essay I am going to discuss what the scientific revolution was and who was of importance at that time. I am also going to discuss more about Thomas Kuhn’s theories of science and discuss Karl Poppers theories of science. I am also going to give my outlook on the scientific revolution, the problems that Khun and Popper faced during their discoveries, and the most talked about theories from Kuhn through out this essay.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The Scientific Revolution had many great minds that made an impact at the time and continued to where we are today in science, medicien, and technology. Some of the important thinkers of the Scientific Revolution were; Andreas Vesalius, Giordano Bruno, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, Paracelsus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Nicolaus Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Rene Descartes, and Isaac Newton. They all had one thing in common being very smart thinkers and changing the way for the discovery of modern science.
A influential philosopher of science came to be known in the twentieth century. Some scientis say he was the most influential one of time. His name is Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was and still is known for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This book not only talks about the “Paradigm Shift” (which I will bring up later in this essay) but this book also changed the way mankind thinks about how mankind attempts to understand the world in an organized and structured way.
Another influential philosopher of science in the twentieth century was Karl Popper (1902-1994) born in Australia. He was well known for his theory of Criterion of falsifiability. This means that, in the philosophy of science, a standard of evaluation of putatively scientific theories, according to which a theory is genuinely scientific only if it is possible in principle to establish that it is false (Britannica).
Now both philosophers explained how the philosophy of science was bias towards physics by scientist. Karl Popper explained that no amount of data points could really prove a theory. However, a single key data point can disprove it. A few theories that help this falsification were quantum mechanics and relativity. As science evolves falsification become less reliable and more complicated.
A main reason falsification has become less reliable is that the modern science is based on models and not theories. Modern science has test that are ran, data that is collected, retested, and test that are solved and/or gives us prof and facts. These models can be retested and have different variables added to the models, which then lead to different results.
When it comes to Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific progress better know as a “paradigm shift” there was an objection to it by the scientific community. Philosopher Arun Bala accused Thomas Kuhn of having being biased towards the Western civilization. Thomas Kuhn responded in writing:
“[O]nly the civilizations that descend from
Hellenic Greece have possessed more than the
most rudimentary science. The bulk of
scientific knowledge is a product of Europe…No
other place and time has supported the very
special communities from which scientific
productivity comes.” (Kuhn 12).
There were others who question and accused Thomas Kuhn. However, I enjoyed reading what Thomas Kuhn wrote to Philosopher Arun Bala. I felt Thomas Kuhn was polite, forward, and truthful in his words. Kuhn believes the paradigms are incommensurable, even though they may provide different explanations of the same phenomenon, such as the different definitions of mass in Einsteinian versus Newtonian physics (Adams 17). Thomas Kuhn’s scientific theories had limitations because his theories could not account for past scientific advancements that happened outside of the “paradigm shift”.
Now lets talk about Thomas Kuhn’s theory of how the “paradigm shift” and came to be. Thomas Kuhn talks about normal science, but what really is normal science? Normal science “means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice” (Kuhn 12). However there can be a shift in normal science meaning new theories and/or paradigms can be allowed. When this occurs a shift takes place with either theory or fact.
When this occurs there is a cycle in a paradigm shift; first is the pre-science, second is the normal science, third is the model drift, fourth is the model crisis, fifth is the model revolution, and last it the paradigm change. The one cycle that I find the most interesting is the model crisis. The model crisis is when the model drift is broken. It can no longer be a reliable guide to solving the problem.
The other steps were also of importance for instance pre-science is a non-workable step. Normal science is when there is a baseline for understanding a theory that works. Model drift is where we start to understand what is going on in the experiment but the end results cannot be explained and the results do not make sense. Model revolution begins when a new model is thought of because the recent one did not work. Finally you have the paradigm change where a new idea emerges from an old one, and a shift occurs.
I find this to hold true in real life science experiments. As Thomas Kuhn said I have argued so far only that paradigms are constitutive of science. Now I wish to display a sense in which they are constitutive of nature as well (Godfrey-Smith 03). This then leads to Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm shift” theory to continue to be in favor of science experiments today. Thomas Kuhn said “he was convinced that not only are there scientificrevolutions but also that they have a structure”(Hacking 12). Which then leads me back to the Scientific Revolution, because these brilliant philosophers’ would not have made great advancements in science like they did.
The Scientific Revolution was and is the biggest shift in the world of science since modern science. There were deveolpments in astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and medicine that changed the views of society. Britiancica’s definition of the scientific revolution is drastic change in scientific thought that took place during the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries (Britannica). This unfolded in Europe around 1550-1700 this was towards the end of the Renaissance era. This was the improvement for how we thought and how the world was ran.
Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) was the person to start the Scientific Revolution with his theory that the sun is at the centered of the Universe and that the Earth is on an axis that spins around once daily. Then came Issac Newton (1642-1727) whos theories where on Universal Laws. In mechanics, his three laws of motion, the basic principles of modern physics, resulted in the formulation of the law of universal gravitation (Britannica). Towards the end of the eighteenth century the scientific revolution community name this era “Age of Reflection”.
These scientific views changed the way society worked at that time. People began to question many things even what the leaders where telling them, some even questioned religion. This gave people a sense of freedom of thinking outside the normal every day life. Along with the good points of the Scientific Revolution there was some theories and discoveries that created war, “It is stated that the scientific revolution has made wars irrational and deprived diplomacy of it most important tool, which is plausible war threats, culminating in the discovery of nuclear bombs and ocean-spanning missiles” (Rabinowitch 63). Unfortunately there will always be people in this world that will use science for advancement and war. Hopefully as we evolve we can move past science being in the wrong hands of people.
CONCLUSION
The philosophers and the scientist, men/woman who lead the way for the scientific revolution made great leaps and bounds in the world of science as we know today. If it was not for these men/women the world would not be where we are today with out technology and science discoveries. What if Nicholas Copernicus never discovered that the sun is centered? Think about the ripple in our time. Where would we be at today? I believe things happened and happen for a reason especially when it comes to the field of science and technology. I look forward to seeing in my lifetime where science will lead us the next.
I feel there is so much more to learn from the philosophers and scientist, plus there are so many more that contributed to the Scientific Revolution. I wonder and have a gut feeling that there were people from those times who thought of these theories and experiments to have someone else take credit for them. If we ever found out the truth I am sure there would be a shift in the science world, as we know. Thank you for taking the time to read my essay I hope I was able to shed some light on the Scientific Revolution, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, and their theories that made them famous both positive and negative in the science world.
Notes
Please note that any direct quotes from Thomas Kuhn’s texts are written in their original form, which may contain grammar mistakes according to twenty-first century grammar rules.
2. I feel that I was trying to get out some main points of the Scientific Revolution, and Thomas Kuhn and I feel that it was so much more than what I talked about.
Works Cited
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn; Author, Scientific Historian
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[] |
[] |
[
""
] | null |
[
"L.A. Times Archives"
] |
1996-06-21T00:00:00
|
Thomas Samuel Kuhn, 73, a philosopher and popular author on the history of science and technology.
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en
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/apple-touch-icon.png
|
Los Angeles Times
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-21-mn-17167-story.html
|
Thomas Samuel Kuhn, 73, a philosopher and popular author on the history of science and technology. Born in Cincinnati, Kuhn studied physics at Harvard and taught there and at UC Berkeley, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His 1962 book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolution,” was printed in a dozen languages and sold 1 million copies. Kuhn was also remembered for his 1957 book “The Copernican Revolution.” On Monday in Cambridge, Mass., of cancer.
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7992
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dbpedia
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1
| 21
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https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/the-life-and-death-of-thomas-kuhn
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en
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The Life and Death of Thomas Kuhn (Philosopher of Science) timeline
|
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1922-07-18T00:00:00+00:00
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en
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/favicon.ico
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Timetoast Timelines
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https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/the-life-and-death-of-thomas-kuhn
|
Thomas Kuhn (Childhood and Early years)
Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in July 18, 1922. He was the son of Minette Scrook Kuhn and Samuel L. Kuhn. He went to a high school in New York known as Hessian Hills. He attended Taft School in Watertown and that is where he discovered his passion for mathematics and physics. In 1940, He graduated from the Taft School. He went to Harvard, where in 1943 he graduated with his B.S. degree in physics. He later went back to Harvard and got his M.S. degree in 1946 and 1949.
Thomas Kuhn Military Work
Thomas Kuhn joined the Radio Research Lab theoretical group where his job was to come up with counter measures against the enemies radar. After that he was sent to go work in the military lab in the United Kingdom. He went to France with the Royal Air Force to study German radar installations that they had captured.
Thomas Kuhn's (History of Science)
Thomas Kuhn was attending Harvard where he was working on his physics doctorate focusing completely on the development of his ideas as a science historian and philosopher. He was excited and preoccupied with the mechanisms which are used to understand scientific process. He taught the History of Science as a professor at Harvard, University of California and Princeton University. He really enjoyed teaching a lot when he was at the schools. He modeled after Isaac Newton's theories.
Thomas Kuhn ( Career)
Thomas Kuhn's career first started in Radio Research Lab when he was at Harvard. He also worked at the Scientific Research and Development in Europe. He also taught the History of Science as a professor at Harvard. He also was appointed as the professor to teach the History of Science at the University of California. He became a professor to teach the History of Science at Princeton University. He was often called the Rockefeller of Philosophy.
Thomas Kuhn's Book's
This book that was published in 1957, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was his most influential work. In his book he talked about how competing paradigms are incommensurable. He proposed a notion of paradigm shifts so that the scientific fields can undergo shifts periodically as long as it doesn't progress in a linear and continuous pattern. In his book, The Copernican Revolution, he refuted the claims of other scientist that the earth was in the center of the solar system.
Thomas Kuhn (Paradigm Shift)
Thomas Kuhn became known when he presented his concept the Paradigm Shift. People used it in all subjects, not just science. Thomas Kuhn explained his concept of the Paradigm Shift in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. His framework came form the paths laid by other intelligent men such as Aristotle, Isaac Newton and Galileo. The change in the framework, was in itself the Paradigm Shift. Thomas Kuhn stated that sometimes you have to go back in order to find the starting point.
Thomas Kuhn's Theory for Normal Science
After a paradigm has already taken place, scientist can start building up facts again by studying different problems and finding facts that exist in different places that was suggested by a new paradigm. This period between paradigm shifts is known as normal science or puzzle solving.
Thomas Kuhn's (Awards and Achievements)
Thomas Kuhn was chosen to be the esteemed Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He was given the prestigious title Guggenheim Fellow. The History of Science Society gave him the George Sarton Medal. Along with all his books that were very influential as the framework for those studying philosophy and trying to understand the concept of science in the world as well as the universe and beyond. In his honor, he got the Paradigm Shift Award by the Chemical Society.
Thomas Kuhn's Theory (Incommensurability and World Change)
Thomas Kuhn used the term Incommensurable so that he can be able to give a description of paradigms that will represent a whole world that has different views on the same subject. He talked about how the mechanics of Newton and Aristotle differ in a way that is so drastic that there is no room for common ground.
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7992
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dbpedia
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3
| 38
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https://archive.philosophersmag.com/thomas-kuhn-a-snapshot/
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en
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Thomas Kuhn: a snapshot
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https://archive.philosophersmag.com/wp-content/themes/genesis-sample/images/favicon.ico
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https://archive.philosophersmag.com/wp-content/themes/genesis-sample/images/favicon.ico
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[
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[
"Kerrie Grain"
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1998-01-01T00:00:02+00:00
|
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He received a Ph. D. in physics from Harvard University in 1949 and remained there as an assistant professor of general education and history of science. In 1956, Kuhn accepted a post at the University of California–Berkeley, where in 1961 he […]
|
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https://archive.philosophersmag.com/thomas-kuhn-a-snapshot/
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He received a Ph. D. in physics from Harvard University in 1949 and remained there as an assistant professor of general education and history of science. In 1956, Kuhn accepted a post at the University of California–Berkeley, where in 1961 he became a full professor of history of science. In 1964, he was named M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. In 1979 he returned to Boston, this time to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as professor of philosophy and history of science. In 1983 he was named Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT.
Of the five books and countless articles he published, Kuhn’s most renown work is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which he wrote while a graduate student in theoretical physics at Harvard. Initially published as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, it was published in book form by the University of Chicago Press in 1962. It has sold some one million copies in 16 languages and is required reading in courses dealing with education, history, psychology, research, and, of course, history and philosophy of science.
Throughout thirteen succinct but thought-provoking chapters, Kuhn argued that science is not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. Instead, science is “a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions,” which he described as “the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.” After such revolutions, “one conceptual world view is replaced by another.”
Although critics chided him for his imprecise use of the term, Kuhn was responsible for popularising the term paradigm, which he described as essentially a collection of beliefs shared by scientists, a set of agreements about how problems are to be understood. According to Kuhn, paradigms are essential to scientific inquiry, for “no natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism.” Indeed, a paradigm guides the research efforts of scientific communities, and it is this criterion that most clearly identifies a field as a science. A fundamental theme of Kuhn’s argument is that the typical developmental pattern of a mature science is the successive transition from one paradigm to another through a process of revolution. When a paradigm shift takes place, “a scientist’s world is qualitatively transformed [and] quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory.”
Kuhn also maintained that, contrary to popular conception, typical scientists are not objective and independent thinkers. Rather, they are conservative individuals who accept what they have been taught and apply their knowledge to solving the problems that their theories dictate. Most are, in essence, puzzle-solvers who aim to discover what they already know in advance – “The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly.”
During periods of normal science, the primary task of scientists is to bring the accepted theory and fact into closer agreement. As a consequence, scientists tend to ignore research findings that might threaten the existing paradigm and trigger the development of a new and competing paradigm. For example, Ptolemy popularised the notion that the sun revolves around the earth, and this view was defended for centuries even in the face of conflicting evidence. In the pursuit of science, Kuhn observed, “novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.”
And yet, young scientists who are not so deeply indoctrinated into accepted theories – a Newton, Lavoisier, or Einstein – can manage to sweep an old paradigm away. Such scientific revolutions come only after long periods of tradition-bound normal science, for “frameworks must be lived with and explored before they can be broken.” However, crisis is always implicit in research because every problem that normal science sees as a puzzle can be seen, from another perspective, as a counterinstance and thus as a source of crisis. This is the “essential tension” in scientific research.
Crises are triggered when scientists acknowledge the discovered counterinstance as an anomaly in fit between the existing theory and nature. All crises are resolved in one of three ways. Normal science can prove capable of handing the crisis-provoking problem, in which case all returns to “normal.” Alternatively, the problem resists and is labelled, but it is perceived as resulting from the field’s failure to possess the necessary tools with which to solve it, and so scientists set it aside for a future generation with more developed tools. In a few cases, a new candidate for paradigm emerges, and a battle over its acceptance ensues – these are the paradigm wars.
Kuhn argued that a scientific revolution is a noncumulative developmental episode in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one. But the new paradigm cannot build on the preceding one. Rather, it can only supplant it, for “the normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but actually incommensurable with that which has gone before.” Revolutions close with total victory for one of the two opposing camps.
Kuhn also took issue with Karl Popper’s view of theory-testing through falsification. According to Kuhn, it is the incompleteness and imperfection of the existing data-theory fit that define the puzzles that characterise normal science. If, as Popper suggested, failure to fit were grounds for theory rejection, all theories would be rejected at all times.
In the face of these arguments, how and why does science progress, and what is the nature of its progress? Kuhn argued that normal science progresses because members of a mature scientific community work from a single paradigm or from a closely related set and because different scientific communities seldom investigate the same problems. The result of successful creative work addressing the problems posed by the paradigm is progress. In fact, it is only during periods of normal science that progress seems both obvious and assured. Moreover, “the man who argues that philosophy has made no progress emphasises that there are still Aristotelians, not that Aristotelianism has failed to progress.”
As to whether progress consists in science discovering ultimate truths, Kuhn observed that “we may have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.” Instead, the developmental process of science is one of evolution from primitive beginnings through successive stages that are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. Kuhn argued that this is not a process of evolution toward anything, and he questioned whether it really helps to imagine that there is one, full, objective, true account of nature. He likened his conception of the evolution of scientific ideas to Darwin’s conception of the evolution of organisms.
The Kuhnian argument that a scientific community is defined by its allegiance to a single paradigm has especially resonated throughout the multiparadigmatic (or preparadigmatic) social sciences, whose community members are often accused of paradigmatic physics envy. Kuhn suggested that questions about whether a discipline is or is not a science can be answered only when members of a scholarly community who doubt their status achieve consensus about their past and present accomplishments.
Thomas Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954 and was awarded the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science in 1982. He held honorary degrees from institutions that included Columbia University and the universities of Notre Dame, Chicago, Padua, and Athens. He suffered from cancer during the last years of his life. Thomas Kuhn died on Monday, June 17, 1996, at the age of 73 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was survived by his wife and three children.
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Thomas Kuhn
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1921 – June 22, 1996) was an American philosopher and historian of science. His most famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, revolutionized the philosophy of science and has become one of the most cited academic books of all time. His contribution to the philosophy of science marked a break with key positivist doctrines and began a new style of philosophy of science that brought it much closer to the history of science. The general thrust of his book is that science operates on the model of paradigms which are clung to until a scientific revolution or paradigm shift happens. As examples, he used the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics, as well as the shift from pre-Darwinian to post-Darwinian biology.
"... while Kuhn thus opened up the entire domain of science for political analysis, he argued that the behaviorally visible mark of a truly scientific community was its high degree of autonomy, its ability to exercise authority over its own intellectual affairs. He confirmed the instinct that science was really different. But he also showed that scientists, within their domain, behaved very much like the rest of us." – David Hollinger, writing in the New York Times.[1]
Kuhn's life and career
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He was awarded a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943 graduating summa cum laude, and spent the remaining war years at Harvard researching into radar. He gained a master's degree in 1946, and a PhD in physics in 1949 for a thesis concerned an application of quantum mechanics to solid state physics. From 1948 until 1956 he taught a course in the history of science at Harvard, and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department. There, he wrote and published (in 1962), at the age of forty, his major work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Most of his subsequent career was spent in articulating and developing the ideas developed within it. In 1964 he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1978 he published Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 and in 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. In 1982 he was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. In 1994 he was diagnosed with cancer of the bronchial tubes; he died in 1996.[2]
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
For more information, see: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (book).
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Will Bouwman considers the development of a paradigmatic revolutionary.
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Will Bouwman considers the development of a paradigmatic revolutionary.
In 1962 Thomas Kuhn published a book from which the philosophy of science has not yet recovered, and probably never will. Before this book it was generally assumed that the only history that was relevant to science was recent. Science was believed to be a relentless march towards the truth, every innovation an advance. Scientists may have been standing on the shoulders of giants (to quote Isaac Newton), but every change was assumed to be taking us higher. Ironically, Kuhn the philosopher did what a good scientist does, and actually looked at the evidence. What he saw was that far from being the steady, uniform accumulation of objective truth about the way the world functions, the history of science is punctuated by moments when the prevailing consensus is completely shattered. His first book, The Copernican Revolution (1957), detailed the events and causes of one of the most graphic examples of this. Kuhn expanded on this picture to provide his general model of the nature of scientific progress in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Normal, and Revolutionary, Life
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father, Samuel, a veteran of World War I, was an industrial engineer and investment consultant whose wife, Minette (née Strook), was a graduate of Vassar College who wrote for and edited progressive publications. Both parents were active in left-wing politics, and in keeping with their radical outlook, Thomas was educated at various progressive schools which nurtured independent thinking rather than adhering to a traditional curriculum. Perhaps because of this, at the age of seven Thomas was still barely able to read and write; so his father took it into his own hands to bring him up to speed.
The unsettled school career and frequent moves may later have made it difficult for Thomas to establish long term relationships, particularly with women. His mother prescribed a course in psychoanalysis. Hating his counsellor, who frequently fell asleep during sessions, Kuhn cured himself of his difficulties in establishing relationships by marrying Kathryn Muhs in 1948. Like his mother, Kathryn was a graduate of Vassar College. They had three children, Sarah, Elizabeth, and Nathaniel, before divorcing in 1978. Three years later Kuhn married Jehane Barton Burns.
His early literacy problems apart, Kuhn was an outstanding student with a particular interest in maths and physics. He was admitted to Harvard in 1940. America entered World War II during Kuhn’s second year as an undergraduate, and after gaining a BSc in physics in 1943 with the highest honours, Kuhn joined the Radio Research Laboratory, which had been set up to develop countermeasures to enemy radar systems. This took him initially to Britain and later into liberated France and Germany itself, to examine captured equipment first hand.
On his return to Harvard, Kuhn continued studying physics as the most convenient route to gaining a doctorate, which he achieved in 1949, although his commitment to physics was dwindling as his interest in philosophy was growing. While working on his PhD, he was invited to teach a course in the History of Science to undergraduates, and it was while preparing for this that he had the insight that was to inspire his most influential work.
One of the key moments in the development of his ideas was his study of Aristotle. The view of science at the time was that it is accumulative; so Kuhn went looking into Aristotle’s ancestral physics, expecting to find the foundations on which Galileo, Newton et al had later built. Instead, Kuhn was baffled to discover that Aristotle’s understanding of physics was, from a modern point of view, complete nonsense. Struggling to comprehend how someone so wrong could be so revered, Kuhn realised that in order to appreciate Aristotle he had to understand the context in which Aristotle had been working. In doing so, he drew a picture of science that was completely different to most contemporary analyses.
The Scientific Method, Historically Speaking
In the middle of the twentieth century the philosophy of science was almost exclusively focussed on defining the scientific method. The assumption was that science is an objective ideal method independent of human foibles, and if we could just describe its characteristics then everyone would have a template for doing proper science.
The debate was largely between the logical positivists and Karl Popper. Both sides took the view that science was a rational endeavour, and that scientists obediently followed where the evidence led them. Broadly speaking, the logical positivists stuck to the traditional view that science was the accumulation of facts and the refinement of mathematical models that accounted for those facts with ever-increasing accuracy. Their distinctive feature was they insisted that science should stick strictly to observable facts and avoid building theories not directly supported by those facts. Logical positivism advocated the ‘verification principle’ promoted by A.J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic. This demanded that anything that could not be supported by empirical evidence or strict logic was metaphysics and had no place in science (or indeed, anywhere else). One major problem – which in fairness the logical positivists were well aware of – is that no amount of empirical evidence (or logic) can prove a scientific claim. The classic example is that a million white swans do not prove that every swan is white. Popper’s innovation was to point out that it only takes one black swan to prove that the proposition ‘all swans are white’ is false. So the evidence could show you either what was only likely to be true, or what was definitely false. Therefore, as an endeavour seeking certainty, science should commit itself to trying to prove its own theories wrong. This is Popper’s principle of falsification.
The Structure of Kuhn’s Revolution
By looking at the historical evidence concerning science itself, Kuhn believed that he could see a pattern in the data (this is after all part of what physicists are trained to do). According to Kuhn, history showed that most scientific research, in whatever field of science, is guided by a set of principles and core beliefs about which there is a general consensus. The word Kuhn used for this guiding intellectual framework was ‘paradigm’. For instance, before Copernicus turned it upside down, Aristotle’s model of the universe, which put the Earth at its centre, was accepted for two thousand years. Some of the data was puzzling, and couldn’t easily be reconciled with this model, but scientists and mathematicians, most notably Ptolemy, worked within the paradigm to solve those puzzles. During that time, astronomers were able to plot and predict the positions of the heavenly bodies with an accuracy that is remarkable, especially given that later technological advances (not least the telescope) have shown the model to be demonstrably false; but for the scientific purposes of the time, Aristotle’s model worked. Working within the bounds of a paradigm is what Kuhn called ‘normal science’, and this is what these Aristotelian cosmologists were doing. In this way, the practise of medieval astronomers resembles the practice of the scientific method that most philosophers of science were trying to model. It is only in the rare occasions of scientific revolutions, when the data can absolutely not be made to fit the existing paradigm, that the paradigm itself changes. This is called ‘revolutionary science’ by Kuhn.
One of Kuhn’s early essays was called ‘The Essential Tension’ (1959). In it he discusses the conflicting pulls of the desire to innovate and the conservatism needed to do normal science. For every revolutionary Einstein, there are thousands of normal scientists who do the routine calculations that keep the scientific world ticking along. Most normal scientists are content to use a paradigm which for all current purposes works extremely well. Contrary to Popper’s recommendation, they don’t abandon a paradigm because they can’t fit a set of data into it: they may instead seek to modify the paradigm until the data fits it. A modern case is creating the ideas of dark matter and energy to fit galactic movement within the paradigm of Einstein’s General Relativity. Of course, there are also revolutionary scientists trying to develop new paradigms which aim to explain the same evidence in innovative ways. There are, for instance, many novel quantum theories which seek to incorporate gravity, of which String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity are just two examples.
Among the most controversial aspects of Kuhn’s model of science, is his claim that different paradigms are ‘incommensurable’. That is to say, in extreme cases, there can be no meaningful dialogue between scientists who hold the different perspectives. That the same evidence can inspire different worldviews is often illustrated by the duck/rabbit illusion. The point Kuhn was making is that if you’re talking about a duck, you are going to make no sense to someone seeing a rabbit. String Theorists look at the universe and see eleven dimensions, whereas according to Loop Quantum Gravity, there are only four.
This raises another issue for which Kuhn’s paradigm model is criticised. How do you decide whether you are looking at a duck or a rabbit? The ‘theory-dependence of observation’ is this idea that exactly the same information can be interpreted in different ways. Kuhn argued that just as your worldview is influenced by your experience, so your scientific paradigm is determined in part by the education you’ve had. This led to accusations of relativism, which Kuhn tried to counter by saying that there are objective criteria for deciding between paradigmatic theories:
1. How accurately a theory agrees with the evidence.
2. It’s consistent within itself and with other accepted theories.
3. It should explain more than just the phenomenon it was designed to explain.
4. The simplest explanation is the best. (In other words, apply Occam’s Razor.)
5. It should make predictions that come true.
However, Kuhn had to concede that there is no objective way to establish which of those criteria is the most important, and so scientists would make their own mind up for subjective reasons. In choosing between competing theories, two scientists “fully committed to the same list of criteria for choice may nevertheless reach different conclusions.” Eventually though, according to Kuhn, a new, revolutionary model is found that most people settle down to developing, by using the new model to solve puzzles in the way of normal science.
The Reception of the Revolution
Many philosophers and physical scientists were initially sceptical, hostile even, to the depiction of scientists as normal people who held opinions and made decisions for idiosyncratic reasons. Social scientists, on the other hand, were inspired by The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to develop their discipline. Prior to publication, the most influential sociologist of science was Robert Merton, whose main focus had been on why scientific theories are rejected. After the Revolutions, sociologists largely turned to why scientific theories are believed.
In a way, Kuhn’s masterpiece was a product of exactly the sort of process it was describing. While ‘normal’ philosophers of science – the logical positivists and Popper – were working within a certain paradigm of what science was about, there was an accumulation of troubling anomalies. For instance, scientists such as Ludwik Fleck and Michael Polyani were pointing out that in their experience science didn’t actually work in the way that those philosophers assumed. Kuhn acknowledged his debt to both men. He also quoted the physicist Max Planck: “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it” (Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, 1949).
For better or worse, Kuhn’s book changed the way science is viewed. Science is no longer straightforwardly an ideal method of gaining knowledge to which people should aspire; rather it is something shaped by ordinary, and a few extraordinary, people.
Kuhn spent much of his subsequent career elucidating and dealing with the fallout. It’s a major part of his legacy that now so does almost everyone else in the philosophy of science. “When reading the works of an important thinker,” he said, “look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them” (‘The Essential Tension’). This is now what many sociologists and most philosophers of science are compelled to do.
Thomas Kuhn retired in 1991, age 69. In 1994 he was diagnosed with cancer of the throat and lungs. He died two years later, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, aged 73.
© Will Bouwman 2019
Will Bouwman is the author of Einstein on the Train and Other Stories: How to Make Sense of the Big Bang, Quantum Mechanics and Relativity.
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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-professor-thomas-s-kuhn-1338172.html
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Obituary: Professor Thomas S. Kuhn
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Thomas S. Kuhn's writing, though not voluminous, had a major impact on how we think about the nature of science, particularly its development. Perhaps the most widely used (and some would say, most frequently misunderstood) concept in discussions of the growth and "progress" of the sciences is the word "paradigm". It appeared as a way of making clear the nature of historical changes in the content and methods of the sciences in Kuhn's famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962 as a volume in the ambitious Encyclopedia of the Unified Sciences, from Chicago University Press.
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The Independent
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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-professor-thomas-s-kuhn-1338172.html
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Thomas S. Kuhn's writing, though not voluminous, had a major impact on how we think about the nature of science, particularly its development. Perhaps the most widely used (and some would say, most frequently misunderstood) concept in discussions of the growth and "progress" of the sciences is the word "paradigm". It appeared as a way of making clear the nature of historical changes in the content and methods of the sciences in Kuhn's famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962 as a volume in the ambitious Encyclopedia of the Unified Sciences, from Chicago University Press.
Though there had been dissident voices, it had been taken for granted that the sciences grew by the accumulation of accredited "facts". Adding new facts had no effect on those already accumulated. Laws of nature were drawn from regularities among these facts by induction.
Drawing on the pioneering work of Ludwik Fleck, Kuhn proposed a very different picture. He was struck by the wholesale transformation that took place in the beliefs of a scientific community when some revolutionary development occurred. In giving up an earth-centred picture of the solar system for a sun-centred cosmology, the astronomers of the 16th century not only changed the factual basis of astronomy but the entire framework of thought in which the old beliefs had been framed. This transformation he called a paradigm shift. It was so drastic a change that Kuhn sometimes used the metaphor of "different worlds" to express the radical shift in perspective that a paradigm change brought about. It was almost as if those who lived within the old paradigm and those in the new were cut off from one another by a chasm of mutual unintelligibility.
The key notion of paradigm did duty, in Kuhn's most influential writings, for a variety of features of the coherent world view of a community of scientists. These included a general conception of the nature of the material world, a cluster of accredited methods and a concrete exemplar of good work to which aspirants to membership of a scientific circle could be directed for guidance. Despite philosophical criticisms of the details of Kuhn's use of the term "paradigm", it has continued to be a valuable tool for characterising large-scale changes in some scientific field.
How did paradigm change occur? How did one paradigm come to replace another, creating a new scientific community? The rational picture of a logically ordered accumulation of facts inductively giving rise to laws left no room for what had evidently happened in history. Paradigm change, or "revolutionary science" as Kuhn called it, was more a matter of persuasion, personal influence, indirect influences from social changes and even propaganda, than it was a matter of logic. Once a revolution had occurred, then the pattern of "normal science", the painstaking accumulation of detailed knowledge within the new paradigm, was resumed.
Kuhn's work was so influential in so many fields partly because of his historical verisimilitude, and partly because, in the spirit of the times, it opened a space for the sociology of knowledge to find a serious role in philosophy of science, hitherto very much the province of those with a predominantly logical interest.
Kuhn himself did not carry these ideas to a fully radical conclusion, as did some philosophers and historians influenced by him. In his later writings he repudiated the extreme historical dislocation that others had taken him to be claiming to divide paradigms from one another. In his "Postscript" to the 1969 edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions he explicitly disavowed the strong "incommensurability thesis", the idea that there was a sharp, unbridgeable gap between successive paradigm-governed discourses and even views of the world.
To combat some of the misunderstandings and indeed vagueness of his original use of the word "paradigm" he came to favour the expression "disciplinary matrix". But "paradigm", for all its ambiguity, has stuck. In response to radical interpretations of his incommensurability thesis, he argued for the commonsense and indeed plausible idea that when scientists become aware of a paradigm difference between two communities they "become translators" working on ways of making the two world views mutually intelligible, while they remain distinct and separate.
Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1922. He studied physics at Harvard, and began his academic career there, first as a Junior Fellow and then from 1952 to 1956 as an assistant professor. In 1957 he moved to Berkeley before taking up a senior post at Princeton in 1964. The final part of his career took him to MIT in 1979. He was married twice and had two daughters and a son. Though not a recluse he was not often seen at large international gatherings. He was an amiable man of considerable personal charm, and with little of the combativeness that is not uncommon in academic circles. He had a quirkish sense of humour, for instance in one autobiographical piece he listed among his hobbies "riding roller-coasters".
Kuhn's moderation in thought and modesty in personal style militated against his later writing on the history of quantum theory and other topics in the development of physics having the same impact as The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. His essays published as The Essential Tension in 1977 were widely read, but contained nothing essentially new. Though Kuhn was not alone in advocating a transformational theory of the development of science, nor indeed in the use of the word "paradigm" for the cluster of very different aspects that the science of an epoch displayed, there was something about the way he presented the case at a moment when logicism was beginning to be looked on with less enthusiasm that ensured that his work took centre stage and will be looked back on as a turning point in our understanding of science.
Thomas Samuel Kuhn, philosopher of science: born Cincinnati, Ohio 18 July 1922; Fellow, Harvard 1948-51, Instructor and Assistant Professor 1951-56; Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and Professor, University of California (Berkeley) 1957-64; Professor and M. Taylor Pine Professor, Princeton University 1964-79; Professor, MIT 1979-83, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy 1983-91 (Emeritus); married 1948 Kathryn Muhs (one son, two daughters; marriage dissolved 1978), 1982 Jehane Burns; died Cambridge, Massachusetts 17 June 1996.
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions and innovations in the philosophy of science. More than a million copies of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, were printed, and it became the most studied and discussed text in philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had far reaching impacts on diverse fields of study beyond the philosophy of science, particularly on social sciences. Key concepts Kuhn presented in this work, such as "paradigm" and "incommensurability," became popular beyond academics.
Life
Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and his wife Minette Stroock Kuhn. The family was Jewish on both sides, although they were non-practicing. His father had been trained as a hydraulic engineer and had gone to Harvard. When he was six months old, the family moved to New York City, and the young Kuhn attended progressive schools there, and later in the upstate New York area.
Kuhn entered Harvard University in 1940 and obtained his bachelor's degree in physics after three years in 1943, his master's in 1946 and Ph.D. in 1949. While there, primarily because of his editorship of the Harvard Crimson, he came to the attention of then Harvard president James Bryant Conant, and eventually gained Conant's sponsorship for becoming a Harvard Fellow. Conant would also be extremely influential in Kuhn’s career, encouraging him to write the book that would become The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first ed. published in 1962).
After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California at Berkeley in both the philosophy and the history departments, being named Professor of the History of Science in 1961. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1979, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991.
Kuhn had entered Harvard as a physics major, intending to study theoretical physics. He did go on to get his degrees in physics. But as an undergraduate he took a course in philosophy and, although this was completely new to him, he was fascinated with it. He especially took to Kant. Later he would say that his own position was Kantian, but with movable categories.
Sometime around 1947 Kuhn began teaching what had before been Conant’s course, “Understanding Science.” This course could be thought of as an elementary course in the history and philosophy of science. This led Kuhn to begin focusing on the history of science. He also had his “Eureka moment”—maybe better called an “Aristotle moment”—in the summer of 1947. As a 1991 article in Scientific American put it, Kuhn “was working toward his doctorate in physics at Harvard …when he was asked to teach some science to undergraduate humanities majors. Searching for a simple case history that could illuminate the roots of Newtonian mechanics, Kuhn opened Aristotle's Physics and was astonished at how ‘wrong’ it was [when understood in Newtonian terms]… Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out of the window of his dormitory room… when suddenly Aristotle ‘made sense.’”
Concerning what he found in Aristotle, Kuhn wrote, “How could [Aristotle’s] characteristic talents have deserted his so systematically when he turned to the study of motion and mechanics? Equally, if his talents had so deserted him, why had his writings in physics been taken so seriously for so many centuries after his death? Those questions troubled me. I could easily believe that Aristotle had stumbled, but not that, on entering physics, he had totally collapsed. Might not the fault be mine, rather than Aristotle’s, I asked myself. Perhaps his words had not always meant to him and his contemporaries quite what they meant to me and mine” (The Road Since Structure, 16).
Kuhn reported that, in his window-gazing, “Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together.” As the Scientific American article put it, “Kuhn … realized that Aristotle's views of such basic concepts as motion and matter were totally unlike Newton's… Understood on its own terms, Aristotle's Physics ‘wasn't just bad Newton,’ Kuhn says; it was just different.” This insight would go on to underlie most of his subsequent work in history and philosophy of science.
Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954, and in 1982 was awarded the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science. He was also awarded numerous honorary doctorates.
Kuhn suffered cancer of the bronchial tubes for the last two years of his life and died Monday, June 17, 1996. He was survived by his wife Jehane R. Kuhn, his ex-wife Kathryn Muhs Kuhn, and their three children, Sarah, Elizabeth, and Nathaniel.
The Copernican Revolution (1957)
In his lifetime, Kuhn published more than a hundred papers and reviews, as well as five books (the fifth published posthumously). His first book—he had already published a few papers and reviews in various journals—was The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Harvard University Press, 1957), with a forward by Conant. This book began out of lectures he had given to the students at Harvard, and was completed after he went to Berkeley. It may be seen as a prolegomena to his later and most important, and far more influential, book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in that in Copernican Revolution Kuhn introduced a number of the points that would be further developed in the later book.
Kuhn emphasized that the Copernican Revolution “event was plural. Its core was a transformation of mathematical astronomy, but it embraced conceptual changes in cosmology, physics, philosophy, and religion as well.” The Copernican revolution, Kuhn clamed, shows “how and with what effect the concepts of many different fields are woven into a single fabric of thought.” And “…filiations between distinct fields of thought appear in the period after the publication of Copernicus’ work. …[This work] could only be assimilated by men able to create a new physics, a new conception of space, and a new idea of man’s relation to God. …Specialized accounts [of the Copernican Revolution] are inhibited both by aim and method from examining the nature of these ties and their effects upon the growth of human knowledge.”
Kuhn claimed that this effort to show the Copernican Revolution’s plurality is “probably the book’s most important novelty.” But also it is novel in that it “repeatedly violates the institutional boundaries which separate the audience for ‘science’ from the audience for ‘history’ or ‘philosophy.’ Occasionally it may seem to be two books, one dealing with science, the other with intellectual history.”
The seven chapters of Copernican Revolution deal with what Kuhn called “The Ancient Two-Sphere Universe,” “The Problem of the Planets [in Ptolemaic cosmology],” “The Two-Sphere Universe in Aristotelian Thought,” “Recasting the Tradition: Aristotle to Copernicus,” “Copernicus’ Innovation,” “The Assimilation of Copernican Astronomy,” and “The New Universe” as it came to be understood after the revolution in thinking.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first ed. 1962), Kuhn claimed that science does not evolve gradually toward truth, but instead undergoes periodic revolutions which he called "paradigm shifts." Ironically, this book was originally printed as a volume in the International Encyclopedia for Unified Science, which was conceived and published by the Vienna circle—the logical positivists. It is ironic because Kuhn seemed to be an arch anti-positivist (although that claim about him came to be doubted in the 1990s). The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured by the revolution it brought about even in the vocabulary of the history and philosophy of science. Besides “paradigm” and “paradigm shifts,” Kuhn coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term “scientific revolutions” in the plural, taking place at different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single "Scientific Revolution" in the late Renaissance.
Kuhn began this book by declaring that there should be a role for history in theory of science, and that this can produce a “decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” Moreover, the textbooks used to teach the next generation of scientists, offer “a concept of science … no more likely to fit the enterprise that produced them than an image of a national culture drawn from a tourist brochure or a language text” (p. 1). He also declared that “methodological directives” are insufficient “to dictate a unique substantive conclusion to many sorts of scientific questions” (3).
Next, Kuhn introduced his notion of “normal science” and said that it “means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice” (10). These achievements can be called “paradigms,” a term much used by Kuhn and a central point of Kuhn’s theory—for better or worse. Paradigms, according to Kuhn, are essential to science. “In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant” (15). Moreover, “no natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism” (16-17). “Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute.” Normal science, then, is a puzzle-solving activity consisting of mopping-up activities, guided by the reigning paradigm. “Rules derive from paradigms, but paradigms can guide science even in the absence of rules” (42). “Normal research, which is cumulative, owes its success to the ability of scientists regularly to select problems that can be solved with conceptual and instrumental techniques close to those already in existence" (96).
Over time, however, new and unsuspected phenomena—anomalies—are uncovered by scientific research, things that will not fit into the reigning paradigm. When a sufficient failure of normal science to solve the emerging anomalies occurs, a crises results, and this eventually leads to the emergence of a new scientific theory, a revolution. A reorientation occurs that breaks with one tradition and introduces a new one. Kuhn stated that the new paradigm is incompatible and incommensurable with the old one. Such “scientific revolutions are … non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one” (92). This crisis and its accompanying revolution lead to a division of camps and polarization within the science, with one camp striving to hold onto and defend the old paradigm or institutional constellation, while the other upholds and seeks to have the new one replace the old one. “That difference [between competing paradigms] could not occur if the two were logically compatible. In the process of being assimilated, the second must displace the first” (97). Moreover, proponents of the two cannot really speak with each other, for “To the extent … that two scientific schools disagree about what is a problem and what is a solution, they will inevitably talk through each other when debating the relative merits of their respective paradigms” (109). Scientific revolutions amount to changes of world view.
Scientific revolutions, Kuhn claied, tend to be invisible because they “have customarily been viewed not as revolutions but as additions to scientific knowledge” (136). This is primarily because of textbooks, which “address themselves to an already articulated body of problems, data, and theory, most often to the particular set of paradigms to which the scientific community is committed at the time they are written.” Textbooks, popularizations, and philosophy of science all “record the stable outcome of past revolutions” and are “systematically misleading” (137). “Textbooks … are produced only in the aftermath of a scientific revolution. They are the bases for a new tradition of normal science” (144). Moreover, “depreciation of historical fact is deeply, and probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession” (138).
Although it may superficially resemble or mimic them, neither verification, as claimed by the positivists, nor falsification, as propounded by Popper, are the methods by which theory change actually occurs. Instead, Kuhn claimed, something resembling religious conversion happens. A new paradigm first needs a few supporters—usually younger people who are not committed or beholden to the older one. “Probably the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm is that they can solve the problems that have led the old one to a crisis” (153). The main issue in circumstances of competing paradigms is “which paradigm will in the future guide research on problems many of which neither competitor can yet claim to resolve completely (157). Because of that “a decision is called for” (157) and “in the circumstances that decision must be based less on past achievement than future promise” (157-158). But Kuhn denied that “new paradigms triumph ultimately through some mystical aesthetic” (158).
The remaining central question for growth of scientific knowledge is, Kuhn acknowledged, “Why should the enterprise [he sketches in his theory] … move steadily ahead in ways that, say, art, political theory, or philosophy does not” (160). He suggested that the answer is partly semantic because, “To a very great extent the term ‘science’ is reserved for fields that do progress in obvious ways.” This is shown "in the recurrent debates about whether one or another of the contemporary social sciences is really a science” (160). Kuhn declared that “we tend to see as science any field in which progress is marked” (162). “It is only during periods of normal science that progress seems both obvious and assured” (163). But, he asked, “Why should progress also be the apparently universal concomitant of scientific revolutions?” He answered that “Revolutions close with a total victory for one of the opposing camps. Will that group ever say that the result of its victory has been something less than progress? That would be rather like admitting that they had been wrong and their opponents right” (166). “The very existence of science,” he wrote, “depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community” (167). And, “a group of this sort must see a paradigm change as progress” (169). But Kuhn denied that a paradigm change of the kind he describes leads toward the truth. “We may … have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes in paradigms carry scientists and those who learn from them closer to the truth” (170). But this is no great loss because, he asked, “Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal? If we can learn to substitute evolution-from-what-we-do-know for evolution-toward-what-we-wish-to-know, a number of very vexing problems may vanish in the process” (171). Moreover, “the entire 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 example” (172-173).
Criticism of Kuhn
Many people responded to Kuhn’s work, and the responses ranged from extremely favorable to highly critical. Dudley Shapere gave a harshly critical review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in Philosophical Review 73 (1964). W.V.O. Quine wrote that Kuhn's work contributed to a wave of “epistemological nihilism.” Quine continued, "This mood is reflected in the tendency of … Kuhn … to belittle the role of evidence and to accentuate cultural relativism"(Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, p. 87). Some people praised Kuhn’s opening to consideration of the sociology and psychology of science. Others—Karl Popper, for an important example—condemned this as a prostitution, or at least severe misrepresentation, of science. Some claimed that Kuhn’s work was progressive in that it opened the door to a new and fresh understanding of what science is and how it operates. But Steve Fuller, in Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, claimed that Kuhn’s work is reactionary because Kuhn tried to remove science from public examination and democratic control.
One of the most important and influential examinations of Kuhn’s work took place at the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, held at Bedford College, Regent’s Park, London, on July 11-17, 1965, with Popper presiding. The proceedings are gathered in a book entitled Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave. In that colloquium, John Watkins argued against normal science. Steven Toulmin asked whether the distinction between normal and revolutionary science holds water. Margaret Masterman pointed out that Kuhn’s use of “paradigm” was highly plastic—she showed more than twenty different usages. L. Pearce Williams claimed that few, if any, scientists recorded in the history of science were "normal" scientists in Kuhn’s sense; i.e. Williams disagreed with Kuhn both about historical facts and about what is characteristic for science. Others then and since have argued that Kuhn was mistaken in claiming that two different paradigms are incompatible and incommensurable because, in order for things to be incompatible, they must be directly comparable or commensurable.
Popper himself admitted that Kuhn had caused him to notice the existence of normal science, but Popper regarded normal science as deplorable because, Popper claimed, it is unimaginative and plodding. He pointed out that Kuhn’s theory of science growing through revolutions fits only some sciences because some other sciences have in fact been cumulative—a point made by numerous other critics of Kuhn. In addition, Popper claimed that Kuhn really does have a logic of scientific discovery: The logic of historical relativism. He and others pointed out that in claiming that a new paradigm is incommensurable and incompatible with an older one Kuhn was mistaken because, Popper claimed, “a critical comparison of the competing theories, of the competing frameworks, is always possible.” (Popper sometimes called this the "myth of the framework.") Moreover, Popper continued, “In science (and only in science) can we say that we have made genuine progress: That we know more than we did before” (Lakatos & Musgrave, 57).
Kuhn responded in an essay entitled “Reflections on my Critics.” In it he discussed further the role of history and sociology, the nature and functions of normal science, the retrieval of normal science from history, irrationality and theory choice, and the question of incommensurability and paradigms. Among many other things, he claimed that his account of science, notwithstanding some of his critics, did not sanction mob rule; that it was not his view that “adoption of a new scientific theory is an intuitive or mystical affair, a matter for psychological description rather than logical or methodological codification” (Lakaos & Musgrave, 261) as, for example, Israel Scheffler had claimed in his book Science and Subjectivity—a claim that has been made against Kuhn by numerous other commentators, especially David Stove—and that translation (from one paradigm or theory to another) always involves a theory of translation and that the possibility of translation taking place does not make the term “conversion” inappropriate (Lakatos & Musgrave, 277).
Kuhn’s work (and that of many other philosophers of science) was examined in The Structure of Scientific Theories, ed. with a Critical Introduction by Frederick Suppe. There Kuhn published an important essay entitled “Second Thoughts on Paradigms” in which he admitted that his use of that term had been too plastic and indefinite and had caused confusion, and he proposed replacing it with “disciplinary matrix.” (Suppe, 463) In an “Afterward” to the 1977 Second Edition of this work, Suppe claimed that there had been a waning of the influence of what he dubbed the Weltanschauungen views of science such as that of Kuhn.
Examination and criticism of Kuhn's work—pro and con, with the con side dominant among philosophers, but the pro side tending to be supported by sociologists of science and by deconstructionists and other irrationalists—continues into the twenty first century. Kuhn is frequently attacked as a purveyor of irrationalism and of the view that science is a subjective enterprise with no objective referent—a view Kuhn strongly denied that he held or supported. One problem is that Kuhn tended to complain that his critics misunderstood and misrepresented him and that he did not hold what they represented him as holding—even though they could point to passages in which he seemed to say explicitly what they claimed he held—but he did not give them much in response that would serve to show that they were wrong or that he actually held to any defensible form of scientific rationalism. Since he gave up the notion of an external referent or “ultimate truth” as the aim or goal of science, it was nearly impossible for him to specify anything except a completely conventionalist account of growth or progress in scientific knowledge.
On the question of Kuhn's relationship to logical positivism (or logical empiricism), George Reisch—in a 1991 essay entitled “Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?”—argued that Kuhn did not do so because there were two previously unpublished letters from Rudolf Carnap (Carnap was regarded by most observers as being the strongest, most important, or arch-logical positivist) to Kuhn in which Carnap expressed strong approval of Kuhn’s work, suggesting that there was a closer relationship between Kuhn and logical positivism than had been previously recognized.
"Post-Kuhnian" philosophy of science produced extensive responses to and critiques of the apparently relativistic and skeptical implications of Kuhn's work—implications Kuhn himself disowned. But, as noted above, Kuhn's disowning of those implications is puzzling and perhaps even disingenuous, given what Kuhn actually wrote on those topics.
Kuhn’s work after Structure
Kuhn published three additional books after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. They were The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977), Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity 1894-1912 (1978; 1984; and reprinted in 1987 with an afterword, “Revisiting Planck”), and The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview (Ed. by James Conant and John Haugeland, published posthumously, 2000). Subsequent editions of The Copernican Revolution were published in 1959, 1966, and 1985. A second revised edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1970, and a third edition in 1996. Essential Tension and The Road Since Structure were mostly collections of previously published essays, except that Road contains a long and informative interview-discussion with him conducted in Athens, Greece, on October 19-21, 1995, by three Greek interviewers; the occasion was the awarding of an honorary doctorate by the Department of Philosophy and History of Philosophy by the University of Athens and a symposium there in his honor.
Understandably, given the importance of Structure and the enormous outpouring of interest and criticism it provoked, almost all of Kuhn's work after it consisted of further discussions and defenses of things he had written, responses to critics, and some modifications of positions he had taken.
During his professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kuhn worked in linguistics. That may not have been an especially important or productive aspect of his work. But in his response "Reflections on my Critics," especially section 6 entitled "Incommensurability and Paradigms," where he wrote "At last we arrive at the central constellation of issues which separate me from most of my critics," Kuhn wrote about linguistic issues, and that set of problems or issues may have been the focus of his later work at MIT.
Understanding of Kuhn's work in Europe
In France, Kuhn's conception of science has been related to Michel Foucault (with Kuhn's paradigm corresponding to Foucault's episteme) and Louis Althusser, although both are more concerned by the historical conditions of possibility of the scientific discourse. (Foucault, in fact, was most directly influenced by Gaston Bachelard, who had developed independently a view of the history of scientific change similar to Kuhn's, but—Kuhn claimed—too rigid.) Thus, they do not consider science as isolated from society as they argue that Kuhn does. In contrast to Kuhn, Althusser's conception of science is that it is cumulative, even though this cumulativity is discontinuous (see his concept of Louis Althusser's "epistemological break") whereas Kuhn considers various paradigms as incommensurable.
Kuhn's work has also been extensively used in social science; for instance, in the post-positivist/positivist debate within International Relations.
References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees
Primary Sources
(In chronological order)
Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957, 1959, 1965.
—The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
—The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977.
—Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
—The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993. Ed. by James Conant and John Haugeland Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. (This book contains a complete bibliography of Kuhn's writings and other presentations.)
Secondary Sources
Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton: Princeton University Press and Acumen Press, 2000.
Einstein, Albert and Leopold Infeld. The Evolution of Physics New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938.
Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Lakatos, Imre and Alan Musgrave, Eds, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. London: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
Lakatos, Imre and Paul Feyerabend. For and Against Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Quine, W.V. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
Raymo, Chet. “A New Paradigm for Thomas Kuhn,” Scientific American. September, 2000.
Reisch, George. “Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?” Philosophy of Science 58 (1991).
Rothman, Milton A. A Physicist's Guide to Skepticism. Prometheus, 1988.
Sardar, Ziauddin. Thomas Kuhn and the Science Wars. Totem Books, 2000.
Scheffler, Israel. Science and Subjectivity. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1967
Shapere, Dudley. “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Philosophical Review. 73, 1964. (A review of Kuhn's book.)
Stove, David. Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult. Transaction Publishers, 2001.
Suppe, Frederick. The Structure of Scientific Theories, Second Ed. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977
Wolpert, Lewis. The Unnatural Nature of Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
All links retrieved April 30, 2023.
Thomas Kuhn, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
General Philosophy Sources
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1921 – June 22, 1996) was an American philosopher and historian of science. His most famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, revolutionized the philosophy of science and has become one of the most cited academic books of all time. His contribution to the philosophy of science marked a break with key positivist doctrines and began a new style of philosophy of science that brought it much closer to the history of science. The general thrust of his book is that science operates on the model of paradigms which are clung to until a scientific revolution or paradigm shift happens. As examples, he used the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics, as well as the shift from pre-Darwinian to post-Darwinian biology.
"... while Kuhn thus opened up the entire domain of science for political analysis, he argued that the behaviorally visible mark of a truly scientific community was its high degree of autonomy, its ability to exercise authority over its own intellectual affairs. He confirmed the instinct that science was really different. But he also showed that scientists, within their domain, behaved very much like the rest of us." – David Hollinger, writing in the New York Times.[1]
Kuhn's life and career
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He was awarded a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943 graduating summa cum laude, and spent the remaining war years at Harvard researching into radar. He gained a master's degree in 1946, and a PhD in physics in 1949 for a thesis concerned an application of quantum mechanics to solid state physics. From 1948 until 1956 he taught a course in the history of science at Harvard, and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department. There, he wrote and published (in 1962), at the age of forty, his major work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Most of his subsequent career was spent in articulating and developing the ideas developed within it. In 1964 he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1978 he published Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 and in 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. In 1982 he was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. In 1994 he was diagnosed with cancer of the bronchial tubes; he died in 1996.[2]
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
For more information, see: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (book).
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A behind-the-scene look at the life of Thomas Kuhn.
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One of the most influential ‘philosophers of science’ of the 20th century, Thomas Kuhn is regarded as the man who changed the way the world perceived and envisioned science. His book, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ was a landmark publication that generated worldwide discussions and debates among scholarly communities. It is also one of the most cited academic books, often referred to by scientific guilds and student communities. He is credited with coining the term, ‘Paradigm Shift’, which today, has become an integral part of English and scientific terminology. His impact has been felt in all academic fields, including the field of science, education theory and research. His contribution to the philosophy of science has inspired various student bodies and has influenced more than one billion readers and researchers at large. His works have so far, laid the foundation for many aspiring researchers who plan to pursue a study of the philosophy of science in the future. He is credited for the accurate representation of science and for introducing a new method towards approaching this branch of study.
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Thomas Kuhn
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1921 – June 22, 1996) was an American philosopher and historian of science. His most famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, revolutionized the philosophy of science and has become one of the most cited academic books of all time. His contribution to the philosophy of science marked a break with key positivist doctrines and began a new style of philosophy of science that brought it much closer to the history of science. The general thrust of his book is that science operates on the model of paradigms which are clung to until a scientific revolution or paradigm shift happens. As examples, he used the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics, as well as the shift from pre-Darwinian to post-Darwinian biology.
"... while Kuhn thus opened up the entire domain of science for political analysis, he argued that the behaviorally visible mark of a truly scientific community was its high degree of autonomy, its ability to exercise authority over its own intellectual affairs. He confirmed the instinct that science was really different. But he also showed that scientists, within their domain, behaved very much like the rest of us." – David Hollinger, writing in the New York Times.[1]
Kuhn's life and career
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He was awarded a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943 graduating summa cum laude, and spent the remaining war years at Harvard researching into radar. He gained a master's degree in 1946, and a PhD in physics in 1949 for a thesis concerned an application of quantum mechanics to solid state physics. From 1948 until 1956 he taught a course in the history of science at Harvard, and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department. There, he wrote and published (in 1962), at the age of forty, his major work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Most of his subsequent career was spent in articulating and developing the ideas developed within it. In 1964 he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. In 1978 he published Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 and in 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. In 1982 he was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. In 1994 he was diagnosed with cancer of the bronchial tubes; he died in 1996.[2]
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
For more information, see: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (book).
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Thomas Kuhn: a snapshot
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He received a Ph. D. in physics from Harvard University in 1949 and remained there as an assistant professor of general education and history of science. In 1956, Kuhn accepted a post at the University of California–Berkeley, where in 1961 he […]
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https://archive.philosophersmag.com/thomas-kuhn-a-snapshot/
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He received a Ph. D. in physics from Harvard University in 1949 and remained there as an assistant professor of general education and history of science. In 1956, Kuhn accepted a post at the University of California–Berkeley, where in 1961 he became a full professor of history of science. In 1964, he was named M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. In 1979 he returned to Boston, this time to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as professor of philosophy and history of science. In 1983 he was named Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT.
Of the five books and countless articles he published, Kuhn’s most renown work is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which he wrote while a graduate student in theoretical physics at Harvard. Initially published as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, it was published in book form by the University of Chicago Press in 1962. It has sold some one million copies in 16 languages and is required reading in courses dealing with education, history, psychology, research, and, of course, history and philosophy of science.
Throughout thirteen succinct but thought-provoking chapters, Kuhn argued that science is not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. Instead, science is “a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions,” which he described as “the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.” After such revolutions, “one conceptual world view is replaced by another.”
Although critics chided him for his imprecise use of the term, Kuhn was responsible for popularising the term paradigm, which he described as essentially a collection of beliefs shared by scientists, a set of agreements about how problems are to be understood. According to Kuhn, paradigms are essential to scientific inquiry, for “no natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism.” Indeed, a paradigm guides the research efforts of scientific communities, and it is this criterion that most clearly identifies a field as a science. A fundamental theme of Kuhn’s argument is that the typical developmental pattern of a mature science is the successive transition from one paradigm to another through a process of revolution. When a paradigm shift takes place, “a scientist’s world is qualitatively transformed [and] quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory.”
Kuhn also maintained that, contrary to popular conception, typical scientists are not objective and independent thinkers. Rather, they are conservative individuals who accept what they have been taught and apply their knowledge to solving the problems that their theories dictate. Most are, in essence, puzzle-solvers who aim to discover what they already know in advance – “The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly.”
During periods of normal science, the primary task of scientists is to bring the accepted theory and fact into closer agreement. As a consequence, scientists tend to ignore research findings that might threaten the existing paradigm and trigger the development of a new and competing paradigm. For example, Ptolemy popularised the notion that the sun revolves around the earth, and this view was defended for centuries even in the face of conflicting evidence. In the pursuit of science, Kuhn observed, “novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.”
And yet, young scientists who are not so deeply indoctrinated into accepted theories – a Newton, Lavoisier, or Einstein – can manage to sweep an old paradigm away. Such scientific revolutions come only after long periods of tradition-bound normal science, for “frameworks must be lived with and explored before they can be broken.” However, crisis is always implicit in research because every problem that normal science sees as a puzzle can be seen, from another perspective, as a counterinstance and thus as a source of crisis. This is the “essential tension” in scientific research.
Crises are triggered when scientists acknowledge the discovered counterinstance as an anomaly in fit between the existing theory and nature. All crises are resolved in one of three ways. Normal science can prove capable of handing the crisis-provoking problem, in which case all returns to “normal.” Alternatively, the problem resists and is labelled, but it is perceived as resulting from the field’s failure to possess the necessary tools with which to solve it, and so scientists set it aside for a future generation with more developed tools. In a few cases, a new candidate for paradigm emerges, and a battle over its acceptance ensues – these are the paradigm wars.
Kuhn argued that a scientific revolution is a noncumulative developmental episode in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one. But the new paradigm cannot build on the preceding one. Rather, it can only supplant it, for “the normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but actually incommensurable with that which has gone before.” Revolutions close with total victory for one of the two opposing camps.
Kuhn also took issue with Karl Popper’s view of theory-testing through falsification. According to Kuhn, it is the incompleteness and imperfection of the existing data-theory fit that define the puzzles that characterise normal science. If, as Popper suggested, failure to fit were grounds for theory rejection, all theories would be rejected at all times.
In the face of these arguments, how and why does science progress, and what is the nature of its progress? Kuhn argued that normal science progresses because members of a mature scientific community work from a single paradigm or from a closely related set and because different scientific communities seldom investigate the same problems. The result of successful creative work addressing the problems posed by the paradigm is progress. In fact, it is only during periods of normal science that progress seems both obvious and assured. Moreover, “the man who argues that philosophy has made no progress emphasises that there are still Aristotelians, not that Aristotelianism has failed to progress.”
As to whether progress consists in science discovering ultimate truths, Kuhn observed that “we may have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.” Instead, the developmental process of science is one of evolution from primitive beginnings through successive stages that are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. Kuhn argued that this is not a process of evolution toward anything, and he questioned whether it really helps to imagine that there is one, full, objective, true account of nature. He likened his conception of the evolution of scientific ideas to Darwin’s conception of the evolution of organisms.
The Kuhnian argument that a scientific community is defined by its allegiance to a single paradigm has especially resonated throughout the multiparadigmatic (or preparadigmatic) social sciences, whose community members are often accused of paradigmatic physics envy. Kuhn suggested that questions about whether a discipline is or is not a science can be answered only when members of a scholarly community who doubt their status achieve consensus about their past and present accomplishments.
Thomas Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954 and was awarded the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science in 1982. He held honorary degrees from institutions that included Columbia University and the universities of Notre Dame, Chicago, Padua, and Athens. He suffered from cancer during the last years of his life. Thomas Kuhn died on Monday, June 17, 1996, at the age of 73 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was survived by his wife and three children.
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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions at Fifty
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Matthew C. Rees looks back on the debates over the Thomas Kuhn classic that brought us the "paradigm shift"
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Fifty years ago, Thomas Kuhn, then a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, released a thin volume entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn challenged the traditional view of science as an accumulation of objective facts toward an ever more truthful understanding of nature. Instead, he argued, what scientists discover depends to a large extent on the sorts of questions they ask, which in turn depend in part on scientists’ philosophical commitments. Sometimes, the dominant scientific way of looking at the world becomes obviously riddled with problems; this can provoke radical and irreversible scientific revolutions that Kuhn dubbed “paradigm shifts” — introducing a term that has been much used and abused. Paradigm shifts interrupt the linear progression of knowledge by changing how scientists view the world, the questions they ask of it, and the tools they use to understand it. Since scientists’ worldview after a paradigm shift is so radically different from the one that came before, the two cannot be compared according to a mutual conception of reality. Kuhn concluded that the path of science through these revolutions is not necessarily toward truth but merely away from previous error.
Kuhn’s thesis has been hotly debated among historians and philosophers of science since it first appeared. The book and its disparate interpretations have given rise to ongoing disagreements over the nature of science, the possibility of progress, and the availability of truth. For some, Kuhn was a relativist, a prophet of postmodernism who considered truth a social construct built on the outlook of a community at a specific point in history. For others, Kuhn was an authoritarian whose work legitimized science as an elitist power structure. Still others considered him neither a relativist nor an authoritarian, but simply misunderstood. Kuhn’s work was ultimately an examination of the borders between the scientific and the metaphysical, and between the scientific community and society at large. As he discovered, these boundaries are not always clear. It behooves us to bear this in mind as we take the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary to revisit his book and the controversies surrounding it.
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati in 1922. He attended Harvard — where his father, a hydraulic engineer, had also studied — and earned a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1943. After graduating, he became a junior researcher on radar, first at Harvard and then in Europe at the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). It was in these jobs that he became close with James B. Conant, who served as both president of Harvard and the head of OSRD. After the war, Kuhn returned to academic life at Harvard, receiving a Ph.D. in physics in 1949, and continuing on to teach the history of science. But the Harvard faculty denied him tenure in 1956, after which he left for Berkeley, where he was eventually made a full professor of the history of science in 1961. He never returned to physics professionally. By 1964, he had made his way to Princeton, and ended his career at M.I.T. as a professor of philosophy, where he retired in 1991. But it was at Berkeley, in 1962, that Kuhn published the work that was to mark his career, and the course of inquiry in the philosophy of science, from that point on: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
The earliest seeds that would grow into Kuhn’s famous book were planted when he was a doctoral student in 1947. Conant tasked Kuhn with giving a series of lectures on seventeenth-century theories of mechanics. It was during the preparation of these lectures that Kuhn first began to develop his ideas. He sought to grasp exactly why Newton had discovered the laws of motion, and why it had taken mankind so long to do that, considering that Aristotle’s theories about motion had been so manifestly wrong. Moreover, Kuhn was confused about why Aristotle had been so wrong, when he had gotten much of biology and social science so right.
One summer day, it occurred to Kuhn rather suddenly that Aristotle had been operating from within a completely different framework of physics than the modern understanding. For Aristotle, the growing of a child into an adult was a similar process to that of a rock falling to the ground: each is moving toward its natural end, the place and state where it belongs. Contrary to Newtonian physics, Kuhn later explained in the preface to his 1977 collection The Essential Tension, “position itself was … a quality in Aristotle’s physics, and a body that changed its position therefore remained the same body only in the problematic sense that the child is the individual it becomes. In a universe where qualities were primary, motion was necessarily a change-of-state rather than a state.” This idea germinated in Kuhn’s mind as he continued his doctoral work, and later formed part of the basis for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
The argument of Structure is not especially complicated. Kuhn held that the historical process of science is divided into three stages: a “normal” stage, followed by “crisis” and then “revolutionary” stages. The normal stage is characterized by a strong agreement among scientists on what is and is not scientific practice. In this stage, scientists largely agree on what are the questions that need answers. Indeed, only problems that are recognized as potentially having solutions are considered scientific. So it is in the normal stage that we see science progress not toward better questions but better answers. The beginning of this period is usually marked by a solution that serves as an example, a paradigm, for further research. (This is just one of many ways in which Kuhn uses the word “paradigm” in Structure.)
A crisis occurs when an existing theory involves so many unsolved puzzles, or “anomalies,” that its explanatory ability becomes questionable. Scientists begin to consider entirely new ways of examining the data, and there is a lack of consensus on which questions are important scientifically. Problems that had previously been left to other, non-scientific fields may now come into view as potentially scientific.
Eventually, a new exemplary solution emerges. This new solution will be “incommensurable” — another key term in Kuhn’s thesis — with the former paradigm, meaning not only that the two paradigms are mutually conflicting, but that they are asking different questions, and to some extent speaking different scientific languages. Such a revolution inaugurates a new period of normal science. Thus normal science can be understood as a period of “puzzle-solving” or “mopping-up” after the discovery or elucidation of a paradigm-shifting theory. The theory is applied in different contexts, using different variables, to fully flesh out its implications. But since every paradigm has its flaws, progress in normal science is always toward the point of another crisis.
Kuhn relies heavily on a “particularly famous case of paradigm change”: the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debate over whether the sun goes around the earth or the earth around the sun. (This had been the subject of Kuhn’s previous book, The Copernican Revolution [1957].) Before Copernicus, Ptolemy conceived of a universe with the earth at its center. The celestial spheres wrapped around the earth like the layers of an onion, although how exactly they rested on each other so smoothly — the theory was that their natural motion in the ether was rotation — remained unknown. Ptolemy and his followers saw that the stars, the planets, the moon, and the sun all appeared to revolve in one direction around the earth in a regular order, and the exceptions — like the occasions when some planets seemed to move backwards in the sky — could be explained away. For over a thousand years, this was the dominant European conception of the universe. The model worked well for most of the questions that were asked of it; it could be used to predict future celestial movements, and as a practical matter, there was little reason to doubt it. In this “normal” stage of science, the mopping-up process was one of refining the data for more accurate predictions in the future.
But there will always be facts and circumstances any given theory cannot explain. “By the early sixteenth century,” Kuhn writes in Structure, “an increasing number of Europe’s best astronomers were recognizing that the astronomical paradigm was failing in application to its own traditional problems” — not to mention outside pressures related to calendar reform and growing medieval criticism of Aristotle. As the unexplainables began to mount, the Ptolemaic paradigm moved into a state of crisis. The Copernican Revolution was the result — a new theoretical framework that could incorporate the contradictory data into a coherent structure by putting the sun at the center of the cosmos. In Kuhn’s view, Copernicus and Galileo were on the tail end of the mopping-up era of Ptolemaic astronomy; Copernicus was not intentionally overthrowing the existing model, but the way he interpreted the data was simply inconsistent with an earth-centered universe. In spite of subsequent efforts by others, such as Tycho Brahe, to synthesize the two theories, they were incompatible.
If a paradigm is “destined to win its fight, the number and strength of the persuasive arguments in its favor will increase.” After a new theory is established, it attracts new supporters, often including younger scientists and perhaps the originating theorist’s students. Meanwhile, Kuhn writes, “those unwilling or unable to accommodate their work” to the new theory “have often simply stayed in the departments of philosophy from which so many of the special sciences have been spawned.” Older scientists have trouble adjusting to the new paradigm, in part because it puts their own work in doubt. Eventually, they are ignored. Kuhn quotes Max Planck, who famously wrote that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Over time, there again comes to be almost unanimous agreement on the validity of the predominant theory — it achieves paradigmatic status. Scientists tacitly assume agreement on the meanings of technical terms, and develop a shared and specialized technical vocabulary to facilitate data accumulation and organization. They establish journals dedicated to their scientific field, begin to cross-reference one another, and scrutinize each other’s work according to whether or not it conforms to the theory. Their students, likewise, learn to approach problems in the same way they do, much as an apprentice learns from a master. Normal science has resumed and the cycle begins anew.
It was important for Kuhn that his conception of the history and process of science was not the same as that of scientific progress. He maintained that the process of science was similar to biological evolution — not necessarily evolution toward anything, only away from previous error. In this way, Kuhn was rather skeptical about the idea of progress at all. This was the most controversial aspect of his thesis, the one that most concerned the contemporary critics of Structure, on the basis of which they accused — or celebrated — Kuhn as a champion of relativism. As University of Toronto philosophy professor Ian Hacking notes in an introductory essay prepended to the new fiftieth-anniversary edition of Structure, Kuhn’s notion that science moves away from previous error
seems to call in question the overarching notion of science as aiming at the truth about the universe. The thought that there is one and only one complete true account of everything is deep in the Western tradition…. In popular versions of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cosmology, there is one true and complete account of everything, namely what God knows. (He knows about the death of the least sparrow.)
This image gets transposed to fundamental physics, many of whose practitioners, who might proudly proclaim themselves to be atheists, take for granted that there just is, waiting to be discovered, one full and complete account of nature. If you think that makes sense, then it offers itself as an ideal towards which the sciences are progressing. Hence Kuhn’s progress away from will seem totally misguided.
For Kuhn, a paradigm shift is fundamentally not a scientific but a philosophical change, because the incommensurability of paradigms means that there is no external stance from which one can be shown to be superior to another. Kuhn explains, “The men who called Copernicus mad because he proclaimed that the earth moved … were not either just wrong or quite wrong. Part of what they meant by ‘earth’ was fixed position. Their earth, at least, could not be moved.” To say that the heliocentric model is true and that the geocentric model is false is to ignore the fact that the two models mean quite different things by the term “earth.”
But science has long been understood as a progressive accumulation of knowledge, not a mere shift from one worldview to another, like the gestalt shift between perceiving a duck or a rabbit in the famous diagram that Kuhn liked to use for illustration. And so Structure was received by many as a denial of the existence of absolute truth. If competing paradigms are both comprehensible, yet are incommensurable, can they not both be true? And if they are both true, who is to be the final arbiter of truth?
Many took Kuhn’s thesis to be a reduction of science to power struggles between competing views. Kuhn himself rejected this interpretation — although his attempts to do so sometimes ended up lending support in form to what they rejected in words: The physicist Freeman Dyson recounts in his 2006 book The Scientist as Rebel that he once attended a conference at which Kuhn’s disciples were repeating these exaggerated interpretations of his thesis, and “Kuhn interrupted them by shouting from the back of the hall with overwhelming volume, ‘One thing you people need to understand: I am not a Kuhnian.’”
Structure had taken on a life of its own. As Kuhn stated in a 1991 interview with science journalist John Horgan, “For Christ’s sake, if I had my choice of having written the book or not having written it, I would choose to have written it. But there have certainly been aspects involving considerable upset about the response to it.” As Hacking notes, a number of critics argued that the first edition was terribly vague. One reviewer in 1966 criticized Kuhn for using the word “paradigm” in twenty-one different senses in the book. Hacking also notes the strikingly ambivalent language that Kuhn often employs, using phrases like “we may want to say” and “[this] may make us wish to say” instead of offering assertions outright, leaving him open to criticism that he was unclear or hedging his argument.
Kuhn was also criticized for building a wall between basic science (that is, science conducted for its own sake) and applied science (that is, science aimed at achieving specific, often socially important, goals). Against Bacon’s dictum that the proper aim of science is “the relief of man’s estate,” Kuhn argued that scientists in the “normal” stage must ignore “socially important problems” and should instead just focus on solving puzzles within the paradigm. In other words, problems that must be solved to improve human life but cannot be solved by the methods of a given paradigm are a distraction from the work necessary during the “normal” phase of science. This suggests that scientists must cloister themselves, at least to an extent, in order to make progress within the confines of their paradigm. Moreover, as Steve Fuller, professor of sociology at the University of Warwick, notes in Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (2000), Kuhn felt that a paradigm should be “sheltered from relentless criticism in its early stages.” So not only can a paradigm “insulate the community” of scientists from the demands of society, in Kuhn’s words, but scientists must in turn insulate the paradigm from harsh criticism.
Kuhn was left having to do some “mopping up” of his own, which he attempted in the years after Structure was published. For example, in a 1973 lecture (collected in The Essential Tension), Kuhn sought to counter the charge that he was a relativist. He argued that some theories and paradigms are better than others, based on five rational criteria: accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness. Much later, in the 1991 interview with Horgan, Kuhn insisted
that he did not mean to be condescending by using terms such as “mopping up” or “puzzle-solving” to describe what most scientists do. “It was meant to be descriptive.” He ruminated a bit. “Maybe I should have said more about the glories that result from puzzle solving, but I thought I was doing that.”
Continuity in a paradigm is not necessarily a bad thing, Kuhn explained in his later years; indeed, it enables scientists to organize the greater and greater amounts of knowledge that grow through the cumulative process of scientific inquiry.
Criticisms aside, whether Kuhn even deserves full credit for the ideas put forth in his seminal work has rightly been questioned. As early as the mid-1940s, the Hungarian-British scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi had published very similar ideas about the significance of scientists’ personal commitments to a framework of beliefs and the role of learning by example in scientific training. As Kuhn later admitted, he became familiar with those works during his studies under Conant, and through a talk that Polanyi delivered and Kuhn attended in 1958. Polanyi’s most extensive work on the subject, Personal Knowledge, was published the same year. In the early 1960s, Kuhn explicitly described his own thought as closely aligned with that of Polanyi, but he did not mention his name in Structure, except for a brief footnote in the first edition and an additional mention in the 1970 second edition. When Polanyi struggled to receive recognition for his thoughts independently of Kuhn’s, Kuhn admitted in private correspondence that he might owe “a major debt” to the older scholar. But shortly before Kuhn’s death (and long after Polanyi’s), he revised those concessions and claimed that Polanyi had not in fact had a great influence on him, and that he had delayed reading Personal Knowledge until after finishing Structure out of a fear that he “would have to go back to first principles and start over again, and I wasn’t going to do that.”
Despite the fact that Polanyi’s work preceded Kuhn’s and was more philosophically rigorous, it was Kuhn whose book became a bestseller and whose terminology entered contemporary parlance. Steve Fuller notes “many Kuhn-like ideas were ‘in the air’ both before and during the time Structure was written,” often from better-known philosophers. Perhaps Kuhn simply hit not only on the right ideas, but more importantly on the right distillation of them, and the right terminology, at the right time.
The reader of Kuhn’s work is struck by his extensive focus on the physical sciences, and the dearth of attention to biology and the social sciences. To some extent, this is hardly surprising, given Kuhn’s background as a theoretical physicist. But it is also true that the public prominence of the physical sciences in the first half of the twentieth century and the early periods of the Cold War provided a unique window into the community of scientists and the patterns by which scientific theory develops.
What Kuhn noticed was that competing paradigms in physics never coexist for very long, and that progress in normal science occurs precisely when scientists work within only one paradigm. But the social sciences are a special kind of science, because they cannot set aside fundamental philosophical concerns as easily as the physical sciences. Moreover, the social sciences are defined by multiple paradigms that are sometimes mutually contradictory. Kuhn pointed out that some social sciences may never be able to enter the paradigmatic stage of normal science for that reason. Unlike physical scientists, social scientists generally cannot in the face of a disagreement revert to an agreed-upon exemplary solution to a problem; their controversies are precisely about what the exemplar ought to be. The social sciences are grounded on competing views of what the world is and should be: certain basic concepts, such as “the state,” “institutions,” or “identity,” cannot be defined by consensus. Competing paradigms — such as those of Marxist, Keynesian, and Hayekian economists — will continue to coexist. So there necessarily will be limits to what the social sciences can achieve, since the lack of unanimity inevitably means that arguments turn on questions of theory, rather than on the application of theory. In addition, since it is more difficult in the social sciences to carry out true experiments and test counterfactuals, the social sciences are inhibited from closely following the model of the physical sciences. And the passage of time is a relevant factor. As social scientist Wolfgang Streeck explains, “What has historically happened cannot be undone — which also means that there can never be an exact return to a past condition, as the memory of what happened in between will always be present. A military dictatorship that has returned after having overthrown a democracy is not the same as a military dictatorship following, say, a foreign occupation.”
Despite these criticisms, many social scientists embraced — or perhaps appropriated — Kuhn’s thesis. It enabled them to elevate the status of their work. The social sciences could never hope to meet the high standards of empirical experimentation and verifiability that the influential school of thought called positivism demanded of the sciences. But Kuhn proposed a different standard, by which science is actually defined by a shared commitment among scientists to a paradigm wherein they refine and apply their theories. Although Kuhn himself denied the social sciences the status of paradigmatic science because of their lack of consensus on a dominant paradigm, social scientists argued that his thesis could still apply to each of those competing paradigms individually. This allowed social scientists to claim that their work was scientific in much the way Kuhn described physics to be.
Disagreements over what counts as science, and how society can hold scientists in any field accountable to a standard of truth, became most heated in the aftermath of a debate between Kuhn and the philosopher Karl Popper. The now-famous debate between Kuhn and the older and far more seasoned Popper took place in London on July 13, 1965. Although no particularly significant exchange between the two took place either before or after this encounter, their disagreement is commonly featured in textbooks and college courses as a major event in the development of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century. The popular view of the conflict, advanced primarily by supporters of Kuhn — the supposed winner of the debate — is that Kuhn was a revolutionary in his field who championed free inquiry, in opposition to the strict empirical and logical standards of the positivists. Popper, on the other hand, is often taken to be a quasi-positivist defender of the authority of science. But, as Steve Fuller argues in his 2003 book Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science, this popular conception is not only a caricature but an inversion of the truth about these two thinkers.
Popper held science to a higher standard than did Kuhn. Popper’s famous proposition was that a seemingly scientific claim, in order to be actually scientific, must be falsifiable, meaning that it is possible to devise an experiment under which the claim could be disproved. A classic example of a falsifiable science is Einsteinian physics, which made specific, well-defined predictions that could be tested through observation — as opposed to, say, Freudian psychology, which did not make well-defined predictions and proved adept at reformulating its explanations to fit observations, changing the details so as to salvage the theory.
By defining science in terms of rational criteria of empirical observation, Popper seemed to place scientific tools equally in the hands of philosophers of science, skeptics, and common persons who needed some means to question scientists who tried to back their claims by appealing to their own scientific authority. For Popper, novel scientific theories should be greeted with skepticism from the outset. But for Kuhn, one of the key characteristics of the healthy functioning of the community of scientists is its practice of singling out a successful theory from its competitors — without concern for its social implications, and in isolation from public scrutiny.
In a sense, Popper and Kuhn each saw himself as a defender of free inquiry — but their notions of free inquiry were fundamentally opposed. Kuhn’s thesis reserved free inquiry specifically for scientists, by considering legitimate whatever paradigm scientists happened to agree upon at a given time. But Popper, given his longstanding concern for the open society, thought that this idea marginalized the role of skepticism, only regarding it as important at the point of crisis, and that it thus undermined free inquiry as a methodological commitment to truth.
Popper particularly targeted the tendency among some influential social scientists to advance their political and social theories without revealing their philosophical underpinnings. Some of the great catastrophes of the twentieth century resulted from the widespread acceptance of theories that reduced society to a machine that could be steered by competent authorities. Popper’s falsification principle was meant in part to moderate the authority of social science, which — to the extent that it attempted to predict and regulate society — could lead to a passive public and technocratic governance at best, or modern serfdom and totalitarianism at worst. Kuhn himself was hardly a great booster of the social sciences. But the application of Kuhn’s ideas to social science seemed to imply that a theory, however false, should be allowed to dominate the opinion of scientists and the public until it buckles under the weight of its own flaws.
For their part, Kuhn and his followers argued that Popperian falsifiability was an impossible and historically unrealistic standard for science, and noted that any paradigm has at least a few anomalies. In fact, these anomalies are critical for determining which puzzles normal science seeks to solve. Popper’s standard, on the other hand, would seem to require scientists to be forever preoccupied with metaphysical, pre-paradigmatic arguments. But in a sense, this was the point: Popper’s insistence on falsification was precisely meant to sustain the need of the social sciences to focus on questions of first principle, so as to avoid the rise of any new dangerous philosophies falsely carrying the banner of science.
While the physical sciences were the most prominent in the public mind when Kuhn was writing Structure in the early 1960s, today biology is in ascendance. It is striking, as Hacking notes in his introductory essay, that Kuhn does not explore whether Darwin’s revolution fits within his thesis. It is far from clear that Kuhn’s thesis can adequately account for not only Darwin’s revolution but also cell theory, Mendelian or molecular genetics, or many of the other major developments in the history of biology.
The differences between physics and biology — their varying methods and metaphors — matter immensely for the way we understand ourselves and our world. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the assumptions of modern science began to play a much more prominent role in political philosophy. A scientific way of thinking permeated the writings of Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, and by the end of the century, with the work of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, the era of social science had begun in earnest. Many of the early social scientists came to view society in terms of contemporary physics; they adopted the Enlightenment belief in science as the source of progress, and considered physics the archetypical science. They understood society as a mechanism that could be engineered and adjusted. These early social scientists began to deem philosophical questions irrelevant or even inappropriate to their work, which instead became about how the mechanism of society operated and how it could be fixed. The preeminence of physics and mechanistic thinking was passed down through generations of social scientists, with qualitative characterization considered far less valuable and less “scientific” than quantitative investigations. Major social scientific theories, from behaviorism to functionalism to constructivism and beyond, tacitly think of man and society as machines and systems.
Given the dominance of physics and mechanism in social scientific thinking, the fact that Kuhn based his thesis almost exclusively on physics gave social scientists reason to consider their philosophical commitments legitimate. They saw Structure as a confirmation of their entire approach.
But in the half century since Kuhn wrote his book, biology has taken the place of physics as the dominant science — and so in the social sciences, the conception of society as a machine has gone out of vogue. Social scientists have increasingly turned to biology and ecology for possible analogies on which to build their social theories; organisms are supplanting machines as the guiding metaphor for social life. In 1991, the Journal of Evolutionary Economics was launched with an eye toward advancing a Darwinian understanding of economics, complete with genotypes and phenotypes. The justification for this kind of model is straightforward: one of the biggest difficulties for economists is the dynamism of any given economy. As Joseph Schumpeter rightly pointed out, economies change; they evolve, rather than staying fixed like a Newtonian machine with merely moving parts. Since machines do not change, whereas societies do, it is reasonable to move the study of economics away from the metaphor of systems and toward that of organisms.
A recent paper in the journal Theory in Biosciences perfectly encapsulates the desire for a more biological perspective in the social sciences, arguing for “Taking Evolution Seriously in Political Science.” The paper outlines the deterministic dangers in the view of social systems as Newtonian machines, as well as the problems posed by the reductionist belief that elements of social systems can be catalogued and analyzed. By contrast, the paper argues that approaching social sciences from an evolutionary perspective is more appropriate philosophically, as well as more effective for scientific explanation. This approach allows us to examine the dynamic nature of social changes and to explain more consistently which phenomena last, which disappear, and which are modified, while still confronting persistent questions, such as why particular institutions change.
This shift from a mechanistic to an evolutionary model seems like a step in the right direction. The new model aims less at predicting the future and derives its strength instead from its apparent ability to explain a wide array of phenomena. It may be better equipped than its predecessor to account for the frequent changes in the stability of modern economies. Furthermore, a biological model can correctly recognize humans as purposeful and creative beings, whereas mechanistic models reduce people to objects that merely react to outside stimuli.
Nevertheless, a biological approach to the social sciences is reductionistic in its own way, and limited in what it can explain. Biological sciences, much like physical sciences, have been stripped of philosophical concerns, of questions regarding the soul or the meaning of life, which have been pushed off to the separate disciplines of philosophy and theology. Much of modern biology seeks to emulate physics by reducing the human organism to a complex machine: thinking becomes merely chemical potentials and electric bursts, interest and motivation become mere drives to perpetuate the genome, and love becomes little more than an illusion. Such accounts can become problematic if we consider them the only ways to understand human nature — and not least because our answers to these non-scientific questions are at the foundation of how we view the world, and so also of how we interpret scientific findings.
Every model that social scientists use, whether it is derived from physics, biology, or ecology, embodies certain philosophical assumptions about human nature and about the optimal functioning of a society. Viewing social relations as movements of a clock implies a set of beliefs quite unlike those of perceiving the same relations as functions of a cell. Since the work of social scientists is so closely tied to these philosophical concerns on which we tend to disagree, we usually see a number of models compete for acceptance at the same time. And because these metaphysical assumptions are usually unspoken, they set the stage for the competition between models to take the place of what was once an explicit competition between differing philosophical accounts of the world — only now while largely denying that any philosophical debate is taking place.
Perhaps the greatest limitation in the social sciences is that, however good a theory’s explanatory abilities, it can say very little about whether or not a particular action ought to be performed in order to bring about social change. Since human relations are the object of the social sciences, questions of ethics — about whether or not a change should be induced, who should be responsible for it, and how it should occur — must always be at the forefront. It may be desirable, for instance, to reduce alcoholism; but it does not follow that all actors, such as churches, governments, businesses, public and private mental-health experts, and the pressure of social norms, are equally responsible for undertaking the task, or can equally do so without altering society in other ways. Decisions of this sort inevitably depend on our views of the proper function of institutions and on what constitutes the well-being of society.
Regardless of whether we view society as akin to a physical machine, or a biosphere, or an organism, it remains crucial that we recognize the limitations of each model. But what we learn from Kuhn is that any science that separates itself from its philosophical bases renders itself incapable of addressing such questions even within its own limited scope.
The political philosopher Eric Voegelin, in his 1952 book The New Science of Politics, provides a helpful treatment on this point in his assessment of the fifteenth-century English judge Sir John Fortescue. Long before the current trend toward the biological sciences, Fortescue used a biological metaphor, arguing, as Voegelin writes, “that a realm must have a ruler like a body a head,” and that a political community grows into an articulate, defined body as though out of an embryo. Rulers were necessary because otherwise the community would be, in Voegelin’s words, “acephalus, headless, the trunk of a body without a head.” Yet Fortescue recognized that the analogy between an organic body and a political realm was limited: by itself, it would have provided an incomplete view of both the individual and society. He therefore introduced into his political theory the Christian notion of a corpus mysticum: society is held together not only by a head but also by an inner spiritual bond, a heart that nourishes the head as well as the rest of the body. As Voegelin puts it, however, this heart “does not serve as the identification of some member of a society with a corresponding organ of the body, but, on the contrary, it strives to show that the animating center of a social body is not to be found in any of its human members … but is the intangible living center of the realm as a whole.”
By extending the analogy in this way, Fortescue went beyond what we now recognize as the limits of biology, and even of political science as such, in the attempt to capture a fuller sense of human nature and of a political body. Neither biology nor political science by itself would have been capable of producing any such holistic image of society. Most significantly, Fortescue understood that his borrowing from biology was merely metaphorical — and so avoided the mistake that plagues the social sciences today, of treating what is really political theory as straightforward scientific truth.
Value judgments are always at the core of the social sciences. “In the end,” wrote Irving Kristol, “the only authentic criterion for judging any economic or political system, or any set of social institutions, is this: what kind of people emerge from them?” And precisely because we differ on what kind of people should emerge from our institutions, our scientific judgments about them are inevitably tied to our value commitments.
But this is not to say that those values, or the scientific work that rests on them, cannot be publicly debated according to recognized standards. Thomas Kuhn’s thesis has often been taken to mean that choices between competing theories or paradigms are arbitrary — merely a matter of subjective taste. As noted earlier, Kuhn challenged the claim that he was a relativist in a 1973 lecture, offering a list of five standards by which we may defend the superiority of one theory over another: accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness. What these criteria precisely mean, how they apply to a given theory, and how they rank in priority are themselves questions subject to dispute by scientists committed to opposing theories. But it is the existence of recognized standards, even if the standards are open to debate, that allows any judgment to be available for public discussion. And we may add that if social scientists recognize the same standards, then debates over their meaning, application, and priority are harder to settle than in physics because the social sciences are intertwined with philosophical questions that are themselves concerned with what our standards of rationality ought to be.
The lasting value of Kuhn’s thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that it reminds us that any science, however apparently purified of the taint of philosophical speculation, is nevertheless embedded in a philosophical framework — and that the great success of physics and biology is due not to their actual independence from philosophy but rather to physicists’ and biologists’ dismissal of it. Those who are inclined to take this dismissal as meaning that philosophy is dead altogether, or has been replaced by science, will do well to recognize the force by which Kuhn’s thesis opposes this stance: History has repeatedly demonstrated that periods of progress in normal science — when philosophy seems to be moot — may be long and steady, but they lead to a time when non-scientific, philosophical questions again become paramount.
One persisting trouble with Kuhn’s classic work is that its narrow focus left too many questions unanswered — including the question not just of what science is but of what science should be. Here many other philosophers of science, including Popper, offered not just descriptions of science but powerful prescriptions for it. Kuhn’s work is largely silent on the value of science and the wellbeing of society, and entirely silent on the wrongheadedness of blindly accepting scientific authority and discarding the philosophical questions that must always come first, even when we pretend otherwise.
Although Kuhn, who died in 1996, was sometimes stung by the criticism he received, he understood the importance of all the poking and prodding. In his 1973 lecture, he argued that “scientists may always be asked to explain their choices, to exhibit the bases of their judgments. Such judgments are eminently discussable, and the man who refuses to discuss his own cannot expect to be taken seriously.” Even the great Einstein, who failed to give a full defense for his skepticism of the fundamental randomness posited by quantum theory, became somewhat marginalized later in his career. Kuhn deserves the respect of the rigorous criticism that has come his way. It is fitting that his provocative thesis has faced blistering scrutiny — and remarkable that it has survived to instruct and vex us five decades later.
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https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2018/08/02/book-club-the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions-august-2018/
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Book Club: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (August 2018)
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During this month’s book club we are reading and discussing “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas S. Kuhn.
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Scott H Young
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https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2018/08/02/book-club-the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions-august-2018/
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This month we read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn.
If you would like to stream audio on your browser, click here listen on Soundcloud.
American historian and philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn was a leading contributor to the change of focus in the philosophy and sociology of science in the 1960s. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Kuhn received a doctorate in theoretical physics from Harvard University in 1949 and later shifted his interest to the history and philosophy of science, which he taught at Harvard, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
In 1962, Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which depicted the development of the basic natural sciences in an innovative way. According to Kuhn, the sciences do not uniformly progress strictly by scientific method. Rather, there are two fundamentally different phases of scientific development in the sciences. Kuhn’s theory has triggered widespread, controversial discussion across many scientific disciplines.
In many ways, Kuhn broke the understanding of science:
In Kuhn’s study, science as it was actually practiced, didn’t work like this at all. Instead it was an oscillation between the normal, commonplace expansion of existing theories and results, and revolutions whereby entire fields were upended and replaced with a new model from the ground up.
Although Kuhn rarely pointed directly to some easily recognizable object as being *the* paradigm he sought to describe… if you’re studying physics for instance, the paradigm is embodied by Newtonian mechanics is balls rolling down inclined planes, pendulums swinging at constant periods or celestial objects following elliptical orbits.
The view, prior to Kuhn, had been that science works via accumulation. Paradigms, in contrast, don’t work this way. Consider a pendulum:
In Newton’s day, it was known that a pendulum, once it started swinging, would continue to swing at the same rate, and the closer it approached ideal conditions (less friction or air resistance), it would keep swinging forever. Kinetic energy becoming potential and back again.
Kuhn argues that the Aristotelian view of a pendulum wouldn’t have been to see it that way. In other words, science didn’t just get an accumulation of new facts when it went from Aristotle to Newton.
In Kuhn’s view, scientific revolutions, like political ones, are a violent affair.
They are not merely the supplanting of the current regime using the tools and structures currently available. Instead they’re a rejection of those tools and often supplant the new theory by breaking the accepted practice of the old one.
In fact, science, according to Kuhn, progresses in a process of three distinct phases: normal science, crisis and revolution.
Normal science is, well, normal. It’s the thing scientists do, except in the times of revolution. Kuhn argues that most of normal science is a kind of puzzle solving. The crisis eventually evolves and soon the anomalies are so prevalent that they cannot be contained in the current paradigm. As a result, scientists increasingly diverge, exploring stranger and broader methods for tackling the problem that begin to depart from the paradigm.
Finally, there’s success, a new theory or paradigm explains the anomalies so well, that other scientists are converted and a revolution is afoot. If the new theory can be pushed successfully to encompass enough of what was already known beforehand, it may triumph over its predecessor wholesale.
In my own life and writing, I feel like I’ve gone through the same process Kuhn describes with many of my ideas. I’ll start with some idea of how life or the world works, and then problems begin to appear in the theory which I push aside. Eventually a new idea comes around that resolves those problems better than before, and I switch over. The old ideas are usually not entirely wrong, but in the new way of thinking they’re wrongly conceived. They don’t match up with the concepts and ideas that now exist in my mind.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was our book for this month in my monthly book club. Each month, I read a new book, and I invite you to read it along with me. At the end of the month, I’ll post a recording or discussion podcast episode like this one, to share my takeaways from the book. I highly recommend reading at least a couple of the books, even if you can’t always keep up with the one-per-month pace.
I’ve been trying to pick books that I think are particularly important, not because they’re necessarily easy to read. My hope is to expose you, even if you just follow this podcast, to some books that are a little different from the usual self-help and business books that populate bookshelves. However, I think the effort you put into reading them can be well worth the effort, perhaps even provoking the revolution in thought that Kuhn described.
Next month, I’m going to be tackling a book that many of you may not agree with. Indeed, when I first encountered the ideas of the book, I was highly resistant, as these too formed an anomaly I wanted to reject. However, much to my chagrin, the book is incredibly good: extremely thoroughly researched, carefully argued and backed up with enormous amounts of data. The book is Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education, and I’ll be discussing it on next month’s episode.
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Thomas Kuhn (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
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1. Life and Career
Thomas Kuhn’s academic life started in physics. He then switched to history of science, and as his career developed he moved over to philosophy of science, although retaining a strong interest in the history of physics. In 1943, he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude. Thereafter he spent the remainder of the war years in research related to radar at Harvard and then in Europe. He gained his master’s degree in physics in 1946, and his doctorate in 1949, also in physics (concerning an application of quantum mechanics to solid state physics). Kuhn was elected to the prestigious Society of Fellows at Harvard, another of whose members was W. V. Quine. At this time, and until 1956, Kuhn taught a class in science for undergraduates in the humanities, as part of the General Education in Science curriculum, developed by James B. Conant, the President of Harvard. This course was centred around historical case studies, and this was Kuhn’s first opportunity to study historical scientific texts in detail. His initial bewilderment on reading the scientific work of Aristotle was a formative experience, followed as it was by a more or less sudden ability to understand Aristotle properly, undistorted by knowledge of subsequent science.
This led Kuhn to concentrate on history of science and in due course he was appointed to an assistant professorship in general education and the history of science. During this period his work focussed on eighteenth century matter theory and the early history of thermodynamics. Kuhn then turned to the history of astronomy, and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution.
In 1961 Kuhn became a full professor at the University of California at Berkeley, having moved there in 1956 to take up a post in history of science, but in the philosophy department. This enabled him to develop his interest in the philosophy of science. At Berkeley Kuhn’s colleagues included Stanley Cavell, who introduced Kuhn to the works of Wittgenstein, and Paul Feyerabend. With Feyerabend Kuhn discussed a draft of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which was published in 1962 in the series “International Encyclopedia of Unified Science”, edited by Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap. The central idea of this extraordinarily influential—and controversial—book is that the development of science is driven, in normal periods of science, by adherence to what Kuhn called a ‘paradigm’. The functions of a paradigm are to supply puzzles for scientists to solve and to provide the tools for their solution. A crisis in science arises when confidence is lost in the ability of the paradigm to solve particularly worrying puzzles called ‘anomalies’. Crisis is followed by a scientific revolution if the existing paradigm is superseded by a rival. Kuhn claimed that science guided by one paradigm would be ‘incommensurable’ with science developed under a different paradigm, by which is meant that there is no common measure for assessing the different scientific theories. This thesis of incommensurability, developed at the same time by Feyerabend, rules out certain kinds of comparison of the two theories and consequently rejects some traditional views of scientific development, such as the view that later science builds on the knowledge contained within earlier theories, or the view that later theories are closer approximations to the truth than earlier theories. Most of Kuhn’s subsequent work in philosophy was spent in articulating and developing the ideas in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, although some of these, such as the thesis of incommensurability, underwent transformation in the process.
According to Kuhn himself (2000, 307), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions first aroused interest among social scientists, although it did in due course create the interest among philosophers that Kuhn had intended (and also before long among a much wider academic and general audience). While acknowledging the importance of Kuhn’s ideas, the philosophical reception was nonetheless 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. This was highlighted by his rejection of the distinction between discovery and justification (denying that we can distinguish between the psychological process of thinking up an idea and the logical process of justifying its claim to truth) and his emphasis on incommensurability (the claim that certain kinds of comparison between theories are impossible). The negative response among philosophers was exacerbated by an important naturalistic tendency in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that was then unfamiliar. A particularly significant instance of this was Kuhn’s insistence on the importance of the history of science for philosophy of science. The opening sentence of the book reads: “History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed” (1962/1970, 1). Also significant and unfamiliar was Kuhn’s appeal to psychological literature and examples (such as linking theory-change with the changing appearance of a Gestalt image).
In 1964 Kuhn left Berkeley to take up the position of M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. In the following year an important event took place which helped promote Kuhn’s profile further among philosophers. An International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science was held at Bedford College, London. One of the key events of the Colloquium was intended to be a debate between Kuhn and Feyerabend, with Feyerabend promoting the critical rationalism that he shared with Popper. As it was, Feyerabend was ill and unable to attend, and the papers delivered focussed on Kuhn’s work. John Watkins took Feyerabend’s place in a session chaired by Popper. The ensuing discussion, to which Popper and also Margaret Masterman and Stephen Toulmin contributed, compared and contrasted the viewpoints of Kuhn and Popper and thereby helped illuminate the significance of Kuhn’s approach. Papers from these discussants along with contributions from Feyerabend and Lakatos, were published several years later, in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (1970) (the fourth volume of proceedings from this Colloquium). In the same year the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published, including an important postscript in which Kuhn clarified his notion of paradigm. This was in part in response to Masterman’s (1970) criticism that Kuhn had used ‘paradigm’ in a wide variety of ways; in addition, Kuhn felt that critics had failed to appreciate the emphasis he placed upon the idea of a paradigm as an exemplar or model of puzzle-solving. Kuhn also, for the first time, explicitly gave his work an anti-realist element by denying the coherence of the idea that theories could be regarded as more or less close to the truth.
A collection of Kuhn’s essays in the philosophy and history of science was published in 1977, with the title The Essential Tension taken from one of Kuhn’s earliest essays in which he emphasizes the importance of tradition in science. The following year saw the publication of his second historical monograph Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, concerning the early history of quantum mechanics. In 1983 he was named Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT. Kuhn continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s to work on a variety of topics in both history and philosophy of science, including the development of the concept of incommensurability, and at the time of his death in 1996 he was working on a second philosophical monograph dealing with, among other matters, an evolutionary conception of scientific change and concept acquisition in developmental psychology.
2. The Development of Science
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn paints a picture of the development of science quite unlike any that had gone before. Indeed, before Kuhn, there was little by way of a carefully considered, theoretically explained account of scientific change. Instead, there was a conception of how science ought to develop that was a by-product of the prevailing philosophy of science, as well as a popular, heroic view of scientific progress. According to such opinions, science develops by the addition of new truths to the stock of old truths, or the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, and in the odd case, the correction of past errors. Such progress might accelerate in the hands of a particularly great scientist, but progress itself is guaranteed by the scientific method.
In the 1950s, when Kuhn began his historical studies of science, the history of science was a young academic discipline. Even so, it was becoming clear that scientific change was not always as straightforward as the standard, traditional view would have it. Kuhn was the first and most important author to articulate a developed alternative account. Since the standard view dovetailed with the dominant, positivist-influenced philosophy of science, a non-standard view would have important consequences for the philosophy of science. Kuhn had little formal philosophical training but was nonetheless fully conscious of the significance of his innovation for philosophy, and indeed he called his work ‘history for philosophical purposes’ (Kuhn 2000, 276).
According to Kuhn the development of a science is not uniform but has alternating ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ (or ‘extraordinary’) phases. The revolutionary phases are not merely periods of accelerated progress, but differ qualitatively from normal science. Normal science does resemble the standard cumulative picture of scientific progress, on the surface at least. Kuhn describes normal science as ‘puzzle-solving’ (1962/1970a, 35–42). While this term suggests that normal science is not dramatic, its main purpose is to convey the idea that like someone doing a crossword puzzle or a chess problem or a jigsaw, the puzzle-solver expects to have a reasonable chance of solving the puzzle, that his doing so will depend mainly on his own ability, and that the puzzle itself and its methods of solution will have a high degree of familiarity. A puzzle-solver is not entering completely uncharted territory. Because its puzzles and their solutions are familiar and relatively straightforward, normal science can expect to accumulate a growing stock of puzzle-solutions. Revolutionary science, however, is not cumulative in that, according to Kuhn, scientific revolutions involve a revision to existing scientific belief or practice (1962/1970a, 92). Not all the achievements of the preceding period of normal science are preserved in a revolution, and indeed a later period of science may find itself without an explanation for a phenomenon that in an earlier period was held to be successfully explained. This feature of scientific revolutions has become known as ‘Kuhn-loss’ (1962/1970a, 99–100).
If, as in the standard picture, scientific revolutions are like normal science but better, then revolutionary science will at all times be regarded as something positive, to be sought, promoted, and welcomed. Revolutions are to be sought on Popper’s view also, but not because they add to positive knowledge of the truth of theories but because they add to the negative knowledge that the relevant theories are false. Kuhn rejected both the traditional and Popperian views in this regard. He claims that normal science can succeed in making progress only if there is a strong commitment by the relevant scientific community to their shared theoretical beliefs, values, instruments and techniques, and even metaphysics. This constellation of shared commitments Kuhn at one point calls a ‘disciplinary matrix’ (1970a, 182) although elsewhere he often uses the term ‘paradigm’. Because commitment to the disciplinary matrix is a pre-requisite for successful normal science, an inculcation of that commitment is a key element in scientific training and in the formation of the mind-set of a successful scientist. This tension between the desire for innovation and the necessary conservativeness of most scientists was the subject of one of Kuhn’s first essays in the theory of science, “The Essential Tension” (1959). The unusual emphasis on a conservative attitude distinguishes Kuhn not only from the heroic element of the standard picture but also from Popper and his depiction of the scientist forever attempting to refute her most important theories.
This conservative resistance to the attempted refutation of key theories means that revolutions are not sought except under extreme circumstances. Popper’s philosophy requires that a single reproducible, anomalous phenomenon be enough to result in the rejection of a theory (Popper 1959, 86–7). Kuhn’s view is that during normal science scientists neither test nor seek to confirm the guiding theories of their disciplinary matrix. Nor do they regard anomalous results as falsifying those theories. (It is only speculative puzzle-solutions that can be falsified in a Popperian fashion during normal science (1970b, 19).) Rather, anomalies are ignored or explained away if at all possible. It is only the accumulation of particularly troublesome anomalies that poses a serious problem for the existing disciplinary matrix. A particularly troublesome anomaly is one that undermines the practice of normal science. For example, an anomaly might reveal inadequacies in some commonly used piece of equipment, perhaps by casting doubt on the underlying theory. If much of normal science relies upon this piece of equipment, normal science will find it difficult to continue with confidence until this anomaly is addressed. A widespread failure in such confidence Kuhn calls a ‘crisis’ (1962/1970a, 66–76).
The most interesting response to crisis will be the search for a revised disciplinary matrix, a revision that will allow for the elimination of at least the most pressing anomalies and optimally the solution of many outstanding, unsolved puzzles. Such a revision will be a scientific revolution. According to Popper the revolutionary overthrow of a theory is one that is logically required by an anomaly. According to Kuhn however, there are no rules for deciding the significance of a puzzle and for weighing puzzles and their solutions against one another. The decision to opt for a revision of a disciplinary matrix is not one that is rationally compelled; nor is the particular choice of revision rationally compelled. For this reason the revolutionary phase is particularly open to competition among differing ideas and rational disagreement about their relative merits. Kuhn does briefly mention that extra-scientific factors might help decide the outcome of a scientific revolution—the nationalities and personalities of leading protagonists, for example (1962/1970a, 152–3). This suggestion grew in the hands of some sociologists and historians of science into the thesis that the outcome of a scientific revolution, indeed of any step in the development of science, is always determined by socio-political factors. Kuhn himself repudiated such ideas and his work makes it clear that the factors determining the outcome of a scientific dispute, particularly in modern science, are almost always to be found within science, specifically in connexion with the puzzle-solving power of the competing ideas.
Kuhn states that science does progress, even through revolutions (1962/1970a, 160ff). The phenomenon of Kuhn-loss does, in Kuhn’s view, rule out the traditional cumulative picture of progress. The revolutionary search for a replacement paradigm is driven by the failure of the existing paradigm to solve certain important anomalies. Any replacement paradigm had better solve the majority of those puzzles, or it will not be worth adopting in place of the existing paradigm. At the same time, even if there is some Kuhn-loss, a worthy replacement must also retain much of the problem-solving power of its predecessor (1962/1970a, 169). (Kuhn does clarify the point by asserting that the newer theory must retain pretty well all its predecessor’s power to solve quantitative problems. It may however lose some qualitative, explanatory power [1970b, 20].) Hence we can say that revolutions do bring with them an overall increase in puzzle-solving power, the number and significance of the puzzles and anomalies solved by the revised paradigm exceeding the number and significance of the puzzles-solutions that are no longer available as a result of Kuhn-loss. Kuhn is quick to deny that there is any inference from such increases to improved nearness to the truth ((1962/1970a, 170–1). Indeed he later denies that any sense can be made of the notion of nearness to the truth (1970a, 206).
Rejecting a teleological view of science progressing towards the truth, Kuhn favours an evolutionary view of scientific progress (1962/1970a, 170–3), discussed in detail by Wray (2011) (see also Bird 2000 and Renzi 2009). The evolutionary development of an organism might be seen as its response to a challenge set by its environment. But that does not imply that there is some ideal form of the organism that it is evolving towards. Analogously, science improves by allowing its theories to evolve in response to puzzles and progress is measured by its success in solving those puzzles; it is not measured by its progress towards to an ideal true theory. While evolution does not lead towards ideal organisms, it does lead to greater diversity of kinds of organism. As Wray explains, this is the basis of a Kuhnian account of specialization in science, an account that Kuhn was developing particularly in the latter part of his career. According to this account, the revolutionary new theory that succeeds in replacing another that is subject to crisis, may fail to satisfy all the needs of those working with the earlier theory. One response to this might be for the field to develop two theories, with domains restricted relative to the original theory (one might be the old theory or a version of it). This formation of new specialties will also bring with it new taxonomic structures and so leads to incommensurability.
3. The Concept of a Paradigm
A mature science, according to Kuhn, experiences alternating phases of normal science and revolutions. In normal science the key theories, instruments, values and metaphysical assumptions that comprise the disciplinary matrix are kept fixed, permitting the cumulative generation of puzzle-solutions, whereas in a scientific revolution the disciplinary matrix undergoes revision, in order to permit the solution of the more serious anomalous puzzles that disturbed the preceding period of normal science.
A particularly important part of Kuhn’s thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions focuses upon one specific component of the disciplinary matrix. This is the consensus on exemplary instances of scientific research. These exemplars of good science are what Kuhn refers to when he uses the term ‘paradigm’ in a narrower sense. He cites Aristotle’s analysis of motion, Ptolemy’s computations of plantery positions, Lavoisier’s application of the balance, and Maxwell’s mathematization of the electromagnetic field as paradigms (1962/1970a, 23). Exemplary instances of science are typically to be found in books and papers, and so Kuhn often also describes great texts as paradigms—Ptolemy’s Almagest, Lavoisier’s Traité élémentaire de chimie, and Newton’s Principia Mathematica and Opticks (1962/1970a, 12). Such texts contain not only the key theories and laws, but also—and this is what makes them paradigms—the applications of those theories in the solution of important problems, along with the new experimental or mathematical techniques (such as the chemical balance in Traité élémentaire de chimie and the calculus in Principia Mathematica) employed in those applications.
In the postscript to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn says of paradigms in this sense that they are “the most novel and least understood aspect of this book” (1962/1970a, 187). The claim that the consensus of a disciplinary matrix is primarily agreement on paradigms-as-exemplars is intended to explain the nature of normal science and the process of crisis, revolution, and renewal of normal science. It also explains the birth of a mature science. Kuhn describes an immature science, in what he sometimes calls its ‘pre-paradigm’ period, as lacking consensus. Competing schools of thought possess differing procedures, theories, even metaphysical presuppositions. Consequently there is little opportunity for collective progress. Even localized progress by a particular school is made difficult, since much intellectual energy is put into arguing over the fundamentals with other schools instead of developing a research tradition. However, progress is not impossible, and one school may make a breakthrough whereby the shared problems of the competing schools are solved in a particularly impressive fashion. This success draws away adherents from the other schools, and a widespread consensus is formed around the new puzzle-solutions.
This widespread consensus now permits agreement on fundamentals. For a problem-solution will embody particular theories, procedures and instrumentation, scientific language, metaphysics, and so forth. Consensus on the puzzle-solution will thus bring consensus on these other aspects of a disciplinary matrix also. The successful puzzle-solution, now a paradigm puzzle-solution, will not solve all problems. Indeed, it will probably raise new puzzles. For example, the theories it employs may involve a constant whose value is not known with precision; the paradigm puzzle-solution may employ approximations that could be improved; it may suggest other puzzles of the same kind; it may suggest new areas for investigation. Generating new puzzles is one thing that the paradigm puzzle-solution does; helping solve them is another. In the most favourable scenario, the new puzzles raised by the paradigm puzzle-solution can be addressed and answered using precisely the techniques that the paradigm puzzle-solution employs. And since the paradigm puzzle-solution is accepted as a great achievement, these very similar puzzle-solutions will be accepted as successful solutions also. This is why Kuhn uses the terms ‘exemplar’ and ‘paradigm’. For the novel puzzle-solution which crystallizes consensus is regarded and used as a model of exemplary science. In the research tradition it inaugurates, a paradigm-as-exemplar fulfils three functions: (i) it suggests new puzzles; (ii) it suggests approaches to solving those puzzles; (iii) it is the standard by which the quality of a proposed puzzle-solution can be measured (1962/1970a, 38–9). In each case it is similarity to the exemplar that is the scientists’ guide.
That normal science proceeds on the basis of perceived similarity to exemplars is an important and distinctive feature of Kuhn’s new picture of scientific development. The standard view explained the cumulative addition of new knowledge in terms of the application of the scientific method. Allegedly, the scientific method encapsulates the rules of scientific rationality. It may be that those rules could not account for the creative side of science—the generation of new hypotheses. The latter was thus designated ‘the context of discovery’, leaving the rules of rationality to decide in the ‘context of justification’ whether a new hypothesis should, in the light of the evidence, be added to the stock of accepted theories.
Kuhn rejected the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification (1962/1970a, 8), and correspondingly rejected the standard account of each. As regards the context of discovery, the standard view held that the philosophy of science had nothing to say on the issue of the functioning of the creative imagination. But Kuhn’s paradigms do provide a partial explanation, since training with exemplars enables scientists to see new puzzle-situations in terms of familiar puzzles and hence enables them to see potential solutions to their new puzzles.
More important for Kuhn was the way his account of the context of justification diverged from the standard picture. The functioning of exemplars is intended explicitly to contrast with the operation of rules. The key determinant in the acceptability of a proposed puzzle-solution is its similarity to the paradigmatic puzzle-solutions. Perception of similarity cannot be reduced to rules, and a fortiori cannot be reduced to rules of rationality. This rejection of rules of rationality was one of the factors that led Kuhn’s critics to accuse him of irrationalism—regarding science as irrational. In this respect at least the accusation is wide of the mark. For to deny that some cognitive process is the outcome of applying rules of rationality is not to imply that it is an irrational process: the perception of similarity in appearance between two members of the same family also cannot be reduced to the application of rules of rationality. Kuhn’s innovation in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was to suggest that a key element in cognition in science operates in the same fashion.
4. Incommensurability and World-Change
The standard empiricist conception of theory evaluation regards our judgment of the epistemic quality of a theory to be a matter of applying rules of method to the theory and the evidence. Kuhn’s contrasting view is that we judge the quality of a theory (and its treatment of the evidence) by comparing it to a paradigmatic theory. The standards of assessment therefore are not permanent, theory-independent rules. They are not rules, because they involve perceived relations of similarity (of puzzle-solution to a paradigm). They are not theory-independent, since they involve comparison to a (paradigm) theory. They are not permanent, since the paradigm may change in a scientific revolution. For example, to many in the seventeenth century, Newton’s account of gravitation, involving action at a distance with no underlying explanation, seemed a poor account, in that respect at least, when compared, for example, to Ptolemy’s explanation of the motion of the planets in terms of contiguous crystalline spheres or to Descartes’ explanation in terms of vortices. However, later, once Newton’s theory had become accepted and the paradigm by which later theories were judged, the lack of an underlying mechanism for a fundamental force was regarded as no objection, as, for example, in the case of Coulomb’s law of electrostatic attraction. Indeed, in the latter case the very similarity of Coulomb’s equation to Newton’s was taken to be in its favour.
Consequently, comparison between theories will not be as straightforward as the standard empiricist picture would have it, since the standards of evaluation are themselves subject to change. This sort of difficulty in theory comparison is an instance of what Kuhn and Feyerabend called ‘incommensurability’. Theories are incommensurable when they share no common measure. Thus, if paradigms are the measures of attempted puzzle-solutions, then puzzle-solutions developed in different eras of normal science will be judged by comparison to differing paradigms and so lack a common measure. The term ‘incommensurable’ derives from a mathematical use, according to which the side and diagonal of a square are incommensurable in virtue of there being no unit that can be used to measure both exactly. Kuhn stressed that incommensurability did not mean non-comparability (just as the side and diagonal of a square are comparable in many respects). Even so, it is clear that at the very least Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis would make theory comparison rather more difficult than had commonly been supposed, and in some cases impossible.
We can distinguish three types of incommensurability in Kuhn’s remarks: (1) methodological—there is no common measure because the methods of comparison and evaluation change; (2) perceptual/observational—observational evidence cannot provide a common basis for theory comparison, since perceptual experience is theory-dependent; (3) semantic—the fact that the languages of theories from different periods of normal science may not be inter-translatable presents an obstacle to the comparison of those theories. (See Sankey 1993 for a useful discussion of Kuhn’s changing accounts of incommensurability.)
4.1 Methodological Incommensurability
The incommensurability illustrated above whereby puzzle-solutions from different eras of normal science are evaluated by reference to different paradigms, is methodological incommensurability. Another source of methodological incommensurability is the fact that proponents of competing paradigms may not agree on which problems a candidate paradigm should solve (1962/1970a, 148). In general the factors that determine our choices of theory (whether puzzle-solutions or potential paradigm theories) are not fixed and neutral but vary and are dependent in particular on the disciplinary matrix within which the scientist is working. Indeed, since decision making is not rule-governed or algorithmic, there is no guarantee that those working within the same disciplinary matrix must agree on their evaluation of theory (1962/1970a, 200), although in such cases the room for divergence will be less than when the disputants operate within different disciplinary matrices. Despite the possibility of divergence, there is nonetheless widespread agreement on the desirable features of a new puzzle-solution or theory. Kuhn (1977, 321–2) identifies five characteristics that provide the shared basis for a choice of theory: 1. accuracy; 2. consistency (both internal and with other relevant currently accepted theories); 3. scope (its consequences should extend beyond the data it is required to explain); 4. simplicity (organizing otherwise confused and isolated phenomena); 5. fruitfulness (for further research). Even though these are, for Kuhn, constitutive of science (1977c, 331; 1993, 338) they cannot determine scientific choice. First, which features of a theory satisfy these criteria may be disputable (e.g. does simplicity concern the ontological commitments of a theory or its mathematical form?). Secondly, these criteria are imprecise, and so there is room for disagreement about the degree to which they hold. Thirdly, there can be disagreement about how they are to be weighted relative to one another, especially when they conflict.
4.2 Perception, Observational Incommensurability, and World-Change
An important focus of Kuhn’s interest in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was on the nature of perception and how it may be that what a scientist observes can change as a result of scientific revolution. He developed what has become known as the thesis of the theory-dependence of observation, building on the work of N. R. Hanson (1958) while also referring to psychological studies carried out by his Harvard colleagues, Leo Postman and Jerome Bruner (Bruner and Postman 1949). The standard positivist view was that observation provides the neutral arbiter between competing theories. The thesis that Kuhn and Hanson promoted denied this, holding that the nature of observation may be influenced by prior beliefs and experiences. Consequently it cannot be expected that two scientists when observing the same scene will make the same theory-neutral observations. Kuhn asserts that Galileo and an Aristotelian when both looking at a pendulum will see different things (see quoted passage below).
The theory-dependence of observation, by rejecting the role of observation as a theory-neutral arbiter among theories, provides another source of incommensurability. Methodological incommensurability (§4.1 above) denies that there are universal methods for making inferences from the data. The theory-dependence of observation means that even if there were agreed methods of inference and interpretation, incommensurability could still arise since scientists might disagree on the nature of the observational data themselves.
Kuhn expresses or builds on the idea that participants in different disciplinary matrices will see the world differently by claiming that their worlds are different:
In a sense I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved, matrix of space. Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction (1962/1970a, 150).
Remarks such as these gave some commentators the impression that Kuhn was a strong kind of constructivist, holding that the way the world literally is depends on which scientific theory is currently accepted. Kuhn, however, denied any constructivist import to his remarks on world-change. (The closest Kuhn came to constructivism was to acknowledge a parallel with Kantian idealism, which is discussed below in Section 6.4.)
Kuhn likened the change in the phenomenal world to the Gestalt-switch that occurs when one sees the duck-rabbit diagram first as (representing) a duck then as (representing) a rabbit, although he himself acknowledged that he was not sure whether the Gestalt case was just an analogy or whether it illustrated some more general truth about the way the mind works that encompasses the scientific case too.
4.3 Kuhn’s Early Semantic Incommensurability Thesis
Although the theory-dependence of observation plays a significant role in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, neither it nor methodological incommensurability could account for all the phenomena that Kuhn wanted to capture with the notion of incommensurability. Some of his own examples are rather stretched—for instance he says Lavoisier saw oxygen where Priestley saw dephlogisticated air, describing this as a ‘transformation of vision’ (1962/1970a, 118). Moreover observation—if conceived of as a form of perception—does not play a significant part in every science. Kuhn wanted to explain his own experience of reading Aristotle, which first left him with the impression that Aristotle was an inexplicably poor scientist (Kuhn 1987). But careful study led to a change in his understanding that allowed him to see that Aristotle was indeed an excellent scientist. This could not simply be a matter of literally perceiving things differently. Kuhn took the incommensurability that prevented him from properly understanding Aristotle to be at least partly a linguistic, semantic matter. Indeed, Kuhn spent much of his career after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions attempting to articulate a semantic conception of incommensurability.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn asserts that there are important shifts in the meanings of key terms as a consequence of a scientific revolution. For example, Kuhn says:
… the physical referents of these Einsteinian concepts are by no means identical with those of the Newtonian concepts that bear the same name. (Newtonian mass is conserved; Einsteinian is convertible with energy. Only at low relative velocities may the two be measured in the same way, and even then they must not be conceived to be the same.) (1962/1970a, 102)
This is important, because a standard conception of the transition from classical to relativistic physics is that although Einstein’s theory of relativity supersedes Newton’s theory, what we have is an improvement or generalization whereby Newton’s theory is a special case of Einstein’s (to a close approximation). We can therefore say that the later theory is closer to the truth than the older theory. Kuhn’s view that ‘mass’ as used by Newton cannot be translated by ‘mass’ as used by Einstein allegedly renders this kind of comparison impossible. Hence incommensurability is supposed to rule out convergent realism, the view that science shows ever improving approximation to the truth. (Kuhn also thinks, for independent reasons, that the very ideas of matching the truth and similarity to the truth are incoherent (1970a, 206).)
Kuhn’s view as expressed in the passage quoted above depends upon meaning holism—the claim that the meanings of terms are interrelated in such a way that changing the meaning of one term results in changes in the meanings of related terms: “To make the transition to Einstein’s universe, the whole conceptual web whose strands are space, time, matter, force, and so on, had to be shifted and laid down again on nature whole.” (1962/1970a, 149). The assumption of meaning holism is a long standing one in Kuhn’s work. One source for this is the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. Another not unrelated source is the assumption of holism in the philosophy of science that is consequent upon the positivist conception of theoretical meaning. According to the latter, it is not the function of the theoretical part of scientific language to refer to and describe unobserved entities. Only observational sentences directly describe the world, and this accounts for them having the meaning that they do. Theories permit the deduction of observational sentences. This is what gives theoretical expressions their meaning. Theoretical statements cannot, however, be reduced to observational ones. This is because, first, theoretical propositions are collectively involved in the deduction of observational statements, rather than singly. Secondly, theories generate dispositional statements (e.g. about the solubility of a substance, about how they would appear if observed under certain circumstances, etc.), and dispositional statements, being modal, are not equivalent to any truth-function of (non-modal) observation statements. Consequently, the meaning of a theoretical sentence is not equivalent to the meaning of any observational sentence or combination of observational sentences. The meaning of a theoretical term is a product of two factors: the relationship of the theory or theories of which it is a part to its observational consequences and the role that particular term plays within those theories. This is the double-language model of the language of science and was the standard picture of the relationship of a scientific theory to the world when Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s challenge to it lay not in rejecting the anti-realism implicit in the view that theories do not refer to the world but rather in undermining the assumption that the relationship of observation sentence to the world is unproblematic. By insisting on the theory-dependence of observation, Kuhn in effect argued that the holism of theoretical meaning is shared by apparently observational terms also, and for this reason the problem of incommensurability cannot be solved by recourse to theory-neutral observation sentences.
(Although it is true that Kuhn uses the expression ‘physical referent’ in the passage quoted above, this should not be taken to mean an independently existing worldly entity. If that were the case, Kuhn would be committed to the worldly existence of both Newtonian mass and Einsteinian mass (which are nonetheless not the same). It is implausible that Kuhn intended to endorse such a view. A better interpretation is to understand Kuhn as taking reference, in this context, to be a relation between a term and a hypothetical rather than worldly entity. Reference of anything like the Fregean, worldly kind plays no part in Kuhn’s thinking. Again this may be seen as a reflection of the influence of one or other or both of the (later) Wittgensteinian downplaying of reference and of the positivist view that theories are not descriptions of the world but are in one way or another tools for the organization or prediction of observations.)
4.4 Kuhn’s Later Semantic Incommensurability Thesis
Although Kuhn asserted a semantic incommensurability thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions he did not there articulate or argue for the thesis in detail. This he attempted in subsequent work, with the result that the nature of the thesis changed over time. The heart of the incommensurability thesis after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the idea that certain kinds of translation are impossible. Early on Kuhn drew a parallel with Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation (1970a, 202; 1970c, 268). According to the latter, if we are translating one language into another, there are inevitably a multitude of ways of providing a translation that is adequate to the behaviour of the speakers. None of the translations is the uniquely correct one, and in Quine’s view there is no such thing as the meaning of the words to be translated. It was nonetheless clear that Quine’s thesis was rather far from Kuhn’s thesis, indeed that they are incompatible. First, Kuhn thought that incommensurability was a matter of there being no fully adequate translation whereas Quine’s thesis involved the availability of multiple translations. Secondly, Kuhn does believe that the translated expressions do have a meaning, whereas Quine denies this. Thirdly, Kuhn later went on to say that unlike Quine he does not think that reference is inscrutable—it is just very difficult to recover (1976, 191).
Subsequently, Kuhn developed the view that incommensurability arises from differences in classificatory schemes. This is taxonomic incommensurability. A field of science is governed by a taxonomy, which divides its subject matter into kinds. Associated with a taxonomy is a lexical network—a network of related terms. A significant scientific change will bring with it an alteration in the lexical network which in turn will lead to a re-alignment of the taxonomy of the field. The terms of the new and old taxonomies will not be inter-translatable.
The problematic nature of translation arises from two assumptions. First, as we have seen, Kuhn assumes that meaning is (locally) holistic. A change in the meaning of one part of the lexical structure will result in a change to all its parts. This would rule out preservation of the translatability of taxonomies by redefining the changed part in terms of the unchanged part. Secondly, Kuhn adopts the ‘no-overlap’ principle which states that categories in a taxonomy must be hierarchically organised: if two categories have members in common then one must be fully included within the other; otherwise they are disjoint—they cannot simply overlap. This rules out the possibility of an all-encompassing taxonomy that incorporates both the original and the changed taxonomies. (Ian Hacking (1993) relates this to the world-change thesis: after a revolution the world of individuals remains as it was, but scientists now work in a world of new kinds.)
Kuhn continued to develop his conceptual approach to incommensurability. At the time of his death he had made considerable progress on a book in which he related incommensurability to issues in developmental psychology and concept acquisition.
5. History of Science
Kuhn’s historical work covered several topics in the history of physics and astronomy. During the 1950s his focus was primarily on the early theory of heat and the work of Sadi Carnot. However, his first book concerned the Copernican revolution in planetary astronomy (1957). This book grew out of the teaching he had done on James Conant’s General Education in Science curriculum at Harvard but also presaged some of the ideas of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In detailing the problems with the Ptolemaic system and Copernicus’ solution to them, Kuhn showed two things. First, he demonstrated that Aristotelian science was genuine science and that those working within that tradition, in particular those working on Ptolemaic astronomy, were engaged in an entirely reasonable and recognizably scientific project. Secondly, Kuhn showed that Copernicus was himself far more indebted to that tradition than had typically been recognized. Thus the popular view that Copernicus was a modern scientist who overthrew an unscientific and long-outmoded viewpoint is mistaken both by exaggerating the difference between Copernicus and the Ptolemaic astronomers and in underestimating the scientific credentials of work carried out before Copernicus. This mistaken view—a product of the distortion caused by our current state of knowledge—can be rectified only by seeing the activities of Copernicus and his predecessors in the light of the puzzles presented to them by tradition that they inevitably had to work with. While Kuhn does acknowledge the influence of causes outside science (such as a resurgence in Sun worship (1962/70a, 152–3)), he nonetheless emphasizes the fact that astronomers were responding primarily to problems raised within science. What appealed to them in Copernicus’ model was its ability to do away with ad hoc devices in Ptolemy’s system (such as the equant), to explain key phenomena in a pleasing fashion (the observed retrograde motion of the planets), and to explain away otherwise inexplicable coincidences in Ptolemy’s system (such as the alignment of the Sun and the centres of the epicycles of the inferior planets).
In the 1960s Kuhn’s historical work turned toward the early history of quantum theory, culminating in his book Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity. According to classical physics a particle could possess any energy in a continuous range and if it changes energy it does so in a continuous fashion, possessing at some point in time every energy between the initial and final energy states. Modern quantum theory denies both these classical principles. Energy is quantised—a particle may possess only one of a set of discrete energies. Consequently if it changes in energy from one value to the next permitted value it does so discontinuously, jumping straight from one energy to the other without taking any of the intermediate (‘forbidden’) values. In order to explain the distribution of energy within a cavity (black-body radiation), Planck used the device of dividing up the energy states into multiples of the unit or ‘quantum’ hν (where ν is the frequency of radiation and h is what subsequently became known as Planck’s constant). Planck did this in order to employ a statistical technique of Boltzmann’s whereby the range of possible continuous energies is divided into ‘cells’ of similar energies that could be treated together for mathematical purposes. Kuhn notes that Planck was puzzled that in carrying out his derivation, only by fixing the cell size at hν could he get the result he wanted—the technique should have worked for any way of dividing the cells, so long as they were small enough but not too small. This work of Planck’s was carried out in the period 1900–1, which is the date tradition has accorded to the invention of the quantum concept. However, argued Kuhn, Planck did not have in mind a genuine physical discontinuity of energies until 1908, which is after Albert Einstein and Paul Ehrenfest had themselves emphasized it in 1905–6.
Many readers were surprised not to find mention of paradigms or incommensurability. Kuhn later added an Afterword, “Revisiting Planck”, explaining that he had not repudiated or ignored those ideas but that they were implicit in the argument he gave. Indeed the whole essay may be seen as a demonstration of an incommensurability between the mature quantum theory and the early quantum theory of Planck which was still rooted in classical statistical physics. In particular the very term ‘quantum’ changed its meaning between its introduction by Planck and its later use. Kuhn argues that the modern quantum concept was introduced first not by Planck but by Einstein. Furthermore, this fact is hidden both by the continued use of the same term and by the same distortion of history that has affected our conception of Ptolemy and Copernicus. As in Copernicus’ case, Planck has been seen as more revolutionary than in fact he was. In Planck’s case, however, this misconception was also shared by Planck himself later in life.
6. Criticism and Influence
Kuhn’s work met with a largely critical reception among philosophers. Some of this criticism became muted as Kuhn’s work became better understood and as his own thinking underwent transformation. At the same time other developments in philosophy opened up new avenues for criticism. That criticism has largely focussed on two areas. First, it has been argued that Kuhn’s account of the development of science is not entirely accurate. Secondly, critics have attacked Kuhn’s notion of incommensurability, arguing that either it does not exist or, if it does exist, it is not a significant problem. Despite this criticism, Kuhn’s work has been hugely influential, both within philosophy and outside it. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was an important stimulus to what has since become known as ‘Science Studies’, in particular the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK).
6.1 Scientific Change
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions periods of normal science and revolutionary science are clearly distinguished. In particular paradigms and their theories are not questioned and not changed in normal science whereas they are questioned and are changed in revolutionary science. Thus a revolution is, by definition revisionary, and normal science is not (as regards paradigms). Furthermore, normal science does not suffer from the conceptual discontinuities that lead to incommensurability whereas revolutions do. This gives the impression, confirmed by Kuhn’s examples, that revolutions are particularly significant and reasonably rare episodes in the history of science.
This picture has been questioned for its accuracy. Stephen Toulmin (1970) argues that a more realistic picture shows that revisionary changes in science are far more common and correspondingly less dramatic than Kuhn supposes, and that perfectly ‘normal’ science experiences these changes also. Kuhn could reply that such revisions are not revisions to the paradigm but to the non-paradigm puzzle-solutions provided by normal science. But that in turn requires a clear distinction between paradigmatic and non-paradigmatic components of science, a distinction that, arguably, Kuhn has not supplied in any detail.
At the same time, by making revisionary change a necessary condition of revolutionary science, Kuhn ignores important discoveries and developments that are widely regarded as revolutionary, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA and the revolution in molecular biology. Kuhn’s view is that discoveries and revolutions come about only as a consequence of the appearance of anomalies. Yet it is also clear that a discovery might come about in the course of normal science and initiate a ‘revolution’ (in a non-Kuhnian sense) in a field because of the unexpected insight it provides and the way it opens up opportunities for new avenues of research. The double-helical structure of DNA was not expected but immediately suggested a mechanism for the duplication of genetic information (e.g. in mitosis), which had enormous consequences for subsequent biological research.
6.2 Incommensurability
Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis presented a challenge not only to positivist conceptions of scientific change but also to realist ones. For a realist conception of scientific progress also wishes to assert that, by and large, later science improves on earlier science, in particular by approaching closer to the truth. A standard realist response from the late 1960s was to reject the anti-realism and anti-referentialism shared by both Kuhn’s picture and the preceding double-language model. If we do take theories to be potential descriptions of the world, involving reference to worldly entities, kind, and properties, then the problems raised by incommensurability largely evaporate. As we have seen, Kuhn thinks that we cannot properly say that Einstein’s theory is an improvement on Newton’s in the sense that the latter as deals reasonably accurately (only) with a special case of the former. Whether or not the key terms (such as ‘mass’) in the two theories differ in meaning, a realist and referentialist approach to theories permits one to say that Einstein’s theory is closer to the truth than Newton’s. For truth and nearness to the truth depend only on reference and not on sense. Two terms can differ in sense yet share the same reference, and correspondingly two sentences may relate to one another as regards truth without their sharing terms with the same sense. And so even if we retain a holism about the sense of theoretical terms and allow that revolutions lead to shifts in sense, there is no direct inference from this to a shift in reference. Consequently, there is no inference to the inadmissibility of the comparison of theories with respect to their truth-nearness.
While this referentialist response to the incommensurability thesis was initially framed in Fregean terms (Scheffler 1967), it received further impetus from the work of Kripke (1980) and Putnam (1975b), which argued that reference could be achieved without anything akin to Fregean sense and that the natural kind terms of science exemplified this sense-free reference. In particular, causal theories of reference permit continuity of reference even through fairly radical theoretical change. (They do not guarantee continuity in reference, and changes in reference can occur on some causal theories, e.g. Gareth Evans’s (1973). Arguing that they do occur would require more, however, than merely pointing to a change in theory. Rather, it seems, cases of reference change must be identified and argued for on a case by case basis.) Therefore, if taken to encompass terms for quantities and properties (such as ‘mass’), the changes that Kuhn identified as changes in meaning (e.g. those involved in the shift from Newtonian to relativistic physics) would not necessarily be changes that bear on reference, nor, consequently, on comparison for nearness to the truth. The simple causal theory of reference does have its problems, such as explaining the referential mechanism of empty theoretical terms (e.g.caloric and phlogiston) (c.f. Enç 1976, Nola 1980). Causal-descriptive theories (which allow for a descriptive component) tackle such problems while retaining the key idea that referential continuity is possible despite radical theory change (Kroon 1985, Sankey 1994).
Of course, the referentialist response shows only that reference can be retained, not that it must be. Consequently it is only a partial defence of realism against semantic incommensurability. A further component of the defence of realism against incommensurability must be an epistemic one. For referentialism shows that a term can retain reference and hence that the relevant theories may be such that the later constitutes a better approximation to the truth than the earlier. Nonetheless it may not be possible for philosophers or others to know that there has been such progress. Methodological incommensurability in particular seems to threaten the possibility of this knowledge. Kuhn thinks that in order to be in a position to compare theories from older and more recent periods of normal science one needs a perspective external to each and indeed any era of science–what he calls an ‘Archimedean platform’ (1992, 14). However, we never are able to escape from our current perspective. A realist response to this kind of incommensurability may appeal to externalist or naturalized epistemology. These (related) approaches reject the idea that for a method to yield knowledge it must be independent of any particular theory, perspective, or historical/cognitive circumstance. So long as the method has an appropriate kind of reliability it can generate knowledge. Contrary to the internalist view characteristic of the positivists (and, it appears, shared by Kuhn) the reliability of a method does not need to be one that must be evaluable independently of any particular scientific perspective. It is not the case, for example, that the reliability of a method used in science must be justifiable by a priori means. Thus the methods developed in one era may indeed generate knowledge, including knowledge that some previous era got certain matters wrong, or right but only to a certain degree. A naturalized epistemology may add that science itself is in the business of investigating and developing methods. As science develops we would expect its methods to change and develop also.
6.3 Kuhn and Social Science
Kuhn’s influence outside of professional philosophy of science may have been even greater than it was within it. The social sciences in particular took up Kuhn with enthusiasm. There are primarily two reasons for this. First, Kuhn’s picture of science appeared to permit a more liberal conception of what science is than hitherto, one that could be taken to include disciplines such as sociology and psychoanalysis. Secondly, Kuhn’s rejection of rules as determining scientific outcomes appeared to permit appeal to other factors, external to science, in explaining why a scientific revolution took the course that it did.
The status as genuine sciences of what we now call the social and human sciences has widely been held in doubt. Such disciplines lack the remarkable track record of established natural sciences and seem to differ also in the methods they employ. More specifically they fail by pre-Kuhnian philosophical criteria of sciencehood. On the one hand, positivists required of a science that it should be verifiable by reference to its predictive successes. On the other, Popper’s criterion was that a science should be potentially falsifiable by a prediction of the theory. Yet psychoanalysis, sociology and even economics have difficulty in making precise predictions at all, let alone ones that provide for clear confirmation or unambiguous refutation. Kuhn’s picture of a mature science as being dominated by a paradigm that generated sui generis puzzles and criteria for assessing solutions to them could much more easily accommodate these disciplines. For example, Popper famously complained that psychoanalysis could not be scientific because it resists falsification. Kuhn’s account argues that resisting falsification is precisely what every disciplinary matrix in science does. Even disciplines that could not claim to be dominated by a settled paradigm but were beset by competing schools with different fundamental ideas could appeal to Kuhn’s description of the pre-paradigm state of a science in its infancy. Consequently Kuhn’s analysis was popular among those seeking legitimacy as science (and consequently kudos and funding) for their new disciplines. Kuhn himself did not especially promote such extensions of his views, and indeed cast doubt upon them. He denied that psychoanalysis is a science and argued that there are reasons why some fields within the social sciences could not sustain extended periods of puzzle-solving normal science (1991b). Although, he says, the natural sciences involve interpretation just as human and social sciences do, one difference is that hermeneutic re-interpretation, the search for new and deeper intepretations, is the essence of many social scientific enterprises. This contrasts with the natural sciences where an established and unchanging interpretation (e.g. of the heavens) is a pre-condition of normal science. Re-intepretation is the result of a scientific revolution and is typically resisted rather than actively sought. Another reason why regular reinterpretation is part of the human sciences and not the natural sciences is that social and political systems are themselves changing in ways that call for new interpretations, whereas the subject matter of the natural sciences is constant in the relevant respects, permitting a puzzle-solving tradition as well as a standing source of revolution-generating anomalies.
A rather different influence on social science was Kuhn’s influence on the development of social studies of science itself, in particular the ‘Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’. A central claim of Kuhn’s work is that scientists do not make their judgments as the result of consciously or unconsciously following rules. Their judgments are nonetheless tightly constrained during normal science by the example of the guiding paradigm. During a revolution they are released from these constraints (though not completely). Consequently there is a gap left for other factors to explain scientific judgments. Kuhn himself suggests in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that Sun worship may have made Kepler a Copernican and that in other cases, facts about an individual’s life history, personality or even nationality and reputation may play a role (1962/70a, 152–3). Later Kuhn repeated the point, with the additional examples of German Romanticism, which disposed certain scientists to recognize and accept energy conservation, and British social thought which enabled acceptance of Darwinism (1977c, 325). Such suggestions were taken up as providing an opportunity for a new kind of study of science, showing how social and political factors external to science influence the outcome of scientific debates. In what has become known as social constructivism/constructionism (e.g. Pickering 1984) this influence is taken to be central, not marginal, and to extend to the very content of accepted theories. Kuhn’s claim and its exploitation can be seen as analogous to or even an instance of the exploitation of the (alleged) underdetermination of theory by evidence (c.f. Kuhn 1992, 7). Feminists and social theorists (e.g. Nelson 1993) have argued that the fact that the evidence, or, in Kuhn’s case, the shared values of science, do not fix a single choice of theory, allows external factors to determine the final outcome (see Martin 1991 and Schiebinger 1999 for feminist social constructivism). Furthermore, the fact that Kuhn identified values as what guide judgment opens up the possibility that scientists ought to employ different values, as has been argued by feminist and post-colonial writers (e.g. Longino 1994).
Kuhn himself, however, showed only limited sympathy for such developments. In his “The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science” (1992) Kuhn derides those who take the view that in the ‘negotiations’ that determine the accepted outcome of an experiment or its theoretical significance, all that counts are the interests and power relations among the participants. Kuhn targeted the proponents of the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge with such comments; and even if this is not entirely fair to the Strong Programme, it reflects Kuhn’s own view that the primary determinants of the outcome of a scientific episode are to be found within science. External history of science seeks causes of scientific change in social, political, religious and other developments of science. Kuhn sees his work as “pretty straight internalist” (2000: 287). First, the five values Kuhn ascribes to all science are in his view constitutive of science. An enterprise could have different values but it would not be science (1977c, 331; 1993, 338). Secondly, when a scientist is influenced by individual or other factors in applying these values or in coming to a judgment when these values are not decisive, those influencing factors will typically themselves come from within science (especially in modern, professionalized science). Personality may play a role in the acceptance of a theory, because, for example, one scientist is more risk-averse than another (1977c, 325)—but that is still a relationship to the scientific evidence. Even when reputation plays a part, it is typically scientific reputation that encourages the community to back the opinion of an eminent scientist. Thirdly, in a large community such variable factors will tend to cancel out. Kuhn supposes that individual differences are normally distributed and that a judgment corresponding to the mean of the distribution will also correspond to the judgment that would, hypothetically, be demanded by the rules of scientific method, as traditionally conceived (1977c, 333). Moreover, the existence of differences of response within the leeway provided by shared values is crucial to science, since it permits “rational men to disagree” (1977c, 332) and thus to commit themselves to rival theories. Thus the looseness of values and the differences they permit “may . . . appear an indispensable means of spreading the risk which the introduction or support of novelty always entails” (Ibid.).
6.4 Recent Developments
Even if Kuhn’s work has not remained at the centre of the philosophy of science, a number of philosophers have continued to find it fruitful and have sought to develop it in a number of directions. Paul Hoyningen-Huene (1989/1993), as a result of working with Kuhn, developed an important neo-Kantian interpretation of his discussion of perception and world-change. We may distinguish between the world-in-itself and the ‘world’ of our perceptual and related experiences (the phenomenal world). This corresponds to the Kantian distinction between noumena and phenomena. The important difference between Kant and Kuhn is that Kuhn takes the general form of phenomena not to be fixed but changeable. A shift in paradigm can lead, via the theory-dependence of observation, to a difference in one’s experiences of things and thus to a change in one’s phenomenal world. This change in phenomenal world articulates the sense in which the world changes as a result of a scientific revolution while also capturing Kuhn’s claims about the theory-dependence of observation and consequent incommensurability (Hoyningen-Huene 1990).
A rather different direction in which Kuhn’s thought has been developed proposes that his ideas might be illuminated by advances in cognitive psychology. One the one hand work on conceptual structures can help understand what might be correct in the incommensurability thesis (Nersessian 1987, 2003). Several authors have sought in different ways to emphasize what they take to be the Wittgensteinian element in Kuhn’s thought (for example Kindi 1995, Sharrock and Read 2002). Andersen, Barker, and Chen (1996, 1998, 2006) draw in particular on Kuhn’s version of Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance. Kuhn articulates a view according to which the extension of a concept is determined by similarity to a set of exemplary cases rather than by an intension. Andersen, Barker, and Chen argue that Kuhn’s view is supported by the work of Rosch (1972; Rosch and Mervis 1975) on prototypes; furthermore, this approach can be developed in the context of dynamic frames (Barsalou 1992), which can then explain the phenomenon of (semantic) incommensurability.
On the other hand, the psychology of analogical thinking and cognitive habits may also inform our understanding of the concept of a paradigm. Kuhn himself tells us that “The paradigm as shared example is the central element of what I now take to be the most novel and least understood aspect of [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]” (1970a, 187). Kuhn, however, failed to develop the paradigm concept in his later work beyond an early application of its semantic aspects to the explanation of incommensurability. Nonetheless, other philosophers, principally Howard Margolis (1987, 1993) have developed the idea that habits of mind formed by training with paradigms-as-exemplars are an important component in understanding the nature of scientific development. As explained by Nickles (2003b) and Bird (2005), this is borne out by recent work by psychologists on model-based and analogical thinking.
6.5 Assessment
Assessing Kuhn’s significance presents a conundrum. Unquestionably he was one of the most influential philosophers and historians of science of the twentieth century. His most obvious achievement was to have been a major force in bringing about the final demise of logical positivism. Nonetheless, there is no characteristically Kuhnian school that carries on his positive work. It is as if he himself brought about a revolution but did not supply the replacement paradigm. For a period in the 1960s and 1970s it looked as if there was a Kuhnian paradigm ‘historical philosophy of science’, flourishing especially in newly formed departments of history and philosophy of science. But as far as the history of science and science studies more generally are concerned, Kuhn repudiated at least the more radical developments made in his name. Indeed part of Kuhn’s fame must be due to the fact that both his supporters and his detractors took his work to be more revolutionary (anti-rationalist, relativist) than it really was.
Turning to the philosophy of science, it was clear by the end of the 1980s that the centreground was now occupied by a new realism, one that took on board lessons from general philosophy of language and epistemology, in particular referentialist semantics and a belief in the possibility of objective knowledge and justification. There is some irony therefore in the fact that it was the demise of logical positivism/empiricism that led to the rebirth of scientific realism along with causal and externalist semantics and epistemology, positions that Kuhn rejected.
One way of understanding this outcome is to see that Kuhn’s relationship on the one hand to positivism and on the other hand to realism places him in an interesting position. Kuhn’s thesis of the theory-dependence of observation parallels related claims by realists. In the hands of realists the thesis is taken to undermine the theory-observation dichotomy that permitted positivists to take an anti-realist attitude to theories. In the hands of Kuhn however, the thesis is taken, in effect, to extend anti-realism from theories to observation also. This in turn fuels the thesis of incommensurability. The fact that incommensurability is founded upon a response to positivism diametrically opposed to the realist response explains why much of Kuhn’s later philosophical work, which developed the incommensurability thesis, has had little impact on the majority of philosophers of science.
The explanation of scientific development in terms of paradigms was not only novel but radical too, insofar as it gives a naturalistic explanation of belief-change. Naturalism was not in the early 1960s the familiar part of philosophical landscape that it has subsequently become. Kuhn’s explanation contrasted with explanations in terms of rules of method (or confirmation, falsification etc.) that most philosophers of science took to be constitutive of rationality. Furthermore, the relevant disciplines (psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence) were not then advanced enough to to support Kuhn’s contentions concerning paradigms, or those disciplines were antithetical to Kuhn’s views (in the case of classical AI). Now that naturalism has become an accepted component of philosophy, there has recently been interest in reassessing Kuhn’s work in the light of developments in the relevant sciences, many of which provide corroboration for Kuhn’s claim that science is driven by relations of perceived similarity and analogy. It may yet be that a characteristically Kuhnian thesis will play a prominent part in our understanding of science.
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The best study guide to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the planet, from the creators of SparkNotes. Get the summaries, analysis, and quotes you need.
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Cited and Celebrated. Though The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had obvious implications for scientists themselves, it was also influential across disciplines: sociologists, philosophers and even economists argued against the book or used it in their own work. It follows, then, that it is one of the most-cited academic works of all time, an impressive achievement for a book published only 50 years ago.
Paradigm Shifts Galore. The term “paradigm shift,” which Kuhn uses to describe the process by which one set of scientific perceptions and questions replaces another, is now commonplace in popular culture. But to ensure that the term remains associated with the man who made it famous, the American Chemical Society created a prize called the Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award, given out to only the most original thinkers in chemistry.
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2022-07-20T14:36:45+00:00
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922–1996) is one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century,
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en
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Vatican Observatory
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https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/event/thomas-kuhn-born-1922/2024-07-18/
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922–1996) 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. Kuhn’s contribution to the philosophy of science marked not only a break with several key positivist doctrines, but also inaugurated a new style of philosophy of science that brought it closer to the history of science. His account of the development of science held that science enjoys periods of stable growth punctuated by revisionary revolutions. To this thesis, Kuhn added the controversial ‘incommensurability thesis’, that theories from differing periods suffer from certain deep kinds of failure of comparability.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/
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7992
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https://louis.pressbooks.pub/introphilosophy/chapter/reading-3-philosophy-of-science-and-technology/
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Thomas Kuhn – The Priority of Paradigms – Readings in Western Philosophy for Louisiana Learners
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2024-01-01T00:00:00
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https://louis.pressbooks.pub/introphilosophy/chapter/reading-3-philosophy-of-science-and-technology/
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23
Biography of Thomas Kuhn
Vol. II, No. 2
44
The Priority of Paradigms
(Note: Materials are included on the basis of fair use as described in the Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Open Education.)
What need we know, Wittgenstein asked, in order that we apply terms like ‘chair,’ or ‘leaf,’ or ‘game’ unequivocally and without provoking argument?2 That question is very old and has generally been answered by saying that we must know, consciously or intuitively, what a chair, or leaf, or game is. We must, that is, grasp some set of attributes that all games and that only games have in common. Wittgenstein, however, concluded that, given the way we use language and the sort of world to which we apply it, there need be no such set of characteristics. Though a discussion of some of the attributes shared by a number of games or chairs or leaves often helps us learn how to employ the corresponding term, there is no set of characteristics that is simultaneously applicable to all members of the class and to them alone. Instead, confronted with a previously unobserved activity, we apply the term ‘game’ because what we are seeing bears a close “family resemblance” to a number of the activities that we have previously learned to call by that name. For Wittgenstein, in short, games, and chairs, and leaves are natural families, each constituted by a network of overlapping and crisscross resemblances. The existence of such a network sufficiently accounts for our success in identifying the corresponding object or activity. Only if the families we named overlapped and merged gradually into one another—only, that is, if there were no natural families—would our success in identifying and naming provide evidence for a set of common characteristics corresponding to each of the class names we employ. Something of the same sort may very well hold for the various research problems and techniques that arise within a single normal scientific tradition. What these have in common is not that they satisfy some explicit or even some fully discoverable set of rules and assumptions that gives the tradition its character and its hold upon the scientific mind. Instead, they may relate by resemblance and by modeling to one or another part of the scientific corpus which the community in question already recognizes as among its established achievements.
Scientists work from models acquired through education and through subsequent exposure to the literature often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms. And because they do so, they need no full set of rules. The coherence displayed by the research tradition in which they participate may not imply even the existence of an underlying body of rules and assumptions that additional historical or philosophical investigation might uncover. That scientists do not usually ask or debate what makes a particular problem or solution legitimate tempts us to suppose that, at least intuitively, they know the answer. But it may only indicate that neither the question nor the answer is felt to be relevant to their research. Paradigms may be prior to, more binding, and more complete than any set of rules for research that could be unequivocally abstracted from them. So far this point has been entirely theoretical: paradigms could determine normal science without the intervention of discoverable rules. Let me now try to increase both its clarity and urgency by indicating some of the reasons for believing that paradigms actually do operate in this manner. The first, which has already been discussed quite fully, is the severe difficulty of discovering the rules that have guided particular normal-scientific traditions. That difficulty is very nearly the same as the one the philosopher encounters when he tries to say what all games have in common. The second, to which the first is really a corollary, is rooted in the nature of scientific education. Scientists, it should already be clear, never learn concepts, laws, and theories in the abstract and by themselves. Instead, these intellectual tools are from the start encountered in a historically and pedagogically prior unit that displays them with and through their applications. A new theory is always announced together with applications to some concrete range of natural phenomena; without them it would not be even a candidate for acceptance. After it has been accepted, those same applications or others accompany the theory into the textbooks from which the future practitioner will learn his trade. They are not there merely as embroidery or even as documentation. On the contrary, the process of learning a theory depends upon the study of applications, including practice problem-solving both with a pencil and paper and with instruments in the laboratory. If, for example, the student of Newtonian dynamics ever discovers the meaning of terms like ‘force,’ ‘mass,’ ‘space,’ and ‘time,’ he does so less from the incomplete though sometimes helpful definitions in his text than by observing and participating in the application of these concepts to problem-solution. That process of learning by finger exercise or by doing continues throughout the process of professional initiation. As the student proceeds from his freshman course to and through his doctoral dissertation, the problems assigned to him become more complex and less completely precedented. But they continue to be closely modeled on previous achievements as are the problems that normally occupy him during his subsequent independent scientific career. One is at liberty to suppose that somewhere along the way the scientist has intuitively abstracted rules of the game for himself, but there is little reason to believe it. Though many scientists talk easily and well about the particular individual hypotheses that underlie a concrete piece of current research, they are little better than laymen at characterizing the established bases of their field, its legitimate problems and methods. If they have learned such abstractions at all, they show it mainly through their ability to do successful research. That ability can, however, be understood without recourse to hypothetical rules of the game. These consequences of scientific education have a converse that provides a third reason to suppose that paradigms guide research by direct modeling as well as through abstracted rules. Normal science can proceed without rules only so long as the relevant scientific community accepts without question the particular problem-solutions already achieved. Rules should therefore become important and the characteristic unconcern about them should vanish whenever paradigms or models are felt to be insecure. That is, moreover, exactly what does occur. The pre-paradigm period, in particular, is regularly marked by frequent and deep debates over legitimate methods, problems, and standards of solution, though these serve rather to define schools than to produce agreement. We have already noted a few of these debates in optics and electricity, and they played an even larger role in the development of seventeenth-century chemistry and of early nineteenth-century geology.3 Furthermore, debates like these do not vanish once and for all with the appearance of a paradigm. Though almost non-existent during periods of normal science, they recur regularly just before and during scientific revolutions, the periods when paradigms are first under attack and then subject to change. The transition from Newtonian to quantum mechanics evoked many debates about both the nature and the standards of physics, some of which still continue.4 There are people alive today who can remember the similar arguments engendered by Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory and by statistical mechanics.5 And earlier still, the assimilation of Galileo’s and Newton’s mechanics gave rise to a particularly famous series of debates with Aristotelians, Cartesians, and Leibnizians about the standards legitimate to science.6 When scientists disagree about whether the fundamental problems of their field have been solved, the search for rules gains a function that it does not ordinarily possess. While paradigms remain secure, however, they can function without agreement over rationalization or without any attempted rationalization at all.
A fourth reason for granting paradigms a status prior to that of shared rules and assumptions can conclude this section. The introduction to this essay suggested that there can be small revolutions as well as large ones, that some revolutions affect only the members of a professional subspecialty, and that for such groups even the discovery of a new and unexpected phenomenon may be revolutionary. The next section will introduce selected revolutions of that sort, and it is still far from clear how they can exist. If normal science is so rigid and if scientific communities are so close-knit as the preceding discussion has implied, how can a change of paradigm ever affect only a small subgroup? What has been said so far may have seemed to imply that normal science is a single monolithic and unified enterprise that must stand or fall with any one of its paradigms as well as with all of them together. But science is obviously seldom or never like that. Often, viewing all fields together, it seems instead a rather ramshackle structure with little coherence among its various parts. Nothing said to this point should, however, conflict with that very familiar observation.
On the contrary, substituting paradigms for rules should make the diversity of scientific fields and specialties easier to understand. Explicit rules, when they exist, are usually common to a very broad scientific group, but paradigms need not be. The practitioners of widely separated fields, say astronomy and taxonomic botany, are educated by exposure to quite different achievements described in very different books. And even men who, being in the same or in closely related fields, begin by studying many of the same books and achievements may acquire rather different paradigms in the course of professional specialization. Consider, for a single example, the quite large and diverse community constituted by all physical scientists. Each member of that group today is taught the laws of, say, quantum mechanics, and most of them employ these laws at some point in their research or teaching. But they do not all learn the same applications of these laws, and they are not therefore all affected in the same ways by changes in quantum-mechanical practice. On the road to professional specialization, a few physical scientists encounter only the basic principles of quantum mechanics. Others study in detail the paradigm applications of these principles to chemistry, still others to the physics of the solid state, and so on. What quantum mechanics means to each of them depends upon what courses he has had, what texts he has read, and which journals he studies. It follows that, though a change in quantum-mechanical law will be revolutionary for all of these groups, a change that reflects only on one or another of the paradigm applications of quantum mechanics need be revolutionary only for the members of a particular professional subspecialty. For the rest of the profession and for those who practice other physical sciences, that change need not be revolutionary at all. In short, though quantum mechanics (or Newtonian dynamics, or electromagnetic theory) is a paradigm for many scientific groups, it is not the same paradigm for them all. Therefore, it can simultaneously determine several traditions of normal science that overlap without being coextensive. A revolution produced within one of these traditions will not necessarily extend to the others as well. One brief illustration of specialization’s effect may give this whole series of points additional force. An investigator who hoped to learn something about what scientists took the atomic theory to be asked a distinguished physicist and an eminent chemist whether a single atom of helium was or was not a molecule. Both answered without hesitation, but their answers were not the same. For the chemist the atom of helium was a molecule because it behaved like one with respect to the kinetic theory of gases. For the physicist, on the other hand, the helium atom was not a molecule because it displayed no molecular spectrum.7 Presumably both men were talking of the same particle, but they were viewing it through their own research training and practice. Their experience in problem-solving told them what a molecule must be. Undoubtedly their experiences had had much in common, but they did not, in this case, tell the two specialists the same thing. As we proceed we shall discover how consequential paradigm differences of this sort can occasionally be.
Notes
2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York, 1953), pp. 31–36. Wittgenstein, however, says almost nothing about the sort of world necessary to support the naming procedure he outlines. Part of the point that follows cannot therefore be attributed to him.
3 For chemistry, see H. Metzger, Les doctrines chimiques en France du début du XVII e à la fin du XVIII e siècle (Paris, 1923), pp. 24–27, 146–49; and Marie Boas, Robert Boyle and Seventeenth-Century Chemistry (Cambridge, 1958), chap. ii. For geology, see Walter F. Cannon, “The Uniformitarian-Catastrophist Debate,” Isis 51 (1960), 38–55; and C. C. Gillispie, Genesis and Geology (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), chaps, iv–v.
4 For controversies over quantum mechanics, see Jean Ullmo, La crise de la physique quantique (Paris, 1950), chap. II.
5 For statistical mechanics, see René Dugas, La théorie physique au sens de Boltzmann et ses prolongements modernes (Neuchatel, 1959), pp. 158–84, 206–19. For the reception of Maxwell’s work, see Max Planck, “Maxwell’s Influence in Germany,” in James Clerk Maxwell: A Commemoration Volume, 1831–1931 (Cambridge, 1931), pp. 45–65, esp. pp. 58– 63; and Silvanus P. Thompson, The Life of William Thomson Baron Kelvin of Largs (London, 1910), II, 1021–27.
6 For a sample of the battle with the Aristotelians, see A. Koyré, “A Documentary History of the Problem of Fall from Kepler to Newton,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, XLV (1955), 329–95. For the debates with the Cartesians and Leibnizians, see Pierre Brunet, L’introduction des théories de Newton en France au XVII e siècle (Paris, 1931); and A. Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, 1957), chap. XI.
7 The investigator was James K. Senior, to whom I am indebted for a verbal report. Some related issues are treated in his paper, “The Vernacular of the Laboratory,” Philosophy of Science, XXV (1958), 163–68.
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http://scihi.org/thomas-kuhn-scientific-revolutions/
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Thomas Kuhn and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions
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http://scihi.org/thomas-kuhn-scientific-revolutions/
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On July 18, 1922, American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born. He is most famous for his controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term “paradigm shift“, which has since become an English-language idiom.
“Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.”
— Thomas Kuhn, Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research? (1970)
Thomas Kuhn – Early Years
Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Samuel L. Kuhn, who was trained as a hydraulic engineer at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and his wife Minette. He attended the Hessian Hills School in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, a liberal school that encouraged students to think independently, and graduated from The Taft School in Watertown, CT, in 1940, where he became aware of his serious interest in mathematics and physics. He obtained his B.S. degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943 with summa cum laude. After graduation, he worked on radar for the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard and later for the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development in Europe. He returned to Harvard at the end of the war, obtained his master’s degree in physics in 1946, and worked toward a PhD degree in the same department, which he obtained in 1949 under the supervision of John Van Vleck. According to his autobiographical notes, his three years of total academic freedom as a Harvard Junior Fellow were crucial in allowing him to switch from physics to the history and philosophy of science.
“Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion.”
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Seeing through the Eyes of the Author
From 1948 to 1956, Kuhn taught a course in the history of science at Harvard at the suggestion of university president James Conant. His encounter with classical texts, especially Aristotle’s Physics, was a crucial experience for him. He realized that it was a great mistake to read and judge an ancient scientific text from the perspective of current science and that one could not really understand it unless one got inside the mind of its author and saw the world through his eyes, through the conceptual framework he employed to describe phenomena. This understanding shaped his later historical and philosophical studies.[2]
“Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense… that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way.”
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
The History of Science
This led Kuhn to concentrate on history of science and in due course he was appointed to an assistant professorship in general education and the history of science. During this period his work focussed on eighteenth century matter theory and the early history of thermodynamics. Kuhn then turned to the history of astronomy, and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution.[3] After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department, being named Professor of the History of Science in 1961. Kuhn interviewed and tape recorded Danish physicist Niels Bohr the day before Bohr’s death.[4] At Berkeley, he wrote and published (in 1962) his best known and most influential work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. He served as the president of the History of Science Society from 1969-70. In 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. In 1994 Kuhn was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in 1996 in Cambridge, Massachussetts, at age 73.[8]
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The central idea of his extraordinarily influential — and controversial — book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that the development of science is driven, in normal periods of science, by adherence to what Kuhn called a ‘paradigm’. The functions of a paradigm are to supply puzzles for scientists to solve and to provide the tools for their solution. A crisis in science arises when confidence is lost in the ability of the paradigm to solve particularly worrying puzzles called ‘anomalies’. Crisis is followed by a scientific revolution if the existing paradigm is superseded by a rival. Kuhn claimed that science guided by one paradigm would be ‘incommensurable’ with science developed under a different paradigm, by which is meant that there is no common measure for assessing the different scientific theories.[3]
Paradigm Shift
The enormous impact of Kuhn’s work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides “paradigm shift“, Kuhn popularized the word “paradigm” itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics and the work of Georg Lichtenberg to its current broader meaning,[5] coined the term “normal science” to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term “scientific revolutions” in the plural, taking place at widely different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single “Scientific Revolution” in the late Renaissance. The frequent use of the phrase “paradigm shift” has made scientists more aware of and in many cases more receptive to paradigm changes, so that Kuhn’s analysis of the evolution of scientific views has by itself influenced that evolution.
The Process of Scientific Change
Kuhn explains the process of scientific change as the result of various phases of paradigm change.
Phase 1: It exists only once and is the pre-paradigm phase, in which there is no consensus on any particular theory. This phase is characterized by several incompatible and incomplete theories. Consequently, most scientific inquiry takes the form of lengthy books, as there is no common body of facts that may be taken for granted.
Phase 2: Normal science begins, in which puzzles are solved within the context of the dominant paradigm. As long as there is consensus within the discipline, normal science continues. Over time, progress in normal science may reveal anomalies, facts that are difficult to explain within the context of the existing paradigm.
Phase 3: If the paradigm proves chronically unable to account for anomalies, the community enters a crisis period. Crises are often resolved within the context of normal science. However, after significant efforts of normal science within a paradigm fail, science may enter the next phase.
Phase 4: Paradigm shift, or scientific revolution, is the phase in which the underlying assumptions of the field are reexamined and a new paradigm is established.
Phase 5: Post-Revolution, the new paradigm’s dominance is established and so scientists return to normal science, solving puzzles within the new paradigm.
Impact
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time. Kuhn’s contribution to the philosophy of science marked not only a break with several key positivist doctrines, but also inaugurated a new style of philosophy of science that brought it closer to the history of science. Years after the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn dropped the concept of a paradigm and began to focus on the semantic aspects of scientific theories. In particular, Kuhn focuses on the taxonomic structure of scientific kind terms. As a consequence, a scientific revolution is not defined as a ‘change of paradigm’ anymore, but rather as a change in the taxonomic structure of the theoretical language of science
Philosophy of Science: Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, lecture 1, [12]
References and Further Reading:
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http://scihi.org/thomas-kuhn-scientific-revolutions/
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Thomas Kuhn and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions
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2021-07-18T17:37:10
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http://scihi.org/thomas-kuhn-scientific-revolutions/
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On July 18, 1922, American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born. He is most famous for his controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term “paradigm shift“, which has since become an English-language idiom.
“Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.”
— Thomas Kuhn, Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research? (1970)
Thomas Kuhn – Early Years
Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Samuel L. Kuhn, who was trained as a hydraulic engineer at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and his wife Minette. He attended the Hessian Hills School in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, a liberal school that encouraged students to think independently, and graduated from The Taft School in Watertown, CT, in 1940, where he became aware of his serious interest in mathematics and physics. He obtained his B.S. degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943 with summa cum laude. After graduation, he worked on radar for the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard and later for the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development in Europe. He returned to Harvard at the end of the war, obtained his master’s degree in physics in 1946, and worked toward a PhD degree in the same department, which he obtained in 1949 under the supervision of John Van Vleck. According to his autobiographical notes, his three years of total academic freedom as a Harvard Junior Fellow were crucial in allowing him to switch from physics to the history and philosophy of science.
“Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion.”
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Seeing through the Eyes of the Author
From 1948 to 1956, Kuhn taught a course in the history of science at Harvard at the suggestion of university president James Conant. His encounter with classical texts, especially Aristotle’s Physics, was a crucial experience for him. He realized that it was a great mistake to read and judge an ancient scientific text from the perspective of current science and that one could not really understand it unless one got inside the mind of its author and saw the world through his eyes, through the conceptual framework he employed to describe phenomena. This understanding shaped his later historical and philosophical studies.[2]
“Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense… that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way.”
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
The History of Science
This led Kuhn to concentrate on history of science and in due course he was appointed to an assistant professorship in general education and the history of science. During this period his work focussed on eighteenth century matter theory and the early history of thermodynamics. Kuhn then turned to the history of astronomy, and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution.[3] After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department, being named Professor of the History of Science in 1961. Kuhn interviewed and tape recorded Danish physicist Niels Bohr the day before Bohr’s death.[4] At Berkeley, he wrote and published (in 1962) his best known and most influential work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. He served as the president of the History of Science Society from 1969-70. In 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991. In 1994 Kuhn was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in 1996 in Cambridge, Massachussetts, at age 73.[8]
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The central idea of his extraordinarily influential — and controversial — book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that the development of science is driven, in normal periods of science, by adherence to what Kuhn called a ‘paradigm’. The functions of a paradigm are to supply puzzles for scientists to solve and to provide the tools for their solution. A crisis in science arises when confidence is lost in the ability of the paradigm to solve particularly worrying puzzles called ‘anomalies’. Crisis is followed by a scientific revolution if the existing paradigm is superseded by a rival. Kuhn claimed that science guided by one paradigm would be ‘incommensurable’ with science developed under a different paradigm, by which is meant that there is no common measure for assessing the different scientific theories.[3]
Paradigm Shift
The enormous impact of Kuhn’s work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides “paradigm shift“, Kuhn popularized the word “paradigm” itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics and the work of Georg Lichtenberg to its current broader meaning,[5] coined the term “normal science” to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term “scientific revolutions” in the plural, taking place at widely different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single “Scientific Revolution” in the late Renaissance. The frequent use of the phrase “paradigm shift” has made scientists more aware of and in many cases more receptive to paradigm changes, so that Kuhn’s analysis of the evolution of scientific views has by itself influenced that evolution.
The Process of Scientific Change
Kuhn explains the process of scientific change as the result of various phases of paradigm change.
Phase 1: It exists only once and is the pre-paradigm phase, in which there is no consensus on any particular theory. This phase is characterized by several incompatible and incomplete theories. Consequently, most scientific inquiry takes the form of lengthy books, as there is no common body of facts that may be taken for granted.
Phase 2: Normal science begins, in which puzzles are solved within the context of the dominant paradigm. As long as there is consensus within the discipline, normal science continues. Over time, progress in normal science may reveal anomalies, facts that are difficult to explain within the context of the existing paradigm.
Phase 3: If the paradigm proves chronically unable to account for anomalies, the community enters a crisis period. Crises are often resolved within the context of normal science. However, after significant efforts of normal science within a paradigm fail, science may enter the next phase.
Phase 4: Paradigm shift, or scientific revolution, is the phase in which the underlying assumptions of the field are reexamined and a new paradigm is established.
Phase 5: Post-Revolution, the new paradigm’s dominance is established and so scientists return to normal science, solving puzzles within the new paradigm.
Impact
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time. Kuhn’s contribution to the philosophy of science marked not only a break with several key positivist doctrines, but also inaugurated a new style of philosophy of science that brought it closer to the history of science. Years after the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn dropped the concept of a paradigm and began to focus on the semantic aspects of scientific theories. In particular, Kuhn focuses on the taxonomic structure of scientific kind terms. As a consequence, a scientific revolution is not defined as a ‘change of paradigm’ anymore, but rather as a change in the taxonomic structure of the theoretical language of science
Philosophy of Science: Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, lecture 1, [12]
References and Further Reading:
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"Thomas S. Kuhn",
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About Thomas S. Kuhn: American historian and philosopher of science, a leading contributor to the change of focus in the philosophy and sociology of scie...
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https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4735497.Thomas_S_Kuhn
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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
4.03 avg rating — 27,711 ratings — published 1962 — 188 editions
The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought
4.12 avg rating — 820 ratings — published 1957 — 53 editions
The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change
4.03 avg rating — 145 ratings — published 1977 — 19 editions
The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview
by
James Conant (Editor),
John Haugeland (Editor)
4.04 avg rating — 121 ratings — published 1993 — 10 editions
Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912
4.30 avg rating — 47 ratings — published 1978 — 6 editions
¿Qué son las revoluciones científicas? y otros ensayos
by
Manuel Cruz (Series Editor)
3.68 avg rating — 25 ratings — published 1987
The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science
3.45 avg rating — 11 ratings — published 1992
Sources for History of Quantum Physics
3.75 avg rating — 8 ratings — 2 editions
The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science
by
Bojana Mladenovic (Editor)
4.14 avg rating — 7 ratings — 5 editions
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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/
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Thomas Kuhn (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
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1. Life and Career
Thomas Kuhn’s academic life started in physics. He then switched to history of science, and as his career developed he moved over to philosophy of science, although retaining a strong interest in the history of physics. In 1943, he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude. Thereafter he spent the remainder of the war years in research related to radar at Harvard and then in Europe. He gained his master’s degree in physics in 1946, and his doctorate in 1949, also in physics (concerning an application of quantum mechanics to solid state physics). Kuhn was elected to the prestigious Society of Fellows at Harvard, another of whose members was W. V. Quine. At this time, and until 1956, Kuhn taught a class in science for undergraduates in the humanities, as part of the General Education in Science curriculum, developed by James B. Conant, the President of Harvard. This course was centred around historical case studies, and this was Kuhn’s first opportunity to study historical scientific texts in detail. His initial bewilderment on reading the scientific work of Aristotle was a formative experience, followed as it was by a more or less sudden ability to understand Aristotle properly, undistorted by knowledge of subsequent science.
This led Kuhn to concentrate on history of science and in due course he was appointed to an assistant professorship in general education and the history of science. During this period his work focussed on eighteenth century matter theory and the early history of thermodynamics. Kuhn then turned to the history of astronomy, and in 1957 he published his first book, The Copernican Revolution.
In 1961 Kuhn became a full professor at the University of California at Berkeley, having moved there in 1956 to take up a post in history of science, but in the philosophy department. This enabled him to develop his interest in the philosophy of science. At Berkeley Kuhn’s colleagues included Stanley Cavell, who introduced Kuhn to the works of Wittgenstein, and Paul Feyerabend. With Feyerabend Kuhn discussed a draft of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which was published in 1962 in the series “International Encyclopedia of Unified Science”, edited by Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap. The central idea of this extraordinarily influential—and controversial—book is that the development of science is driven, in normal periods of science, by adherence to what Kuhn called a ‘paradigm’. The functions of a paradigm are to supply puzzles for scientists to solve and to provide the tools for their solution. A crisis in science arises when confidence is lost in the ability of the paradigm to solve particularly worrying puzzles called ‘anomalies’. Crisis is followed by a scientific revolution if the existing paradigm is superseded by a rival. Kuhn claimed that science guided by one paradigm would be ‘incommensurable’ with science developed under a different paradigm, by which is meant that there is no common measure for assessing the different scientific theories. This thesis of incommensurability, developed at the same time by Feyerabend, rules out certain kinds of comparison of the two theories and consequently rejects some traditional views of scientific development, such as the view that later science builds on the knowledge contained within earlier theories, or the view that later theories are closer approximations to the truth than earlier theories. Most of Kuhn’s subsequent work in philosophy was spent in articulating and developing the ideas in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, although some of these, such as the thesis of incommensurability, underwent transformation in the process.
According to Kuhn himself (2000, 307), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions first aroused interest among social scientists, although it did in due course create the interest among philosophers that Kuhn had intended (and also before long among a much wider academic and general audience). While acknowledging the importance of Kuhn’s ideas, the philosophical reception was nonetheless 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. This was highlighted by his rejection of the distinction between discovery and justification (denying that we can distinguish between the psychological process of thinking up an idea and the logical process of justifying its claim to truth) and his emphasis on incommensurability (the claim that certain kinds of comparison between theories are impossible). The negative response among philosophers was exacerbated by an important naturalistic tendency in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that was then unfamiliar. A particularly significant instance of this was Kuhn’s insistence on the importance of the history of science for philosophy of science. The opening sentence of the book reads: “History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed” (1962/1970, 1). Also significant and unfamiliar was Kuhn’s appeal to psychological literature and examples (such as linking theory-change with the changing appearance of a Gestalt image).
In 1964 Kuhn left Berkeley to take up the position of M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. In the following year an important event took place which helped promote Kuhn’s profile further among philosophers. An International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science was held at Bedford College, London. One of the key events of the Colloquium was intended to be a debate between Kuhn and Feyerabend, with Feyerabend promoting the critical rationalism that he shared with Popper. As it was, Feyerabend was ill and unable to attend, and the papers delivered focussed on Kuhn’s work. John Watkins took Feyerabend’s place in a session chaired by Popper. The ensuing discussion, to which Popper and also Margaret Masterman and Stephen Toulmin contributed, compared and contrasted the viewpoints of Kuhn and Popper and thereby helped illuminate the significance of Kuhn’s approach. Papers from these discussants along with contributions from Feyerabend and Lakatos, were published several years later, in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (1970) (the fourth volume of proceedings from this Colloquium). In the same year the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published, including an important postscript in which Kuhn clarified his notion of paradigm. This was in part in response to Masterman’s (1970) criticism that Kuhn had used ‘paradigm’ in a wide variety of ways; in addition, Kuhn felt that critics had failed to appreciate the emphasis he placed upon the idea of a paradigm as an exemplar or model of puzzle-solving. Kuhn also, for the first time, explicitly gave his work an anti-realist element by denying the coherence of the idea that theories could be regarded as more or less close to the truth.
A collection of Kuhn’s essays in the philosophy and history of science was published in 1977, with the title The Essential Tension taken from one of Kuhn’s earliest essays in which he emphasizes the importance of tradition in science. The following year saw the publication of his second historical monograph Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, concerning the early history of quantum mechanics. In 1983 he was named Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT. Kuhn continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s to work on a variety of topics in both history and philosophy of science, including the development of the concept of incommensurability, and at the time of his death in 1996 he was working on a second philosophical monograph dealing with, among other matters, an evolutionary conception of scientific change and concept acquisition in developmental psychology.
2. The Development of Science
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn paints a picture of the development of science quite unlike any that had gone before. Indeed, before Kuhn, there was little by way of a carefully considered, theoretically explained account of scientific change. Instead, there was a conception of how science ought to develop that was a by-product of the prevailing philosophy of science, as well as a popular, heroic view of scientific progress. According to such opinions, science develops by the addition of new truths to the stock of old truths, or the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, and in the odd case, the correction of past errors. Such progress might accelerate in the hands of a particularly great scientist, but progress itself is guaranteed by the scientific method.
In the 1950s, when Kuhn began his historical studies of science, the history of science was a young academic discipline. Even so, it was becoming clear that scientific change was not always as straightforward as the standard, traditional view would have it. Kuhn was the first and most important author to articulate a developed alternative account. Since the standard view dovetailed with the dominant, positivist-influenced philosophy of science, a non-standard view would have important consequences for the philosophy of science. Kuhn had little formal philosophical training but was nonetheless fully conscious of the significance of his innovation for philosophy, and indeed he called his work ‘history for philosophical purposes’ (Kuhn 2000, 276).
According to Kuhn the development of a science is not uniform but has alternating ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ (or ‘extraordinary’) phases. The revolutionary phases are not merely periods of accelerated progress, but differ qualitatively from normal science. Normal science does resemble the standard cumulative picture of scientific progress, on the surface at least. Kuhn describes normal science as ‘puzzle-solving’ (1962/1970a, 35–42). While this term suggests that normal science is not dramatic, its main purpose is to convey the idea that like someone doing a crossword puzzle or a chess problem or a jigsaw, the puzzle-solver expects to have a reasonable chance of solving the puzzle, that his doing so will depend mainly on his own ability, and that the puzzle itself and its methods of solution will have a high degree of familiarity. A puzzle-solver is not entering completely uncharted territory. Because its puzzles and their solutions are familiar and relatively straightforward, normal science can expect to accumulate a growing stock of puzzle-solutions. Revolutionary science, however, is not cumulative in that, according to Kuhn, scientific revolutions involve a revision to existing scientific belief or practice (1962/1970a, 92). Not all the achievements of the preceding period of normal science are preserved in a revolution, and indeed a later period of science may find itself without an explanation for a phenomenon that in an earlier period was held to be successfully explained. This feature of scientific revolutions has become known as ‘Kuhn-loss’ (1962/1970a, 99–100).
If, as in the standard picture, scientific revolutions are like normal science but better, then revolutionary science will at all times be regarded as something positive, to be sought, promoted, and welcomed. Revolutions are to be sought on Popper’s view also, but not because they add to positive knowledge of the truth of theories but because they add to the negative knowledge that the relevant theories are false. Kuhn rejected both the traditional and Popperian views in this regard. He claims that normal science can succeed in making progress only if there is a strong commitment by the relevant scientific community to their shared theoretical beliefs, values, instruments and techniques, and even metaphysics. This constellation of shared commitments Kuhn at one point calls a ‘disciplinary matrix’ (1970a, 182) although elsewhere he often uses the term ‘paradigm’. Because commitment to the disciplinary matrix is a pre-requisite for successful normal science, an inculcation of that commitment is a key element in scientific training and in the formation of the mind-set of a successful scientist. This tension between the desire for innovation and the necessary conservativeness of most scientists was the subject of one of Kuhn’s first essays in the theory of science, “The Essential Tension” (1959). The unusual emphasis on a conservative attitude distinguishes Kuhn not only from the heroic element of the standard picture but also from Popper and his depiction of the scientist forever attempting to refute her most important theories.
This conservative resistance to the attempted refutation of key theories means that revolutions are not sought except under extreme circumstances. Popper’s philosophy requires that a single reproducible, anomalous phenomenon be enough to result in the rejection of a theory (Popper 1959, 86–7). Kuhn’s view is that during normal science scientists neither test nor seek to confirm the guiding theories of their disciplinary matrix. Nor do they regard anomalous results as falsifying those theories. (It is only speculative puzzle-solutions that can be falsified in a Popperian fashion during normal science (1970b, 19).) Rather, anomalies are ignored or explained away if at all possible. It is only the accumulation of particularly troublesome anomalies that poses a serious problem for the existing disciplinary matrix. A particularly troublesome anomaly is one that undermines the practice of normal science. For example, an anomaly might reveal inadequacies in some commonly used piece of equipment, perhaps by casting doubt on the underlying theory. If much of normal science relies upon this piece of equipment, normal science will find it difficult to continue with confidence until this anomaly is addressed. A widespread failure in such confidence Kuhn calls a ‘crisis’ (1962/1970a, 66–76).
The most interesting response to crisis will be the search for a revised disciplinary matrix, a revision that will allow for the elimination of at least the most pressing anomalies and optimally the solution of many outstanding, unsolved puzzles. Such a revision will be a scientific revolution. According to Popper the revolutionary overthrow of a theory is one that is logically required by an anomaly. According to Kuhn however, there are no rules for deciding the significance of a puzzle and for weighing puzzles and their solutions against one another. The decision to opt for a revision of a disciplinary matrix is not one that is rationally compelled; nor is the particular choice of revision rationally compelled. For this reason the revolutionary phase is particularly open to competition among differing ideas and rational disagreement about their relative merits. Kuhn does briefly mention that extra-scientific factors might help decide the outcome of a scientific revolution—the nationalities and personalities of leading protagonists, for example (1962/1970a, 152–3). This suggestion grew in the hands of some sociologists and historians of science into the thesis that the outcome of a scientific revolution, indeed of any step in the development of science, is always determined by socio-political factors. Kuhn himself repudiated such ideas and his work makes it clear that the factors determining the outcome of a scientific dispute, particularly in modern science, are almost always to be found within science, specifically in connexion with the puzzle-solving power of the competing ideas.
Kuhn states that science does progress, even through revolutions (1962/1970a, 160ff). The phenomenon of Kuhn-loss does, in Kuhn’s view, rule out the traditional cumulative picture of progress. The revolutionary search for a replacement paradigm is driven by the failure of the existing paradigm to solve certain important anomalies. Any replacement paradigm had better solve the majority of those puzzles, or it will not be worth adopting in place of the existing paradigm. At the same time, even if there is some Kuhn-loss, a worthy replacement must also retain much of the problem-solving power of its predecessor (1962/1970a, 169). (Kuhn does clarify the point by asserting that the newer theory must retain pretty well all its predecessor’s power to solve quantitative problems. It may however lose some qualitative, explanatory power [1970b, 20].) Hence we can say that revolutions do bring with them an overall increase in puzzle-solving power, the number and significance of the puzzles and anomalies solved by the revised paradigm exceeding the number and significance of the puzzles-solutions that are no longer available as a result of Kuhn-loss. Kuhn is quick to deny that there is any inference from such increases to improved nearness to the truth ((1962/1970a, 170–1). Indeed he later denies that any sense can be made of the notion of nearness to the truth (1970a, 206).
Rejecting a teleological view of science progressing towards the truth, Kuhn favours an evolutionary view of scientific progress (1962/1970a, 170–3), discussed in detail by Wray (2011) (see also Bird 2000 and Renzi 2009). The evolutionary development of an organism might be seen as its response to a challenge set by its environment. But that does not imply that there is some ideal form of the organism that it is evolving towards. Analogously, science improves by allowing its theories to evolve in response to puzzles and progress is measured by its success in solving those puzzles; it is not measured by its progress towards to an ideal true theory. While evolution does not lead towards ideal organisms, it does lead to greater diversity of kinds of organism. As Wray explains, this is the basis of a Kuhnian account of specialization in science, an account that Kuhn was developing particularly in the latter part of his career. According to this account, the revolutionary new theory that succeeds in replacing another that is subject to crisis, may fail to satisfy all the needs of those working with the earlier theory. One response to this might be for the field to develop two theories, with domains restricted relative to the original theory (one might be the old theory or a version of it). This formation of new specialties will also bring with it new taxonomic structures and so leads to incommensurability.
3. The Concept of a Paradigm
A mature science, according to Kuhn, experiences alternating phases of normal science and revolutions. In normal science the key theories, instruments, values and metaphysical assumptions that comprise the disciplinary matrix are kept fixed, permitting the cumulative generation of puzzle-solutions, whereas in a scientific revolution the disciplinary matrix undergoes revision, in order to permit the solution of the more serious anomalous puzzles that disturbed the preceding period of normal science.
A particularly important part of Kuhn’s thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions focuses upon one specific component of the disciplinary matrix. This is the consensus on exemplary instances of scientific research. These exemplars of good science are what Kuhn refers to when he uses the term ‘paradigm’ in a narrower sense. He cites Aristotle’s analysis of motion, Ptolemy’s computations of plantery positions, Lavoisier’s application of the balance, and Maxwell’s mathematization of the electromagnetic field as paradigms (1962/1970a, 23). Exemplary instances of science are typically to be found in books and papers, and so Kuhn often also describes great texts as paradigms—Ptolemy’s Almagest, Lavoisier’s Traité élémentaire de chimie, and Newton’s Principia Mathematica and Opticks (1962/1970a, 12). Such texts contain not only the key theories and laws, but also—and this is what makes them paradigms—the applications of those theories in the solution of important problems, along with the new experimental or mathematical techniques (such as the chemical balance in Traité élémentaire de chimie and the calculus in Principia Mathematica) employed in those applications.
In the postscript to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn says of paradigms in this sense that they are “the most novel and least understood aspect of this book” (1962/1970a, 187). The claim that the consensus of a disciplinary matrix is primarily agreement on paradigms-as-exemplars is intended to explain the nature of normal science and the process of crisis, revolution, and renewal of normal science. It also explains the birth of a mature science. Kuhn describes an immature science, in what he sometimes calls its ‘pre-paradigm’ period, as lacking consensus. Competing schools of thought possess differing procedures, theories, even metaphysical presuppositions. Consequently there is little opportunity for collective progress. Even localized progress by a particular school is made difficult, since much intellectual energy is put into arguing over the fundamentals with other schools instead of developing a research tradition. However, progress is not impossible, and one school may make a breakthrough whereby the shared problems of the competing schools are solved in a particularly impressive fashion. This success draws away adherents from the other schools, and a widespread consensus is formed around the new puzzle-solutions.
This widespread consensus now permits agreement on fundamentals. For a problem-solution will embody particular theories, procedures and instrumentation, scientific language, metaphysics, and so forth. Consensus on the puzzle-solution will thus bring consensus on these other aspects of a disciplinary matrix also. The successful puzzle-solution, now a paradigm puzzle-solution, will not solve all problems. Indeed, it will probably raise new puzzles. For example, the theories it employs may involve a constant whose value is not known with precision; the paradigm puzzle-solution may employ approximations that could be improved; it may suggest other puzzles of the same kind; it may suggest new areas for investigation. Generating new puzzles is one thing that the paradigm puzzle-solution does; helping solve them is another. In the most favourable scenario, the new puzzles raised by the paradigm puzzle-solution can be addressed and answered using precisely the techniques that the paradigm puzzle-solution employs. And since the paradigm puzzle-solution is accepted as a great achievement, these very similar puzzle-solutions will be accepted as successful solutions also. This is why Kuhn uses the terms ‘exemplar’ and ‘paradigm’. For the novel puzzle-solution which crystallizes consensus is regarded and used as a model of exemplary science. In the research tradition it inaugurates, a paradigm-as-exemplar fulfils three functions: (i) it suggests new puzzles; (ii) it suggests approaches to solving those puzzles; (iii) it is the standard by which the quality of a proposed puzzle-solution can be measured (1962/1970a, 38–9). In each case it is similarity to the exemplar that is the scientists’ guide.
That normal science proceeds on the basis of perceived similarity to exemplars is an important and distinctive feature of Kuhn’s new picture of scientific development. The standard view explained the cumulative addition of new knowledge in terms of the application of the scientific method. Allegedly, the scientific method encapsulates the rules of scientific rationality. It may be that those rules could not account for the creative side of science—the generation of new hypotheses. The latter was thus designated ‘the context of discovery’, leaving the rules of rationality to decide in the ‘context of justification’ whether a new hypothesis should, in the light of the evidence, be added to the stock of accepted theories.
Kuhn rejected the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification (1962/1970a, 8), and correspondingly rejected the standard account of each. As regards the context of discovery, the standard view held that the philosophy of science had nothing to say on the issue of the functioning of the creative imagination. But Kuhn’s paradigms do provide a partial explanation, since training with exemplars enables scientists to see new puzzle-situations in terms of familiar puzzles and hence enables them to see potential solutions to their new puzzles.
More important for Kuhn was the way his account of the context of justification diverged from the standard picture. The functioning of exemplars is intended explicitly to contrast with the operation of rules. The key determinant in the acceptability of a proposed puzzle-solution is its similarity to the paradigmatic puzzle-solutions. Perception of similarity cannot be reduced to rules, and a fortiori cannot be reduced to rules of rationality. This rejection of rules of rationality was one of the factors that led Kuhn’s critics to accuse him of irrationalism—regarding science as irrational. In this respect at least the accusation is wide of the mark. For to deny that some cognitive process is the outcome of applying rules of rationality is not to imply that it is an irrational process: the perception of similarity in appearance between two members of the same family also cannot be reduced to the application of rules of rationality. Kuhn’s innovation in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was to suggest that a key element in cognition in science operates in the same fashion.
4. Incommensurability and World-Change
The standard empiricist conception of theory evaluation regards our judgment of the epistemic quality of a theory to be a matter of applying rules of method to the theory and the evidence. Kuhn’s contrasting view is that we judge the quality of a theory (and its treatment of the evidence) by comparing it to a paradigmatic theory. The standards of assessment therefore are not permanent, theory-independent rules. They are not rules, because they involve perceived relations of similarity (of puzzle-solution to a paradigm). They are not theory-independent, since they involve comparison to a (paradigm) theory. They are not permanent, since the paradigm may change in a scientific revolution. For example, to many in the seventeenth century, Newton’s account of gravitation, involving action at a distance with no underlying explanation, seemed a poor account, in that respect at least, when compared, for example, to Ptolemy’s explanation of the motion of the planets in terms of contiguous crystalline spheres or to Descartes’ explanation in terms of vortices. However, later, once Newton’s theory had become accepted and the paradigm by which later theories were judged, the lack of an underlying mechanism for a fundamental force was regarded as no objection, as, for example, in the case of Coulomb’s law of electrostatic attraction. Indeed, in the latter case the very similarity of Coulomb’s equation to Newton’s was taken to be in its favour.
Consequently, comparison between theories will not be as straightforward as the standard empiricist picture would have it, since the standards of evaluation are themselves subject to change. This sort of difficulty in theory comparison is an instance of what Kuhn and Feyerabend called ‘incommensurability’. Theories are incommensurable when they share no common measure. Thus, if paradigms are the measures of attempted puzzle-solutions, then puzzle-solutions developed in different eras of normal science will be judged by comparison to differing paradigms and so lack a common measure. The term ‘incommensurable’ derives from a mathematical use, according to which the side and diagonal of a square are incommensurable in virtue of there being no unit that can be used to measure both exactly. Kuhn stressed that incommensurability did not mean non-comparability (just as the side and diagonal of a square are comparable in many respects). Even so, it is clear that at the very least Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis would make theory comparison rather more difficult than had commonly been supposed, and in some cases impossible.
We can distinguish three types of incommensurability in Kuhn’s remarks: (1) methodological—there is no common measure because the methods of comparison and evaluation change; (2) perceptual/observational—observational evidence cannot provide a common basis for theory comparison, since perceptual experience is theory-dependent; (3) semantic—the fact that the languages of theories from different periods of normal science may not be inter-translatable presents an obstacle to the comparison of those theories. (See Sankey 1993 for a useful discussion of Kuhn’s changing accounts of incommensurability.)
4.1 Methodological Incommensurability
The incommensurability illustrated above whereby puzzle-solutions from different eras of normal science are evaluated by reference to different paradigms, is methodological incommensurability. Another source of methodological incommensurability is the fact that proponents of competing paradigms may not agree on which problems a candidate paradigm should solve (1962/1970a, 148). In general the factors that determine our choices of theory (whether puzzle-solutions or potential paradigm theories) are not fixed and neutral but vary and are dependent in particular on the disciplinary matrix within which the scientist is working. Indeed, since decision making is not rule-governed or algorithmic, there is no guarantee that those working within the same disciplinary matrix must agree on their evaluation of theory (1962/1970a, 200), although in such cases the room for divergence will be less than when the disputants operate within different disciplinary matrices. Despite the possibility of divergence, there is nonetheless widespread agreement on the desirable features of a new puzzle-solution or theory. Kuhn (1977, 321–2) identifies five characteristics that provide the shared basis for a choice of theory: 1. accuracy; 2. consistency (both internal and with other relevant currently accepted theories); 3. scope (its consequences should extend beyond the data it is required to explain); 4. simplicity (organizing otherwise confused and isolated phenomena); 5. fruitfulness (for further research). Even though these are, for Kuhn, constitutive of science (1977c, 331; 1993, 338) they cannot determine scientific choice. First, which features of a theory satisfy these criteria may be disputable (e.g. does simplicity concern the ontological commitments of a theory or its mathematical form?). Secondly, these criteria are imprecise, and so there is room for disagreement about the degree to which they hold. Thirdly, there can be disagreement about how they are to be weighted relative to one another, especially when they conflict.
4.2 Perception, Observational Incommensurability, and World-Change
An important focus of Kuhn’s interest in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was on the nature of perception and how it may be that what a scientist observes can change as a result of scientific revolution. He developed what has become known as the thesis of the theory-dependence of observation, building on the work of N. R. Hanson (1958) while also referring to psychological studies carried out by his Harvard colleagues, Leo Postman and Jerome Bruner (Bruner and Postman 1949). The standard positivist view was that observation provides the neutral arbiter between competing theories. The thesis that Kuhn and Hanson promoted denied this, holding that the nature of observation may be influenced by prior beliefs and experiences. Consequently it cannot be expected that two scientists when observing the same scene will make the same theory-neutral observations. Kuhn asserts that Galileo and an Aristotelian when both looking at a pendulum will see different things (see quoted passage below).
The theory-dependence of observation, by rejecting the role of observation as a theory-neutral arbiter among theories, provides another source of incommensurability. Methodological incommensurability (§4.1 above) denies that there are universal methods for making inferences from the data. The theory-dependence of observation means that even if there were agreed methods of inference and interpretation, incommensurability could still arise since scientists might disagree on the nature of the observational data themselves.
Kuhn expresses or builds on the idea that participants in different disciplinary matrices will see the world differently by claiming that their worlds are different:
In a sense I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved, matrix of space. Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction (1962/1970a, 150).
Remarks such as these gave some commentators the impression that Kuhn was a strong kind of constructivist, holding that the way the world literally is depends on which scientific theory is currently accepted. Kuhn, however, denied any constructivist import to his remarks on world-change. (The closest Kuhn came to constructivism was to acknowledge a parallel with Kantian idealism, which is discussed below in Section 6.4.)
Kuhn likened the change in the phenomenal world to the Gestalt-switch that occurs when one sees the duck-rabbit diagram first as (representing) a duck then as (representing) a rabbit, although he himself acknowledged that he was not sure whether the Gestalt case was just an analogy or whether it illustrated some more general truth about the way the mind works that encompasses the scientific case too.
4.3 Kuhn’s Early Semantic Incommensurability Thesis
Although the theory-dependence of observation plays a significant role in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, neither it nor methodological incommensurability could account for all the phenomena that Kuhn wanted to capture with the notion of incommensurability. Some of his own examples are rather stretched—for instance he says Lavoisier saw oxygen where Priestley saw dephlogisticated air, describing this as a ‘transformation of vision’ (1962/1970a, 118). Moreover observation—if conceived of as a form of perception—does not play a significant part in every science. Kuhn wanted to explain his own experience of reading Aristotle, which first left him with the impression that Aristotle was an inexplicably poor scientist (Kuhn 1987). But careful study led to a change in his understanding that allowed him to see that Aristotle was indeed an excellent scientist. This could not simply be a matter of literally perceiving things differently. Kuhn took the incommensurability that prevented him from properly understanding Aristotle to be at least partly a linguistic, semantic matter. Indeed, Kuhn spent much of his career after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions attempting to articulate a semantic conception of incommensurability.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn asserts that there are important shifts in the meanings of key terms as a consequence of a scientific revolution. For example, Kuhn says:
… the physical referents of these Einsteinian concepts are by no means identical with those of the Newtonian concepts that bear the same name. (Newtonian mass is conserved; Einsteinian is convertible with energy. Only at low relative velocities may the two be measured in the same way, and even then they must not be conceived to be the same.) (1962/1970a, 102)
This is important, because a standard conception of the transition from classical to relativistic physics is that although Einstein’s theory of relativity supersedes Newton’s theory, what we have is an improvement or generalization whereby Newton’s theory is a special case of Einstein’s (to a close approximation). We can therefore say that the later theory is closer to the truth than the older theory. Kuhn’s view that ‘mass’ as used by Newton cannot be translated by ‘mass’ as used by Einstein allegedly renders this kind of comparison impossible. Hence incommensurability is supposed to rule out convergent realism, the view that science shows ever improving approximation to the truth. (Kuhn also thinks, for independent reasons, that the very ideas of matching the truth and similarity to the truth are incoherent (1970a, 206).)
Kuhn’s view as expressed in the passage quoted above depends upon meaning holism—the claim that the meanings of terms are interrelated in such a way that changing the meaning of one term results in changes in the meanings of related terms: “To make the transition to Einstein’s universe, the whole conceptual web whose strands are space, time, matter, force, and so on, had to be shifted and laid down again on nature whole.” (1962/1970a, 149). The assumption of meaning holism is a long standing one in Kuhn’s work. One source for this is the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. Another not unrelated source is the assumption of holism in the philosophy of science that is consequent upon the positivist conception of theoretical meaning. According to the latter, it is not the function of the theoretical part of scientific language to refer to and describe unobserved entities. Only observational sentences directly describe the world, and this accounts for them having the meaning that they do. Theories permit the deduction of observational sentences. This is what gives theoretical expressions their meaning. Theoretical statements cannot, however, be reduced to observational ones. This is because, first, theoretical propositions are collectively involved in the deduction of observational statements, rather than singly. Secondly, theories generate dispositional statements (e.g. about the solubility of a substance, about how they would appear if observed under certain circumstances, etc.), and dispositional statements, being modal, are not equivalent to any truth-function of (non-modal) observation statements. Consequently, the meaning of a theoretical sentence is not equivalent to the meaning of any observational sentence or combination of observational sentences. The meaning of a theoretical term is a product of two factors: the relationship of the theory or theories of which it is a part to its observational consequences and the role that particular term plays within those theories. This is the double-language model of the language of science and was the standard picture of the relationship of a scientific theory to the world when Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s challenge to it lay not in rejecting the anti-realism implicit in the view that theories do not refer to the world but rather in undermining the assumption that the relationship of observation sentence to the world is unproblematic. By insisting on the theory-dependence of observation, Kuhn in effect argued that the holism of theoretical meaning is shared by apparently observational terms also, and for this reason the problem of incommensurability cannot be solved by recourse to theory-neutral observation sentences.
(Although it is true that Kuhn uses the expression ‘physical referent’ in the passage quoted above, this should not be taken to mean an independently existing worldly entity. If that were the case, Kuhn would be committed to the worldly existence of both Newtonian mass and Einsteinian mass (which are nonetheless not the same). It is implausible that Kuhn intended to endorse such a view. A better interpretation is to understand Kuhn as taking reference, in this context, to be a relation between a term and a hypothetical rather than worldly entity. Reference of anything like the Fregean, worldly kind plays no part in Kuhn’s thinking. Again this may be seen as a reflection of the influence of one or other or both of the (later) Wittgensteinian downplaying of reference and of the positivist view that theories are not descriptions of the world but are in one way or another tools for the organization or prediction of observations.)
4.4 Kuhn’s Later Semantic Incommensurability Thesis
Although Kuhn asserted a semantic incommensurability thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions he did not there articulate or argue for the thesis in detail. This he attempted in subsequent work, with the result that the nature of the thesis changed over time. The heart of the incommensurability thesis after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the idea that certain kinds of translation are impossible. Early on Kuhn drew a parallel with Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation (1970a, 202; 1970c, 268). According to the latter, if we are translating one language into another, there are inevitably a multitude of ways of providing a translation that is adequate to the behaviour of the speakers. None of the translations is the uniquely correct one, and in Quine’s view there is no such thing as the meaning of the words to be translated. It was nonetheless clear that Quine’s thesis was rather far from Kuhn’s thesis, indeed that they are incompatible. First, Kuhn thought that incommensurability was a matter of there being no fully adequate translation whereas Quine’s thesis involved the availability of multiple translations. Secondly, Kuhn does believe that the translated expressions do have a meaning, whereas Quine denies this. Thirdly, Kuhn later went on to say that unlike Quine he does not think that reference is inscrutable—it is just very difficult to recover (1976, 191).
Subsequently, Kuhn developed the view that incommensurability arises from differences in classificatory schemes. This is taxonomic incommensurability. A field of science is governed by a taxonomy, which divides its subject matter into kinds. Associated with a taxonomy is a lexical network—a network of related terms. A significant scientific change will bring with it an alteration in the lexical network which in turn will lead to a re-alignment of the taxonomy of the field. The terms of the new and old taxonomies will not be inter-translatable.
The problematic nature of translation arises from two assumptions. First, as we have seen, Kuhn assumes that meaning is (locally) holistic. A change in the meaning of one part of the lexical structure will result in a change to all its parts. This would rule out preservation of the translatability of taxonomies by redefining the changed part in terms of the unchanged part. Secondly, Kuhn adopts the ‘no-overlap’ principle which states that categories in a taxonomy must be hierarchically organised: if two categories have members in common then one must be fully included within the other; otherwise they are disjoint—they cannot simply overlap. This rules out the possibility of an all-encompassing taxonomy that incorporates both the original and the changed taxonomies. (Ian Hacking (1993) relates this to the world-change thesis: after a revolution the world of individuals remains as it was, but scientists now work in a world of new kinds.)
Kuhn continued to develop his conceptual approach to incommensurability. At the time of his death he had made considerable progress on a book in which he related incommensurability to issues in developmental psychology and concept acquisition.
5. History of Science
Kuhn’s historical work covered several topics in the history of physics and astronomy. During the 1950s his focus was primarily on the early theory of heat and the work of Sadi Carnot. However, his first book concerned the Copernican revolution in planetary astronomy (1957). This book grew out of the teaching he had done on James Conant’s General Education in Science curriculum at Harvard but also presaged some of the ideas of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In detailing the problems with the Ptolemaic system and Copernicus’ solution to them, Kuhn showed two things. First, he demonstrated that Aristotelian science was genuine science and that those working within that tradition, in particular those working on Ptolemaic astronomy, were engaged in an entirely reasonable and recognizably scientific project. Secondly, Kuhn showed that Copernicus was himself far more indebted to that tradition than had typically been recognized. Thus the popular view that Copernicus was a modern scientist who overthrew an unscientific and long-outmoded viewpoint is mistaken both by exaggerating the difference between Copernicus and the Ptolemaic astronomers and in underestimating the scientific credentials of work carried out before Copernicus. This mistaken view—a product of the distortion caused by our current state of knowledge—can be rectified only by seeing the activities of Copernicus and his predecessors in the light of the puzzles presented to them by tradition that they inevitably had to work with. While Kuhn does acknowledge the influence of causes outside science (such as a resurgence in Sun worship (1962/70a, 152–3)), he nonetheless emphasizes the fact that astronomers were responding primarily to problems raised within science. What appealed to them in Copernicus’ model was its ability to do away with ad hoc devices in Ptolemy’s system (such as the equant), to explain key phenomena in a pleasing fashion (the observed retrograde motion of the planets), and to explain away otherwise inexplicable coincidences in Ptolemy’s system (such as the alignment of the Sun and the centres of the epicycles of the inferior planets).
In the 1960s Kuhn’s historical work turned toward the early history of quantum theory, culminating in his book Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity. According to classical physics a particle could possess any energy in a continuous range and if it changes energy it does so in a continuous fashion, possessing at some point in time every energy between the initial and final energy states. Modern quantum theory denies both these classical principles. Energy is quantised—a particle may possess only one of a set of discrete energies. Consequently if it changes in energy from one value to the next permitted value it does so discontinuously, jumping straight from one energy to the other without taking any of the intermediate (‘forbidden’) values. In order to explain the distribution of energy within a cavity (black-body radiation), Planck used the device of dividing up the energy states into multiples of the unit or ‘quantum’ hν (where ν is the frequency of radiation and h is what subsequently became known as Planck’s constant). Planck did this in order to employ a statistical technique of Boltzmann’s whereby the range of possible continuous energies is divided into ‘cells’ of similar energies that could be treated together for mathematical purposes. Kuhn notes that Planck was puzzled that in carrying out his derivation, only by fixing the cell size at hν could he get the result he wanted—the technique should have worked for any way of dividing the cells, so long as they were small enough but not too small. This work of Planck’s was carried out in the period 1900–1, which is the date tradition has accorded to the invention of the quantum concept. However, argued Kuhn, Planck did not have in mind a genuine physical discontinuity of energies until 1908, which is after Albert Einstein and Paul Ehrenfest had themselves emphasized it in 1905–6.
Many readers were surprised not to find mention of paradigms or incommensurability. Kuhn later added an Afterword, “Revisiting Planck”, explaining that he had not repudiated or ignored those ideas but that they were implicit in the argument he gave. Indeed the whole essay may be seen as a demonstration of an incommensurability between the mature quantum theory and the early quantum theory of Planck which was still rooted in classical statistical physics. In particular the very term ‘quantum’ changed its meaning between its introduction by Planck and its later use. Kuhn argues that the modern quantum concept was introduced first not by Planck but by Einstein. Furthermore, this fact is hidden both by the continued use of the same term and by the same distortion of history that has affected our conception of Ptolemy and Copernicus. As in Copernicus’ case, Planck has been seen as more revolutionary than in fact he was. In Planck’s case, however, this misconception was also shared by Planck himself later in life.
6. Criticism and Influence
Kuhn’s work met with a largely critical reception among philosophers. Some of this criticism became muted as Kuhn’s work became better understood and as his own thinking underwent transformation. At the same time other developments in philosophy opened up new avenues for criticism. That criticism has largely focussed on two areas. First, it has been argued that Kuhn’s account of the development of science is not entirely accurate. Secondly, critics have attacked Kuhn’s notion of incommensurability, arguing that either it does not exist or, if it does exist, it is not a significant problem. Despite this criticism, Kuhn’s work has been hugely influential, both within philosophy and outside it. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was an important stimulus to what has since become known as ‘Science Studies’, in particular the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK).
6.1 Scientific Change
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions periods of normal science and revolutionary science are clearly distinguished. In particular paradigms and their theories are not questioned and not changed in normal science whereas they are questioned and are changed in revolutionary science. Thus a revolution is, by definition revisionary, and normal science is not (as regards paradigms). Furthermore, normal science does not suffer from the conceptual discontinuities that lead to incommensurability whereas revolutions do. This gives the impression, confirmed by Kuhn’s examples, that revolutions are particularly significant and reasonably rare episodes in the history of science.
This picture has been questioned for its accuracy. Stephen Toulmin (1970) argues that a more realistic picture shows that revisionary changes in science are far more common and correspondingly less dramatic than Kuhn supposes, and that perfectly ‘normal’ science experiences these changes also. Kuhn could reply that such revisions are not revisions to the paradigm but to the non-paradigm puzzle-solutions provided by normal science. But that in turn requires a clear distinction between paradigmatic and non-paradigmatic components of science, a distinction that, arguably, Kuhn has not supplied in any detail.
At the same time, by making revisionary change a necessary condition of revolutionary science, Kuhn ignores important discoveries and developments that are widely regarded as revolutionary, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA and the revolution in molecular biology. Kuhn’s view is that discoveries and revolutions come about only as a consequence of the appearance of anomalies. Yet it is also clear that a discovery might come about in the course of normal science and initiate a ‘revolution’ (in a non-Kuhnian sense) in a field because of the unexpected insight it provides and the way it opens up opportunities for new avenues of research. The double-helical structure of DNA was not expected but immediately suggested a mechanism for the duplication of genetic information (e.g. in mitosis), which had enormous consequences for subsequent biological research.
6.2 Incommensurability
Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis presented a challenge not only to positivist conceptions of scientific change but also to realist ones. For a realist conception of scientific progress also wishes to assert that, by and large, later science improves on earlier science, in particular by approaching closer to the truth. A standard realist response from the late 1960s was to reject the anti-realism and anti-referentialism shared by both Kuhn’s picture and the preceding double-language model. If we do take theories to be potential descriptions of the world, involving reference to worldly entities, kind, and properties, then the problems raised by incommensurability largely evaporate. As we have seen, Kuhn thinks that we cannot properly say that Einstein’s theory is an improvement on Newton’s in the sense that the latter as deals reasonably accurately (only) with a special case of the former. Whether or not the key terms (such as ‘mass’) in the two theories differ in meaning, a realist and referentialist approach to theories permits one to say that Einstein’s theory is closer to the truth than Newton’s. For truth and nearness to the truth depend only on reference and not on sense. Two terms can differ in sense yet share the same reference, and correspondingly two sentences may relate to one another as regards truth without their sharing terms with the same sense. And so even if we retain a holism about the sense of theoretical terms and allow that revolutions lead to shifts in sense, there is no direct inference from this to a shift in reference. Consequently, there is no inference to the inadmissibility of the comparison of theories with respect to their truth-nearness.
While this referentialist response to the incommensurability thesis was initially framed in Fregean terms (Scheffler 1967), it received further impetus from the work of Kripke (1980) and Putnam (1975b), which argued that reference could be achieved without anything akin to Fregean sense and that the natural kind terms of science exemplified this sense-free reference. In particular, causal theories of reference permit continuity of reference even through fairly radical theoretical change. (They do not guarantee continuity in reference, and changes in reference can occur on some causal theories, e.g. Gareth Evans’s (1973). Arguing that they do occur would require more, however, than merely pointing to a change in theory. Rather, it seems, cases of reference change must be identified and argued for on a case by case basis.) Therefore, if taken to encompass terms for quantities and properties (such as ‘mass’), the changes that Kuhn identified as changes in meaning (e.g. those involved in the shift from Newtonian to relativistic physics) would not necessarily be changes that bear on reference, nor, consequently, on comparison for nearness to the truth. The simple causal theory of reference does have its problems, such as explaining the referential mechanism of empty theoretical terms (e.g.caloric and phlogiston) (c.f. Enç 1976, Nola 1980). Causal-descriptive theories (which allow for a descriptive component) tackle such problems while retaining the key idea that referential continuity is possible despite radical theory change (Kroon 1985, Sankey 1994).
Of course, the referentialist response shows only that reference can be retained, not that it must be. Consequently it is only a partial defence of realism against semantic incommensurability. A further component of the defence of realism against incommensurability must be an epistemic one. For referentialism shows that a term can retain reference and hence that the relevant theories may be such that the later constitutes a better approximation to the truth than the earlier. Nonetheless it may not be possible for philosophers or others to know that there has been such progress. Methodological incommensurability in particular seems to threaten the possibility of this knowledge. Kuhn thinks that in order to be in a position to compare theories from older and more recent periods of normal science one needs a perspective external to each and indeed any era of science–what he calls an ‘Archimedean platform’ (1992, 14). However, we never are able to escape from our current perspective. A realist response to this kind of incommensurability may appeal to externalist or naturalized epistemology. These (related) approaches reject the idea that for a method to yield knowledge it must be independent of any particular theory, perspective, or historical/cognitive circumstance. So long as the method has an appropriate kind of reliability it can generate knowledge. Contrary to the internalist view characteristic of the positivists (and, it appears, shared by Kuhn) the reliability of a method does not need to be one that must be evaluable independently of any particular scientific perspective. It is not the case, for example, that the reliability of a method used in science must be justifiable by a priori means. Thus the methods developed in one era may indeed generate knowledge, including knowledge that some previous era got certain matters wrong, or right but only to a certain degree. A naturalized epistemology may add that science itself is in the business of investigating and developing methods. As science develops we would expect its methods to change and develop also.
6.3 Kuhn and Social Science
Kuhn’s influence outside of professional philosophy of science may have been even greater than it was within it. The social sciences in particular took up Kuhn with enthusiasm. There are primarily two reasons for this. First, Kuhn’s picture of science appeared to permit a more liberal conception of what science is than hitherto, one that could be taken to include disciplines such as sociology and psychoanalysis. Secondly, Kuhn’s rejection of rules as determining scientific outcomes appeared to permit appeal to other factors, external to science, in explaining why a scientific revolution took the course that it did.
The status as genuine sciences of what we now call the social and human sciences has widely been held in doubt. Such disciplines lack the remarkable track record of established natural sciences and seem to differ also in the methods they employ. More specifically they fail by pre-Kuhnian philosophical criteria of sciencehood. On the one hand, positivists required of a science that it should be verifiable by reference to its predictive successes. On the other, Popper’s criterion was that a science should be potentially falsifiable by a prediction of the theory. Yet psychoanalysis, sociology and even economics have difficulty in making precise predictions at all, let alone ones that provide for clear confirmation or unambiguous refutation. Kuhn’s picture of a mature science as being dominated by a paradigm that generated sui generis puzzles and criteria for assessing solutions to them could much more easily accommodate these disciplines. For example, Popper famously complained that psychoanalysis could not be scientific because it resists falsification. Kuhn’s account argues that resisting falsification is precisely what every disciplinary matrix in science does. Even disciplines that could not claim to be dominated by a settled paradigm but were beset by competing schools with different fundamental ideas could appeal to Kuhn’s description of the pre-paradigm state of a science in its infancy. Consequently Kuhn’s analysis was popular among those seeking legitimacy as science (and consequently kudos and funding) for their new disciplines. Kuhn himself did not especially promote such extensions of his views, and indeed cast doubt upon them. He denied that psychoanalysis is a science and argued that there are reasons why some fields within the social sciences could not sustain extended periods of puzzle-solving normal science (1991b). Although, he says, the natural sciences involve interpretation just as human and social sciences do, one difference is that hermeneutic re-interpretation, the search for new and deeper intepretations, is the essence of many social scientific enterprises. This contrasts with the natural sciences where an established and unchanging interpretation (e.g. of the heavens) is a pre-condition of normal science. Re-intepretation is the result of a scientific revolution and is typically resisted rather than actively sought. Another reason why regular reinterpretation is part of the human sciences and not the natural sciences is that social and political systems are themselves changing in ways that call for new interpretations, whereas the subject matter of the natural sciences is constant in the relevant respects, permitting a puzzle-solving tradition as well as a standing source of revolution-generating anomalies.
A rather different influence on social science was Kuhn’s influence on the development of social studies of science itself, in particular the ‘Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’. A central claim of Kuhn’s work is that scientists do not make their judgments as the result of consciously or unconsciously following rules. Their judgments are nonetheless tightly constrained during normal science by the example of the guiding paradigm. During a revolution they are released from these constraints (though not completely). Consequently there is a gap left for other factors to explain scientific judgments. Kuhn himself suggests in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that Sun worship may have made Kepler a Copernican and that in other cases, facts about an individual’s life history, personality or even nationality and reputation may play a role (1962/70a, 152–3). Later Kuhn repeated the point, with the additional examples of German Romanticism, which disposed certain scientists to recognize and accept energy conservation, and British social thought which enabled acceptance of Darwinism (1977c, 325). Such suggestions were taken up as providing an opportunity for a new kind of study of science, showing how social and political factors external to science influence the outcome of scientific debates. In what has become known as social constructivism/constructionism (e.g. Pickering 1984) this influence is taken to be central, not marginal, and to extend to the very content of accepted theories. Kuhn’s claim and its exploitation can be seen as analogous to or even an instance of the exploitation of the (alleged) underdetermination of theory by evidence (c.f. Kuhn 1992, 7). Feminists and social theorists (e.g. Nelson 1993) have argued that the fact that the evidence, or, in Kuhn’s case, the shared values of science, do not fix a single choice of theory, allows external factors to determine the final outcome (see Martin 1991 and Schiebinger 1999 for feminist social constructivism). Furthermore, the fact that Kuhn identified values as what guide judgment opens up the possibility that scientists ought to employ different values, as has been argued by feminist and post-colonial writers (e.g. Longino 1994).
Kuhn himself, however, showed only limited sympathy for such developments. In his “The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science” (1992) Kuhn derides those who take the view that in the ‘negotiations’ that determine the accepted outcome of an experiment or its theoretical significance, all that counts are the interests and power relations among the participants. Kuhn targeted the proponents of the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge with such comments; and even if this is not entirely fair to the Strong Programme, it reflects Kuhn’s own view that the primary determinants of the outcome of a scientific episode are to be found within science. External history of science seeks causes of scientific change in social, political, religious and other developments of science. Kuhn sees his work as “pretty straight internalist” (2000: 287). First, the five values Kuhn ascribes to all science are in his view constitutive of science. An enterprise could have different values but it would not be science (1977c, 331; 1993, 338). Secondly, when a scientist is influenced by individual or other factors in applying these values or in coming to a judgment when these values are not decisive, those influencing factors will typically themselves come from within science (especially in modern, professionalized science). Personality may play a role in the acceptance of a theory, because, for example, one scientist is more risk-averse than another (1977c, 325)—but that is still a relationship to the scientific evidence. Even when reputation plays a part, it is typically scientific reputation that encourages the community to back the opinion of an eminent scientist. Thirdly, in a large community such variable factors will tend to cancel out. Kuhn supposes that individual differences are normally distributed and that a judgment corresponding to the mean of the distribution will also correspond to the judgment that would, hypothetically, be demanded by the rules of scientific method, as traditionally conceived (1977c, 333). Moreover, the existence of differences of response within the leeway provided by shared values is crucial to science, since it permits “rational men to disagree” (1977c, 332) and thus to commit themselves to rival theories. Thus the looseness of values and the differences they permit “may . . . appear an indispensable means of spreading the risk which the introduction or support of novelty always entails” (Ibid.).
6.4 Recent Developments
Even if Kuhn’s work has not remained at the centre of the philosophy of science, a number of philosophers have continued to find it fruitful and have sought to develop it in a number of directions. Paul Hoyningen-Huene (1989/1993), as a result of working with Kuhn, developed an important neo-Kantian interpretation of his discussion of perception and world-change. We may distinguish between the world-in-itself and the ‘world’ of our perceptual and related experiences (the phenomenal world). This corresponds to the Kantian distinction between noumena and phenomena. The important difference between Kant and Kuhn is that Kuhn takes the general form of phenomena not to be fixed but changeable. A shift in paradigm can lead, via the theory-dependence of observation, to a difference in one’s experiences of things and thus to a change in one’s phenomenal world. This change in phenomenal world articulates the sense in which the world changes as a result of a scientific revolution while also capturing Kuhn’s claims about the theory-dependence of observation and consequent incommensurability (Hoyningen-Huene 1990).
A rather different direction in which Kuhn’s thought has been developed proposes that his ideas might be illuminated by advances in cognitive psychology. One the one hand work on conceptual structures can help understand what might be correct in the incommensurability thesis (Nersessian 1987, 2003). Several authors have sought in different ways to emphasize what they take to be the Wittgensteinian element in Kuhn’s thought (for example Kindi 1995, Sharrock and Read 2002). Andersen, Barker, and Chen (1996, 1998, 2006) draw in particular on Kuhn’s version of Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance. Kuhn articulates a view according to which the extension of a concept is determined by similarity to a set of exemplary cases rather than by an intension. Andersen, Barker, and Chen argue that Kuhn’s view is supported by the work of Rosch (1972; Rosch and Mervis 1975) on prototypes; furthermore, this approach can be developed in the context of dynamic frames (Barsalou 1992), which can then explain the phenomenon of (semantic) incommensurability.
On the other hand, the psychology of analogical thinking and cognitive habits may also inform our understanding of the concept of a paradigm. Kuhn himself tells us that “The paradigm as shared example is the central element of what I now take to be the most novel and least understood aspect of [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]” (1970a, 187). Kuhn, however, failed to develop the paradigm concept in his later work beyond an early application of its semantic aspects to the explanation of incommensurability. Nonetheless, other philosophers, principally Howard Margolis (1987, 1993) have developed the idea that habits of mind formed by training with paradigms-as-exemplars are an important component in understanding the nature of scientific development. As explained by Nickles (2003b) and Bird (2005), this is borne out by recent work by psychologists on model-based and analogical thinking.
6.5 Assessment
Assessing Kuhn’s significance presents a conundrum. Unquestionably he was one of the most influential philosophers and historians of science of the twentieth century. His most obvious achievement was to have been a major force in bringing about the final demise of logical positivism. Nonetheless, there is no characteristically Kuhnian school that carries on his positive work. It is as if he himself brought about a revolution but did not supply the replacement paradigm. For a period in the 1960s and 1970s it looked as if there was a Kuhnian paradigm ‘historical philosophy of science’, flourishing especially in newly formed departments of history and philosophy of science. But as far as the history of science and science studies more generally are concerned, Kuhn repudiated at least the more radical developments made in his name. Indeed part of Kuhn’s fame must be due to the fact that both his supporters and his detractors took his work to be more revolutionary (anti-rationalist, relativist) than it really was.
Turning to the philosophy of science, it was clear by the end of the 1980s that the centreground was now occupied by a new realism, one that took on board lessons from general philosophy of language and epistemology, in particular referentialist semantics and a belief in the possibility of objective knowledge and justification. There is some irony therefore in the fact that it was the demise of logical positivism/empiricism that led to the rebirth of scientific realism along with causal and externalist semantics and epistemology, positions that Kuhn rejected.
One way of understanding this outcome is to see that Kuhn’s relationship on the one hand to positivism and on the other hand to realism places him in an interesting position. Kuhn’s thesis of the theory-dependence of observation parallels related claims by realists. In the hands of realists the thesis is taken to undermine the theory-observation dichotomy that permitted positivists to take an anti-realist attitude to theories. In the hands of Kuhn however, the thesis is taken, in effect, to extend anti-realism from theories to observation also. This in turn fuels the thesis of incommensurability. The fact that incommensurability is founded upon a response to positivism diametrically opposed to the realist response explains why much of Kuhn’s later philosophical work, which developed the incommensurability thesis, has had little impact on the majority of philosophers of science.
The explanation of scientific development in terms of paradigms was not only novel but radical too, insofar as it gives a naturalistic explanation of belief-change. Naturalism was not in the early 1960s the familiar part of philosophical landscape that it has subsequently become. Kuhn’s explanation contrasted with explanations in terms of rules of method (or confirmation, falsification etc.) that most philosophers of science took to be constitutive of rationality. Furthermore, the relevant disciplines (psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence) were not then advanced enough to to support Kuhn’s contentions concerning paradigms, or those disciplines were antithetical to Kuhn’s views (in the case of classical AI). Now that naturalism has become an accepted component of philosophy, there has recently been interest in reassessing Kuhn’s work in the light of developments in the relevant sciences, many of which provide corroboration for Kuhn’s claim that science is driven by relations of perceived similarity and analogy. It may yet be that a characteristically Kuhnian thesis will play a prominent part in our understanding of science.
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2023-07-19T01:23:09.757000+00:00
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Today is the 101st anniversary of the birth of Thomas Kuhn (18 July 1922–17 June 1996), who was born in Cincinnati on this date in 1922. Kuhn is not remembered as a philosopher of history, but as a…
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en
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https://miro.medium.com/v2/5d8de952517e8160e40ef9841c781cdc14a5db313057fa3c3de41c6f5b494b19
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Medium
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https://jnnielsen.medium.com/thomas-kuhn-7c7d8a499014
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Today is the 101st anniversary of the birth of Thomas Kuhn (18 July 1922–17 June 1996), who was born in Cincinnati on this date in 1922.
Kuhn is not remembered as a philosopher of history, but as a philosopher and an historian of science, yet the influential work he produced has had profound implications for how we understand history, and in particular for how we understanding the history of science. You could call Kuhn’s work, if you liked, a philosophy of the history of science. And given the outsize role that science plays in the history of industrialized civilization, a philosophy of the history of science is a large part of a philosophy of the history of industrialized civilization. That is no small contribution.
A reductionist account of Kuhn’s philosophy is that scientific progress is not cumulative, but proceeds in fits and starts, with many losses along the way. There is an ongoing debate among Kuhn’s heirs as to whether theory change in science is ultimately a rational process, even if non-linear, or if it is ultimately an irrational process, essentially arbitrary, and without deeper meaning. If this is reflected upward to the history of industrialized civilization, which is predicated upon science, and the technology that science makes possible, then the ongoing debate is about whether the history of our civilization is ultimately rational, even if it jumps around in the short term, or whether it is ultimately irrational and arbitrary.
That’s just the disputed portion of Kuhn’s interpretation, about which one can be hopeful or despairing. The undisputed portion of Kuhn’s interpretation, again, reflected upward, is that a civilization based on science and technology is not cumulative, but more like Gould and Eldridge’s punctuated equilibrium: institutions that have been stable for a long period of time, perhaps over the longue durée, can suddenly be upended in the paradigm shift when old principles are abandoned, and new principles eventually take their place. Come to think of it, this is pretty much how modern industrialized civilization came into being: the nearly static medieval world endured for about a millennium, but then when things started to change, they changed rapidly and drastically. Old certainties that seem to have stood the test of time were abandoned forthwith, and new uncertainties had to take their place.
Of course, Kuhn doesn’t say what I have written above; generally speaking, he doesn’t project from his history of science to the history of civilization, but he does touch briefly upon civilization in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
“Inevitably those remarks will suggest that the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character of Orwell’s 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the powers that be. Furthermore, that suggestion is not altogether inappropriate. There are losses as well as gains in scientific revolutions, and scientists tend to be peculiarly blind to the former. On the other hand, no explanation of progress through revolutions may stop at this point. To do so would be to imply that in the sciences might makes right, a formulation which would again not be entirely wrong if it did not suppress the nature of the process and of the authority by which the choice between paradigms is made. If authority alone, and particularly if non-professional authority, were the arbiter of paradigm debates, the outcome of those debates might still be revolution, but it would not be scientific revolution. The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community. Just how special that community must be if science is to survive and grow may be indicated by the very tenuousness of humanity’s hold on the scientific enterprise. Every civilization of which we have records has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws, and so on. In many cases those facets of civilization have been as developed as our own. But only the civilizations that descend from Hellenic Greece have possessed more than the most rudimentary science. The bulk of scientific knowledge is a product of Europe in the last four centuries. No other place and time has supported the very special communities from which scientific productivity comes.”
Kuhn explicitly addresses philosophy of history in one of the essays in The Essential Tension, more or less to disavow that he has any philosophy of history:
“During my days as a philosophically inclined physicist, my view of history resembled that of the covering law theorists, and the philosophers in my seminars usually begin by viewing it in a similar way. What changed my mind and often changes their’s is the experience of putting together a historical narrative. That experience is vital, for the difference between learning history and doing it is far larger than that in most other creative fields, philosophy certainly included. From it I conclude, among other things, that an ability to predict the future is no part of the historian’s arsenal. He is neither a social scientist nor a seer. It is no mere accident that he knows the end of his narrative as well as the start before he begins to write. History cannot be written without that information. Though I have no alternate philosophy of history or of historical explanation to offer here, I can at least outline a better image of the historian’s task and suggest why its performance might produce a sort of understanding.”
While Kuhn had no explicitly formulated philosophy of history, there is much in the understanding of history that is implicit in Kuhn, for example, in the above passage, there is the distinction between learning history and doing history. What exactly is doing history? Presumably this could be writing history, or teaching history… it could even mean studying history, though the latter would certainly also count as learning history. In the above, for Kuhn doing history is “putting together a historical narrative.” He also suggests that doing history may produce a sort of understanding. Is this the sort of understanding that we derive (or hope to derive) from a philosophy of history? Is a philosophical understanding of history best to be had from putting together an historical narrative?
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dbpedia
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| 8
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https://blog.oup.com/2019/11/thomas-kuhn-paradigm-shift-philosopher-of-the-month/
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en
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Thomas Kuhn and the paradigm shift – Philosopher of the Month
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2019-11-14T10:30:49+00:00
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Thomas S. Kuhn (b. 1922–d. 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science best-known for his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) which influenced social sciences and theories of knowledge. He is widely considered one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century.
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en
|
OUPblog
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https://blog.oup.com/2019/11/thomas-kuhn-paradigm-shift-philosopher-of-the-month/
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Thomas S. Kuhn (1922–1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science best-known for his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which influenced social sciences and theories of knowledge. He is widely considered one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century.
Kuhn was born in in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Samuel Lewis Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He obtained his Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, and PhD in physics from Harvard University. While completing his PhD, he worked as a teaching assistant for Harvard President James B. Conant, who designed and taught the general education history of science courses. This experience allowed Kuhn to switch from physics to the study of the history and philosophy of science. From 1948 until 1956, Kuhn taught a course in the history of science at Harvard. Subsequently he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, then at Princeton University, and finally at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) where from 1982 until the end of his academic career in 1991 he was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy and History of Science.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn challenged the prevailing philosophical views of the logical empiricists about the development of scientific knowledge and introduced the notion of the scientific paradigm. He argued that science does not progress in a linear and consistent fashion via an accumulation of knowledge, but proceeds within a scientific paradigm – a set of fundamental theoretical assumptions that guides the direction of inquiry, determines the standard of truth and defines a scientific discipline at any particular period of time. He used the term “normal science” to describe scientific research that operates in accordance with the dominant paradigm.
Khun believed that normal science can be interrupted by periods of revolutionary science when old scientific theory and method fail to address the problem or explain new phenomena, or when anomalies occur to undermine the existing theory. If the failure is perceived as serious and persistent, a crisis can arise, culminating in revolutionary changes of theory. A paradigm shift occurs when the scientific community adopts the new paradigm, which leads to the beginning of the new period of normal science. Khun also maintained that the new and old paradigms were ‘incommensurable’ and thus could not be compared. Well known examples of paradigm shifts are the change from classical mechanics to relativistic mechanics, and the shift from classical statistic to big data analytics.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions became an influential and widely read book of the 1960s and sold more than a million copies. It had a profound impact on the history and philosophy of science (and also brought the term “paradigm shift” into common use). It was also controversial since Kuhn challenged the accepted theories of science of the time.
Kuhn’s other important works include his first book, The Copernican Revolution (1957), The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977), and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity: 1894–1912 (1978).
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/19/thomas-kuhn-structure-scientific-revolutions
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en
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Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science
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2012-08-19T00:00:00
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<p>Fifty years ago, a book by Thomas Kuhn altered the way we look at the philosophy behind science, as well as introducing the much abused phrase 'paradigm shift', as <strong>John Naughton</strong> explains</p>
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en
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the Guardian
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/19/thomas-kuhn-structure-scientific-revolutions
|
Fifty years ago this month, one of the most influential books of the 20th century was published by the University of Chicago Press. Many if not most lay people have probably never heard of its author, Thomas Kuhn, or of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but their thinking has almost certainly been influenced by his ideas. The litmus test is whether you've ever heard or used the term "paradigm shift", which is probably the most used – and abused – term in contemporary discussions of organisational change and intellectual progress. A Google search for it returns more than 10 million hits, for example. And it currently turns up inside no fewer than 18,300 of the books marketed by Amazon. It is also one of the most cited academic books of all time. So if ever a big idea went viral, this is it.
The real measure of Kuhn's importance, however, lies not in the infectiousness of one of his concepts but in the fact that he singlehandedly changed the way we think about mankind's most organised attempt to understand the world. Before Kuhn, our view of science was dominated by philosophical ideas about how it ought to develop ("the scientific method"), together with a heroic narrative of scientific progress as "the addition of new truths to the stock of old truths, or the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, and in the odd case, the correction of past errors", as the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy puts it. Before Kuhn, in other words, we had what amounted to the Whig interpretation of scientific history, in which past researchers, theorists and experimenters had engaged in a long march, if not towards "truth", then at least towards greater and greater understanding of the natural world.
Kuhn's version of how science develops differed dramatically from the Whig version. Where the standard account saw steady, cumulative "progress", he saw discontinuities – a set of alternating "normal" and "revolutionary" phases in which communities of specialists in particular fields are plunged into periods of turmoil, uncertainty and angst. These revolutionary phases – for example the transition from Newtonian mechanics to quantum physics – correspond to great conceptual breakthroughs and lay the basis for a succeeding phase of business as usual. The fact that his version seems unremarkable now is, in a way, the greatest measure of his success. But in 1962 almost everything about it was controversial because of the challenge it posed to powerful, entrenched philosophical assumptions about how science did – and should – work.
What made it worse for philosophers of science was that Kuhn wasn't even a philosopher: he was a physicist, dammit. Born in 1922 in Cincinnati, he studied physics at Harvard, graduating summa cum laude in 1943, after which he was swept up by the war effort to work on radar. He returned to Harvard after the war to do a PhD – again in physics – which he obtained in 1949. He was then elected into the university's elite Society of Fellows and might have continued to work on quantum physics until the end of his days had he not been commissioned to teach a course on science for humanities students as part of the General Education in Science curriculum. This was the brainchild of Harvard's reforming president, James Conant, who believed that every educated person should know something about science.
The course was centred around historical case studies and teaching it forced Kuhn to study old scientific texts in detail for the first time. (Physicists, then as now, don't go in much for history.) Kuhn's encounter with the scientific work of Aristotle turned out to be a life- and career-changing epiphany.
"The question I hoped to answer," he recalled later, "was how much mechanics Aristotle had known, how much he had left for people such as Galileo and Newton to discover. Given that formulation, I rapidly discovered that Aristotle had known almost no mechanics at all… that conclusion was standard and it might in principle have been right. But I found it bothersome because, as I was reading him, Aristotle appeared not only ignorant of mechanics, but a dreadfully bad physical scientist as well. About motion, in particular, his writings seemed to me full of egregious errors, both of logic and of observation."
What Kuhn had run up against was the central weakness of the Whig interpretation of history. By the standards of present-day physics, Aristotle looks like an idiot. And yet we know he wasn't. Kuhn's blinding insight came from the sudden realisation that if one is to understand Aristotelian science, one must know about the intellectual tradition within which Aristotle worked. One must understand, for example, that for him the term "motion" meant change in general – not just the change in position of a physical body, which is how we think of it. Or, to put it in more general terms, to understand scientific development one must understand the intellectual frameworks within which scientists work. That insight is the engine that drives Kuhn's great book.
Kuhn remained at Harvard until 1956 and, having failed to get tenure, moved to the University of California at Berkeley where he wrote Structure… and was promoted to a professorship in 1961. The following year, the book was published by the University of Chicago Press. Despite the 172 pages of the first edition, Kuhn – in his characteristic, old-world scholarly style – always referred to it as a mere "sketch". He would doubtless have preferred to have written an 800-page doorstop.
But in the event, the readability and relative brevity of the "sketch" was a key factor in its eventual success. Although the book was a slow starter, selling only 919 copies in 1962-3, by mid-1987 it had sold 650,000 copies and sales to date now stand at 1.4 million copies. For a cerebral work of this calibre, these are Harry Potter-scale numbers.
Kuhn's central claim is that a careful study of the history of science reveals that development in any scientific field happens via a series of phases. The first he christened "normal science" – business as usual, if you like. In this phase, a community of researchers who share a common intellectual framework – called a paradigm or a "disciplinary matrix" – engage in solving puzzles thrown up by discrepancies (anomalies) between what the paradigm predicts and what is revealed by observation or experiment. Most of the time, the anomalies are resolved either by incremental changes to the paradigm or by uncovering observational or experimental error. As philosopher Ian Hacking puts it in his terrific preface to the new edition of Structure: "Normal science does not aim at novelty but at clearing up the status quo. It tends to discover what it expects to discover."
The trouble is that over longer periods unresolved anomalies accumulate and eventually get to the point where some scientists begin to question the paradigm itself. At this point, the discipline enters a period of crisis characterised by, in Kuhn's words, "a proliferation of compelling articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals". In the end, the crisis is resolved by a revolutionary change in world-view in which the now-deficient paradigm is replaced by a newer one. This is the paradigm shift of modern parlance and after it has happened the scientific field returns to normal science, based on the new framework. And so it goes on.
This brutal summary of the revolutionary process does not do justice to the complexity and subtlety of Kuhn's thinking. To appreciate these, you have to read his book. But it does perhaps indicate why Structure… came as such a bombshell to the philosophers and historians who had pieced together the Whig interpretation of scientific progress.
As an illustration, take Kuhn's portrayal of "normal" science. The most influential philosopher of science in 1962 was Karl Popper, described by Hacking as "the most widely read, and to some extent believed, by practising scientists". Popper summed up the essence of "the" scientific method in the title of one of his books: Conjectures and Refutations. According to Popper, real scientists (as opposed to, say, psychoanalysts) were distinguished by the fact that they tried to refute rather than confirm their theories. And yet Kuhn's version suggested that the last thing normal scientists seek to do is to refute the theories embedded in their paradigm!
Many people were also enraged by Kuhn's description of most scientific activity as mere "puzzle-solving" – as if mankind's most earnest quest for knowledge was akin to doing the Times crossword. But in fact these critics were over-sensitive. A puzzle is something to which there is a solution. That doesn't mean that finding it is easy or that it will not require great ingenuity and sustained effort. The unconscionably expensive quest for the Higgs boson that has recently come to fruition at Cern, for example, is a prime example of puzzle-solving because the existence of the particle was predicted by the prevailing paradigm, the so-called "standard model" of particle physics.
But what really set the cat among the philosophical pigeons was one implication of Kuhn's account of the process of paradigm change. He argued that competing paradigms are "incommensurable": that is to say, there exists no objective way of assessing their relative merits. There's no way, for example, that one could make a checklist comparing the merits of Newtonian mechanics (which applies to snooker balls and planets but not to anything that goes on inside the atom) and quantum mechanics (which deals with what happens at the sub-atomic level). But if rival paradigms are really incommensurable, then doesn't that imply that scientific revolutions must be based – at least in part – on irrational grounds? In which case, are not the paradigm shifts that we celebrate as great intellectual breakthroughs merely the result of outbreaks of mob psychology?
Kuhn's book spawned a whole industry of commentary, interpretation and exegesis. His emphasis on the importance of communities of scientists clustered round a shared paradigm essentially triggered the growth of a new academic discipline – the sociology of science – in which researchers began to examine scientific disciplines much as anthropologists studied exotic tribes, and in which science was regarded not as a sacred, untouchable product of the Enlightenment but as just another subculture.
As for his big idea – that of a "paradigm" as an intellectual framework that makes research possible –well, it quickly escaped into the wild and took on a life of its own. Hucksters, marketers and business school professors adopted it as a way of explaining the need for radical changes of world-view in their clients. And social scientists saw the adoption of a paradigm as a route to respectability and research funding, which in due course led to the emergence of pathological paradigms in fields such as economics, which came to esteem mastery of mathematics over an understanding of how banking actually works, with the consequences that we now have to endure.
The most intriguing idea, however, is to use Kuhn's thinking to interpret his own achievement. In his quiet way, he brought about a conceptual revolution by triggering a shift in our understanding of science from a Whiggish paradigm to a Kuhnian one, and much of what is now done in the history and philosophy of science might be regarded as "normal" science within the new paradigm. But already the anomalies are beginning to accumulate. Kuhn, like Popper, thought that science was mainly about theory, but an increasing amount of cutting-edge scientific research is data- rather than theory-driven. And while physics was undoubtedly the Queen of the Sciences when Structure… was being written, that role has now passed to molecular genetics and biotechnology. Does Kuhn's analysis hold good for these new areas of science? And if not, isn't it time for a paradigm shift?
In the meantime, if you're making a list of books to read before you die, Kuhn's masterwork is one.
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https://www.thecollector.com/thomas-kuhn-on-scientific-revolution/
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en
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Thomas Kuhn On Scientific Revolution: How Does Scientific Change Work?
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2023-08-19T06:11:13
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Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), created a unique philosophy of science based on real historical developments.
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en
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/favicon/apple-touch-icon.png
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TheCollector
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https://www.thecollector.com/thomas-kuhn-on-scientific-revolution/
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Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), introduced the concept of paradigm into the philosophy of science. Instead of conceiving the history of science as a linear process of accumulation, he defends an image in which periods of stability are followed by crises, after which a new paradigm is found.
Scientific change thus also includes a sociological process in which scientific communities accept or reject key assumptions regarding the nature of their disciplines and the types of problems they are interested in.
Before delving into the concept of paradigm and scientific revolutions, it is worth remembering who Thomas Kuhn was. Thomas Kuhn is one of the most influential and relevant philosophers of science of the twentieth century. He graduated in 1943 from Harvard College in physics. He would also obtain a master’s in science and his Ph.D. from the same university in 1946 and 1949, respectively.
Kuhn taught a history of science course that marked the beginning of his growing interest in the way science is produced; this course would eventually lead him to explore the philosophy of science (Bird, 2018). He lectured at Berkeley University, California, in 1956. His colleagues at Berkeley introduced him to the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Feyerabend (Bird, 2018). Other universities where he lectured were Princeton and MIT. Some of his two most prominent books are The Copernican Revolution (1957), and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). The second book continues to be, without a doubt, his most significant and controversial work. Many of his later contributions, including a postscript in 1969, deal with the concepts introduced in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Paradigms and Normal Science
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn explores the history of science to create his philosophy of science. Instead of speculating about what scientists do, he preferred to carefully observe how is it that theories are created and tested, and how communities of scientists establish assumptions and axioms that underpin their research. With this idea, Thomas Kuhn commences his essay:
“History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed”
(1996, p. 1).
From his historical examination, Kuhn discovers a pattern of theory development. The different stages he encountered can be immensely simplified in the following chart:
The preparadigmatic stage is characterized by debates between competing schools within a particular field of science. These schools disagree about which methods of research are the most useful, the questions that require more attention, and the standard procedures of the solution to scientific problems (Kuhn, 1996, p. 47). Consequently, at this stage, there is an absence of a paradigm that encompasses scientific practice; put differently, no scientific consensus has been reached. Normally, this preparadigmatic stage relates to the early phases of any discipline.
The ancient philosophers of the physis (also called the presocratic philosophers) are a good example of this lack of consensus: Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Democritus wanted to grasp the nature of the cosmos but disagreed about the “arche,” that is, the primordial element of everything (Kenny & Kenny, 2004, Chapter 1).
Once methods, problems, and the main axioms are accepted by a large community of scientists, the second phase initiates, that of normal science. Here, research is done under a paradigm; the discipline can be regarded as a mature science (Nickles, 2017).
An abridged version of the term ‘paradigm’ is that it constitutes exemplary pieces of research taken as a guide for future inquiries; they are recognized ways of modeling problems and solutions adopted by a scientific community (Kuhn, 1996, p. 24). The concept also includes what Kuhn later calls “symbolic generalizations”: a bundle of expressions and claims that are employed by the group without the need for justification. The arsenal of exemplary pieces and symbolic generalizations are constituents of a paradigm.
Normal Science actualizes those generalizations by “increasing the extent of the match between … facts and the paradigm’s predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itself” (Kuhn, 1996, p. 24).
Normal science, thus, works within the paradigm, with the theoretical and methodological techniques that the paradigm provides. For Thomas Kuhn, the paradigm not only orients theory but also the type of facts that should be highlighted in research (1996, p. 25). To use a metaphor, paradigms are like lenses through which the world is seen and interpreted; some phenomena are highlighted while others are ignored. In this sense, normal science discourages revolutionary initiatives in the field and novel discoveries because these threaten the paradigm (Nickles, 2017).
In his book, Thomas Kuhn uses concepts of Gestalt Psychology to better explain what a paradigm is. Often, paintings and images are used in Gestalt Psychology to explain perception. The main idea is that the image is not being neutrally observed, but rather it is being interpreted. For example, when looking at the famous image of the duck-rabbit (below), one can see two images: a depiction of a duck and a depiction of a rabbit. However, it is difficult to see the two layers simultaneously. Kuhn was fond of this effect in terms of how a paradigm affects the relationship between the researcher and the world she is investigating. The paradigm brings attention to one aspect while obscuring the other. For this reason, a scientific revolution is akin to a change in vision; the scientist “must learn to see a new gestalt” (Kuhn, 1996, p. 112).
We said that a paradigm is made both by exemplary pieces of research (that function as models for future inquiry) and by bundles of assumptions, methods, problems, and ways of solving them. Before Copernicus, the accepted paradigm in cosmology was that of the Greco-Roman astronomer Ptolemy (c. 100 – c. 170 AD). Ptolemy defended a geocentric model of the universe. The Earth was fixed in his model and all celestial bodies moved around it. In a later work titled Planetary Hypotheses, he not only continued to develop his geocentric model but, even more, he provided descriptions of how to build the proper instruments adapted to his astronomical model (Hamm, 2016). This is a great illustration of a paradigm that shapes scientific practice down to the details of instrumentation.
Let us now consider the subsequent stages: crisis and paradigm shifts. The periods of crises in a paradigm begin with the accumulation of anomalies. In the words of Nickles:
“When persistent efforts by the best researchers fail to resolve the anomalies, the community begins to lose confidence in the paradigm and a crisis period ensues in which serious alternatives can now be entertained”
(2017).
Anomalies are initially explained within the paradigm. In the case of the Ptolemaic model of the universe, anomalies in the movement of the planets had to be clarified. The retrograde motion of the planets (observed from the Earth) lead Ptolemy to argue in favor of a combination of two circulation motions. Nevertheless, this increased the complexity of the theory as a whole.
The Copernican model, in contrast, dissolved the apparent anomaly without the need for increasing complexity. The movement of the earth around the sun (better known as the heliocentric model) easily explained the strange retrograde motion of the other planets. Consequently, scientific revolutions occur when a set of assumptions and theories lose credibility once faced with anomalies.
Anomalies, writes Thomas Kuhn, foster new ways of seeing; that is why he also alluded to revolutions as gestalt shifts (1996, p. 122). During the crisis, other competing schools try to replace the old paradigm. Once a new paradigm has been accepted (In this case the cosmological model of Copernicus) the period of normal science commences. The new paradigm reorganizes many elements of scientific practice: “goals, standards, linguistic meaning, key scientific practices, the way both the technical content and the relevant specialist community are organized, and the way scientists perceive the world.” (Nickles, 2017).
Scientific Revolutions After Thomas Kuhn
There are of course more examples of Scientific Revolutions: Galileo’s work, the transition from Aristotelian physics to that of Newton, or the revolution in biology and evolutionary theory when the goal-oriented model was challenged by Charles Darwin’s natural selection theory. It is essential to keep in mind that Kuhn’s explanation makes sense when looking at the way these revolutions are structured. The scope and applicability of his work partly illuminate why his book remains among the most widely quoted in history.
Kuhn’s theory showed that science is not a linear progress; science does not consist of the historical accumulation of knowledge and facts about the world. This was an idea from the Enlightenment and the positivistic understanding of science (e.g., Comte). The reality of the history of science, on the other hand, draws a picture of cycles between times of normal science and periods of crisis. After a crisis, phenomena that were considered explained become problematic.
This is referred to as the “Kuhn loss,” meaning that solutions found in the older tradition may temporarily disappear or become obsolete (Oberheim & Hoyningen-Huene, 2018) For Kuhn, this is the reason why Newton’s theory was rejected: because it did not explain the attractive forces between matter, something that the perspective of Aristotle and Descartes did provide (Kuhn 1962, p. 148).
Remarkably, Thomas Kuhn’s work had immense influence outside the philosophy of the natural sciences. Those within the social sciences and the critical tradition warmly welcomed the concept of paradigm and scientific revolution. In a long struggle against positivism, social philosophers had adamantly opposed the image of science as a neutral, biased-free enterprise. Kuhn offered a conception of science where the world was not transparent but was always being interpreted from a paradigm. Thus, The Structure of the Scientific Revolutions remains a referent both in poststructuralism and constructivism in the social sciences.
Literature
Bird, A. (2018). Thomas Kuhn. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Hamm, E. (2016). Modeling the Heavens: Sphairopoiia and Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses. Perspectives on Science, 24(4), 416–424. https://doi.org/10.1162/POSC_a_00214
Kenny, A., & Kenny, A. (2004). Ancient philosophy. Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press.
Kuhn, T. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd Ed.). University of Chicago Press.
Nickles, T. (2017). Scientific Revolutions. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/scientific-revolutions/
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1922-07-18T00:00:00+00:00
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Timetoast Timelines
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https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/thomas-kuhn-450613d6-65b5-4e4c-8aa5-ce38b2fba6ae
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn Birth
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father, Samuel Louis Kuhn was an industrial engineer and investment consultant. He fought in WW1 and a Harvard and MIT alumni. His Mother, Minette Kuhn, was a graduate of Vassar college and was from a wealthy family. She worked as a freelance editor and wrote unpaid articles for progressive organizations.
Master's Degree
After earning his undergraduate degree (and the remainder of the war years), he was doing radar related researches in Harvard and then in Europe. Three years after, he earned his Master's Degree in Physics three years after earning his undergraduate degree
Married Kathryn Muhs
Thomas Kuhn became isolated while studying for his PhD. He isolated himself from other people. This worried his mother and had Kuhn undergo psychoanalysis. He would fall asleep during sessions. The sessions ended when the psychiatrist left town and Kuhn got married. Thomas Kuhn married Kathryn Muhs, who's a Vassar College alumni. Kathryn Muhs aided her husband's career by typing his PhD thesis.They had two daughter's and a son namely; Sarah, Elizabeth and Nathaniel. The couple divorced in 1978
Doctor of Philosophy in Physics
Kuhn focused his studies on the application of quantum mechanics to solid state physics. Three years after earning his Masters degree in Physics, he earned his PhD in Physics at Harvard University under Nobel Prize winner John Van Vleck.
Society of Fellows
Kuhn was elected to the prestigious Society of Fellows at Harvard. As a faculty member he taught a class in science for the undergraduates in the humanities. The class he was teaching was developed by James Conant (President of Harvard), which centered on historical case studies. This was Kuhn's first opportunity to study historical scientific texts in detail.
University of California at Berkley Faculty member
After teaching in Harvard University, he taught the History of Science and Philosophy of Science in the University of California at Berkley during this time period
Published his first book
Kuhn focussed his work on the early history of thermodynamics and 18th century matter theory. After this, he focused on the history of astronomy, these resulted in him publishing his first book. The Copernican Revolution, was published which focuses on the heliocentric theory development during the Renaissance Period.
Full Professor University of California at Berkley
Kuhn took a post in History of Science but in the philosophy department. During this time he developed an interest in the philosophy of Science
Published his Second Book
During his time in University of California Kuhn met Stanley Cavell, who introduced him to Wittgenstein and Paul Feyerbend's works. Kuhn discussed a draft of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions with Feyerbend. In 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in the series of "International Encyclopedia of Unified Science", edited by Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap. In this book Kuhn argued that scientific research and thoughts are defined by conceptual world views or "paradigms".
Princeton University Faculty Member
After teaching in University of California at Berkley, he taught the History of Science and Philosophy of Science in the University of California at Berkley during this time period.
Debate with Feyerabend
Bedford College in London hosted The International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science. One of the key events was intended for a debate between Kuhn and Feyerabend, chaired by Popper. In this debate, Feyerabend was absent due to illness and had John Watkins take his place. Feyerabend was promoting critical rationalism (which he shared with Popper), while Kuhn promoted his paradigms. Kuhn felt the critics failed to appreciate the paradigms as a model for puzzle solving.
Popper and Kuhn on Theory change (Video)
Professor of Philosophy of Science, the London School of Economics and Political Science, John Worrall on the scientific revolutions, falsifiability and what are the main features of a scientific hypothesis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM8XBhEuyoo
President of History of Science Society
The History of Science Society is dedicated in understanding science, technology, medicine and its interactions with society in a historical context.
The Essential Tension
Kuhn published another book entitled "The Essential Tension", which was a collection of his essays in philosophy and history of science. This book emphasizes the importance of tradition in science.
Awarded Howard T. Behrman Award
For distinguished achievement in humanities, Kuhn was awarded the Howard T. Behrman Award. This award is given annually to selected faculty members from Princeton's humanities department. This is to recognize the awardee's recognition of research, publication, teaching and other distinguished services to Princeton's community.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Faculty Member
After teaching in Princeton University, he taught the History of Science and Philosophy of Science in the University of California at Berkley during this time period
Awarded George Sarton Medal in the History of Science
After bring a president of the History of Science Society from 1968 to 1970, the society awarded him the highest honor, the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science. This award is given to outstanding historians of science selected from the international scholarly community. This medal honors Thomas Kuhn for lifetime scholarly achievement.
Lawrence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy
Kuhn was named Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT. He continued his work on both history and philosophy of science on topics such as the development of the concept of incommensurability.
Awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize
For his distinguished contributions to the Field of Science and Technology Studies and his studies on the structures of scientific revolutions, Thomas Kuhn was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize.
Retired in MIT
Thomas Kuhn was the chair's first holder of the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professorship in Philosophy/ He took the rank of professor emeritus and retired in MIT. From 1982 to 1991 Kuhn held the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professorship in Philosophy. He was the chair's first holder. Kuhn retired in 1991 and took the rank of professor emeritus.
Death
At the age of 73 Thomas Kuhn Died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He died from throat and lung cancer which he has been battling for two years. He is survived by his wife, Jehane and three children, Sarah Kuhn of Framingham, Massachusetts., Elizabeth Kuhn of Los Angeles and Nathaniel Kuhn of Arlington, Massachusetts.
Sources 1
Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (n.d.). Thomas S. Kuhn. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved April 19, 2022, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-S-Kuhn Bird, A. (2018, October 31). Thomas Kuhn. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved April 19, 2022, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/ American Institute of Physics. (2016, July 18). Thomas Kuhn. Physics Today. Retrieved April 19, 2022, from https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.5.031266/full/
Sources 2
Famous Scientists. (n.d.). Retrieved April 19, 2022, from https://www.famousscientists.org/thomas-kuhn/ Gelder, L. V. (1996, June 19). Thomas Kuhn, 73; devised Science Paradigm. The New York Times. Retrieved April 18, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/19/us/thomas-kuhn-73-devised-science-paradigm.html History of Science Society (Ed.). (n.d.). Sarton Medalists. HSS sarton medalists. Retrieved April 19, 2022, from http://depts.washington.edu/hssexec/about/awards/sarton.html
Sources 3
Princeton University (Ed.). (n.d.). Howard T. Behrman Award for distinguished achievement in the humanities | dean of the faculty. Princeton University. Retrieved April 19, 2022, from https://dof.princeton.edu/howard-t-behrman-award-distinguished-achievement-humanities Thomas Kuhn. Internet encyclopedia of philosophy. (n.d.). Retrieved April 19, 2022, from https://iep.utm.edu/kuhn-ts/
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https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/19/us/thomas-kuhn-73-devised-science-paradigm.html
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Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm
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1996-06-19T00:00:00
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https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/19/us/thomas-kuhn-73-devised-science-paradigm.html
|
Thomas S. Kuhn, whose theory of scientific revolution became a profoundly influential landmark of 20th-century intellectual history, died on Monday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 73.
Robert DiIorio, associate director of the news office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the scholar, who held the title of professor emeritus at M.I.T., had been ill with cancer in recent years.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," was conceived while Professor Kuhn was a graduate student in theoretical physics and published as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science before the University of Chicago Press issued it as a 180-page book in 1962. The work punctured the widely held notion that scientific change was a strictly rational process.
Professor's Kuhn's treatise influenced not only scientists but also economists, historians, sociologists and philosophers, touching off considerable debate. It has sold about one million copies in 16 languages and remains required reading in many basic courses in the history and philosophy of science.
Dr. Kuhn, a professor of philosophy and history of science at M.I.T. from 1979 to 1983 and the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy there from 1983 until 1991, was the author or co-author of five books and scores of articles on the philosophy and history of science. But Dr. Kuhn remained best known for "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."
His thesis was that science was not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. Instead, he wrote, it is "a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions." And in those revolutions, he wrote, "one conceptual world view is replaced by another."
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn (; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.
Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon "objectivity" alone. Science must account for subjective perspectives as well, since all objective conclusions are ultimately founded upon the subjective conditioning/worldview of its researchers and participants.
Early life, family and education
Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Minette Stroock Kuhn and Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, both Jewish.
From kindergarten through fifth grade, he was educated at Lincoln School, a private progressive school in Manhattan, which stressed independent thinking rather than learning facts and subjects. The family then moved 40 mi (64 km) north to the small town of Croton-on-Hudson, New York where, once again, he attended a private progressive school – Hessian Hills School. It was here that, in sixth through ninth grade, he learned to love mathematics. He left Hessian Hills in 1937. He graduated from The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, in 1940.
He obtained his BSc degree in physics from Harvard College in 1943, where he also obtained MSc and PhD degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949, respectively, under the supervision of John Van Vleck. As he states in the first few pages of the preface to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his three years of total academic freedom as a Harvard Junior Fellow were crucial in allowing him to switch from physics to the history and philosophy of science.
Career
Kuhn taught a course in the history of science at Harvard from 1948 until 1956, at the suggestion of university president James Conant. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in both the philosophy department and the history department, being named Professor of the history of science in 1961. Kuhn interviewed and tape recorded Danish physicist Niels Bohr the day before Bohr's death. At Berkeley, he wrote and published (in 1962) his best known and most influential work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In 1964, he joined Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. He served as the president of the History of Science Society from 1969 to 1970. In 1979 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, remaining there until 1991.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Main article: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) was originally printed as an article in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, published by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. In this book, heavily influenced by the fundamental work of Ludwik Fleck, Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called "paradigm shifts" (although he did not coin the phrase, he did contribute to its increase in popularity), in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. In general, science is broken up into three distinct stages. Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. This is followed by "normal science", when scientists attempt to enlarge the central paradigm by "puzzle-solving". Guided by the paradigm, normal science is extremely productive: "when the paradigm is successful, the profession will have solved problems that its members could scarcely have imagined and would never have undertaken without commitment to the paradigm".
In regard to experimentation and collection of data with a view toward solving problems through the commitment to a paradigm, Kuhn states: "The operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not 'the given' of experience but rather 'the collected with difficulty.' They are not what the scientist sees—at least not before his research is well advanced and his attention focused. Rather, they are concrete indices to the content of more elementary perceptions, and as such they are selected for the close scrutiny of normal research only because they promise opportunity for the fruitful elaboration of an accepted paradigm. Far more clearly than the immediate experience from which they in part derive, operations and measurements are paradigm-determined. Science does not deal in all possible laboratory manipulations. Instead, it selects those relevant to the juxtaposition of a paradigm with the immediate experience that that paradigm has partially determined. As a result, scientists with different paradigms engage in different concrete laboratory manipulations."
During the period of normal science, the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher, contra Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science. The difference between the normal and revolutionary science soon sparked the Kuhn-Popper debate.
In SSR, Kuhn also argues that rival paradigms are incommensurable—that is, it is not possible to understand one paradigm through the conceptual framework and terminology of another rival paradigm. For many critics, for example David Stove (Popper and After, 1982), this thesis seemed to entail that theory choice is fundamentally irrational: if rival theories cannot be directly compared, then one cannot make a rational choice as to which one is better. Whether Kuhn's views had such relativistic consequences is the subject of much debate; Kuhn himself denied the accusation of relativism in the third edition of SSR, and sought to clarify his views to avoid further misinterpretation. Freeman Dyson has quoted Kuhn as saying "I am not a Kuhnian!", referring to the relativism that some philosophers have developed based on his work.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the single most widely cited book in the social sciences. The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides "paradigm shift", Kuhn popularized the word paradigm itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics and the work of Georg Lichtenberg to its current broader meaning, coined the term "normal science" to refer to the relatively routine, day-to-day work of scientists working within a paradigm, and was largely responsible for the use of the term "scientific revolutions" in the plural, taking place at widely different periods of time and in different disciplines, as opposed to a single scientific revolution in the late Renaissance. The frequent use of the phrase "paradigm shift" has made scientists more aware of and in many cases more receptive to paradigm changes, so that Kuhn's analysis of the evolution of scientific views has by itself influenced that evolution.
Kuhn's work has been extensively used in social science; for instance, in the post-positivist/positivist debate within International Relations. Kuhn is credited as a foundational force behind the post-Mertonian sociology of scientific knowledge. Kuhn's work has also been used in the Arts and Humanities, such as by Matthew Edward Harris to distinguish between scientific and historical communities (such as political or religious groups): 'political-religious beliefs and opinions are not epistemologically the same as those pertaining to scientific theories'. This is because would-be scientists' worldviews are changed through rigorous training, through the engagement between what Kuhn calls 'exemplars' and the Global Paradigm. Kuhn's notions of paradigms and paradigm shifts have been influential in understanding the history of economic thought, for example the Keynesian revolution, and in debates in political science.
A defense Kuhn gives against the objection that his account of science from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions results in relativism can be found in an essay by Kuhn called "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice." In this essay, he reiterates five criteria from the penultimate chapter of SSR that determine (or help determine, more properly) theory choice:
Accurate – empirically adequate with experimentation and observation
Consistent – internally consistent, but also externally consistent with other theories
Broad Scope – a theory's consequences should extend beyond that which it was initially designed to explain
Simple – the simplest explanation, principally similar to Occam's razor
Fruitful – a theory should disclose new phenomena or new relationships among phenomena
He then goes on to show how, although these criteria admittedly determine theory choice, they are imprecise in practice and relative to individual scientists. According to Kuhn, "When scientists must choose between competing theories, two men fully committed to the same list of criteria for choice may nevertheless reach different conclusions." For this reason, the criteria still are not "objective" in the usual sense of the word because individual scientists reach different conclusions with the same criteria due to valuing one criterion over another or even adding additional criteria for selfish or other subjective reasons. Kuhn then goes on to say, "I am suggesting, of course, that the criteria of choice with which I began function not as rules, which determine choice, but as values, which influence it." Because Kuhn utilizes the history of science in his account of science, his criteria or values for theory choice are often understood as descriptive normative rules (or more properly, values) of theory choice for the scientific community rather than prescriptive normative rules in the usual sense of the word "criteria", although there are many varied interpretations of Kuhn's account of science.
Post-Structure philosophy
Years after the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn dropped the concept of a paradigm and began to focus on the semantic aspects of scientific theories. In particular, Kuhn focuses on the taxonomic structure of scientific kind terms. As a consequence, a scientific revolution is not defined as a 'change of paradigm' anymore, but rather as a change in the taxonomic structure of the theoretical language of science. Some scholars describe this change as resulting from a 'linguistic turn'. In their book, Andersen, Barker and Chen use some recent theories in cognitive psychology to vindicate Kuhn's mature philosophy.
Apart from dropping the concept of a paradigm, Kuhn also began to look at the process of scientific specialisation. In a scientific revolution, a new paradigm (or a new taxonomy) replaces the old one; by contrast, specialisation leads to a proliferation of new specialties and disciplines. This attention to the proliferation of specialties would make Kuhn's model less 'revolutionary' and more 'evolutionary'. Some philosophers claim that Kuhn attempted to describe different kinds of scientific change: revolutions and specialty-creation. Others claim that the process of specialisation is in itself a special case of scientific revolutions. It is also possible to argue that, in Kuhn's model, science evolves through revolutions.
Polanyi–Kuhn debate
Although they used different terminologies, both Kuhn and Michael Polanyi believed that scientists' subjective experiences made science a relativized discipline. Polanyi lectured on this topic for decades before Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Supporters of Polanyi charged Kuhn with plagiarism, as it was known that Kuhn attended several of Polanyi's lectures, and that the two men had debated endlessly over epistemology before either had achieved fame. After the charge of plagiarism, Kuhn acknowledged Polanyi in the Second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Despite this intellectual alliance, Polanyi's work was constantly interpreted by others within the framework of Kuhn's paradigm shifts, much to Polanyi's (and Kuhn's) dismay.
Honors
Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963, elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1974, elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1979, and, in 1982 was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. He also received numerous honorary doctorates.
In honor of his legacy, the Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award is awarded by the American Chemical Society to speakers who present original views that are at odds with mainstream scientific understanding. The winner is selected based on the novelty of the viewpoint and its potential impact if it were to be widely accepted.
Personal life
Thomas Kuhn was married twice, first to Kathryn Muhs with whom he had three children, then to Jehane Barton Burns (Jehane B. Kuhn).
In 1994, Kuhn was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in 1996.
See also
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Thomas Kuhn – HILOBROW
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Thomas Kuhn
By: Tor Aarestad
July 18, 2009
A self-described “physicist turned historian for philosophical purposes,” THOMAS KUHN (1922-96) was largely an autodidact in his eventual home — the then-new field of the history of science. With his scattershot academic background, it seems only appropriate that his major work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), became a cynosure for intellectuals from all fields for several decades. Kuhn inspired calumny from fellow scientists for arguing that every scientific paradigm is eventually replaced by a new paradigm that’s no closer to “truth.” Although humanist-baiter Alan Sokal has laid the blame for the Science Wars at his feet (because, for Kuhn, science was “fundamentally a social undertaking,” as one of his followers paraphrased him), Kuhn rejected the anti-scientific rants of the cultural leftists as vehemently as he skewered the scientific theism of the positivists. He was an intellectual evolutionist — in his view only those theories that best suited the problems of the time would develop and thrive — and a heretic in what we can now recognize as a religious war.
***
On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: | M.I.A. | Screamin Jay Hawkins | Hunter S. Thompson |
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James W. Hagadorn on LinkedIn: Sixty Seconds of Science: Sunrise Science
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DMNS Dawn Patrol: Science outside the museum in first light...with uber-rare Cretaceous fossil tracks
https://lnkd.in/gUiyi6V5
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https://static.licdn.com/aero-v1/sc/h/al2o9zrvru7aqj8e1x2rzsrca
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https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jameswhagadorn_sixty-seconds-of-science-sunrise-science-activity-7189789209413464064-mEMP
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Check out this interesting new episode from Museum of the Future talking about augmenting humanity. Discusses elements of digital twins and their application in medicine and beyond. https://lnkd.in/d7QZ5f-u
COP28 UAE presidency is advocating for #actionism - it’s time to implement #netzero and #naturebasedsolutions with urgency and integrity, at unprecedented rates. No room for errors. We need to learn from the huge mistakes of the voluntary #carbonmarket and make sure we have the governance, accountability frameworks, transparency to implement #NbS with integrity: ecologically sound, socially just, economically viable, and net zero aligned, of course! #biodiversity #naturebasedsolutions #naturefinance #cop28uae #actionism #naturepositive #naturerecovery #netzero #climatechange #climateactionnow
Learn more about the emerging field of complexity science and visualization through the lens of interdisciplinary creativity in this article from Liuhuaying Yang and Paul Kahn: https://ow.ly/z2AM50RB5rN
In light of the rapidly advancing scientific and technological progress worldwide, the anticipated scientific revolution occurred on March 12, 2024. From now on, nothing will remain the same. We are witnessing the closure of an old era and the dawn of a new one. Are you aware of this? I wrote this here to make a note in history.
#How_We_See_Color Science behind how our eyes and brain perceive color from different light sources! 🌈👁️🧠 Watch this video to learn how light interacts with our vision to create the vibrant world we see every day. © American Museum of Natural History #ColorTheory #VisualScience #UXDesign #HumanPerception #LightAndColor
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July 18: Thomas Kuhn and the “Paradigm Shift”
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https://jewishcurrents.org/july-18-thomas-kuhn-paradigm-shift
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Founded in 1946, Jewish Currents is a magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish left.
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Thomas Kuhn - The Living Philosophy
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2022-02-09T10:52:21+00:00
|
Thomas Kuhn’s work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one […]
|
en
|
The Living Philosophy
|
https://www.thelivingphilosophy.com/kuhn-paradigm/
|
Thomas Kuhn’s work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most referenced academic works in history and one of the most influential and controversial books of the 20th century. Its release in 1962 triggered a hornet’s nest of activity in response.
In the book, Kuhn challenges all the traditional notions about how science progresses. In our post-Kuhnian world where the word paradigm is thrown around like hotcakes, it is difficult to appreciate just how revolutionary Kuhn’s reconception of science was.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions saw Kuhn labelled as a relativist, an irrationalist, an anti-realist and perhaps most horrifying of all a postmodernist.
What’s interesting in Kuhn’s case is just how different his background is from the people usually entrusted with these labels.
In this article, we are going to look at the central idea of Kuhn’s work: the term paradigm. This term has attained a state of ubiquity that most buzzwords can only dream of; from the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies to the circle sharing at remote hippy communes, the term has penetrated every layer of the culture.
The Traditional vs Kuhnian History of Science
Before we get into the term paradigm, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the traditional view of scientific progress. It is in contrast to this view that Kuhn’s term paradigm stands and so getting a clearer picture of what the term is distinguished from will give us a clearer idea of what he means by paradigm.
The standard view of scientific progression before Kuhn — and a view that still seems to hold more sway in popular culture — is the idea that science is a piecemeal cumulative process. The history of science on this view is seen a linear progression of slow and steady incremental refinement over the course of the past few centuries.
Science is growing closer and closer to capturing truth with a capital T in its theories. We already have most of the theory developed, the work of science now is just filling in the details — putting the final brushstrokes on the complete understanding of reality.
Kuhn of course, couldn’t disagree more. Having studied the history of science, Kuhn was struck by the contrast between the reality of scientific history and the narrative he and every other student of the sciences is given in their undergraduate courses and textbooks.
Rather than seeing the scientist as a heroic warrior of truth, Kuhn characterises the scientist as a puzzle-solver. The activity of science is more akin to doing a crossword or a chess puzzle in which the potential answer is already suggested by the context. Science doesn’t proceed by choosing great problems and trying to solve them but by taking already established knowledge and trying to move it forward one step.
Science then is less of a heroic endeavour than an army of puzzle-solvers each attempting to solve one of the many puzzles in their field. And this is where the term paradigm comes in because it is the paradigm that tells scientists where the puzzles are and what the solution looks like.
But what is a paradigm? After the publishing of the first edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, one supporter of Kuhn observed that he had used the term in no less than 21 different ways and so with the publishing of the second edition in 1969, Kuhn added a postscript that deals more specifically with this question and which provides the most stimulating reading for the philosopher concerned with the epistemological and ontological implications of Kuhn’s work.
In this postscript divides the uses of paradigm into two core meanings.
Paradigm as Disciplinary Matrix
The first definition tells us that a paradigm is what he calls a “Disciplinary Matrix”. Kuhn claims that science can succeed in making progress only if the relevant scientific community shares a strong commitment to their shared theoretical beliefs, values, instruments, techniques and even metaphysics. This constellation of shared commitments is what Kuhn means by the term Disciplinary Matrix and this is the first meaning of the term paradigm.
This definition of paradigm flies in the face of the traditional view that sees rules as the defining element of science. On the contrary, Kuhn tells us, science proceeds in the absence of rules. The paradigm is the shared worldview that points all its members in the right direction and while there are rules that govern how the community proceeds these rules are implicit.
They only become explicit when the paradigm hits rocky ground. At this point scientists attempt to articulate the rules that have been guiding them in an attempt to move past the present blockade. In such times scientists resort to becoming philosophers in order to get their enterprise unstuck.
We will be exploring the dynamics of these rocky times of scientific crisis in much more depth in the next article on Kuhn’s argument about the cyclical phases every science goes through as it evolves.
Sufficed to say, as long as scientists are in clear water, it is not rules that guide their activity but the Disciplinary Matrix of the paradigm. There is one particular element of the Disciplinary Matrix that does this job above the others and this is second definition of paradigm.
Paradigm as Exemplar
The other definition that Kuhn gives of paradigm is as an exemplar. This is the community’s consensus on exemplary instances of scientific research in the field. These exemplars are what Kuhn is referring to when he uses the term ‘paradigm’ in this second narrower sense.
These exemplary instances of science are often the founding works of a field such as Newton’s Principia or his Optiks or Darwin’s On the Origin of Species or Ptolemy’s Almagest. These texts contain not only the key theories and laws of the new paradigm but the applications of those theories in the solution of important problems along with the new experimental or mathematical techniques employed in those applications.
This exemplar definition of a paradigm tells future scientists exactly what it is they should be working on — i.e. what the puzzles are — it suggests ways in which these puzzles might be solved and finally it tells the scientists how they will know if they have solved them.
Kuhn also tells us two core traits of this exemplar:
The paradigmatic scientific theory does a very good job at explaining the world — much better than any of its competitors.
Crucially, the paradigmatic theory doesn’t solve everything — it leaves many more problems to be solved.
This gives us a peculiar perspective on science as something that constantly needs problems to be solved. If there were no more puzzles to be solved then there would be nothing for a new generation of scientists to rally around. It’s possible then to imagine a comedy in which a scientist would present a unified theory of everything but that it wouldn’t gain that many adherents since it leaves nothing more for scientists to do.
Incommensurability and Kuhn Loss
Perhaps the most controversial thesis of Kuhn’s controversial work is the idea of incommensurability. This is the idea that science guided by one paradigm is ‘incommensurable’ with science developed under a different paradigm which is to say that there is no common measure for assessing the different scientific theories.
This thesis of incommensurability rules out certain kinds of comparison between different paradigms and rejects the idea that later science builds on the knowledge contained in earlier theories.
Rather than science’s development being a linear progression of incremental accumulation, Kuhn tells us that not everything makes it forward in the shift from one paradigm to another. In the shift, many avenues of research are debarred. Many problems that were previously considered properly scientific are dismissed as either metaphysical or too problematic.
More dramatic than this shift of research focus is Kuhn’s claim that the new paradigm also sheds some of what was previously considered knowledge. This idea of lost knowledge has come to be known as “Kuhn Loss”.
As critics have observed, however, whatever Kuhn Loss there is does not seem important. The examples usually given of Kuhn Loss point to a loss of anecdotal rather than empirical explanatory power. That is to say, that that which is lost had no quantitative explanatory power in the first place and so is no loss as far as scientific realism is concerned.
Though Kuhn claimed that different paradigms were ultimately incommensurable, this does not mean that members of different paradigms cannot communicate. It simply means that we can’t assume unimpeded communication. Communication between paradigms requires translation of certain terms that may be used differently in each paradigm.
Different Worlds
Another core element of Kuhn’s work that overlaps with this idea of incommensurability is his philosophy of perception. For Kuhn, the difference between one paradigm and another is like entering into a different world. He says that there is a fundamental sense in which scientists in different paradigms are in fact inhabiting different worlds.
When Kuhn first read Aristotle, he was struck by a series of unforgivable errors on Aristotle’s part that made him question the Macedonian philosopher’s prestige. This is because he was judging Aristotle through the lens of his own paradigm. But when he had his breakthrough moment and he had penetrated Aristotle’s paradigm he could appreciate the ancient philosopher’s brilliance as a scientist.
Kuhn had experienced a perceptual shift. The facts were the same but he was looking at them in a completely different way. Kuhn compares this to the shift in perception that happens with a Gestalt image.
For example, in this classic image, you can flick between a rabbit and a duck but you can’t hold both at the same time. Your awareness flicks from one perceptual mode to another. This is what it is like to undergo a paradigm shift — the entire world and all of the facts within it take on a completely new and different aspect.
One of the examples that Kuhn gives of this from the history of science was when Copernicus argued that the earth was rotating around the sun. Scientists at the time kicked back at this idea as absurd — something that 400 years later seems completely ridiculous to us.
But Kuhn doesn’t dismiss the perspective of these scientists. He tells us that what they meant by Earth and what Copernicus was proposing were two very different things. Inherent to their definition of “Earth” was its unmoving position. From this perspective Copernicus’s perspective was absurd. Thus to shift from their perspective to Copernicus we must move from one world into another; it is necessary to make this perceptual Gestalt shift and to see the world with new eyes.
Talking about the difference between Galileo and the Aristotelians when looking at a pendulum Kuhn writes:
Practising in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction (1962/1970a, 150).
To summarise then, a paradigm for Kuhn has two core meanings. The first is the broader meaning of a Disciplinary Matrix — the collection of beliefs, techniques, values and assumptions that together form a shared worldview and research program within which normal science takes place.
One aspect of this Disciplinary Matrix is the idea of the exemplar which is the second narrower meaning of the term paradigm. This is an exemplary bit of research that has rallied consensus in the field and it provides an exemplary solution to a puzzle as well as pointing the way to further puzzles, how these puzzles might be solved and what the solution should look like.
Thomas Kuhn’s work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most referenced academic works in history and one of the most influential and controversial books of the 20th century. Its release in 1962 triggered a hornet’s nest of activity in response.
In the book, Kuhn challenges all the traditional notions about how science progresses. In our post-Kuhnian world where the word paradigm is thrown around like hotcakes, it is difficult to appreciate just how revolutionary Kuhn’s reconception of science was.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions saw Kuhn labelled as a relativist, an irrationalist, an anti-realist and perhaps most horrifying of all a postmodernist.
What’s interesting in Kuhn’s case is just how different his background is from the people usually entrusted with these labels.
In this article, we are going to look at the central idea of Kuhn’s work: the term paradigm. This term has attained a state of ubiquity that most buzzwords can only dream of; from the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies to the circle sharing at remote hippy communes, the term has penetrated every layer of the culture.
The Traditional vs Kuhnian History of Science
Before we get into the term paradigm, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the traditional view of scientific progress. It is in contrast to this view that Kuhn’s term paradigm stands and so getting a clearer picture of what the term is distinguished from will give us a clearer idea of what he means by paradigm.
The standard view of scientific progression before Kuhn — and a view that still seems to hold more sway in popular culture — is the idea that science is a piecemeal cumulative process. The history of science on this view is seen a linear progression of slow and steady incremental refinement over the course of the past few centuries.
Science is growing closer and closer to capturing truth with a capital T in its theories. We already have most of the theory developed, the work of science now is just filling in the details — putting the final brushstrokes on the complete understanding of reality.
Kuhn of course, couldn’t disagree more. Having studied the history of science, Kuhn was struck by the contrast between the reality of scientific history and the narrative he and every other student of the sciences is given in their undergraduate courses and textbooks.
Rather than seeing the scientist as a heroic warrior of truth, Kuhn characterises the scientist as a puzzle-solver. The activity of science is more akin to doing a crossword or a chess puzzle in which the potential answer is already suggested by the context. Science doesn’t proceed by choosing great problems and trying to solve them but by taking already established knowledge and trying to move it forward one step.
Science then is less of a heroic endeavour than an army of puzzle-solvers each attempting to solve one of the many puzzles in their field. And this is where the term paradigm comes in because it is the paradigm that tells scientists where the puzzles are and what the solution looks like.
But what is a paradigm? After the publishing of the first edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, one supporter of Kuhn observed that he had used the term in no less than 21 different ways and so with the publishing of the second edition in 1969, Kuhn added a postscript that deals more specifically with this question and which provides the most stimulating reading for the philosopher concerned with the epistemological and ontological implications of Kuhn’s work.
In this postscript divides the uses of paradigm into two core meanings.
Paradigm as Disciplinary Matrix
The first definition tells us that a paradigm is what he calls a “Disciplinary Matrix”. Kuhn claims that science can succeed in making progress only if the relevant scientific community shares a strong commitment to their shared theoretical beliefs, values, instruments, techniques and even metaphysics. This constellation of shared commitments is what Kuhn means by the term Disciplinary Matrix and this is the first meaning of the term paradigm.
This definition of paradigm flies in the face of the traditional view that sees rules as the defining element of science. On the contrary, Kuhn tells us, science proceeds in the absence of rules. The paradigm is the shared worldview that points all its members in the right direction and while there are rules that govern how the community proceeds these rules are implicit.
They only become explicit when the paradigm hits rocky ground. At this point scientists attempt to articulate the rules that have been guiding them in an attempt to move past the present blockade. In such times scientists resort to becoming philosophers in order to get their enterprise unstuck.
We will be exploring the dynamics of these rocky times of scientific crisis in much more depth in the next article on Kuhn’s argument about the cyclical phases every science goes through as it evolves.
Sufficed to say, as long as scientists are in clear water, it is not rules that guide their activity but the Disciplinary Matrix of the paradigm. There is one particular element of the Disciplinary Matrix that does this job above the others and this is second definition of paradigm.
Paradigm as Exemplar
The other definition that Kuhn gives of paradigm is as an exemplar. This is the community’s consensus on exemplary instances of scientific research in the field. These exemplars are what Kuhn is referring to when he uses the term ‘paradigm’ in this second narrower sense.
These exemplary instances of science are often the founding works of a field such as Newton’s Principia or his Optiks or Darwin’s On the Origin of Species or Ptolemy’s Almagest. These texts contain not only the key theories and laws of the new paradigm but the applications of those theories in the solution of important problems along with the new experimental or mathematical techniques employed in those applications.
This exemplar definition of a paradigm tells future scientists exactly what it is they should be working on — i.e. what the puzzles are — it suggests ways in which these puzzles might be solved and finally it tells the scientists how they will know if they have solved them.
Kuhn also tells us two core traits of this exemplar:
The paradigmatic scientific theory does a very good job at explaining the world — much better than any of its competitors.
Crucially, the paradigmatic theory doesn’t solve everything — it leaves many more problems to be solved.
This gives us a peculiar perspective on science as something that constantly needs problems to be solved. If there were no more puzzles to be solved then there would be nothing for a new generation of scientists to rally around. It’s possible then to imagine a comedy in which a scientist would present a unified theory of everything but that it wouldn’t gain that many adherents since it leaves nothing more for scientists to do.
Incommensurability and Kuhn Loss
Perhaps the most controversial thesis of Kuhn’s controversial work is the idea of incommensurability. This is the idea that science guided by one paradigm is ‘incommensurable’ with science developed under a different paradigm which is to say that there is no common measure for assessing the different scientific theories.
This thesis of incommensurability rules out certain kinds of comparison between different paradigms and rejects the idea that later science builds on the knowledge contained in earlier theories.
Rather than science’s development being a linear progression of incremental accumulation, Kuhn tells us that not everything makes it forward in the shift from one paradigm to another. In the shift, many avenues of research are debarred. Many problems that were previously considered properly scientific are dismissed as either metaphysical or too problematic.
More dramatic than this shift of research focus is Kuhn’s claim that the new paradigm also sheds some of what was previously considered knowledge. This idea of lost knowledge has come to be known as “Kuhn Loss”.
As critics have observed, however, whatever Kuhn Loss there is does not seem important. The examples usually given of Kuhn Loss point to a loss of anecdotal rather than empirical explanatory power. That is to say, that that which is lost had no quantitative explanatory power in the first place and so is no loss as far as scientific realism is concerned.
Though Kuhn claimed that different paradigms were ultimately incommensurable, this does not mean that members of different paradigms cannot communicate. It simply means that we can’t assume unimpeded communication. Communication between paradigms requires translation of certain terms that may be used differently in each paradigm.
Different Worlds
Another core element of Kuhn’s work that overlaps with this idea of incommensurability is his philosophy of perception. For Kuhn, the difference between one paradigm and another is like entering into a different world. He says that there is a fundamental sense in which scientists in different paradigms are in fact inhabiting different worlds.
When Kuhn first read Aristotle, he was struck by a series of unforgivable errors on Aristotle’s part that made him question the Macedonian philosopher’s prestige. This is because he was judging Aristotle through the lens of his own paradigm. But when he had his breakthrough moment and he had penetrated Aristotle’s paradigm he could appreciate the ancient philosopher’s brilliance as a scientist.
Kuhn had experienced a perceptual shift. The facts were the same but he was looking at them in a completely different way. Kuhn compares this to the shift in perception that happens with a Gestalt image.
For example, in this classic image, you can flick between a rabbit and a duck but you can’t hold both at the same time. Your awareness flicks from one perceptual mode to another. This is what it is like to undergo a paradigm shift — the entire world and all of the facts within it take on a completely new and different aspect.
One of the examples that Kuhn gives of this from the history of science was when Copernicus argued that the earth was rotating around the sun. Scientists at the time kicked back at this idea as absurd — something that 400 years later seems completely ridiculous to us.
But Kuhn doesn’t dismiss the perspective of these scientists. He tells us that what they meant by Earth and what Copernicus was proposing were two very different things. Inherent to their definition of “Earth” was its unmoving position. From this perspective Copernicus’s perspective was absurd. Thus to shift from their perspective to Copernicus we must move from one world into another; it is necessary to make this perceptual Gestalt shift and to see the world with new eyes.
Talking about the difference between Galileo and the Aristotelians when looking at a pendulum Kuhn writes:
Practising in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction (1962/1970a, 150).
To summarise then, a paradigm for Kuhn has two core meanings. The first is the broader meaning of a Disciplinary Matrix — the collection of beliefs, techniques, values and assumptions that together form a shared worldview and research program within which normal science takes place.
One aspect of this Disciplinary Matrix is the idea of the exemplar which is the second narrower meaning of the term paradigm. This is an exemplary bit of research that has rallied consensus in the field and it provides an exemplary solution to a puzzle as well as pointing the way to further puzzles, how these puzzles might be solved and what the solution should look like.
Thomas Kuhn’s work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most referenced academic works in history and one of the most influential and controversial books of the 20th century. Its release in 1962 triggered a hornet’s nest of activity in response.
In the book, Kuhn challenges all the traditional notions about how science progresses. In our post-Kuhnian world where the word paradigm is thrown around like hotcakes, it is difficult to appreciate just how revolutionary Kuhn’s reconception of science was.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions saw Kuhn labelled as a relativist, an irrationalist, an anti-realist and perhaps most horrifying of all a postmodernist.
What’s interesting in Kuhn’s case is just how different his background is from the people usually entrusted with these labels.
In this article, we are going to look at the central idea of Kuhn’s work: the term paradigm. This term has attained a state of ubiquity that most buzzwords can only dream of; from the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies to the circle sharing at remote hippy communes, the term has penetrated every layer of the culture.
The Traditional vs Kuhnian History of Science
Before we get into the term paradigm, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the traditional view of scientific progress. It is in contrast to this view that Kuhn’s term paradigm stands and so getting a clearer picture of what the term is distinguished from will give us a clearer idea of what he means by paradigm.
The standard view of scientific progression before Kuhn — and a view that still seems to hold more sway in popular culture — is the idea that science is a piecemeal cumulative process. The history of science on this view is seen a linear progression of slow and steady incremental refinement over the course of the past few centuries.
Science is growing closer and closer to capturing truth with a capital T in its theories. We already have most of the theory developed, the work of science now is just filling in the details — putting the final brushstrokes on the complete understanding of reality.
Kuhn of course, couldn’t disagree more. Having studied the history of science, Kuhn was struck by the contrast between the reality of scientific history and the narrative he and every other student of the sciences is given in their undergraduate courses and textbooks.
Rather than seeing the scientist as a heroic warrior of truth, Kuhn characterises the scientist as a puzzle-solver. The activity of science is more akin to doing a crossword or a chess puzzle in which the potential answer is already suggested by the context. Science doesn’t proceed by choosing great problems and trying to solve them but by taking already established knowledge and trying to move it forward one step.
Science then is less of a heroic endeavour than an army of puzzle-solvers each attempting to solve one of the many puzzles in their field. And this is where the term paradigm comes in because it is the paradigm that tells scientists where the puzzles are and what the solution looks like.
But what is a paradigm? After the publishing of the first edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, one supporter of Kuhn observed that he had used the term in no less than 21 different ways and so with the publishing of the second edition in 1969, Kuhn added a postscript that deals more specifically with this question and which provides the most stimulating reading for the philosopher concerned with the epistemological and ontological implications of Kuhn’s work.
In this postscript divides the uses of paradigm into two core meanings.
Paradigm as Disciplinary Matrix
The first definition tells us that a paradigm is what he calls a “Disciplinary Matrix”. Kuhn claims that science can succeed in making progress only if the relevant scientific community shares a strong commitment to their shared theoretical beliefs, values, instruments, techniques and even metaphysics. This constellation of shared commitments is what Kuhn means by the term Disciplinary Matrix and this is the first meaning of the term paradigm.
This definition of paradigm flies in the face of the traditional view that sees rules as the defining element of science. On the contrary, Kuhn tells us, science proceeds in the absence of rules. The paradigm is the shared worldview that points all its members in the right direction and while there are rules that govern how the community proceeds these rules are implicit.
They only become explicit when the paradigm hits rocky ground. At this point scientists attempt to articulate the rules that have been guiding them in an attempt to move past the present blockade. In such times scientists resort to becoming philosophers in order to get their enterprise unstuck.
We will be exploring the dynamics of these rocky times of scientific crisis in much more depth in the next article on Kuhn’s argument about the cyclical phases every science goes through as it evolves.
Sufficed to say, as long as scientists are in clear water, it is not rules that guide their activity but the Disciplinary Matrix of the paradigm. There is one particular element of the Disciplinary Matrix that does this job above the others and this is second definition of paradigm.
Paradigm as Exemplar
The other definition that Kuhn gives of paradigm is as an exemplar. This is the community’s consensus on exemplary instances of scientific research in the field. These exemplars are what Kuhn is referring to when he uses the term ‘paradigm’ in this second narrower sense.
These exemplary instances of science are often the founding works of a field such as Newton’s Principia or his Optiks or Darwin’s On the Origin of Species or Ptolemy’s Almagest. These texts contain not only the key theories and laws of the new paradigm but the applications of those theories in the solution of important problems along with the new experimental or mathematical techniques employed in those applications.
This exemplar definition of a paradigm tells future scientists exactly what it is they should be working on — i.e. what the puzzles are — it suggests ways in which these puzzles might be solved and finally it tells the scientists how they will know if they have solved them.
Kuhn also tells us two core traits of this exemplar:
The paradigmatic scientific theory does a very good job at explaining the world — much better than any of its competitors.
Crucially, the paradigmatic theory doesn’t solve everything — it leaves many more problems to be solved.
This gives us a peculiar perspective on science as something that constantly needs problems to be solved. If there were no more puzzles to be solved then there would be nothing for a new generation of scientists to rally around. It’s possible then to imagine a comedy in which a scientist would present a unified theory of everything but that it wouldn’t gain that many adherents since it leaves nothing more for scientists to do.
Incommensurability and Kuhn Loss
Perhaps the most controversial thesis of Kuhn’s controversial work is the idea of incommensurability. This is the idea that science guided by one paradigm is ‘incommensurable’ with science developed under a different paradigm which is to say that there is no common measure for assessing the different scientific theories.
This thesis of incommensurability rules out certain kinds of comparison between different paradigms and rejects the idea that later science builds on the knowledge contained in earlier theories.
Rather than science’s development being a linear progression of incremental accumulation, Kuhn tells us that not everything makes it forward in the shift from one paradigm to another. In the shift, many avenues of research are debarred. Many problems that were previously considered properly scientific are dismissed as either metaphysical or too problematic.
More dramatic than this shift of research focus is Kuhn’s claim that the new paradigm also sheds some of what was previously considered knowledge. This idea of lost knowledge has come to be known as “Kuhn Loss”.
As critics have observed, however, whatever Kuhn Loss there is does not seem important. The examples usually given of Kuhn Loss point to a loss of anecdotal rather than empirical explanatory power. That is to say, that that which is lost had no quantitative explanatory power in the first place and so is no loss as far as scientific realism is concerned.
Though Kuhn claimed that different paradigms were ultimately incommensurable, this does not mean that members of different paradigms cannot communicate. It simply means that we can’t assume unimpeded communication. Communication between paradigms requires translation of certain terms that may be used differently in each paradigm.
Different Worlds
Another core element of Kuhn’s work that overlaps with this idea of incommensurability is his philosophy of perception. For Kuhn, the difference between one paradigm and another is like entering into a different world. He says that there is a fundamental sense in which scientists in different paradigms are in fact inhabiting different worlds.
When Kuhn first read Aristotle, he was struck by a series of unforgivable errors on Aristotle’s part that made him question the Macedonian philosopher’s prestige. This is because he was judging Aristotle through the lens of his own paradigm. But when he had his breakthrough moment and he had penetrated Aristotle’s paradigm he could appreciate the ancient philosopher’s brilliance as a scientist.
Kuhn had experienced a perceptual shift. The facts were the same but he was looking at them in a completely different way. Kuhn compares this to the shift in perception that happens with a Gestalt image.
For example, in this classic image, you can flick between a rabbit and a duck but you can’t hold both at the same time. Your awareness flicks from one perceptual mode to another. This is what it is like to undergo a paradigm shift — the entire world and all of the facts within it take on a completely new and different aspect.
One of the examples that Kuhn gives of this from the history of science was when Copernicus argued that the earth was rotating around the sun. Scientists at the time kicked back at this idea as absurd — something that 400 years later seems completely ridiculous to us.
But Kuhn doesn’t dismiss the perspective of these scientists. He tells us that what they meant by Earth and what Copernicus was proposing were two very different things. Inherent to their definition of “Earth” was its unmoving position. From this perspective Copernicus’s perspective was absurd. Thus to shift from their perspective to Copernicus we must move from one world into another; it is necessary to make this perceptual Gestalt shift and to see the world with new eyes.
Talking about the difference between Galileo and the Aristotelians when looking at a pendulum Kuhn writes:
Practising in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction (1962/1970a, 150).
To summarise then, a paradigm for Kuhn has two core meanings. The first is the broader meaning of a Disciplinary Matrix — the collection of beliefs, techniques, values and assumptions that together form a shared worldview and research program within which normal science takes place.
One aspect of this Disciplinary Matrix is the idea of the exemplar which is the second narrower meaning of the term paradigm. This is an exemplary bit of research that has rallied consensus in the field and it provides an exemplary solution to a puzzle as well as pointing the way to further puzzles, how these puzzles might be solved and what the solution should look like.
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[
"timeline",
"timeline maker",
"interactive",
"create",
"historical",
"time",
"visualization",
"chronology",
"chronological",
"reference"
] | null |
[] |
1922-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
|
en
|
/favicon.ico
|
Timetoast Timelines
|
https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/thomas-kuhn-732e35ab-1b04-4194-9464-779134ba4a8b
|
Thomas Samuel Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on July 18, 1922. He was born to Samuel L. and Minette Kuhn. He was the oldest for three siblings. His father was a hydraulic engineer who studied at Harvard.
Kuhns' parents political views were liberal which reflected into Kuhns education. In 1927 Kuhn attended Lincoln School in Manhattan.
Undergraduate Education
Kuhn followed his father foot steps and enrolled into Harvard University in the fall of 1940. During Kuhns freshman year of college he took a year long philosophy class in which he learned about Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume and Kant.
In 1941, during his sophomore year of university the attacks on Pearl Harbor occurred. This same year he decided to major in Physics.
In 1943 Kuhn graduated Harvard University with a bachelors degree in Physics.
Graduate Education
In 1946, Kuhn attained his master's degree in physics. In 1949, Kuhn earned his Ph.D also in physics concentrating in the application of quantum mechanics to solid state physics. In 1956, Kuhn began teaching undergraduate students humanities as part of the General Education in Science. Teaching gave Kuhn the opportunity to read on historical science texts. His teachings focused on eighteen century matter theory and history of thermodynamics.
The Copernican Revolution- The book
In 1957, Kuhn published his first book "The Copernican Revolution" In this book he claimed he had identified an important feature missed by scholars: its plurality. Scientist must have philosophical and religious commitments that are important for justification of scientific knowledge.
University of California- Berkeley
In 1961 Kuhn became a professor at the University of California- Berkeley teaching history of science in the philosophy department. Kuhn had moved to California in 1956. While teaching Kuhn had developed an interest for philosophy of science. Kuhns colleagues introduced him to the works of Wittgenstein and Paul Feyerabend.
The Structure of Scientific Revolution
In 1962, Kuhn published, "The Structure of Scientific Revolution" in the international Encyclopedia of United States. The idea was the development of science driven in normal periods. Kuhn mentions that a function of a paradigm is to supply a puzzle for scientist to solve and provide tools for a solution. There is a YouTube video that explains this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L70T4pQv7P8
|
|||||
7992
|
dbpedia
|
2
| 38
|
https://www.hilobrow.com/2009/07/18/hilo-hero-thomas-kuhn/
|
en
|
Thomas Kuhn – HILOBROW
|
[
"https://www.hilobrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/logo.png",
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] |
[] |
[] |
[
""
] | null |
[
"Tor Aarestad"
] |
2009-07-18T00:00:00
|
en
|
https://www.hilobrow.com/2009/07/18/hilo-hero-thomas-kuhn/
|
Thomas Kuhn
By: Tor Aarestad
July 18, 2009
A self-described “physicist turned historian for philosophical purposes,” THOMAS KUHN (1922-96) was largely an autodidact in his eventual home — the then-new field of the history of science. With his scattershot academic background, it seems only appropriate that his major work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), became a cynosure for intellectuals from all fields for several decades. Kuhn inspired calumny from fellow scientists for arguing that every scientific paradigm is eventually replaced by a new paradigm that’s no closer to “truth.” Although humanist-baiter Alan Sokal has laid the blame for the Science Wars at his feet (because, for Kuhn, science was “fundamentally a social undertaking,” as one of his followers paraphrased him), Kuhn rejected the anti-scientific rants of the cultural leftists as vehemently as he skewered the scientific theism of the positivists. He was an intellectual evolutionist — in his view only those theories that best suited the problems of the time would develop and thrive — and a heretic in what we can now recognize as a religious war.
***
On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: | M.I.A. | Screamin Jay Hawkins | Hunter S. Thompson |
|
|||||||
7992
|
dbpedia
|
3
| 1
|
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-S-Kuhn
|
en
|
Thomas S. Kuhn | Biography, Paradigms, Structure of Scientific Revolution, & Facts
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1998-07-20T00:00:00+00:00
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Thomas S. Kuhn was an American historian of science who is best known for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), one of the most influential works of history and philosophy written in the 20th century.
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Encyclopedia Britannica
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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-S-Kuhn
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Thomas S. Kuhn (born July 18, 1922, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.—died June 17, 1996, Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American historian of science noted for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), one of the most influential works of history and philosophy written in the 20th century.
Kuhn earned bachelor’s (1943) and master’s (1946) degrees in physics at Harvard University but obtained a Ph.D. (1949) there in the history of science. He taught the history or philosophy of science at Harvard (1951–56), the University of California at Berkeley (1956–64), Princeton University (1964–79), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979–91).
More From Britannica
philosophy of science: The work of Thomas Kuhn
In his first book, The Copernican Revolution (1957), Kuhn studied the development of the heliocentric theory of the solar system during the Renaissance. In his landmark second book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that scientific research and thought are defined by “paradigms,” or conceptual world-views, that consist of formal theories, classic experiments, and trusted methods. Scientists typically accept a prevailing paradigm and try to extend its scope by refining theories, explaining puzzling data, and establishing more precise measures of standards and phenomena. Eventually, however, their efforts may generate insoluble theoretical problems or experimental anomalies that expose a paradigm’s inadequacies or contradict it altogether. This accumulation of difficulties triggers a crisis that can only be resolved by an intellectual revolution that replaces an old paradigm with a new one. The overthrow of Ptolemaic cosmology by Copernican heliocentrism, and the displacement of Newtonian mechanics by quantum physics and general relativity, are both examples of major paradigm shifts.
Kuhn questioned the traditional conception of scientific progress as a gradual, cumulative acquisition of knowledge based on rationally chosen experimental frameworks. Instead, he argued that the paradigm determines the kinds of experiments scientists perform, the types of questions they ask, and the problems they consider important. A shift in the paradigm alters the fundamental concepts underlying research and inspires new standards of evidence, new research techniques, and new pathways of theory and experiment that are radically incommensurate with the old ones.
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https://franklycurious.com/wp/2014/07/18/misunderstanding-thomas-kuhn/
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Misunderstanding Thomas Kuhn at Frankly Curious
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2014-07-18T00:00:00
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The great philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn was born on this day in 1922. He is best know, of course, for his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In it, he argued that science doesn’t so much evolve slowly but … Continue reading →
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en
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Frankly Curious
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https://franklycurious.com/wp/2014/07/18/misunderstanding-thomas-kuhn/
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The great philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn was born on this day in 1922. He is best know, of course, for his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In it, he argued that science doesn’t so much evolve slowly but rather lurches from one paradigm to another. I think this is often misunderstood to mean that it is random, but that’s not it at all. Scientists create one paradigm like, “radiation is continuous like a river flowing rather than a rock slide.” And we learned much using this paradigm. But then we learned about the ultraviolet catastrophe, where increasing an objects temperature didn’t cause the frequency of light to just get higher and higher. And so, a scientific revolution took place and we moved to a new paradign, “radiation is not continuous; it is like a rock slide and not a flowing river.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean that everything we learned in the old paradigm was now wrong. It all became a special case of the new paradigm. In my example, the truth is that the “rocks” are so small that they usually look like a river flowing. Unfortunately, a lot of people have used Kuhn and people who have followed him to argue for relativism. We see this in the worst excesses of postmodernism. A lot of that comes from a misunderstanding of what science itself is. And sadly, I see this misunderstanding in notable scientists all time. Science isn’t reality or even what causes reality. It is simply an endeavor to create models of how reality works.
I’m very interested in the uncertainty principle, which states that we can only know an object’s velocity and position to a certain level. It is named after Werner Heisenberg, because it falls out rather simply from his formalism of quantum mechanics. Does that mean that there is an inherent uncertainty in the universe? No! (But as far as we humans living inside the universe it probably does.) What it means is in the very best model we have of mechanics, there are limits to how accurately we can measure objects.
So Kuhn was not arguing for relativism. In fact, he argued just the opposite and pushed back against that reading of his work. It is funny, though. In the world of normal people who don’t deal with the philosophy of science, it was initially the liberals who were most interested in relativism. In the conservative Paul Johnson’s book Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1980s, he spends much time attacking relativism among liberals. (Johnson is also a Catholic.) But if you look at modern America, you will see that it is the conservative movement that has fully embraced relativism. The conservative argument against global warming is the same as The Dude’s in The Big Lebowski, “That’s just like, your opinion, man.”
What is perhaps most interesting about Thomas Kuhn’s work is that it created a revolution in the history of science. So it was an example of what it was talking about. It has done an enormous amount to increase our knowledge of how we advance intellectually. It has also had a bad effect on the way some people look at the whole intellectual endeavor. But I certainly don’t think that Kuhn can be blamed for people misunderstanding his work.
Happy birthday Thomas Kuhn!
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https://theconversation.com/thomas-kuhns-the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions-50-years-on-6586
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Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50 years on
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2012-08-02T20:13:04+00:00
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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the original publication of Thomas Kuhn’s famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn, who taught at Berkeley, Princeton and MIT following studies…
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en
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The Conversation
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https://theconversation.com/thomas-kuhns-the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions-50-years-on-6586
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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the original publication of Thomas Kuhn’s famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn, who taught at Berkeley, Princeton and MIT following studies in physics at Harvard, was a historian of science whose ideas have had a major impact on the philosophy of science.
Now in its third edition, Structure has had a lasting influence on our thinking about science. After 50 years, Kuhn’s ideas show signs of wear. But they continue to shape our “image of science”, to echo Kuhn’s own turn of phrase in the opening lines of Structure.
The argument of Structure
The core idea of Structure is that scientific research is based on underlying theoretical structures that provide a framework for research in a field for a sustained period of time. Kuhn’s name for these structures was paradigm. Indeed it was Kuhn’s use of the word that inserted “paradigm” into the popular lexicon.
His original use of the word was flexible. But he had two key points in mind. First, there’s a set of beliefs about a domain of study (including generalisations and a model of how the domain is constituted) that’s adopted as the basis for scientific practice in a scientific field at a time.
Second, there are a number of important examples of exemplary scientific research which later scientists look back to as guiding inspiration for their own research. Examples of this include Copernican heliocentric astronomy, Lavoisier’s oxygen-based chemistry and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. All of these constituted paradigms for scientists working in these areas for a significant period of time, both in the sense of providing an overarching set of beliefs about the world and in the sense of providing examples of exemplary research.
The controversy
Kuhn’s most controversial ideas relate to how paradigms change. In his terms, the replacement of one paradigm by another constitutes a scientific revolution. His use of the term revolution was deliberate. Like political revolution, scientific revolution involves a radical break with the past.
In what Kuhn termed “normal science”, scientists employ an accepted paradigm to solve “puzzles” that are thrown up in the attempt to apply the paradigm to nature. The solution of puzzles is governed by the norms and procedures of that paradigm.
But paradigms sometimes run into trouble. They face “anomalies” that resist solution within the paradigm. If anomalies proliferate, the community of scientists within a paradigm may enter a period of “crisis”.
The results of crises
In crisis, scientists behave in an unusual way. They propose and develop alternatives to the existing paradigm. An alternative to the paradigm may acquire a following as scientists “convert” from the accepted paradigm to the newcomer.
If the scientific community converts to the alternative, a revolution has occurred, and normal science recommences on the basis of the newly-appointed paradigm.
Kuhn points out that the choice between the reigning paradigm and the challenger is unable to be determined by the norms and procedures of normal science. Nor is there any set of fixed and all-encompassing rules of scientific method able to dictate the choice. The choice involves a shift of gestalt that Kuhn compares to religious conversion.
Irrational science?
For many readers of Kuhn, the take-home message was one of irrationalism and relativism, since choice between paradigms seemed unable to be made in a rational way on the basis of objective criteria. And this message of irrationalism may explain the popularity of Kuhn’s ideas. Certainly, it is one basis for the controversy that has surrounded Structure since its initial publication.
But, with hindsight, the message of the book can be understood differently. Kuhn’s critics argued that there are independent standards that may be employed in the choice of paradigm. Kuhn himself came to accept the point in later work.
Scientists, Kuhn thought, evaluate theories or paradigms using a set of values, such as accuracy, simplicity, consistency, breadth and fertility. The values are employed throughout the sciences, and may be employed to evaluate competing theories or paradigms.
A question of values
But there’s a hitch. They do not constitute a “neutral algorithm of theory choice”. They do not yield a mechanical decision procedure that will deliver a unique outcome acceptable to all parties.
The values may conflict with each other. They may be interpreted in different ways. Scientists who appeal to the same set of values may understand them differently, and reach conflicting decisions based on the same values. They may even reach the same decision on the basis of differing weightings and interpretations of the values.
From a more contemporary perspective, what this suggests is not that paradigm choice is irrational, but that rational choice between paradigms is a deliberative process in which scientists exercise a variety of judgements that may differ significantly. The choice is not a mechanical one governed by an algorithm. But it may be a rational one just the same.
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https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions-at-fifty
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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions at Fifty
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2012-11-14T05:00:00+00:00
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Matthew C. Rees looks back on the debates over the Thomas Kuhn classic that brought us the "paradigm shift"
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en
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The New Atlantis
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https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions-at-fifty
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Fifty years ago, Thomas Kuhn, then a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, released a thin volume entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn challenged the traditional view of science as an accumulation of objective facts toward an ever more truthful understanding of nature. Instead, he argued, what scientists discover depends to a large extent on the sorts of questions they ask, which in turn depend in part on scientists’ philosophical commitments. Sometimes, the dominant scientific way of looking at the world becomes obviously riddled with problems; this can provoke radical and irreversible scientific revolutions that Kuhn dubbed “paradigm shifts” — introducing a term that has been much used and abused. Paradigm shifts interrupt the linear progression of knowledge by changing how scientists view the world, the questions they ask of it, and the tools they use to understand it. Since scientists’ worldview after a paradigm shift is so radically different from the one that came before, the two cannot be compared according to a mutual conception of reality. Kuhn concluded that the path of science through these revolutions is not necessarily toward truth but merely away from previous error.
Kuhn’s thesis has been hotly debated among historians and philosophers of science since it first appeared. The book and its disparate interpretations have given rise to ongoing disagreements over the nature of science, the possibility of progress, and the availability of truth. For some, Kuhn was a relativist, a prophet of postmodernism who considered truth a social construct built on the outlook of a community at a specific point in history. For others, Kuhn was an authoritarian whose work legitimized science as an elitist power structure. Still others considered him neither a relativist nor an authoritarian, but simply misunderstood. Kuhn’s work was ultimately an examination of the borders between the scientific and the metaphysical, and between the scientific community and society at large. As he discovered, these boundaries are not always clear. It behooves us to bear this in mind as we take the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary to revisit his book and the controversies surrounding it.
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati in 1922. He attended Harvard — where his father, a hydraulic engineer, had also studied — and earned a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1943. After graduating, he became a junior researcher on radar, first at Harvard and then in Europe at the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). It was in these jobs that he became close with James B. Conant, who served as both president of Harvard and the head of OSRD. After the war, Kuhn returned to academic life at Harvard, receiving a Ph.D. in physics in 1949, and continuing on to teach the history of science. But the Harvard faculty denied him tenure in 1956, after which he left for Berkeley, where he was eventually made a full professor of the history of science in 1961. He never returned to physics professionally. By 1964, he had made his way to Princeton, and ended his career at M.I.T. as a professor of philosophy, where he retired in 1991. But it was at Berkeley, in 1962, that Kuhn published the work that was to mark his career, and the course of inquiry in the philosophy of science, from that point on: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
The earliest seeds that would grow into Kuhn’s famous book were planted when he was a doctoral student in 1947. Conant tasked Kuhn with giving a series of lectures on seventeenth-century theories of mechanics. It was during the preparation of these lectures that Kuhn first began to develop his ideas. He sought to grasp exactly why Newton had discovered the laws of motion, and why it had taken mankind so long to do that, considering that Aristotle’s theories about motion had been so manifestly wrong. Moreover, Kuhn was confused about why Aristotle had been so wrong, when he had gotten much of biology and social science so right.
One summer day, it occurred to Kuhn rather suddenly that Aristotle had been operating from within a completely different framework of physics than the modern understanding. For Aristotle, the growing of a child into an adult was a similar process to that of a rock falling to the ground: each is moving toward its natural end, the place and state where it belongs. Contrary to Newtonian physics, Kuhn later explained in the preface to his 1977 collection The Essential Tension, “position itself was … a quality in Aristotle’s physics, and a body that changed its position therefore remained the same body only in the problematic sense that the child is the individual it becomes. In a universe where qualities were primary, motion was necessarily a change-of-state rather than a state.” This idea germinated in Kuhn’s mind as he continued his doctoral work, and later formed part of the basis for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
The argument of Structure is not especially complicated. Kuhn held that the historical process of science is divided into three stages: a “normal” stage, followed by “crisis” and then “revolutionary” stages. The normal stage is characterized by a strong agreement among scientists on what is and is not scientific practice. In this stage, scientists largely agree on what are the questions that need answers. Indeed, only problems that are recognized as potentially having solutions are considered scientific. So it is in the normal stage that we see science progress not toward better questions but better answers. The beginning of this period is usually marked by a solution that serves as an example, a paradigm, for further research. (This is just one of many ways in which Kuhn uses the word “paradigm” in Structure.)
A crisis occurs when an existing theory involves so many unsolved puzzles, or “anomalies,” that its explanatory ability becomes questionable. Scientists begin to consider entirely new ways of examining the data, and there is a lack of consensus on which questions are important scientifically. Problems that had previously been left to other, non-scientific fields may now come into view as potentially scientific.
Eventually, a new exemplary solution emerges. This new solution will be “incommensurable” — another key term in Kuhn’s thesis — with the former paradigm, meaning not only that the two paradigms are mutually conflicting, but that they are asking different questions, and to some extent speaking different scientific languages. Such a revolution inaugurates a new period of normal science. Thus normal science can be understood as a period of “puzzle-solving” or “mopping-up” after the discovery or elucidation of a paradigm-shifting theory. The theory is applied in different contexts, using different variables, to fully flesh out its implications. But since every paradigm has its flaws, progress in normal science is always toward the point of another crisis.
Kuhn relies heavily on a “particularly famous case of paradigm change”: the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debate over whether the sun goes around the earth or the earth around the sun. (This had been the subject of Kuhn’s previous book, The Copernican Revolution [1957].) Before Copernicus, Ptolemy conceived of a universe with the earth at its center. The celestial spheres wrapped around the earth like the layers of an onion, although how exactly they rested on each other so smoothly — the theory was that their natural motion in the ether was rotation — remained unknown. Ptolemy and his followers saw that the stars, the planets, the moon, and the sun all appeared to revolve in one direction around the earth in a regular order, and the exceptions — like the occasions when some planets seemed to move backwards in the sky — could be explained away. For over a thousand years, this was the dominant European conception of the universe. The model worked well for most of the questions that were asked of it; it could be used to predict future celestial movements, and as a practical matter, there was little reason to doubt it. In this “normal” stage of science, the mopping-up process was one of refining the data for more accurate predictions in the future.
But there will always be facts and circumstances any given theory cannot explain. “By the early sixteenth century,” Kuhn writes in Structure, “an increasing number of Europe’s best astronomers were recognizing that the astronomical paradigm was failing in application to its own traditional problems” — not to mention outside pressures related to calendar reform and growing medieval criticism of Aristotle. As the unexplainables began to mount, the Ptolemaic paradigm moved into a state of crisis. The Copernican Revolution was the result — a new theoretical framework that could incorporate the contradictory data into a coherent structure by putting the sun at the center of the cosmos. In Kuhn’s view, Copernicus and Galileo were on the tail end of the mopping-up era of Ptolemaic astronomy; Copernicus was not intentionally overthrowing the existing model, but the way he interpreted the data was simply inconsistent with an earth-centered universe. In spite of subsequent efforts by others, such as Tycho Brahe, to synthesize the two theories, they were incompatible.
If a paradigm is “destined to win its fight, the number and strength of the persuasive arguments in its favor will increase.” After a new theory is established, it attracts new supporters, often including younger scientists and perhaps the originating theorist’s students. Meanwhile, Kuhn writes, “those unwilling or unable to accommodate their work” to the new theory “have often simply stayed in the departments of philosophy from which so many of the special sciences have been spawned.” Older scientists have trouble adjusting to the new paradigm, in part because it puts their own work in doubt. Eventually, they are ignored. Kuhn quotes Max Planck, who famously wrote that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Over time, there again comes to be almost unanimous agreement on the validity of the predominant theory — it achieves paradigmatic status. Scientists tacitly assume agreement on the meanings of technical terms, and develop a shared and specialized technical vocabulary to facilitate data accumulation and organization. They establish journals dedicated to their scientific field, begin to cross-reference one another, and scrutinize each other’s work according to whether or not it conforms to the theory. Their students, likewise, learn to approach problems in the same way they do, much as an apprentice learns from a master. Normal science has resumed and the cycle begins anew.
It was important for Kuhn that his conception of the history and process of science was not the same as that of scientific progress. He maintained that the process of science was similar to biological evolution — not necessarily evolution toward anything, only away from previous error. In this way, Kuhn was rather skeptical about the idea of progress at all. This was the most controversial aspect of his thesis, the one that most concerned the contemporary critics of Structure, on the basis of which they accused — or celebrated — Kuhn as a champion of relativism. As University of Toronto philosophy professor Ian Hacking notes in an introductory essay prepended to the new fiftieth-anniversary edition of Structure, Kuhn’s notion that science moves away from previous error
seems to call in question the overarching notion of science as aiming at the truth about the universe. The thought that there is one and only one complete true account of everything is deep in the Western tradition…. In popular versions of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cosmology, there is one true and complete account of everything, namely what God knows. (He knows about the death of the least sparrow.)
This image gets transposed to fundamental physics, many of whose practitioners, who might proudly proclaim themselves to be atheists, take for granted that there just is, waiting to be discovered, one full and complete account of nature. If you think that makes sense, then it offers itself as an ideal towards which the sciences are progressing. Hence Kuhn’s progress away from will seem totally misguided.
For Kuhn, a paradigm shift is fundamentally not a scientific but a philosophical change, because the incommensurability of paradigms means that there is no external stance from which one can be shown to be superior to another. Kuhn explains, “The men who called Copernicus mad because he proclaimed that the earth moved … were not either just wrong or quite wrong. Part of what they meant by ‘earth’ was fixed position. Their earth, at least, could not be moved.” To say that the heliocentric model is true and that the geocentric model is false is to ignore the fact that the two models mean quite different things by the term “earth.”
But science has long been understood as a progressive accumulation of knowledge, not a mere shift from one worldview to another, like the gestalt shift between perceiving a duck or a rabbit in the famous diagram that Kuhn liked to use for illustration. And so Structure was received by many as a denial of the existence of absolute truth. If competing paradigms are both comprehensible, yet are incommensurable, can they not both be true? And if they are both true, who is to be the final arbiter of truth?
Many took Kuhn’s thesis to be a reduction of science to power struggles between competing views. Kuhn himself rejected this interpretation — although his attempts to do so sometimes ended up lending support in form to what they rejected in words: The physicist Freeman Dyson recounts in his 2006 book The Scientist as Rebel that he once attended a conference at which Kuhn’s disciples were repeating these exaggerated interpretations of his thesis, and “Kuhn interrupted them by shouting from the back of the hall with overwhelming volume, ‘One thing you people need to understand: I am not a Kuhnian.’”
Structure had taken on a life of its own. As Kuhn stated in a 1991 interview with science journalist John Horgan, “For Christ’s sake, if I had my choice of having written the book or not having written it, I would choose to have written it. But there have certainly been aspects involving considerable upset about the response to it.” As Hacking notes, a number of critics argued that the first edition was terribly vague. One reviewer in 1966 criticized Kuhn for using the word “paradigm” in twenty-one different senses in the book. Hacking also notes the strikingly ambivalent language that Kuhn often employs, using phrases like “we may want to say” and “[this] may make us wish to say” instead of offering assertions outright, leaving him open to criticism that he was unclear or hedging his argument.
Kuhn was also criticized for building a wall between basic science (that is, science conducted for its own sake) and applied science (that is, science aimed at achieving specific, often socially important, goals). Against Bacon’s dictum that the proper aim of science is “the relief of man’s estate,” Kuhn argued that scientists in the “normal” stage must ignore “socially important problems” and should instead just focus on solving puzzles within the paradigm. In other words, problems that must be solved to improve human life but cannot be solved by the methods of a given paradigm are a distraction from the work necessary during the “normal” phase of science. This suggests that scientists must cloister themselves, at least to an extent, in order to make progress within the confines of their paradigm. Moreover, as Steve Fuller, professor of sociology at the University of Warwick, notes in Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (2000), Kuhn felt that a paradigm should be “sheltered from relentless criticism in its early stages.” So not only can a paradigm “insulate the community” of scientists from the demands of society, in Kuhn’s words, but scientists must in turn insulate the paradigm from harsh criticism.
Kuhn was left having to do some “mopping up” of his own, which he attempted in the years after Structure was published. For example, in a 1973 lecture (collected in The Essential Tension), Kuhn sought to counter the charge that he was a relativist. He argued that some theories and paradigms are better than others, based on five rational criteria: accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness. Much later, in the 1991 interview with Horgan, Kuhn insisted
that he did not mean to be condescending by using terms such as “mopping up” or “puzzle-solving” to describe what most scientists do. “It was meant to be descriptive.” He ruminated a bit. “Maybe I should have said more about the glories that result from puzzle solving, but I thought I was doing that.”
Continuity in a paradigm is not necessarily a bad thing, Kuhn explained in his later years; indeed, it enables scientists to organize the greater and greater amounts of knowledge that grow through the cumulative process of scientific inquiry.
Criticisms aside, whether Kuhn even deserves full credit for the ideas put forth in his seminal work has rightly been questioned. As early as the mid-1940s, the Hungarian-British scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi had published very similar ideas about the significance of scientists’ personal commitments to a framework of beliefs and the role of learning by example in scientific training. As Kuhn later admitted, he became familiar with those works during his studies under Conant, and through a talk that Polanyi delivered and Kuhn attended in 1958. Polanyi’s most extensive work on the subject, Personal Knowledge, was published the same year. In the early 1960s, Kuhn explicitly described his own thought as closely aligned with that of Polanyi, but he did not mention his name in Structure, except for a brief footnote in the first edition and an additional mention in the 1970 second edition. When Polanyi struggled to receive recognition for his thoughts independently of Kuhn’s, Kuhn admitted in private correspondence that he might owe “a major debt” to the older scholar. But shortly before Kuhn’s death (and long after Polanyi’s), he revised those concessions and claimed that Polanyi had not in fact had a great influence on him, and that he had delayed reading Personal Knowledge until after finishing Structure out of a fear that he “would have to go back to first principles and start over again, and I wasn’t going to do that.”
Despite the fact that Polanyi’s work preceded Kuhn’s and was more philosophically rigorous, it was Kuhn whose book became a bestseller and whose terminology entered contemporary parlance. Steve Fuller notes “many Kuhn-like ideas were ‘in the air’ both before and during the time Structure was written,” often from better-known philosophers. Perhaps Kuhn simply hit not only on the right ideas, but more importantly on the right distillation of them, and the right terminology, at the right time.
The reader of Kuhn’s work is struck by his extensive focus on the physical sciences, and the dearth of attention to biology and the social sciences. To some extent, this is hardly surprising, given Kuhn’s background as a theoretical physicist. But it is also true that the public prominence of the physical sciences in the first half of the twentieth century and the early periods of the Cold War provided a unique window into the community of scientists and the patterns by which scientific theory develops.
What Kuhn noticed was that competing paradigms in physics never coexist for very long, and that progress in normal science occurs precisely when scientists work within only one paradigm. But the social sciences are a special kind of science, because they cannot set aside fundamental philosophical concerns as easily as the physical sciences. Moreover, the social sciences are defined by multiple paradigms that are sometimes mutually contradictory. Kuhn pointed out that some social sciences may never be able to enter the paradigmatic stage of normal science for that reason. Unlike physical scientists, social scientists generally cannot in the face of a disagreement revert to an agreed-upon exemplary solution to a problem; their controversies are precisely about what the exemplar ought to be. The social sciences are grounded on competing views of what the world is and should be: certain basic concepts, such as “the state,” “institutions,” or “identity,” cannot be defined by consensus. Competing paradigms — such as those of Marxist, Keynesian, and Hayekian economists — will continue to coexist. So there necessarily will be limits to what the social sciences can achieve, since the lack of unanimity inevitably means that arguments turn on questions of theory, rather than on the application of theory. In addition, since it is more difficult in the social sciences to carry out true experiments and test counterfactuals, the social sciences are inhibited from closely following the model of the physical sciences. And the passage of time is a relevant factor. As social scientist Wolfgang Streeck explains, “What has historically happened cannot be undone — which also means that there can never be an exact return to a past condition, as the memory of what happened in between will always be present. A military dictatorship that has returned after having overthrown a democracy is not the same as a military dictatorship following, say, a foreign occupation.”
Despite these criticisms, many social scientists embraced — or perhaps appropriated — Kuhn’s thesis. It enabled them to elevate the status of their work. The social sciences could never hope to meet the high standards of empirical experimentation and verifiability that the influential school of thought called positivism demanded of the sciences. But Kuhn proposed a different standard, by which science is actually defined by a shared commitment among scientists to a paradigm wherein they refine and apply their theories. Although Kuhn himself denied the social sciences the status of paradigmatic science because of their lack of consensus on a dominant paradigm, social scientists argued that his thesis could still apply to each of those competing paradigms individually. This allowed social scientists to claim that their work was scientific in much the way Kuhn described physics to be.
Disagreements over what counts as science, and how society can hold scientists in any field accountable to a standard of truth, became most heated in the aftermath of a debate between Kuhn and the philosopher Karl Popper. The now-famous debate between Kuhn and the older and far more seasoned Popper took place in London on July 13, 1965. Although no particularly significant exchange between the two took place either before or after this encounter, their disagreement is commonly featured in textbooks and college courses as a major event in the development of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century. The popular view of the conflict, advanced primarily by supporters of Kuhn — the supposed winner of the debate — is that Kuhn was a revolutionary in his field who championed free inquiry, in opposition to the strict empirical and logical standards of the positivists. Popper, on the other hand, is often taken to be a quasi-positivist defender of the authority of science. But, as Steve Fuller argues in his 2003 book Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science, this popular conception is not only a caricature but an inversion of the truth about these two thinkers.
Popper held science to a higher standard than did Kuhn. Popper’s famous proposition was that a seemingly scientific claim, in order to be actually scientific, must be falsifiable, meaning that it is possible to devise an experiment under which the claim could be disproved. A classic example of a falsifiable science is Einsteinian physics, which made specific, well-defined predictions that could be tested through observation — as opposed to, say, Freudian psychology, which did not make well-defined predictions and proved adept at reformulating its explanations to fit observations, changing the details so as to salvage the theory.
By defining science in terms of rational criteria of empirical observation, Popper seemed to place scientific tools equally in the hands of philosophers of science, skeptics, and common persons who needed some means to question scientists who tried to back their claims by appealing to their own scientific authority. For Popper, novel scientific theories should be greeted with skepticism from the outset. But for Kuhn, one of the key characteristics of the healthy functioning of the community of scientists is its practice of singling out a successful theory from its competitors — without concern for its social implications, and in isolation from public scrutiny.
In a sense, Popper and Kuhn each saw himself as a defender of free inquiry — but their notions of free inquiry were fundamentally opposed. Kuhn’s thesis reserved free inquiry specifically for scientists, by considering legitimate whatever paradigm scientists happened to agree upon at a given time. But Popper, given his longstanding concern for the open society, thought that this idea marginalized the role of skepticism, only regarding it as important at the point of crisis, and that it thus undermined free inquiry as a methodological commitment to truth.
Popper particularly targeted the tendency among some influential social scientists to advance their political and social theories without revealing their philosophical underpinnings. Some of the great catastrophes of the twentieth century resulted from the widespread acceptance of theories that reduced society to a machine that could be steered by competent authorities. Popper’s falsification principle was meant in part to moderate the authority of social science, which — to the extent that it attempted to predict and regulate society — could lead to a passive public and technocratic governance at best, or modern serfdom and totalitarianism at worst. Kuhn himself was hardly a great booster of the social sciences. But the application of Kuhn’s ideas to social science seemed to imply that a theory, however false, should be allowed to dominate the opinion of scientists and the public until it buckles under the weight of its own flaws.
For their part, Kuhn and his followers argued that Popperian falsifiability was an impossible and historically unrealistic standard for science, and noted that any paradigm has at least a few anomalies. In fact, these anomalies are critical for determining which puzzles normal science seeks to solve. Popper’s standard, on the other hand, would seem to require scientists to be forever preoccupied with metaphysical, pre-paradigmatic arguments. But in a sense, this was the point: Popper’s insistence on falsification was precisely meant to sustain the need of the social sciences to focus on questions of first principle, so as to avoid the rise of any new dangerous philosophies falsely carrying the banner of science.
While the physical sciences were the most prominent in the public mind when Kuhn was writing Structure in the early 1960s, today biology is in ascendance. It is striking, as Hacking notes in his introductory essay, that Kuhn does not explore whether Darwin’s revolution fits within his thesis. It is far from clear that Kuhn’s thesis can adequately account for not only Darwin’s revolution but also cell theory, Mendelian or molecular genetics, or many of the other major developments in the history of biology.
The differences between physics and biology — their varying methods and metaphors — matter immensely for the way we understand ourselves and our world. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the assumptions of modern science began to play a much more prominent role in political philosophy. A scientific way of thinking permeated the writings of Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, and by the end of the century, with the work of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, the era of social science had begun in earnest. Many of the early social scientists came to view society in terms of contemporary physics; they adopted the Enlightenment belief in science as the source of progress, and considered physics the archetypical science. They understood society as a mechanism that could be engineered and adjusted. These early social scientists began to deem philosophical questions irrelevant or even inappropriate to their work, which instead became about how the mechanism of society operated and how it could be fixed. The preeminence of physics and mechanistic thinking was passed down through generations of social scientists, with qualitative characterization considered far less valuable and less “scientific” than quantitative investigations. Major social scientific theories, from behaviorism to functionalism to constructivism and beyond, tacitly think of man and society as machines and systems.
Given the dominance of physics and mechanism in social scientific thinking, the fact that Kuhn based his thesis almost exclusively on physics gave social scientists reason to consider their philosophical commitments legitimate. They saw Structure as a confirmation of their entire approach.
But in the half century since Kuhn wrote his book, biology has taken the place of physics as the dominant science — and so in the social sciences, the conception of society as a machine has gone out of vogue. Social scientists have increasingly turned to biology and ecology for possible analogies on which to build their social theories; organisms are supplanting machines as the guiding metaphor for social life. In 1991, the Journal of Evolutionary Economics was launched with an eye toward advancing a Darwinian understanding of economics, complete with genotypes and phenotypes. The justification for this kind of model is straightforward: one of the biggest difficulties for economists is the dynamism of any given economy. As Joseph Schumpeter rightly pointed out, economies change; they evolve, rather than staying fixed like a Newtonian machine with merely moving parts. Since machines do not change, whereas societies do, it is reasonable to move the study of economics away from the metaphor of systems and toward that of organisms.
A recent paper in the journal Theory in Biosciences perfectly encapsulates the desire for a more biological perspective in the social sciences, arguing for “Taking Evolution Seriously in Political Science.” The paper outlines the deterministic dangers in the view of social systems as Newtonian machines, as well as the problems posed by the reductionist belief that elements of social systems can be catalogued and analyzed. By contrast, the paper argues that approaching social sciences from an evolutionary perspective is more appropriate philosophically, as well as more effective for scientific explanation. This approach allows us to examine the dynamic nature of social changes and to explain more consistently which phenomena last, which disappear, and which are modified, while still confronting persistent questions, such as why particular institutions change.
This shift from a mechanistic to an evolutionary model seems like a step in the right direction. The new model aims less at predicting the future and derives its strength instead from its apparent ability to explain a wide array of phenomena. It may be better equipped than its predecessor to account for the frequent changes in the stability of modern economies. Furthermore, a biological model can correctly recognize humans as purposeful and creative beings, whereas mechanistic models reduce people to objects that merely react to outside stimuli.
Nevertheless, a biological approach to the social sciences is reductionistic in its own way, and limited in what it can explain. Biological sciences, much like physical sciences, have been stripped of philosophical concerns, of questions regarding the soul or the meaning of life, which have been pushed off to the separate disciplines of philosophy and theology. Much of modern biology seeks to emulate physics by reducing the human organism to a complex machine: thinking becomes merely chemical potentials and electric bursts, interest and motivation become mere drives to perpetuate the genome, and love becomes little more than an illusion. Such accounts can become problematic if we consider them the only ways to understand human nature — and not least because our answers to these non-scientific questions are at the foundation of how we view the world, and so also of how we interpret scientific findings.
Every model that social scientists use, whether it is derived from physics, biology, or ecology, embodies certain philosophical assumptions about human nature and about the optimal functioning of a society. Viewing social relations as movements of a clock implies a set of beliefs quite unlike those of perceiving the same relations as functions of a cell. Since the work of social scientists is so closely tied to these philosophical concerns on which we tend to disagree, we usually see a number of models compete for acceptance at the same time. And because these metaphysical assumptions are usually unspoken, they set the stage for the competition between models to take the place of what was once an explicit competition between differing philosophical accounts of the world — only now while largely denying that any philosophical debate is taking place.
Perhaps the greatest limitation in the social sciences is that, however good a theory’s explanatory abilities, it can say very little about whether or not a particular action ought to be performed in order to bring about social change. Since human relations are the object of the social sciences, questions of ethics — about whether or not a change should be induced, who should be responsible for it, and how it should occur — must always be at the forefront. It may be desirable, for instance, to reduce alcoholism; but it does not follow that all actors, such as churches, governments, businesses, public and private mental-health experts, and the pressure of social norms, are equally responsible for undertaking the task, or can equally do so without altering society in other ways. Decisions of this sort inevitably depend on our views of the proper function of institutions and on what constitutes the well-being of society.
Regardless of whether we view society as akin to a physical machine, or a biosphere, or an organism, it remains crucial that we recognize the limitations of each model. But what we learn from Kuhn is that any science that separates itself from its philosophical bases renders itself incapable of addressing such questions even within its own limited scope.
The political philosopher Eric Voegelin, in his 1952 book The New Science of Politics, provides a helpful treatment on this point in his assessment of the fifteenth-century English judge Sir John Fortescue. Long before the current trend toward the biological sciences, Fortescue used a biological metaphor, arguing, as Voegelin writes, “that a realm must have a ruler like a body a head,” and that a political community grows into an articulate, defined body as though out of an embryo. Rulers were necessary because otherwise the community would be, in Voegelin’s words, “acephalus, headless, the trunk of a body without a head.” Yet Fortescue recognized that the analogy between an organic body and a political realm was limited: by itself, it would have provided an incomplete view of both the individual and society. He therefore introduced into his political theory the Christian notion of a corpus mysticum: society is held together not only by a head but also by an inner spiritual bond, a heart that nourishes the head as well as the rest of the body. As Voegelin puts it, however, this heart “does not serve as the identification of some member of a society with a corresponding organ of the body, but, on the contrary, it strives to show that the animating center of a social body is not to be found in any of its human members … but is the intangible living center of the realm as a whole.”
By extending the analogy in this way, Fortescue went beyond what we now recognize as the limits of biology, and even of political science as such, in the attempt to capture a fuller sense of human nature and of a political body. Neither biology nor political science by itself would have been capable of producing any such holistic image of society. Most significantly, Fortescue understood that his borrowing from biology was merely metaphorical — and so avoided the mistake that plagues the social sciences today, of treating what is really political theory as straightforward scientific truth.
Value judgments are always at the core of the social sciences. “In the end,” wrote Irving Kristol, “the only authentic criterion for judging any economic or political system, or any set of social institutions, is this: what kind of people emerge from them?” And precisely because we differ on what kind of people should emerge from our institutions, our scientific judgments about them are inevitably tied to our value commitments.
But this is not to say that those values, or the scientific work that rests on them, cannot be publicly debated according to recognized standards. Thomas Kuhn’s thesis has often been taken to mean that choices between competing theories or paradigms are arbitrary — merely a matter of subjective taste. As noted earlier, Kuhn challenged the claim that he was a relativist in a 1973 lecture, offering a list of five standards by which we may defend the superiority of one theory over another: accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness. What these criteria precisely mean, how they apply to a given theory, and how they rank in priority are themselves questions subject to dispute by scientists committed to opposing theories. But it is the existence of recognized standards, even if the standards are open to debate, that allows any judgment to be available for public discussion. And we may add that if social scientists recognize the same standards, then debates over their meaning, application, and priority are harder to settle than in physics because the social sciences are intertwined with philosophical questions that are themselves concerned with what our standards of rationality ought to be.
The lasting value of Kuhn’s thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that it reminds us that any science, however apparently purified of the taint of philosophical speculation, is nevertheless embedded in a philosophical framework — and that the great success of physics and biology is due not to their actual independence from philosophy but rather to physicists’ and biologists’ dismissal of it. Those who are inclined to take this dismissal as meaning that philosophy is dead altogether, or has been replaced by science, will do well to recognize the force by which Kuhn’s thesis opposes this stance: History has repeatedly demonstrated that periods of progress in normal science — when philosophy seems to be moot — may be long and steady, but they lead to a time when non-scientific, philosophical questions again become paramount.
One persisting trouble with Kuhn’s classic work is that its narrow focus left too many questions unanswered — including the question not just of what science is but of what science should be. Here many other philosophers of science, including Popper, offered not just descriptions of science but powerful prescriptions for it. Kuhn’s work is largely silent on the value of science and the wellbeing of society, and entirely silent on the wrongheadedness of blindly accepting scientific authority and discarding the philosophical questions that must always come first, even when we pretend otherwise.
Although Kuhn, who died in 1996, was sometimes stung by the criticism he received, he understood the importance of all the poking and prodding. In his 1973 lecture, he argued that “scientists may always be asked to explain their choices, to exhibit the bases of their judgments. Such judgments are eminently discussable, and the man who refuses to discuss his own cannot expect to be taken seriously.” Even the great Einstein, who failed to give a full defense for his skepticism of the fundamental randomness posited by quantum theory, became somewhat marginalized later in his career. Kuhn deserves the respect of the rigorous criticism that has come his way. It is fitting that his provocative thesis has faced blistering scrutiny — and remarkable that it has survived to instruct and vex us five decades later.
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The best study guide to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the planet, from the creators of SparkNotes. Get the summaries, analysis, and quotes you need.
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Cited and Celebrated. Though The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had obvious implications for scientists themselves, it was also influential across disciplines: sociologists, philosophers and even economists argued against the book or used it in their own work. It follows, then, that it is one of the most-cited academic works of all time, an impressive achievement for a book published only 50 years ago.
Paradigm Shifts Galore. The term “paradigm shift,” which Kuhn uses to describe the process by which one set of scientific perceptions and questions replaces another, is now commonplace in popular culture. But to ensure that the term remains associated with the man who made it famous, the American Chemical Society created a prize called the Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award, given out to only the most original thinkers in chemistry.
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The Kuhn Cycle
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The Kuhn Cycle is a simple cycle of progress described by Thomas Kuhn in 1962 in his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In Structure Kuhn challenged the world's current conception of science, which was that it was a steady progression of the accumulation of new ideas. In a brilliant series of reviews of past major scientific advances, Kuhn showed this viewpoint was wrong. Science advanced the most by occasional revolutionary explosions of new knowledge, each revolution triggered by introduction of new ways of thought so large they must be called new paradigms. From Kuhn's work came the popular use of terms like "paradigm," "paradigm shift," and "paradigm change."
The Kuhn Cycle is preceded by the Pre-science step. After that the cycle consists of the five steps as shown. The Model Drift step was added to clarify the cycle and allow reuse of the Model Drift concept in the System Improvement Process.
Kuhn's hypothesis that big progress comes from revolutionary breakthroughs has an equivalent in the life sciences, as we can see in this extract from Wikipedia:
Punctuated equilibrium ... is a theory in evolutionary biology which proposes that most species will exhibit little net evolutionary change for most of their geological history, remaining in an extended state called stasis. When significant evolutionary change occurs, the theory proposes that it is generally restricted to rare and geologically rapid events of branching speciation....
Punctuated equilibrium is commonly contrasted against the theory of phyletic gradualism, which states that evolution generally occurs uniformly and by the steady and gradual transformation of whole lineages (called anagenesis). In this view, evolution is seen as generally smooth and continuous.
Defining "paradigm"
Thomas Kuhn defined paradigms as "universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of researchers," (page X of the 1996 edition). A paradigm describes:
What is to be observed and scrutinized.
The kind of questions that are supposed to be asked and probed for answers in relation to this subject.
How these questions are to be structured.
How the results of scientific investigations should be interpreted.
In short, a paradigm is a comprehensive model of understanding that provides a field's members with viewpoints and rules on how to look at the field's problems and how to solve them. "Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practritioners has come to recognize as acute." (page 23)
Why understanding the Kuhn Cycle is important
The global environmental sustainability problem is so large, complex, novel, urgent, and its solution so difficult that solving the problem entails creation of a new paradigm. Just conceiving of the problem requires a fundamentally new way of thinking. Before The Limits to Growth defined the problem in 1972, there was little realization that human system growth could not be infinite. So called "progress" cannot go on forever. The environment cannot be tamed and subjugated, as mankind has done before to everything else that stood in the way of "progress."
Environmentalism finds itself in the Pre-science step of the Kuhn Cycle. It lacks a valid paradigm for solving its central problem of sustainability. Yet the field's members are assuming they are in the Normal Science step, where a field has a paradigm that works well enough for that field to be called a bona fide science. This is a grave error.
Civilization as a whole is in the Model Crisis step. The model it uses to run itself, mostly free market democracy, a collection of national governments, and some central coordination like the UN and the World Bank, is no longer capable of solving the world's top problems. The model was good enough to navigate through the Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and other problems. The model shows no sign of being able to solve the global sustainability problem. Because of this void modern environmentalism appeared to fill the gap, beginning with Silent Spring in 1962. But the gap is large and difficult. The new field has so far been unable to provide a new model, a new paradigm, capable of solving the sustainability problem.
The top problem to solve is thus not the sustainability problem itself, but finding the new paradigm needed to solve it. Environmentalism and civilization may not know it but they are both in search of a paradigm that works.
A short introduction to how the Kuhn Cycle works
All new fields begin in Pre-science, where they have begun to focus on a problem area but are not yet capable of solving it or making major advances.
Efforts to provide a model of understanding that works eventually bear fruit. The field can at last make major progress on its central problems. This puts the field in the Normal Science step where it tends to stay longer than any other step.
Over time the field digs so deep into its area of interest it discovers new questions its current model of understanding cannot answer. As more of these anomalies ("violations of expectations") appear the model grows weaker. This is the Model Drift step.
If enough unsolved anomalies appear and the model cannot be patched up to explain them, the Model Crisis step is reached. Here the model is obviously no longer capable of solving the field's current problems of interest. It's a crisis because decisions can no longer be made rationally. Guesswork and intuition must be used instead. These tend to fail.
Finally out of the struggle to form a new model of understanding one or more viable candidates emerge. This begins the Model Revolution step. It's a revolution because the new model is a new paradigm. It's radically different from the old paradigm, so different the two are incommensurate. Each uses its own rules to judge the other. Thus believers in each paradigm cannot communicate well. This causes paradigm change resistance.
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Thomas Kuhn Biography | List of Works, Study Guides & Essays
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https://www.gradesaver.com/author/thomas-kuhn
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Thomas Kuhn was an American physicist born on July 18, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was raised in a family that strongly valued science considering his father was an engineer and instilled in him a passion for the subject. After graduating from...
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Other articles where paradigm is discussed: Thomas S. Kuhn: …thought are defined by “paradigms,” or conceptual world-views, that consist of formal theories, classic experiments, and trusted methods. Scientists typically accept a prevailing paradigm and try to extend its scope by refining theories, explaining puzzling data, and establishing more precise measures of standards and phenomena. Eventually, however, their efforts…
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Encyclopedia Britannica
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https://www.britannica.com/science/paradigm-scientific-research
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In Thomas S. Kuhn
…thought are defined by “paradigms,” or conceptual world-views, that consist of formal theories, classic experiments, and trusted methods. Scientists typically accept a prevailing paradigm and try to extend its scope by refining theories, explaining puzzling data, and establishing more precise measures of standards and phenomena. Eventually, however, their efforts…
Read More
In philosophy of science: The work of Thomas Kuhn
…pursuing it—they follow the “paradigm.” Commitment to the approach begins a tradition of normal science in which there are well-defined problems, or “puzzles,” for researchers to solve. In the practice of normal science, the failure to solve a puzzle does not reflect badly on the paradigm but rather does…
Read More
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Find out where Thomas Kuhn was born, their birthday and details about their professions, education, religion, family and other life details and facts.
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Playback.fm
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https://playback.fm/person/thomas-kuhn
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Fame Ranking
What does "Most Famous" mean? Unlike other sites which use current mentions, follower counts, etc. that tend to call the most famous people YouTube stars or Reality TV stars, we've decided to mark fame as a persons importance in history. We've conducted research scouring millions of historical references to determine the importance of people in History. That being said, we might have missed a few people here and there. The ranking system is a continuing work in progress - if you happen to feel like someone is misranked or missing, please shoot us a message!
Fame Ranking
What does "Most Famous" mean? Unlike other sites which use current mentions, follower counts, etc. that tend to call the most famous people YouTube stars or Reality TV stars, we've decided to mark fame as a persons importance in history. We've conducted research scouring millions of historical references to determine the importance of people in History. That being said, we might have missed a few people here and there. The ranking system is a continuing work in progress - if you happen to feel like someone is misranked or missing, please shoot us a message!
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https://letsquiz.com/quiz/thomas-kuhn/when-was-thomas-kuhn-born
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When was Thomas Kuhn born?
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Thomas Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922. He was an American historian and philosopher of science whose work was influential in the development of the field of history and philosophy of science. Kuhn's m
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https://letsquiz.com/quiz/thomas-kuhn/when-was-thomas-kuhn-born
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Thomas Kuhn Facts
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 to June 17, 1996) was an American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science. In 1962 he published his most famous book, <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i>, in which he popularized the term "paradigm shift."
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Interesting Thomas Kuhn Facts: Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his father Samuel Kuhn was an industrial engineer. In 1940 he graduated from The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut. In 1943 he earned a B.S. in physics from Harvard University. He earned his M.S. in 1946 and his PhD in 1949 at Harvard. Kuhn credits his three years as a Harvard Junior Fellow for his insight into the theory of scientific thought. From 1948 to 1956 he taught the history of science at Harvard. He transferred to University of California, Berkeley and taught in both the philosophy and history departments. Kuhn interviewed Niels Bohr just before Bohr's death. While he was at Berkeley he published The Structure of Scientific Thought. In it he introduced the controversial idea that the subjective worldview of the investigator influences and colors his scientific interpretation. He stated that the history of scientific progress is not linear but that it undergoes periodic revolutions in which a field of study is abruptly transformed. In 1964 he became the M.Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. From 1979 to 1991 he was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kuhn's work has had enormous impact in several fields. In the philosophy of science it expanded the vocabulary to encompass the everyday workings of science. In sociology, he is a force behind the post Mertonian Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. He work also influenced the Humanities and was used to distinguish between historical and scientific communities and between political and religious groups.
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https://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.1996_06.dir/0041.html
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xmcamail.9606: Thomas Kuhn obituary (fwd)
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https://philevents.org/event/show/96421
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en
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Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy of Science: In Honour of the 100th Year of His Birth
|
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The conference will honour the 100th year of Thomas Kuhn’s birth, and the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s book has had a profound influence on the history, sociology and philosophy of science, and has sold more than 1.2 million copies. Though best known for popularizing the notion of “paradigm change”, many aspects of the book continue to have an impact on our contemporary understanding of science.
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/data/sites/3/favicon20120404024918.ico
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Let us know so we can notify you of any change of plan.
RSVPing on PhilEvents is not sufficient to register for this event.
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https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/07/18/486487713/what-is-a-paradigm-shift-anyway
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en
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What Is A Paradigm Shift, Anyway?
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[
"Tania Lombrozo"
] |
2016-07-18T00:00:00
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Thomas Kuhn, the well-known physicist, philosopher and historian of science, was born 94 years ago today. Psychologist Tania Lombrozo takes a look at what his "paradigm shift" really means.
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en
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NPR
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https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/07/18/486487713/what-is-a-paradigm-shift-anyway
|
Thomas Kuhn, the well-known physicist, philosopher and historian of science, was born 94 years ago today. He went on to become an important and broad-ranging thinker, and one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.
Kuhn's 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, transformed the philosophy of science and changed the way many scientists think about their work. But his influence extended well beyond the academy: The book was widely read — and seeped into popular culture. One measure of his influence is the widespread use of the term "paradigm shift," which he introduced in articulating his views about how science changes over time.
Inspired, in part, by the theories of psychologist Jean Piaget, who saw children's development as a series of discrete stages marked by periods of transition, Kuhn posited two kinds of scientific change: incremental developments in the course of what he called "normal science," and scientific revolutions that punctuate these more stable periods. He suggested that scientific revolutions are not a matter of incremental advance; they involve "paradigm shifts."
Talk of paradigms and paradigm shifts has since become commonplace — not only in science, but also in business, social movements and beyond. In a column at The Globe and Mail, Robert Fulford describes paradigm as "a crossover hit: It moved nimbly from science to culture to sports to business."
But what, exactly, is a paradigm shift? Or, for that matter, a paradigm?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary offers the following:
Simple Definition of paradigm:
: a model or pattern for something that may be copied
: a theory or a group of ideas about how something should be done, made, or thought about
Accordingly, a paradigm shift is defined as "an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way."
More than 50 years after Kuhn's famous book, these definitions may seem intuitive rather than technical. But do they capture what Kuhn actually had in mind in developing an account of scientific change?
It turns out this question is hard to answer — not because paradigm has an especially technical or obscure definition, but because it has many. In a paper published in 1970, Margaret Masterson presented a careful reading of Kuhn's 1962 book. She identified 21 distinct senses in which Kuhn used the term paradigm. (That's right: 21.)
Consider a few examples.
First, a paradigm could refer to a special kind of achievement. Masterson quotes Kuhn, who introduces a paradigm as a textbook or classic example that is "sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity," but that is simultaneously "sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve." Writes Kuhn: "Achievements that share these two characteristics I shall henceforth refer to as 'paradigms.' "
But in other parts of the text, paradigms cover more ground. Paradigms can offer general epistemological viewpoints, like the "philosophical paradigm initiated by Descartes," or define a broad sweep of reality, as when "Paradigms determine large areas of experience at the same time."
Given this bounty of related uses, Masterson asks a provocative question:
Is there, philosophically speaking, anything definite or general about the notion of a paradigm which Kuhn is trying to make clear? Or is he just a historian-poet describing different happenings which have occurred in the course of the history of science, and referring to them all by using the same word "paradigm"?
In the end, Masterson distills Kuhn's 21 senses of paradigm into a more respectable three, and she identifies what she sees as both novel and important aspects of Kuhn's "paradigm view" of science. But for our purposes, Masterson's analysis sheds light on two questions that turn out to be related: what Kuhn meant by paradigm in the first place, and how a single word managed to assume such a broad and expansive set of meanings after being unleashed by Kuhn's book.
Of course, Kuhn can't be blamed single-handedly for the way paradigm — and its shiftier cousin — have propagated in popular culture. What he did do was provide some classic examples of the term that were sufficiently unprecedented to attract adherents away from more mundane alternatives, but sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of possibilities for others to explore. And that, I suppose, is an achievement.
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https://louis.pressbooks.pub/introphilosophy/chapter/reading-3-philosophy-of-science-and-technology/
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Thomas Kuhn – The Priority of Paradigms – Readings in Western Philosophy for Louisiana Learners
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"Jeff McLaughlin"
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2024-01-01T00:00:00
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https://louis.pressbooks.pub/introphilosophy/chapter/reading-3-philosophy-of-science-and-technology/
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23
Biography of Thomas Kuhn
Vol. II, No. 2
44
The Priority of Paradigms
(Note: Materials are included on the basis of fair use as described in the Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Open Education.)
What need we know, Wittgenstein asked, in order that we apply terms like ‘chair,’ or ‘leaf,’ or ‘game’ unequivocally and without provoking argument?2 That question is very old and has generally been answered by saying that we must know, consciously or intuitively, what a chair, or leaf, or game is. We must, that is, grasp some set of attributes that all games and that only games have in common. Wittgenstein, however, concluded that, given the way we use language and the sort of world to which we apply it, there need be no such set of characteristics. Though a discussion of some of the attributes shared by a number of games or chairs or leaves often helps us learn how to employ the corresponding term, there is no set of characteristics that is simultaneously applicable to all members of the class and to them alone. Instead, confronted with a previously unobserved activity, we apply the term ‘game’ because what we are seeing bears a close “family resemblance” to a number of the activities that we have previously learned to call by that name. For Wittgenstein, in short, games, and chairs, and leaves are natural families, each constituted by a network of overlapping and crisscross resemblances. The existence of such a network sufficiently accounts for our success in identifying the corresponding object or activity. Only if the families we named overlapped and merged gradually into one another—only, that is, if there were no natural families—would our success in identifying and naming provide evidence for a set of common characteristics corresponding to each of the class names we employ. Something of the same sort may very well hold for the various research problems and techniques that arise within a single normal scientific tradition. What these have in common is not that they satisfy some explicit or even some fully discoverable set of rules and assumptions that gives the tradition its character and its hold upon the scientific mind. Instead, they may relate by resemblance and by modeling to one or another part of the scientific corpus which the community in question already recognizes as among its established achievements.
Scientists work from models acquired through education and through subsequent exposure to the literature often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms. And because they do so, they need no full set of rules. The coherence displayed by the research tradition in which they participate may not imply even the existence of an underlying body of rules and assumptions that additional historical or philosophical investigation might uncover. That scientists do not usually ask or debate what makes a particular problem or solution legitimate tempts us to suppose that, at least intuitively, they know the answer. But it may only indicate that neither the question nor the answer is felt to be relevant to their research. Paradigms may be prior to, more binding, and more complete than any set of rules for research that could be unequivocally abstracted from them. So far this point has been entirely theoretical: paradigms could determine normal science without the intervention of discoverable rules. Let me now try to increase both its clarity and urgency by indicating some of the reasons for believing that paradigms actually do operate in this manner. The first, which has already been discussed quite fully, is the severe difficulty of discovering the rules that have guided particular normal-scientific traditions. That difficulty is very nearly the same as the one the philosopher encounters when he tries to say what all games have in common. The second, to which the first is really a corollary, is rooted in the nature of scientific education. Scientists, it should already be clear, never learn concepts, laws, and theories in the abstract and by themselves. Instead, these intellectual tools are from the start encountered in a historically and pedagogically prior unit that displays them with and through their applications. A new theory is always announced together with applications to some concrete range of natural phenomena; without them it would not be even a candidate for acceptance. After it has been accepted, those same applications or others accompany the theory into the textbooks from which the future practitioner will learn his trade. They are not there merely as embroidery or even as documentation. On the contrary, the process of learning a theory depends upon the study of applications, including practice problem-solving both with a pencil and paper and with instruments in the laboratory. If, for example, the student of Newtonian dynamics ever discovers the meaning of terms like ‘force,’ ‘mass,’ ‘space,’ and ‘time,’ he does so less from the incomplete though sometimes helpful definitions in his text than by observing and participating in the application of these concepts to problem-solution. That process of learning by finger exercise or by doing continues throughout the process of professional initiation. As the student proceeds from his freshman course to and through his doctoral dissertation, the problems assigned to him become more complex and less completely precedented. But they continue to be closely modeled on previous achievements as are the problems that normally occupy him during his subsequent independent scientific career. One is at liberty to suppose that somewhere along the way the scientist has intuitively abstracted rules of the game for himself, but there is little reason to believe it. Though many scientists talk easily and well about the particular individual hypotheses that underlie a concrete piece of current research, they are little better than laymen at characterizing the established bases of their field, its legitimate problems and methods. If they have learned such abstractions at all, they show it mainly through their ability to do successful research. That ability can, however, be understood without recourse to hypothetical rules of the game. These consequences of scientific education have a converse that provides a third reason to suppose that paradigms guide research by direct modeling as well as through abstracted rules. Normal science can proceed without rules only so long as the relevant scientific community accepts without question the particular problem-solutions already achieved. Rules should therefore become important and the characteristic unconcern about them should vanish whenever paradigms or models are felt to be insecure. That is, moreover, exactly what does occur. The pre-paradigm period, in particular, is regularly marked by frequent and deep debates over legitimate methods, problems, and standards of solution, though these serve rather to define schools than to produce agreement. We have already noted a few of these debates in optics and electricity, and they played an even larger role in the development of seventeenth-century chemistry and of early nineteenth-century geology.3 Furthermore, debates like these do not vanish once and for all with the appearance of a paradigm. Though almost non-existent during periods of normal science, they recur regularly just before and during scientific revolutions, the periods when paradigms are first under attack and then subject to change. The transition from Newtonian to quantum mechanics evoked many debates about both the nature and the standards of physics, some of which still continue.4 There are people alive today who can remember the similar arguments engendered by Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory and by statistical mechanics.5 And earlier still, the assimilation of Galileo’s and Newton’s mechanics gave rise to a particularly famous series of debates with Aristotelians, Cartesians, and Leibnizians about the standards legitimate to science.6 When scientists disagree about whether the fundamental problems of their field have been solved, the search for rules gains a function that it does not ordinarily possess. While paradigms remain secure, however, they can function without agreement over rationalization or without any attempted rationalization at all.
A fourth reason for granting paradigms a status prior to that of shared rules and assumptions can conclude this section. The introduction to this essay suggested that there can be small revolutions as well as large ones, that some revolutions affect only the members of a professional subspecialty, and that for such groups even the discovery of a new and unexpected phenomenon may be revolutionary. The next section will introduce selected revolutions of that sort, and it is still far from clear how they can exist. If normal science is so rigid and if scientific communities are so close-knit as the preceding discussion has implied, how can a change of paradigm ever affect only a small subgroup? What has been said so far may have seemed to imply that normal science is a single monolithic and unified enterprise that must stand or fall with any one of its paradigms as well as with all of them together. But science is obviously seldom or never like that. Often, viewing all fields together, it seems instead a rather ramshackle structure with little coherence among its various parts. Nothing said to this point should, however, conflict with that very familiar observation.
On the contrary, substituting paradigms for rules should make the diversity of scientific fields and specialties easier to understand. Explicit rules, when they exist, are usually common to a very broad scientific group, but paradigms need not be. The practitioners of widely separated fields, say astronomy and taxonomic botany, are educated by exposure to quite different achievements described in very different books. And even men who, being in the same or in closely related fields, begin by studying many of the same books and achievements may acquire rather different paradigms in the course of professional specialization. Consider, for a single example, the quite large and diverse community constituted by all physical scientists. Each member of that group today is taught the laws of, say, quantum mechanics, and most of them employ these laws at some point in their research or teaching. But they do not all learn the same applications of these laws, and they are not therefore all affected in the same ways by changes in quantum-mechanical practice. On the road to professional specialization, a few physical scientists encounter only the basic principles of quantum mechanics. Others study in detail the paradigm applications of these principles to chemistry, still others to the physics of the solid state, and so on. What quantum mechanics means to each of them depends upon what courses he has had, what texts he has read, and which journals he studies. It follows that, though a change in quantum-mechanical law will be revolutionary for all of these groups, a change that reflects only on one or another of the paradigm applications of quantum mechanics need be revolutionary only for the members of a particular professional subspecialty. For the rest of the profession and for those who practice other physical sciences, that change need not be revolutionary at all. In short, though quantum mechanics (or Newtonian dynamics, or electromagnetic theory) is a paradigm for many scientific groups, it is not the same paradigm for them all. Therefore, it can simultaneously determine several traditions of normal science that overlap without being coextensive. A revolution produced within one of these traditions will not necessarily extend to the others as well. One brief illustration of specialization’s effect may give this whole series of points additional force. An investigator who hoped to learn something about what scientists took the atomic theory to be asked a distinguished physicist and an eminent chemist whether a single atom of helium was or was not a molecule. Both answered without hesitation, but their answers were not the same. For the chemist the atom of helium was a molecule because it behaved like one with respect to the kinetic theory of gases. For the physicist, on the other hand, the helium atom was not a molecule because it displayed no molecular spectrum.7 Presumably both men were talking of the same particle, but they were viewing it through their own research training and practice. Their experience in problem-solving told them what a molecule must be. Undoubtedly their experiences had had much in common, but they did not, in this case, tell the two specialists the same thing. As we proceed we shall discover how consequential paradigm differences of this sort can occasionally be.
Notes
2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York, 1953), pp. 31–36. Wittgenstein, however, says almost nothing about the sort of world necessary to support the naming procedure he outlines. Part of the point that follows cannot therefore be attributed to him.
3 For chemistry, see H. Metzger, Les doctrines chimiques en France du début du XVII e à la fin du XVIII e siècle (Paris, 1923), pp. 24–27, 146–49; and Marie Boas, Robert Boyle and Seventeenth-Century Chemistry (Cambridge, 1958), chap. ii. For geology, see Walter F. Cannon, “The Uniformitarian-Catastrophist Debate,” Isis 51 (1960), 38–55; and C. C. Gillispie, Genesis and Geology (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), chaps, iv–v.
4 For controversies over quantum mechanics, see Jean Ullmo, La crise de la physique quantique (Paris, 1950), chap. II.
5 For statistical mechanics, see René Dugas, La théorie physique au sens de Boltzmann et ses prolongements modernes (Neuchatel, 1959), pp. 158–84, 206–19. For the reception of Maxwell’s work, see Max Planck, “Maxwell’s Influence in Germany,” in James Clerk Maxwell: A Commemoration Volume, 1831–1931 (Cambridge, 1931), pp. 45–65, esp. pp. 58– 63; and Silvanus P. Thompson, The Life of William Thomson Baron Kelvin of Largs (London, 1910), II, 1021–27.
6 For a sample of the battle with the Aristotelians, see A. Koyré, “A Documentary History of the Problem of Fall from Kepler to Newton,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, XLV (1955), 329–95. For the debates with the Cartesians and Leibnizians, see Pierre Brunet, L’introduction des théories de Newton en France au XVII e siècle (Paris, 1931); and A. Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, 1957), chap. XI.
7 The investigator was James K. Senior, to whom I am indebted for a verbal report. Some related issues are treated in his paper, “The Vernacular of the Laboratory,” Philosophy of Science, XXV (1958), 163–68.
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https://news.mit.edu/1996/kuhn
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en
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Prof. Thomas S. Kuhn of MIT, Noted Historian of Science, Dead at 73
|
https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/assets/img/favicon/favicon.ico
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https://news.mit.edu/themes/mit/assets/img/favicon/favicon.ico
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1996-06-18T09:00:00+00:00
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/themes/mit/assets/img/favicon/favicon.ico
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MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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https://news.mit.edu/1996/kuhn
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Professor Emeritus Thomas S. Kuhn of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the internationally known historian and philosopher who made seminal contributions to understanding how scientific views are supported and discounted over time, died Monday, June 17, at his home in Cambridge. He had been ill for the last two years with cancer of the bronchial tubes and throat. He was 73.
Professor Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), an enormously influential work on the nature of scientific change, was widely celebrated as the central figure in contemporary thought about how the scientific process evolves.
Earlier this month, for example, Vice President Albert Gore, delivering the June 7 commencement address at MIT, spoke of the relationship "between science and technology on the one hand and humankind and society on the other," and referred to "the great historian of science, Thomas Kuhn."
Mr. Gore said Professor Kuhn "described the way in which our understanding of the world properly evolves when faced with a sudden increase in the amount of information. More precisely, he showed how well-established theories collapse under the weight of new facts and observations which cannot be explained, and then accumulate to the point where the once useful theory is clearly obsolete. As new facts continue to accumulate, a new threshold is reached at which a new pattern is suddenly perceptible and a new theory explaining this pattern emerges. It is an important process, not only at the societal level, but for each of us as individuals as we try to make sense of the growing mountain of information placed at our disposal."
More than one million copies of Professor Kuhn's famous 1962 book have been printed. It exists in more than a dozen languages and continues to be a basic text in the study of the history of science and technology.
From 1982 to 1991, when he became an emeritus professor, Dr. Kuhn held the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professorship in Philosophy. He was the chair's first holder.
Jed Z. Buchwald, the Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and director of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, said Professor Kuhn "was the most influential historian and philosopher of science or our time. He instructed and inspired his students and colleagues at Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton and MIT, as well as the tens of thousands of scholars and students in his own and other fields of social science and the humanities who read his works."
Professor Kuhn joined MIT in 1979 from Princeton University where he had been the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of the History of Science and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. At MIT, his work has centered on cognitive and linguistic processes that bear on the philosophy of science, including the influence of language on the development of science.
Born in Cincinnati in 1922, Professor Kuhn studied physics at Harvard University, where he received the SB (1943), AM (1946) and PhD (1949). His shift from an interest in solid state physics to the history of science, was traceable to a "single 'Eureka!' moment in 1947," according to a 1991 Scientific American article. Professor Kuhn, the article says, "was working toward his doctorate in physics at Harvard University when he was asked to teach some science to undergraduate humanities majors. Searching for a simple case history that could illuminate the roots of Newtonian mechanics, Kuhn opened Aristotle's Physics and was astonished at how 'wrong' it was. How could someone so brilliant on other topics be so misguided in physics? Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out of the window of his dormitory room . . .when suddenly Aristotle 'made sense.' Kuhn realized that Aristotle's views of such basic concepts as motion and matter were totally unlike Newton's. Aristotle used the word 'motion,' for example, to refer not just to change in position but to change in general. . . . Understood on its own terms, Aristole's physics 'wasn't just bad Newton,' Kuhn says; it was just different."
Professor Kuhn taught at Harvard and at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining Princeton in 1964. From 1978 to 1979 he was a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities.
His honors included the Howard T. Behrman Award for distinguished achievements in the humanities (1977), the History of Science Society's George Sarton Medal (1982) and the Society for Social Studies of Science's John Desmond Bernal Award (1983). He became a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 1990 and was given honorary degrees by several universities throughout the world.
He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Philosophy of Science Association (president, 1988-90), and the History of Science Society (president, 1968-70). Professor Kuhn is survived by his wife, Jehane (Barton) Kuhn; two daughters, Sarah Kuhn-La Chance of Framingham, Mass., and Elizabeth Kuhn of Los Angles, and a son, Nathaniel Kuhn of Arlington, Mass.
The service is private. A memorial service will be held at MIT in the fall.
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https://www.123helpme.com/essay/Evaluate-Kuhns-theory-of-scientific-development-440221
|
en
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Evaluate Kuhn’s theory of scientific development
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Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States of America. He studied and worked at Harvard, Kuhn was initially a physicist...
|
https://www.123helpme.com/essay/Evaluate-Kuhns-theory-of-scientific-development-440221
|
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States of America. He studied and worked at Harvard, Kuhn was initially a physicist but later changed courses to study the history of science. While a student at Harvard Kuhn wrote the book the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Paradigm Shift. In this book, Kuhn changed the view of scientific progress and his theory has been by far the most important and influential theory of the history of science since its publication in 1962.Thomas Kuhn brought a new perspective and option to scientific progression. Before Kuhn’s theory, science was taken as a steady and upward progression where theories were added one and another until the desired result is attained, Kuhn saw a series of revolutionary changes of the popular view of other scientist, where the view of one period had very little in common with the previous. Most importantly, Kuhn seek to find if were possibility for science to discover the truth. This essay will look at Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific development. It will begin with an explanation of the theory, and then will state some of its impact of science. It will then show and evaluate some weakness of Kuhn’s theory; assessing and mentioning the views of a number of scientists’ academics critical of Kuhn's concept of paradigms. Finally, it will then conclude by arguing that although Kuhn’s theory made us view the social effect of the scientific, it does this to the detriment of scientific rationality and progress which undermines the point of science itself.
Thomas Kuhn theory of Paradigm shift.
Kuhn is known for making the term paradigm popular, he described paradigm as basically a collection of beliefs and theory’s shared by scientists, a set...
... middle of paper ...
...ost cases. He also did not show enough proof or evidence to support most of his major claims. However, Kuhn s conception of normal science seem to have greater value, as it shows generally the methods most scientist use every day do not follow pattern comparable with Kuhn’s claims. Laudan disagree strongly with Kuhn’s claims on paradigm shifts but not in a way that the whole theory need be reduced to nothing. He disagrees mostly on where he focused on the fact that this is mostly the case and that science has never being able to function rationally. Although in some special cases rationality is not the main force, but to say that it never is seems too presumptions. Thus, although Kuhn’s theory made us view the social effect of the scientific community, it does this to the detriment of scientific rationality and progress which undermines the point of science itself.
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https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/thomas-kuhn-3455.php
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Thomas Kuhn Biography
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A behind-the-scene look at the life of Thomas Kuhn.
|
en
|
//www.thefamouspeople.com/images/favicon_tfp.ico
|
https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/thomas-kuhn-3455.php
|
One of the most influential ‘philosophers of science’ of the 20th century, Thomas Kuhn is regarded as the man who changed the way the world perceived and envisioned science. His book, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ was a landmark publication that generated worldwide discussions and debates among scholarly communities. It is also one of the most cited academic books, often referred to by scientific guilds and student communities. He is credited with coining the term, ‘Paradigm Shift’, which today, has become an integral part of English and scientific terminology. His impact has been felt in all academic fields, including the field of science, education theory and research. His contribution to the philosophy of science has inspired various student bodies and has influenced more than one billion readers and researchers at large. His works have so far, laid the foundation for many aspiring researchers who plan to pursue a study of the philosophy of science in the future. He is credited for the accurate representation of science and for introducing a new method towards approaching this branch of study.
|
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https://www.huckmag.com/article/mostly-translucent-interview-telefon-tel-aviv
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en
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Mostly Translucent: An interview with Telefon Tel Aviv
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[] |
2023-03-27T09:38:32+01:00
|
Following the death of Charlie Cooper, the future of duo Telefon Tel Aviv looked uncertain. Now its other half is carrying on in the name of catharsis.
|
en
|
/apple-touch-icon.png
|
Huck
|
https://www.huckmag.com/article/mostly-translucent-interview-telefon-tel-aviv
|
When Charlie Cooper died in 2009, the future of electronic duo Telefon Tel Aviv looked uncertain. Joshua Eustis, its other half, relocated from New Orleans to Los Angeles and worked as a member of Nine Inch Nails and Maynard James Keenan’s Puscifer as well as branching into solo act Sons of Magdalene.
This month marks the first real live performances of Telefon Tel Aviv since the project lapsed into hiatus over six years ago. Not only are the old releases being re-issued on Ghostly, but Eustis has a string of new material in development too: a collaborative project with Turk Dietrich called Second Woman, his other project Tropic of Cancer as well as the creative rebirth of Telefon Tel Aviv.
“All the old stuff that hasn’t been released will get bundled with re-releases,” he says. “I’m also working on a new Telefon record right now, the first stuff that I have really gathered since Charlie died that I feel makes sense. I am hoping to get that record out in 2016.”
Can you remember what first sparked your interest in electronic music?
It was actually a very specific moment: I was seven-and-a-half years old and I saw the video for ‘Rockit’ by Herbie Hancock. It was this really incredible dystopian view of the future: these robot legs walking back and forth and this completely mechanised form of music. I became obsessed with futurism and associated electronic music with that. And I knew I would do it for the rest of my life. There was no question about it. I got some little toy keyboard for my eighth birthday and I never left the fucking thing alone.
Were you instantly a good player or did you have to work for it?
No, I’m still not great. I’m a student of a form. Electronic music is the kind of thing where you can name on one hand the people who have really brought it forward: the people who are untouchable and just ahead of everybody in electronic music… Autechre, Aphex Twin, Oval, Pole… and I would put everything associated with Moritz Von Oswald in there too. I feel like his obsession with dub music was really what brought dub to electronic music and out of Kingston to the rest of the world.
How did Telefon Tel Aviv form?
I met Charlie in 1992. We went to separate high schools but we had a lot of mutual friends and he was a big shot in the New Orleans music scene. He had a band there that was really popular. I was in maybe the only real, purely electronic band at the time. Fast forward to 1999: I ran into him in this department store and just started talking about music and said, ‘Hang on, man. We have been friends for this long and we like the same shit. Let’s do some stuff together.’ The next weekend, he brought over a session that ended up being the first Telefon Tel Aviv song [‘Introductory Nomenclature’] and the second last on the first record.
Can you remember how your style developed? Was there a discussion or was it organic?
It’s interesting that you bring that up because we originally started two projects at the same time. The first project was purely electronic instrumental stuff and then the other project was kind of post rocky stuff. Eventually we wanted to combine elements of both into one project.
Listening back to your production – especially on the first record – every beat, glitch and synth part sounds so meticulous.
That’s just a symptom of a process that we went through to make songs. We would do sound design for two days before we even started working on a song. We would sit around and make sounds again and again; thousands of them. Then one of us would present a mechanical idea and we would start adding sound design into the session with a melodic idea and it kind of happened that way. Every single sound was made by hand and placed specifically in this stereo spectrum with volume, panning and the effects. We didn’t know any other way to do it, so it took a year.
That’s so funny. So what sounds like such a sophisticated end result was developed purely out of naivety?
Absolutely. It was totally naive. We wanted to achieve this sound and we couldn’t think of any way to do it except saying, ‘Fuck… we have got to do it by hand. It’s the only way we know how.’ We would loop one bar and work on it for hours; days, sometimes.
How long would, say, the first track on Fahrenheit Fair Enough take?
That song took two months of 12 hours a day. The front section of it where it’s really hectic took five weeks. It’s a minute and half of music and took a huge amount of time.
On the second record, where did the idea come about to incorporate R&B vocalists?
We wanted to expand the pallet and get more into the song side of things but we didn’t really know how. We just figured we should get collaborators to come in and do that side of it, then we’d manipulate it and make it fit. In retrospect, we didn’t really achieve what we were trying to make but that is no one’s fault but ours. We wanted to make this really kind of dark, seedy, kind of sleazy, sketchy, RnB thing and then it ended up sounding really polished and soft and kind of mellow.
I’ve always thought some of that record really sounds like what Drake, The Weeknd and Frank Ocean are doing now. Specifically the chilled minimal production, melancholic soul vocalists songs. Have people commented on this before?
Yeah, they have and that’s great.
And that’s not an insult. I really love Drake.
No, I do too. A lot of his stuff is great. We were and still are obsessed with futurism and trying to bring soul into American musical forms. I don’t know… I think I would be really presumptuous if I was to say any of these modern guys were influenced by what we did because there is no way they know about it… at least, I can’t imagine. It would be really awesome if I found out that they were influenced by it… but we are such a niche project, it seems highly unlikely to me.
On the third record, you’ve really got a dark eighties electro sound going on. Almost like OMD on steroids.
[Laughs] Yeah, we were listening to a lot of OMD at that time. Everybody kept saying, ‘Oh, it sounds like Depeche Mode.’ We were listening to a lot of minimal wave and stuff like that. A lot of krautrock and psychedelic stuff – all of these things that we loved but we still wanted to have some element of futurism and romanticism and that’s kind of what came out.
When we made it, we were like, ‘Oh god, this is the third record that sounds like a different band. What the fuck are we doing?’ It was really confusing to us but maybe this is a symptom of so much time passing between records. It took us so long to make a record that I feel like we got older and our tastes changed.
Listening back recently I thought, ‘Man, what an amazing era for electronic music.’ For someone who was part of it at the time, do you feel like the same way?
I look back on it so fondly. It’s funny, as I was having a talk with Sean Booth from Autechre about this very thing a couple of weeks ago and he said the same thing: ‘Man, that was a hell of a time, wasn’t it? 1999 to 2004… It fucking went off!’
And I was like, ‘Yeah… and then you guys made Confield and everybody felt stupid.’[Laughs] It really was a golden era in a lot of ways. I think because the technology bloomed so fast right around that time.
They’re the one artist that still blow my mind. Stuff like ‘Flutter’ from Anti EP and ‘Eutow’ from Tri Repeate are just incredible
‘Eutow’ is the best electro track I have ever heard and people don’t hear it as electro – but it’s 100% electro. It’s just Autechre’s version. Those guys are B-boys and people forget that about them. Everything they are doing is rooted in hip-hop and B-boyism. If you listen to their music with that lens, it just opens up a whole new interpretation of it and I love that. I love listening to it knowing that those guys were like probably riding BMXs and tagging buildings in the ’80s. It makes a lot of sense to me.
How did your involvement with Tropic of Cancer come about?
I just became friends with Camella [Lobo] and she eventually asked me to come aboard and help her with the records. She had been doing it already for five years maybe when she asked me. She just wanted another person to handle the more technical aspects of it and expand the pallet and tidy up production. I like that kind of stuff. I was a super fan of Tropic of Cancer before I knew Camella and before I joined the band so being in the band is pretty amazing for me because I love her records. I’m hoping to get the new Tropic record out in 2016 also.
How do you feel about the current state of electronic music?
Honestly I feel it’s coming back. I feel like there is a tremendous amount of good music being made right now I mean Houndstooth label is amazing; the Berlin based Pan record label is amazing; Editions Mego; Raster-Noton is still incredible, Modern Love Records – they can do no wrong; Blackest Ever Black… there are so many great electronic record labels and so many new artists, young artists, older guys who are newer artists…
I mean there’s so much good music being made right now I feel like we are about to enter another golden era for electronic music.
I hope for this. I feel like we hit a big peak in 2001 and it kind of dwindled but I feel like it’s getting back into a time period and environment which experimentation, pushing the envelope, forward thinking – all of these things are becoming core values again.
|
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| 14
|
https://xlr8r.com/features/inbox-telefon-tel-aviv/
|
en
|
Inbox: Telefon Tel Aviv
|
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2008-12-01T09:00:00+00:00
|
Sure, we’re always curious to know about an artist’s upcoming release, most recent tour, or […]
|
en
|
/apple-touch-icon.png
|
XLR8R
|
https://xlr8r.com/features/inbox-telefon-tel-aviv/
|
Sure, we’re always curious to know about an artist’s upcoming release, most recent tour, or arsenal of analog gear, but XLR8R’s also got a curiosity for quirk. Thus, each week, we email a different artist and find out what makes them tick, in the studio and in life. This week finds us talking about the Chicago Cubs, Kurt Vonnegut, and enslavement of ex-girlfriends with Josh Eustis and Charlie Cooper, the boys behind Telefon Tel Aviv.
What are you listening to right now?
Josh Eustis: Grouper, Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill. I’ve burned it out; I play it so much. I’m also heavily jamming “It’s My Life” by Talk Talk, a very underrated record that hipsters overlook because it was popular. Everyone goes “Oooh, but see, like, ‘Spirit of Eden’ is the one, man…”
Charlie Cooper: I have to agree with the Grouper record. “Heavy Water” is the best new song I’ve heard in years. Also in heavy rotation are Fleetwood Mac (Rumors, Tusk), Danzig (The Lost Tracks of Danzig), Wire (Chairs Missing), Raekwon (Only Built 4 Cuban Linx). You can’t mess with Fleetwood Mac for sheer songwriting genius. Danzig is a major weakness for me from way back. This new comp of outtakes and rarities is actually really good. Mostly classic sounding tracks recorded in a more raw way–good shit. That wire record is so dope also. I can’t believe how ahead of their time they were. What can I say about Raekwon? Track after track of genius beats and lyrics. Love it.
What’s the weirdest story you ever heard about yourself?
JE: From Wikipedia: “Charlie Cooper is an avid shoe collector and has been known to take up to 21 pairs of shoes while on tour. During a show last spring in Moscow, Russia he had three outfit changes, including one “encore set” that featured a vintage pair of UNC (University of North Carolina) Blue Air Jordan’s with matching t-shirt. [Citation needed]”
CC: Guess Josh has me covered on this one. Someone is enjoying themselves.
What band did you want to be in when you were 15?
JE: Skinny Puppy, or nothing. Seriously.
CC: Would have been NIN, or The Cure, probably.
Worst live show experience?
JE: It’s a tie, I think. It was either the knuckle-dragging Rotterdam simpleton that threw a Heineken bottle at my head in Amsterdam or the ridiculous and reproachful hippy-trance-diva that yelled, “You fucking suuuuck, get off the stage,” while we were finishing our set and thanking both of the fans in front that enjoyed the show. Shpongle was on next. What can I say? She hurt my feelings.
CC: Ditto. Oh yeah, I remember playing a house party with Josh back in the day when we first started out, and this retard in the room kept heckling us and asking us if we were making the music or was it our computers. What a dickwad that guy was.
Favorite city to play in?
JE: Wow. Napoli? Rome? Istanbul? Ann Arbor? Those four, believe it or not, are all well in the running. We’ve had a blast playing shows in all of those cities. Istanbul was completely bananas. I was surprised.
CC: I love all those cities also. I have to add in Austin. Really great people out there who have been bringing us out and supporting us for years.
How do you, as your website states, “quantify and qualify nostalgia?”
JE: Good question. I have no idea. With a tape machine, or something, I guess…
CC: I’ll get back to you on that one.
What is your favorite thing you own?
JE: I don’t really care much about anything that I own. However I think that I would like to “own” my ex-girlfriend, make her my slave, or have some similar arrangement. She’s fantastic and I’m still hung up on her. A real catch. A contract of ownership thereof would really be swell.
CC: I’d have to say I love my Arp Omni II. It’s an old string synthesizer. I always loved the sound of them on all sorts of records. It’s like playing a really good memory.
Name one item of clothing you can’t live without.
JE: My Helmut Lang hooded jacket that Eliot Lipp gave me as a Christmas present in October.
CC: Hanes black no-tag t-shirt.
Your music most closely resembles which Captain Planet hero (choose one): Earth, Wind, Water, Fire, Heart.
JE: “After the Love is Gone” by Earth, Wind, and Fire.
What did you always get in trouble for when you were little?
JE: From the time I was about six years old up until about 13 years old I basically did not stop talking–or beefing in church.
CC: For always doing the exact opposite of what I was told to do. Sometimes it worked out, mostly not.
What other artist would you most like to work with?
JE: For me? Stupid answer, but Steve Reich. My lifetime dream is to play piano on a performance of “Music for 18 Musicians.” I know all the parts already, from studying them in college and practicing like crazy.
CC: I have no business in the same room as these people, but if there ever was a reason I’d like to work with PJ Harvey, Antony Hegarty, Bowie, Burial, Animal Collective.
What’s the last thing you read?
JE:Samedi The Deafness by Jesse Ball. Radical.
CC:Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut. To me, [he ‘s] the most important contemporary writer. That’s just me though. R.I.P.
Complete this sentence: In the future…
JE: …all the hip kids will wear Z. Cavariccis and hyper-color t-shirts. Wait, we are already in the future.
CC: No worries… We won’t exist.
Stupidest thing you’ve done in the last 12 months?
JE: I allowed myself to become deeply emotionally invested in the Chicago Cubs. I watched well over one hundred games of this past season–irrevocably stupid.
CC: Oh man, you might have to bump a few articles to accommodate my dumb shit. I’ll spare you.
What’s next?
JE: I don’t care and I can’t believe that anyone else does, either.
CC: Lots and lots of jetlag.
Telefon Tel Aviv’s Immolate Yourself is out January 20, 2009 on BPitch Control.
MP3: “Helen of Troy”
|
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https://floodmagazine.com/42018/telefon-tel-aviv-fahrenheit-fair-enough-reissue/
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Telefon Tel Aviv, “Fahrenheit Fair Enough” [reissue]
|
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The reissue of the New Orleans IDM duo’s debut is a refreshing reminder of a more cerebral time.
|
en
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/favicon.png
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FLOOD
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https://floodmagazine.com/42018/telefon-tel-aviv-fahrenheit-fair-enough-reissue/
|
Telefon Tel Aviv
Fahrenheit Fair Enough [reissue]
GHOSTLY
7/10
At its advent, the ridiculously named genre Intelligent Dance Music (or IDM) came with smart-kid credentials, and was pioneered by those who considered themselves the thinking man’s electro wizards. Aphex Twin, Autechre, and The Orb were its godfathers; think of them as the sullen philosophy professor rolling his eyes at EDM’s fist-pumping frat boy.
The influence of those early IDM acts helped spurn Telefon Tel Aviv, an experimental duo—Joshua Eustis and Charles Cooper—out of New Orleans whose 2001 debut album Fahrenheit Fair Enough is considered a defining release in the category. TTA remained left of center throughout their career—three albums in ten years, with remixes a plenty, suggesting an obsessive tinkerer’s mindset. During the launch of their third album, 2009’s Immolate Yourself, Cooper died unexpectedly and the band was scuttled. Now fifteen years after its release, Fahrenheit is being reissued with a number of unreleased outtakes and new tracks, and a new sheen added to the original nine.
The album reads as part history lesson, part interesting discovery. Comparing the various versions of tracks is a welcome task, and recognizing the sounds of earlier musical idioms is a nice refresher course on IDM’s early thrills. At seventeen tracks, it may be too much of an introduction, but it’s still a welcome reminder of a more cerebral time.
|
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https://www.zscaler.com/company/contact
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Contact Us
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[] |
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[
"Zscaler Support Zscaler Contact"
] | null |
[] | null |
Contact Zscaler to discover our comprehensive, unified internet security and compliance SaaS platform, delivered 100 in the cloud.
|
en
|
/favicons/apple-touch-icon.png
|
https://www.zscaler.com/company/contact
| ||||||
9034
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https://www.beyondtrust.com/contact
|
en
|
Contact BeyondTrust for Secure Access Solutions
|
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2018-12-17T16:06:22-06:00
|
BeyondTrustâs Privileged Access Management platform protects your organization from unwanted remote access, stolen credentials, and misused privileges
|
en
|
/favicon.png?v=5
|
BeyondTrust
|
https://www.beyondtrust.com/contact
|
Copyright © 2003 â 2024 BeyondTrust Corporation. All rights reserved. Other trademarks identified on this page are owned by their respective owners. BeyondTrust Corporation is not a chartered bank or trust company, or depository institution. It is not authorized to accept deposits or trust accounts and is not licensed or regulated by any state or federal banking authority.
|
||||
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| 5
|
https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/telefon-tel-aviv-shifting-time/
|
en
|
Telefon Tel Aviv: Shifting Time
|
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Ableton interview with Josh Eustis about the making of Telefon Tel Aviv’s first album in ten years.Includes free download of a custom made Max for Live device.
|
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| null |
When the last Telefon Tel Aviv record came out, the band already had a tangled legacy behind them. Originally hailing from New Orleans, the duo of Josh Eustis and Charles Cooper quickly drew an avid following with their 2001 debut album, Fahrenheit Fair Enough. Their initial combination of micro-sampling techniques, folky songwriting and expressive sound design remains a unique proposition that mutated over time. Subsequent albums Map Of What Is Effortless and Immolate Yourself each represented a departure from its predecessors, simultaneously confusing existing fans while acquiring new ones. When Cooper tragically passed away in 2009, Telefon Tel Aviv went on indefinite hiatus, leaving behind a small but prominent body of work for listeners to reflect upon. A band that steadfastly refused to adhere to genre conventions or kowtow to expectations, their cult status has only deepened over time.
Having earned a reputation for the high production values of the TTA material, Eustis forged a productive career in music that found him working as a sound designer, producer and mastering engineer for a variety of projects. He notched up repeated stints in alternative rock megaliths such as Nine Inch Nails, A Perfect Circle and Puscifer as well as production credits for Tropic Of Cancer and Vatican Shadow, and much more besides. He also formed Second Woman with Turk Dietrich – an acclaimed project that mutates bruising club aesthetics through intense signal processing and sound design.
Understandably, returning to Telefon Tel Aviv was a conflicted decision for Eustis, but as his work with Dietrich brought him back into a similar sphere of music production, ideas for the project began to present themselves. While his decades of experience in music production had provided him with more than enough tools to solve most conventional production problems, Eustis struck upon a particular concept about time manipulation that couldn’t be solved by conventional means. In 2016 he started trying to realise that idea by immersing himself in the world of Max MSP, all the while developing musical themes that would eventually manifest in the fourth Telefon Tel Aviv album, Dreams Are Not Enough.
A brooding, stormy record at once reminiscent of TTA and equally not like any previous album, Dreams Are Not Enough arrives on Ghostly International as the wholly appropriate follow up to one of the most singular projects in the history of US electronica. We caught up with Eustis to find out more about the process behind the long awaited return.
How do you feel that Dreams Are Not Enough relates sonically to the rest of the Telefon Tel Aviv legacy?
The quick answer is that I think it totally picks up where the last record left off. But the records are all so different from one another, a lot of people think of it like three different bands across three different records, so my thinking this time was to try to incorporate elements of all the records into one record. A little bit of Map [Of What Is Effortless], a little bit of Fahrenheit [Fair Enough] a little bit of Immolate [Yourself] and then whatever else it's gonna be. We always got bored of whatever we were doing and took a hard turn each time we made a new record, so maybe this one is like the others in that it is a bit of a departure again.
Did you strike upon an angle of approach you thought would be the right thing to do for Telefon Tel Aviv?
After five years trying to figure if I was even gonna do the damn thing in the first place, I had to figure out what the sound was gonna be. Once I got my brain around that it was like, ‘Oh, I'm not gonna be able to do this with my current skill set.’ I realised I had to dig in on Max, so I started learning Max online around 2016 and then spent two years while tinkering with little melodies and lyrics and saving them. While doing all that, I spent two and a half years building the tool kit I needed to make the record.
“A Younger Version of Myself” from the new Telefon Tel Aviv album “Dreams Are Not Enough”
Could you tell me more about the technical vision you had for the record?
I needed to figure out a way to mess with the timing of things. And this ties into the Second Woman stuff I've been working on with Turk, where we started trying to think about things being fluid and loose, not on the grid. It goes all the way back to the very beginning of Telefon Tel Aviv. There are a lot of points on Fahrenheit Fair Enough where a rhythm is programmed according to the Fibonacci sequence, or things break apart according to the Mandelbrot Set. We used actual math to program a lot of that stuff manually, to get these curved rhythms. I've always been obsessed with curved rhythms, but while we did a lot with sound design and complex programming, I didn't really dig in a lot on this curved rhythm idea. I wanted to explore it more deeply in the context of melodic material, but also to try to make something that was just fun to listen to and didn't really sound like anything else.
Complex, interlocking patterns – a hallmark of Telefon Tel Aviv’s sound since their debut album “Fahrenheit Fair Enough”
Having come up with the idea and technical approach, what did you set about trying to do going into Max?
It was actually the most fun I've had making music since the very beginning of trying to make electronic music. It was an incredible, liberating, mind blowing experience. It's the same feeling I had the very first time Charlie and I started working on music together in the Pro Tools window, when we really didn't know anything at all. It was this incredible feeling of the world being your oyster and not knowing how to do anything and just tinkering until things sound cool or interesting or new. I've made so many records in the interim time for myself and for other artists, I got to a point where I had a cockiness about the process of making records and I thought I knew everything. Getting into Max took me out of the kiddie pool and threw me in the deep end with no floaty.
What is the toolkit you built in Max?
It’s basically a big standalone app I built in Max, which I then parted out into individual pieces for Max for Live, for working within Ableton Live. I knew that [Live] was gonna be the canvas for this thing because of its implementation with Max. It was either learn Max and deal with the idea of Max For Live controlling timing in Ableton, or learn Javascript and try to do it in Logic, and that seemed much harder. Ableton just feels like home right now.
Josh Eustis breaks down his studio set-up
Can you explain the system you built in Max?
It all has to do with changing the way time is divided. The main system is called Guilt. What Guilt does is, you can set a time period of, let's say two bars, and then instead of dividing those two bars into two bars of 32nd notes, you have 32 steps that can be any length. Each step can be its own length, and you can draw in step lengths using a multi-slider or a graph, and it'll loop around those two bars perfectly, but the distance between steps is not measured in note length, it's measured in a pure time value. So each step can have its own time value, and so you're constantly getting these different time divisions. You can use this to trigger other things. If you put a synth after the Guilt system and play chords or melodies, it will play the notes that you're holding down almost like an arpeggiator, but play them at the times that you determine on the multi-slider.
Now that can also trigger other things. There's a Tragedy system [originally built by Alessio from K-Devices] which is similar, but it's basically a polyphonic MIDI note repeater which has LFOs built into it for velocities, and that can fire together with Guilt if you want to do it a different way. It can store patterns, it can morph or interpolate between patterns, which is a really cool feature. Then there's Pity, which is a gate that also keys off its own timing system, or it can key off the main Guilt timing system. Every time it receives a bang from one of the other devices it will start an amplitude envelope on whatever's coming through it, so you can break something up pretty interestingly that way. There are Polyphonic MIDI note delays that also have curvable delay times, there’s a mono delay... Most of it deals with manipulating MIDI, and how MIDI timing is computed, and it's all really pretty simple.
Josh Esutis has kindly shared one of his own Max for Live creations, a simple tool for designing kick drums and generating low-end frequencies, used in the making of the latest album. The device requires Live 10 and Max for Live.
How long did it take you to strike upon this process?
It took years. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but I had no clue how to do it, and so I just had to iterate on the idea until it worked. I took the Kadenze course online, which really blew the doors open for me. Tom Hall from Cycling ‘74 helped me a lot with a couple of things.
How much more developed is the system now compared to your original idea?
Way, way beyond anything I thought I would ever be able to do. Without sounding like I got too proud of myself, I was really stoked that I somehow managed to do it and it was way beyond what I thought it was gonna be.
"We always got bored of whatever we were doing and took a hard turn each time we made a new record, so maybe this one is like the others in that it is a bit of a departure again."
Did you ever feel at risk of losing focus on the creative aspect and just obsessing on the technical side of the system?
It's a pitfall for anybody doing something on the technical side of music, but I just put limits on myself. I let myself program Max during the day, but if I was gonna work in the evening it had to be just tinkering with melodies or a beat, it had to be something creative and not technical. It's just about compartmentalising those things and making sure you don't just make busy work for yourself. I started to notice this about myself as I was working on this record. I was working 60, 70 hours a week, and I was justifying it to myself saying, ‘I'm not gonna be able to make the record until I have this tool kit done.’ At the worst part of it, it felt like I was allowing myself to do all this extremely tedious technical work so I wouldn't feel guilty about not writing the record, but then the tool kit really started coming together and Ghostly [International] were like, ‘Hey dude, are you gonna do this record?’ I already knew what all the song titles were gonna be, I had all the themes worked out, most of the melodic stuff was written. I just had to sit down and produce it.
Did you need that kick from Ghostly?
Yeah, I could have probably just worked on this Max MSP stuff for the rest of my life without ever really writing a record. I had to put limits on myself. I listened to promptings from the label, and it was good for me.
What was it like when you began the actual production process, and how did it flow?
Technically I started writing the album in 2016-ish, and I had three songs done before I even really sat down to do the record.
So to make the remaining six tracks, were you firing up the system and feeding pre-prepared ingredients into it?
Yeah. I sort of knew what they were all going to be ahead of time. I have this thing where I don't really sit down and tinker with song stuff. When it comes to melodic stuff or basic song structures, I have a real good idea of where I'm going a lot of the time.
Electronic music creation can lend itself to a non-linear, un-composed approach, but were you still coming at it from a song-writing perspective?
Yeah. It was definitely on my mind. I knew I was gonna have to worry about words and themes and setting a picture – I knew what the songs were going to be about but I didn't know exactly how I was going to say it. I also wasn't sure it wasn't going to be rooted in dance music anyway, because I love that. But it ended up being more... I don't want to say it's a folk record, but it ended up being more like that than it ended up a dance record.
Second Woman – Josh Eustis’ collaboration with Turk Dietrich of Belong takes more direct aim at the dance floor
Beyond the central production ideas about time shifting on Dreams Are Not Enough, it also seemed like there was an emphasis on spatial processing and breathing room in the mixes.
Absolutely. It was an attempt to think about the space between notes. I didn't want this record to be too full, or 70 tracks in a session like the old Telefon stuff. I wanted to exercise a little bit of self-censorship and leave space. I just started to like the way space sounded in music and it became a very rewarding feeling.
You’ve been playing live sets as Telefon Tel Aviv for a few years again, and there are dates scheduled around the release of the new album. Can you explain how your live set is laid out?
It's laid out as scenes in session view, and there are instruments that are just tone generators that are open, and MIDI clips and vocal chains and stuff like that. There's a track for video, there's a track for triggering lights, there's a bunch of auxiliary stuff, but then basically what happens is using Max I've built a graphical overlay that goes on top of everything, so I'm not even looking at Ableton [Live] when I'm playing. With this graphical user interface I can send timing data to MIDI that's already playing, change it or manipulate it in ways that I think are interesting. And that also deals with doing stuff like that to the vocals. It's pretty simple, but also totally open-ended. I can play the song exactly as it is off the record if I wanted, or I can take it somewhere and make a complete mess out of it, and that to me is kind of the fun part of it.
Did you design the live set with a view to being able to improvise more on stage?
I would say live performance in electronic music culture values things like improvisation very much. In the context of songs, improvisation for me doesn't work very well. I get married to the way things should be and I have a hard time wrapping my brain around how to improvise, so what I'm constantly trying to do is find ways to improvise on it. If I've only got a set amount of time for this musical idea to happen, how far can I take it within that time?
Keep up with Telefon Tel Aviv on Soundcloud
Text and interview by Oli Warwick
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https://isramisraelusa.com/plan-your-trip/travel-guide-to-israel/
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The Essential Travel Guide to Israel
|
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Checkout our travel guide to Israel to get valuable information about your upcoming trip: best time of the year to travel to Israel , what to pack, public transportation, currency, dress code, sightseeing, tour guiding, dining, medical assistance and much more.
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IsramIsrael
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https://isramisraelusa.com/plan-your-trip/travel-guide-to-israel/
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Travel Guide to Israel
Shalom!
Bon Voyage!
We wish you a wonderful journey and an enjoyable stay in the endlessly fascinating and beautiful land of Israel.
Isram Israel will do everything possible to ensure that your tour will be an exciting and memorable experience, filled with the joy of discovery and remembered happily for many years to come.
This booklet is designed to answer many of your questions and to provide you with valuable information to make your trip to Israel more enjoyable. We hope you will find it useful.
We look forward to hosting you in Israel and thank you for choosing Isram Israel.
Sincerely,
Ilana Apelboim
General Manager
Isram Israel, USA
Passport
Tourists are required to hold passports valid for 6 months beyond the duration of their stay. Visitors are allowed to stay in the country for three months from the date of arrival.
You Do Not Need A Visa – U.S. and Canadian citizens do not need a visa to visit Israel – just a valid passport (valid for at least 6 months beyond the duration of your stay). Visitors from most European countries, Mexico, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and many other countries also do not need visas. To check the requirements for other nationalities contact the Israeli Consulate.
Upon entering Israel, please be sure to retain the stamped separate slip that is issued at Israeli Passport Control. As your passports are not stamped, this is your official entry to the country and serves as ID while traveling within Israel. It is also required at hotel check in and car rentals.
You Don’t Need Vaccinations – No vaccinations or shots are required for U.S. or Canadian visitors to Israel. (If you’ve visited a country prior to coming to Israel where cholera, typhoid or yellow fever is endemic, you will need a vaccination certificate.)
Baggage
In general, most Transatlantic flights allow one checked bag per person with neither to exceed 62 inches or 50 pounds currently, plus one carry-on bag not to exceed 39”. Infants: No baggage permitted. For domestic flights in the USA, some airlines permit one piece of checked luggage and have a charge for a second piece of checked luggage and some charge from the first piece. However, most of these charges do not apply to passengers who have purchased their domestic connecting flight on the same ticket as their transatlantic flight from/to the USA and are entitled to one checked piece per person not exceeding 50lbs per piece. Weight restrictions on some routes on inter-country or international air flights may apply. Please contact your airline or refer to its website for detailed information regarding your airline’s checked baggage policies. Airline policies vary and may change at any time. Isram Israel is not responsible for any excess luggage/weight charges levied by an airline. Baggage insurance is highly recommended, as we cannot be held responsible for lost or damaged luggage or personal items.
Note: Due to space limitations in the touring vehicles we ask that you limit your luggage to 1 piece per person plus a small carry-on.
Arrival Transfers
For passengers entitled to an arrival transfer at Ben Gurion Airport, our transfer host will greet you inside the baggage claim area once you clear Passport Control. Should you have any difficulties locating him/her, please proceed to the information counter and they will gladly page ISRAM/SMILE host. If you are part of a tour group, or have private car arrangements, please affix the Isram Israel tags to your luggage for easy identification. Those who have selected the special VIP Laufer service for meeting at the sleeve of the aircraft, kindly refer to your documents for meeting details.
Israeli – Jordanian Border Crossings
There are three crossing points used frequently for travel between Israel and Jordan: The Arava crossing near Eilat, the Sheikh Hussein Crossing in the north, and the Allenby Bridge (King Hussein) crossing near Jerusalem. American & Canadian citizens can secure visas for Jordan locally when crossing at Sheikh Hussein (north). For crossings at the Arava Border (near Eilat), or at the Allenby Bridge (near Jerusalem) visas must be issued in advance of your arrival or you will not be able to enter Jordan at these borders. Isram Israel will review the procedure and in most cases, will apply for your visa through our representatives in Jordan (restrictions apply). Visa Fees and Border Crossing Fees are generally not included in the price of your tour unless otherwise indicated.
In some instances, you must apply to the Jordan Embassy directly for your visa. The address of the Embassy in Washington is: Embassy of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan Consular Office, 3504 International Drive, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20008. Application forms can be downloaded from the Jordan Embassy website. Please note that you should not apply more than 45 days in advance of your arrival in Jordan as the visa issued is valid for only 2 months from issue date.
Customs
You may bring in almost anything you’ll need for personal use and your convenience. Limited items per adult are: 44 pints cologne or perfume; 2 liters wine; 1 liter liquor; 250 grams cigars or loose tobacco; 250 cigarettes; gifts up to $200.00 in value.
Upon return to the U.S., you may bring in up to $400.00 worth of items duty free. Please Note: Many Israeli-made items are not counted as part of your duty-free allowance as they are exempt from U.S. duty.
Foreign Currency Exchange
Tourists, who have changed foreign currency (U.S. dollars) into Israeli currency (NIS), may re-exchange their money into dollars by presenting the receipt of the transaction up to a maximum of $500. This may be done at any bank in Israel or at Ben Gurion Airport upon departure.
Currency
The Israeli Shekel (NIS) is the country’s legal tender. The Shekel is divided into 100 agorot. The bills are in denominations of 10, 20, 50, 100 and 200 shekels. There are coins of 1,5, and 10 shekels and 5,10, and 50 agorot. You may bring an unlimited amount of foreign currency into Israel – cash, traveler’s checks, letters of credit or State of Israel bonds. Upon departure you may take out up to NIS 1,000.
You may wish to change some currency at the bank so that you may pay for incidental items such as buses, taxis, fast food, newspaper, soft drinks, etc. However, we recommend that you change only a limited amount at one time, as it will cost you a fee to change back to USD. Most places accept traveler’s checks & major credit cards. There are also many ATM machines throughout Israel that dispense both NIS and USD.
V.A.T. (Value Added Tax)
The V.A.T. (Value Added Tax) is 17% (Israel’s equivalent of U.S. Sales Tax) at printing time. All tourists in Israel are exempt from V.A.T. when paying in foreign currency for services provided in Israel. It is advisable to charge all of your extras, including meals, to your room and when checking out pay in U.S. dollars or credit card. Anything that is not charged to your room even if paid in dollars will be assessed the VAT. When purchasing items in approved shops, be sure to ask for a “V.A.T. Refund Form” if your goods are in excess of NIS 400. Be sure that the shopkeeper completes this form. This will entitle you to a V.A.T. refund at Ben Gurion International Airport upon departure at the Bank Leumi counter (after check in). The refund will be given in cash after presentation of your purchase invoice.
Please be sure to have with you the articles purchased as you may be asked to present them. Should the items you purchased include creams and liquids such as Ahava products, which are over the restricted quantity allowed by the airline, then you may not be able to take them on board as “carry on”. As such, although you may have wanted to secure the VAT refund for these items, we strongly advise you to pack such items as check in luggage and possibly forfeit the VAT refund. Otherwise, there is a risk that you may have to leave these items behind.
Kindly be advised that if you are exiting Israel to Jordan or Egypt at one of the border crossings and returning to Israel, the V.A.T. refund for your purchased items in Israel will apply only if your stay in Jordan or Egypt did not exceed 48 hours (from departure to return). Otherwise, for any VAT refund to apply, you must make your purchases only after returning from Jordan or Egypt.
Please Note: Passengers who are in possession of an Israeli Passport (including those with dual citizenship) may be subject to a 17% V.A.T. charge levied in Israel at the hotels or for car rentals. It must be paid, if requested, directly to the hotel/establishment. Please note that Isram Israel assumes no responsibility whatsoever for any charges to your account made by an establishment.
Banking Hours
Sunday, Tuesday & Thursday from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m., Monday & Wednesday from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and eve of holidays from 8:30 a.m. to Noon. Branches in leading hotels usually offer additional hours.
State of Israel Bonds
Tourists holding State of Israel Bonds in their name or legally assigned to them, may redeem them at any bank prior to their date of maturity for Israeli currency (NIS) up to the equivalent of $2,500 per month of stay for each member of the family.
Time
Israeli Standard Time is 2 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, 1 hour ahead of mid-European Time. Israel is 7 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time and 10 hours ahead of Pacific U.S.A time.
Electrical Appliances
The electric current in Israel is 220 volts AC, single phase, 50 cycles. Sockets are usually three pronged and foreign-made appliances often require adapters for plugs. Israel’s voltage is 220 volts, like Europe. Most luxury hotels provide hair dryers, and virtually all hotel rooms have 110/220 electric shaver sockets. Our electricity outlets usually conform to European adapters, but hotels and electrical stores can easily supply you with the right adapter if necessary.
Weather
The weather in Israel is often compared to the temperate climate in Florida and southern California. There are sun-drenched summers and mild, balmy winters. However, as in most countries there can be sharp contrasts dependent upon the season. Year-round swimming is possible from April to October along the Mediterranean coast and the Sea of Galilee and throughout the year at the Dead Sea and the Red Sea.
The summer season (April to October) has fairly constant temperatures and is unspoiled by sudden showers. The winter season (November to March) is mild but quite cold in hilly areas (Jerusalem). Spells of rain are interspersed with brilliant sunshine.
Mean Temperature (Fahrenheit)
Jerusalem Tel Aviv Haifa Tiberias Eilat Jan 43-53 49-65 45-63 48-65 49-70 Feb 43-57 47-65 47-64 48-67 51-73 Mar 47-60 51-68 47-70 51-72 56-79 Apr 53-69 54-72 54-77 55-80 62-87 May 59-77 63-77 58-76 62-89 69-94 June 63-81 66-82 63-81 68-94 75-98 July 65-83 70-86 68-86 73-98 77-103 Aug 65-85 72-86 70-86 74-99 79-104 Sep 64-82 68-88 67-85 70-95 74-97 Oct 60-77 59-83 59-81 65-89 68-91 Nov 54-66 54-76 55-73 58-78 60-82 Dec 46-56 47-66 48-64 53-68 51-74
Shabbat in Israel
Public transportation stops on Fridays about an hour before the onset of the Shabbat (except in Haifa, Nazareth and East Jerusalem) and starts again after nightfall on Saturday.
Most theaters, motion-picture houses and restaurants are closed, but most non-Kosher restaurants are open. In the major cities most shops are closed, except in the non-Jewish neighborhoods.
Although some museums, zoos and public places stay open, they do not sell tickets on Shabbat; you must buy them in advance.
Hotel restaurants and room service operate normally on Shabbat with menu limitations.
If you are driving on Shabbat, please be aware that if your route takes you through certain orthodox, deeply religious areas, residents may be disturbed to see motor vehicles operating through their neighborhood.
Some private bus companies and sightseeing tours do operate on Shabbat.
What to Pack
Summer Season: Very light and comfortable clothing, preferably drip-dry for daywear. In the mountains (Jerusalem, Safed and Upper Galilee) a sweater is quite useful in the evening even in the middle of summer. This hold true for the desert also.
In-Between Seasons: Light coats, sweaters, suits and light shirts. The secret of dressing for this time of year is to “layer” and “peel” as the weather changes.
Winter Season: Warm coat, raincoat, hat, sweaters, woolen or heavy suit, warm shoes and boots. Lighter clothing and a swimsuit are suitable if you are travelling to Eilat on the Red Sea or to the Dead Sea area.
Please note: Proper attire is a must for visits to Holy sites (no shorts or sleeveless blouses for women and no shorts above the knee for men).
Don’t Forget to Pack:
A scarf (for head and shoulders)
Very comfortable shoes or Sneakers
First-aid kit
Sewing kit
Bathing suit
Medical and eyeglass prescriptions
Soft, foldable slippers for the plane
Packets of tissues and towelettes
Crease-free and casual clothing
Tote-bag for day trips
Decaffeinated coffee/tea packets
Rubber shoes for Dead Sea or Red Sea
Sunglasses, sunhat and sunscreen
Travel alarm
For Dinners, we recommend shirts and slacks for the men, while dresses, slacks and blouses or pants suits are recommended for the ladies. On the Jewish Sabbath (Friday night) men may wear sports jackets although it is not mandatory in most hotels.
Public Telephones
Since there is a service charge on international calls from hotels, even with Calling Cards, we suggest that whenever possible you use public pay phones. You may buy phone cards at the front desk or newsstand at your hotel. Instructions on how to use the pay phone is clearly illustrated and explained in English on the telephone. The most economical alternative for USA calls is to use AT&T USADirect® Service.
Public Transportation
Buses, Trains & “Sheiruts”:
You will need Israeli currency, but not exact change. The public transportation (buses and trains) does not run on Saturdays and Jewish holidays (in the Jewish calendar the day starts and ends at sunset). On these days, and other days as well, you can use a “Sheirut” or a taxi. A “Sheirut” is a service that uses 7-seater minibuses and operates on the exact routes of public bus lines. You can get on and off the “Sheirut” anywhere along the line, not only at bus stops.
Taxis:
When using taxis, insist that the driver uses the meter. Remember that the amount shown on the meter is in Israeli currency and prices do change according to time of day. Evening rates are higher.
If you have not prearranged the transfer to your hotel, please be aware that there is an Airport Bus Service at Ben Gurion Airport, which operates hourly to all of the major hotels in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. The Information Desk will give you complete details as to the cost of the service. The buses also operate in reverse, picking up passengers at the hotels for return to Ben Gurion Airport. All hotels have a complete time table.
Driving Yourself:
All international car rental companies are represented in Israel, and there is a variety of Israeli companies too. A passport, major credit card and U.S. or Canadian driver’s license is needed to rent a car in Israel. The highway system is advanced and up to U.S./European standards. Most signs are in English in addition to Hebrew. In Israel, we drive on the right, just like in the U.S.A.
Valuables
We recommend that you use safe in your hotel room (or in the hotel) for your valuables and passports, etc. It is advisable to make a photocopy of your passport and carry it with you. Visits to Bethlehem require a passport.
Keeping In Touch
How to call Israel?
To call Israel from North America, dial 011-972 and then the number in Israel (omitting the initial zero).
Calling Home from Israel?
It’s easy: AT&T, MCI and Sprint all have toll-free access numbers in Israel. Ask the hotel operator how to dial directly from your room. From a public phone check the instruction card (which will tell you to dial 012, 013 or 014 for overseas) then continue with 1 for the United States, the area code and phone number. If you are dialing from an office or a cell phone, dial 00 and then the number including the 1 before the area code. Other countries, please check with the Hotel Operator for the correct country code.
Calling Cards:
Public phones in Israel operate with calling cards purchased from your hotel, post office, kiosks and newsstands throughout the country.
Cell (Mobile) Phones:
It’s easy to rent a cell-phone for Israel. Please see Isram Israel’s website www.isramisraelusa.com. Go to “Plan Your Trip” and there you will find cell phone rentals. If you are not a USA resident, it is also possible to rent a phone when you arrive at Ben Gurion International Airport and return it upon departure (advance reservations aren’t necessary). However, this may take time and delay your transfer service. If your U.S. cell-phone is a Tri-Band model, it will work in Israel.
Postal Service:
You can buy stamps at your hotel, at kiosks and at post offices. The Post Office also sells calling cards and will help you with money transfers.
Internet:
Travelers can get on the internet in their hotel’s Business Center, or, with their own laptop, from the comfort of their hotel room (there may be a charge for internet access). You will also find Internet Cafes and public Internet outlets all over Israel.
Tour Guides
The Israeli Tour Guides are world-famous. They are well trained, extraordinarily knowledgeable and ready at all times to aid you with your special requests and arrangements. Your guide will be happy to make suggestions for evenings or free days and provide lists of available optional tours.
Sightseeing
There is so much to see in Israel and we want to show you the maximum during the short time you will be here. Therefore, we ask that you follow the guide’s instructions and be punctual at all times…this makes our job easier and your trip even better.
Seat Rotation on the Motorcoach
Seats on the bus are rotated on a daily basis in order to enable everyone to have the opportunity to sit in the front.
Smoking
Smoking is not allowed on any of our touring vehicles. However, rest stops are made with frequency for people who wish to smoke.
English Newspapers & Broadcasts
The Jerusalem Post is published daily and on weekends and is the major English newspaper in Israel. News broadcasts in English on the radio are aired in the evening. Most of the major hotels feature all of the major news channels.
Medical Information
While touring, please remember not to pack your medication in your luggage, since your luggage is not readily available during the day. We recommend that you keep your medication and valuables in your carry-on piece. Please be aware that every hotel does have a House Doctor on call, if necessary.
Photography
Israel’s stunning landscapes and picturesque inhabitants make it truly a “photographer’s paradise.” Please be aware, however, that there are certain religious communities whose members resent having their picture taken. These include certain Orthodox Jewish sects and observant Moslems. Your discretion will save embarrassment.
Be sure to protect your camera against the sun and heat. Don’t take pictures between 12 noon and 3:30 p.m. when the light is too harsh, particularly in the summertime. In the Negev, don’t take color shots early in the morning or late in the afternoon as the result will be a reddish overtone.
Departure Transfer
For passengers who are entitled to departure transfers, our office in Israel will advise you as to the time of your pick up for departure to the airport. Please settle your hotel bill and be ready at the reception desk at the time indicated.
Shopping
Several hundred shops are approved for tourists by the Israel Ministry of Tourism. These shops display a sign stating “Listed by the Ministry” and the Ministry’s emblem (two scouts carrying a bunch of grapes on a pole between them). Among the best buys in Israel are carpets, ceramics, copperware, religious articles, jewelry, silverware, diamonds, paintings and sculptures.
Stores are generally open from 9:30 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. Sunday to Thursday. The Jewish Shabbat is from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday where most stores and businesses are closed. On Friday and eve of holidays, stores close at Noon. Department stores and malls are open all day and some evenings. If you like to bargain, comb the colorful local markets and bazaars (Jerusalem, Acre, Jaffa) for handmade arts and crafts.
Remember to ask for the “V.A.T. Refund Form” as discussed in the V.A.T. section.
Food and Wine
Israeli food takes the best of Oriental and Western cuisine and adds its own flavor. Hungarian goulash, Russian borscht, Viennese schnitzel, American hot dogs, hamburgers and pizza are to be found side by side with Oriental falafel, humus, tahini, shishlik, kebab and Turkish coffee, as well as traditional Jewish dishes such as gefilte fish, chopped liver and chicken soup (like Mama makes)!
The wines of Israel compare well with those of Europe and range from light white to dry red to sweet rosé. There is also a good choice of local brandies and liqueurs. If you’re used to your “name brand” liquor, we suggest you bring it from the Duty Free Shop before you arrive in Israel – imported liquor is very expensive in Israel.
You will thoroughly enjoy the fruits and vegetables in Israel, as they are extraordinarily tasty, fresh and delicious.
Most Israelis eat a large breakfast, a main meat meal at midday and a light dairy meal in the evening. The wide variety of restaurants throughout the country caters to this preference, but they are also prepared to suit individual tastes.
You Don’t Need to Worry About Water and Fresh Produce: The water is safe to drink throughout Israel, and Israel’s fresh fruit and vegetables are world-class. Bottled water is available everywhere as well.
Kosher Food: The Hebrew word “kosher” means food conforming to Jewish dietary laws. Certain animals and fish are prohibited and milk, cream or cheese may not be served together with meat. Most hotels have kosher food and many restaurants conform to the dietary laws. However, it is quite easy to find non-Kosher restaurants all over Israel.
Water: Tap water is officially drinkable throughout Israel, but bottled mineral water is widely available for those who prefer to be cautious. In hot weather remember to drink much more liquid than usual to combat the effects of dehydration.
Israeli Breakfast: The famous Israeli Buffet Breakfast is included in your tour unless otherwise specified. You have free choice at the buffet and may eat as much as you want, but there may be a charge for some special items ordered from the waiter. Breakfast at some hotels may be ordered to your room, but please note that there is a small charge for room service. Please check with your hotel for clarification.
Lunches: When touring, stops are usually made at self-service restaurants for lunch, where you may choose from a large selection of dishes. We attempt to stop at clean places where you will be able to get fast service and have proper washroom facilities. Please bear in mind, however, that in some areas of the country these places are limited and not always up to standard. Restaurants do not permit eating of food brought in from outside.
Dinners: Our guides can recommend different restaurants in each city (for those days that dinner may not be included in your program.) There is a wide variation of restaurants specializing in international cuisine in Israel. You may, of course, always choose to eat at your own hotel.
Half-Board (Passengers with Meal Plans):No credit is given for meals that are missed, nor can they be eaten on another day and transferred. If arrangements are made in advance with the reception desk at the hotel, lunch may be substituted for dinner the same day.At some hotels, “Half-Board” dinners are limited to certain dining rooms and there may be a supplement for meals eaten at different outlets. Please check with the reception desk at the hotel to be sure that you are eating in the proper dining room. If you decide to eat in the Grill Groom at the hotel, we recommend making reservations in advance.
Tipping
Tipping in Israel is very similar to tipping in the U.S. Use your own judgment, based on your personal satisfaction with the services as to how much to tip.
Following is a suggestion guideline:
Restaurant & Hotel Dining Rooms: Average tip is approximately 15%. (Tips are not expected in hotels at breakfast.)
Included Dinners on Tour: Tips are not included unless advised otherwise by your guide/tour manager. We suggest a tip of $3.00 per person.
Bellboys: Tipping for service to and from your room is recommended at $2.00 per bag.
Chambermaids: We recommend approximately $2.00 per person per day.
Taxicabs: Although Israelis do not normally tip taxi drivers, if you are pleased with the service, we recommend tipping 10% of the fare.
Tour Guides & Drivers: It is customary to show your appreciation to the guide and driver of your tour. Please note the following suggestions:
Bus Tour: The average tip (per person, per day) should begin at $5 to the driver and as from $15 for the guide.
Private Car Tours: Suggested tip is as from $50 per day for your guide/driver (same person),
Please note that all the above tipping is only a recommendation and as such, entirely at your discretion.
Hebrew Expressions
Boker Tov……………………………………………….good morning
Erev Tov…………………………………………………good evening
Lyla tov………………………………………………….good night
Shalom………………………………………………….hello, goodbye; peace
Toda Raba……………………………………………..thank you
B’va-ka-sha……………………………………………please, you’re welcome
Ken………………………………………………………yes
Lo………………………………………………………..no
Ha-yom…………………………………………………today
Ma-char………………………………………………..tomorrow
Et-mohl…………………………………………………yesterday
La-ma?………………………………………………….why
Ma-taii?…………………………………………………when?
Ka’mah?…………………………………………………how much? how many?
Yo-tair’ me-die!…………………………………………too much
A-nee m’dah-ber’et-evreet’ (fem.)…………………..I speak Hebrew
A-nee m’dah-ber’evreet’ (masc.)…………………….I speak Hebrew
Ha-tich-ha………………………………………………pretty girl
Ha-tich…………………………………………………..a handsome man
Sab’-ra……………………………………………………a prickly pear; someone born in Israel
Sh’mi……………………………………………………..my name is
Hanut…………………………………………………….store; shop
Kesef……………………………………………………..money
Bank………………………………………………………bank
Bool……………………………………………………….stamp
Ma Zeh?………………………………………………….what is it?
Mi Zeh?…………………………………………………..who is it?
Ma Shlomcha? (masc.)………………………………..how are you?
Ma Shlomech? (fem.)………………………………….how are you?
Ma Shlomcha? (masc.)……………………………….how are you?
Ma Shlomech? (fem.)…………………………………how are you?
Ma ha mechir?…………………………………………what is the price?
Ehfoh ha telefon?……………………………………..where is the telephone?
Yofi!………………………………………………………wonderful
Road Distances
Jerusalem Tel Aviv Haifa Tiberias Beersheva Km Mi Km Mi Km Mi Km Mi Km Mi Jerusalem – – 62 39 159 99 157 97 84 52 Tel Aviv 62 39 – – 95 59 132 92 113 70 Haifa 159 99 95 56 – – 69 43 210 130 Tiberias 157 97 132 82 69 43 – – 236 147 Beersheva 84 52 113 70 210 130 236 147 – – Acre 181 112 117 73 22 14 56 35 232 144 Arad 104 65 158 98 255 158 232 144 45 28 Ashdod 66 41 42 26 139 86 176 109 83 52 Ashkelon 73 45 63 39 160 99 197 122 67 42 Beit She’an 120 75 117 73 67 42 37 23 198 123 Eilat 312 194 354 220 451 280 403 250 241 150 Hadera 110 68 46 29 53 33 84 52 161 100 Hebron 35 22 97 60 194 120 186 116 50 31 Jericho 39 24 101 63 148 92 118 73 117 73 Metulla 221 137 196 122 120 75 64 40 300 186 Mitzpe Ramon 167 104 196 122 293 182 319 198 83 52 Nazareth 157 97 102 63 35 22 29 18 217 135 Netanya 93 58 29 18 66 41 103 64 144 89 Rehovot 53 33 24 15 121 75 158 98 83 52 Rosh Hanikra 201 125 137 85 42 26 76 47 252 157 Rosh Pina 184 114 159 99 81 50 27 17 263 163 Sodom (Dead Sea) 127 79 189 117 248 154 218 135 82 51 Safed 192 120 168 104 72 45 36 22 272 169 Zikhron Ya’acov 121 75 69 43 38 24 78 48 172 107
Distances Indicated are measured along the most convenient routes, which are not necessarily the shortest ones.
A Final Request
We welcome your valuable feedback on the services rendered. Please take a few minutes to let us know about your trip as this will help us to maintain our excellent level of quality and service for all Isram Israel guests.
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Actress announces North American dates with Nicolas Jaar and Telefon Tel Aviv
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Hark! Forget all those vocaloids and Tupac holograms, everybody — because the next stage in the Future of Live Performance™ is upon us with Actress’ newly announced fall tour!
The new string of dates (which follows a summer U.S. tour that we won’t talk about because we’re all about THE FUTURE here) will take the producer through the US — as well as a few fleeting dalliances across the Canadian border — as he debuts a brand new live A/V set featuring two “AI performers” and
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Tiny Mix Tapes
|
https://www.tinymixtapes.com/news/actress-announces-north-american-dates-nicolas-jaar-and-telefon-tel-aviv
|
Hark! Forget all those vocaloids and Tupac holograms, everybody — because the next stage in the Future of Live Performance™ is upon us with Actress’ newly announced fall tour!
The new string of dates (which follows a summer U.S. tour that we won’t talk about because we’re all about THE FUTURE here) will take the producer through the US — as well as a few fleeting dalliances across the Canadian border — as he debuts a brand new live A/V set featuring two “AI performers” and “a special appearance from Actress’ ‘Chrome Man’ figure on keyboard.” But enough of this impenetrable technical jargon. All you lay people need to know is that there’s lots of STATE-OF-THE-ART TECH and WHOZITS and WHATZITS going on behind the scenes to make the performance as groundbreaking and forward-thinking as, I don’t know, Blade Runner 2049 (I haven’t seen it yet, guys; so no spoilers!). The tour will also feature shows with similarly-minded futurist luminaries Nicolas Jaar and Telefon Tel Aviv, which is, you know, “nice”.
So, if you have an eye for tech and ear for electronic music (or you just really liked Actress’ most recent album, AZD) and you happen to call one of those big colorful areas in the top left quadrant of that old framed map in your grandparents’ basement home, then check out the full list of dates below and, like, buy tickets and stuff! In either case, until next time: I’ll see you…in the FUTUREEEE!!
Actress Tours Soon-To-Be Dystopian Urban Wastelands 2017:
10.11.17 - Toronto, ON - Massey Hall *
10.12.17 - Montreal, QC - Olympia *
10.13.17 - Miami, FL - III Points Festival
10.17.17 - Los Angeles, CA - UNION
10.18.17 - San Francisco, CA - Grey Area
10.19.17 - Brooklyn, NY - Brooklyn Steel *
10.20.17 - Troy, NY - EMPAC
10.21.17 - Brooklyn, NY - Brooklyn Bazaar
11.30.17 - Dallas, TX - Dada ^
12.01.17 - Austin, TX - Barracuda ^
12.02.17 - Houston, TX - Walters ^
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INTERVIEW: Telefon Tel Aviv: Growing beyond electronica
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INTERVIEW: Telefon Tel Aviv
Growing beyond electronica
By: Alex Steininger
Formed in New Orleans, 1999, by two friends, Joshua Eustis and Charles Cooper, who came together with a love of electronic and classical music, Telefon Tel Aviv was formed.
The duo recorded a four-song demo and sent it to their favorite indie label, Chicago-based Hefty Records ("It was the only demo we sent out and the only label we wanted to be on", says Cooper with confidence). Cooper and Eustis were slightly surprised, but more so excited, when Hefty called them back upon hearing the demo and offered to put out their record.
The result was 2001's Fahrenheit Fair Enough, a collection of ambient techno and pure electronica beats. The Immediate Action 8 EP would follow in 2002, and their duo's sophomore full-length, Map of What Is Effortless, was released January 27, 2004.
"It would have been boring to do Fahrenheit again," Eustis says, "for us, and for the people that have heard us before. So we challenged ourselves."
Map of What Is Effortless was the challenge, and the band more than lived up to their own expectations.
"The addition of the singers, and the fact that we went into it writing songs this time," comments Eustis on how the duo felt challenged. "All the orchestration, too. There was a lot of stuff we didn't do on the first record, stuff we couldn't pull off or just couldn't afford to do. But we did this time around on this record."
"We added Damon [Aaron], the male vocalist, later in the game. We added him about three-fourths through the recording process. Originally we thought it would just be Lindsay [Anderson]," adds Cooper. "We did everything we could drum up for this record. We put all our ideas into it. We put every stupid idea we could think of into the record. And we'll do that again for the next record we're making, which we've already began writing and thinking about."
After pushing the envelope on their own sound, and employing more of a melodic structure to their songs, lessening the electronica and making things more rock oriented, without losing the electronica edge, and following the album's release, the band's new goal is to win over new listeners.
"We'll lose some fans, we know that," admits Cooper on the fact that the band has heavily enriched and furthered their sound with Map of What Is Effortless. "But we hope to gain new ones. We want people to know we're not going to limit ourselves to just one audience. Just because the first record was predominantly electronic doesn't mean that's what we always want to do. We want to expand and gain other fans in other genres."
"We want to get to more people than we did with the previous record," adds Eustis.
We then begin discussing the record, how they originally envisioned it, what kind of thoughts or ideas they went into it with, and how the final product turned out compared to their original perceptions of how it was going to be.
"The record turned out darker than we originally thought it would be," confesses Eustis.
"As we are writing we have things on our mind, but things do take on a life of their own. But we pretty much know where everything is going to be," he further explains.
"When we go into an album we know about what tempo we want everything to be, and how we want an album to sound. We go into an album with a storyboard or a screen play," Cooper informs me.
With such a rich, textural sound as you would find on Map of What Is Effortless, and employing as much electronic instrumentation as they do, it makes it hard for Telefon Tel Aviv to be considered a live band, something they are working on.
"We would like to tour more than we do," shares Eustis. "We're a hassle, though. We're more than a lap top band like other electronica bands, but we're not rock enough to be considered rock."
"It's not exactly how we'd like it to be yet, but club to club it differs," Cooper chimes in, telling me the live show is something the band is definitely working on and something they want to fine-tune and perfect, much like they have their songwriting and recording methods.
"You know, we've only played our hometown, New Orleans, as Telefon Tel Aviv once," Eustis laughs. "We mostly just play Chicago now, as that is where we live and where the label is".
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Telefon Tel Aviv
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Play Telefon Tel Aviv and discover followers on SoundCloud | Stream tracks, albums, playlists on desktop and mobile.
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Artist: Telefon Tel Aviv, MusicBrainzID: 453f1594-112e-4d3c-921a-8d14e9c97b2e, data, artwork, logo, fanart, clearart, charts, best songs, musicvideos
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../images/ico/favicon.ico
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Immolate Yourself (2009)
Map of What Is Effortless (2004)
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2011-10-05T00:45:03+00:00
|
Contact Us - contact the Claims Conference offices around the world.
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|
Claims Conference
|
https://www.claimscon.org/about/contact-us/
|
Press/Media Inquires
For all other questions or concerns, please contact us at one of the offices below closest to your country/region.
Residents of Israel and Eastern Europe
Mailing address:
Claims Conference
P.O. Box 20064
Tel Aviv, Israel 6120001
Tel: +972-3-519-4400
Fax: +972-3-624-1056
Email: infodesk@claimscon.org
Residents of Western Europe and North Africa
Claims Conference
Postfach 90 05 43
60445 Frankfurt am Main
Deutschland
Tel: +49-69-970-7010
Fax: +49-69-9707-0140
E-mail: A2-HF-CEEF2@claimscon.org
Austria
Desider Friedmann-Platz 1
A-1010 Vienna
Austria
Tel: 1-533-1622
Fax: 1-533-1623
Email: Vienna.Office@claimscon.org
Residents of the Former Soviet Union:
Main office
Claims Conference
Logistical Department
Postfach 90 05 43
60445 Frankfurt am Main
Deutschland
———————————————
Regional Liaison Offices
UKRAINE & MOLDOVA
Claims Conference / Zeltser Larisa
Please note that our office in Kiev is currently closed.
You can reach us at the below email addresses:
Email: Larisa.Zeltser@claimscon.org or zelyal@ukr.net
United States and All Other Countries
PO Box 1215
New York, NY 10113
USA
Tel: +1-646-536-9100
Fax: +1-212-679-2126
Email: info@claimscon.org
Successor Organization
Claims Conference Successor Organization
Postfach 90 02 08
60442 Frankfurt am Main
Deutschland
|
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https://tastedive.com/music/like/Telefon-Tel-Aviv
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Music like Telefon Tel Aviv
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Similar music like Telefon Tel Aviv include Apparat, Nitrada, Milosh…
|
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|
TasteDive
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https://tastedive.com/category/music/like/Telefon-Tel-Aviv
|
Telefon Tel Aviv is a New Orleans–derived, Chicago-based American electronic music act, formerly comprising Charles Cooper and Joshua Eustis. Since Cooper's accidental death in 2009, Telefon Tel Aviv has continued with Eustis as the sole official member. Eustis was also a touring member of Puscifer and Nine Inch Nails for a time.
Telefon Tel Aviv was formed in 1999 by Charles Cooper and Joshua Eustis, with their first album Fahrenheit Fair Enough, released in the fall of 2001 to positive reviews. In 2002, the group released an EP on the Hefty Records Immediate Action label. In 2004, the duo released their second full-length album, Map of What Is Effortless, and a compilation album of remixes titled Remixes Compiled in 2007. The group released its third full-length album in January 2009 on the BPitch Control label. Influenced by English electronic band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), Immolate Yourself peaked at #17 on the Billboard Top Electronic Albums chart. In 2016, their debut was re-released with eight bonus tracks.
|
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9034
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https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/10/27/israel-hamas-war-live-israel-bombs-gaza-overnight-more-than-7000-dead
|
en
|
Israel-Hamas war updates: Israeli ground forces expanding Gaza operations
|
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[] |
[] |
[
"News",
"Gaza",
"Hamas",
"Israel-Palestine conflict",
"Israel",
"Middle East",
"Palestine"
] | null |
[
"Joseph Stepansky",
"Farah Najjar"
] |
2023-10-27T00:00:00
|
These were the updates on the Israel-Hamas war for Friday, October 27.
|
en
|
/favicon_aje.ico
|
Al Jazeera
|
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/10/27/israel-hamas-war-live-israel-bombs-gaza-overnight-more-than-7000-dead
|
This live page has now been closed. For the latest live coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, follow along here.
|
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9034
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| 97
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https://www.fortinet.com/corporate/about-us/global-offices
|
en
|
Locate Fortinet's Offices throughout the world
|
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Fortinet global office locations in North America, EMEA, APAC and LATAM.
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en
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/etc/designs/fortinet/favicon.ico?v=1
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Fortinet
|
https://www.fortinet.com/corporate/about-us/global-offices
|
2024 Cybersecurity Skills Gap Global Research Report
IT leaders reveal causes of breaches and how they are addressing them. Get all the survey findings and learn how to close the gap.
Read the Press Release
|
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9034
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dbpedia
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0
| 4
|
https://www.shazam.com/artist/telefon-tel-aviv/4210796
|
en
|
Telefon Tel Aviv
|
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[
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[] | null |
Find Telefon Tel Aviv's top tracks, watch videos, see tour dates and buy concert tickets for Telefon Tel Aviv.
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https://www.jamf.com/contact/
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Contact us
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https://www.genesys.com/global-offices
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Global Offices
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Global Offices. Find Genesys near you. All Regions. North America. Latin America. Europe, Middle East and Africa. Asia Pacific. All Countries. Argentina.
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Genesys empowers more than 8,000 organizations in over 100 countries to improve loyalty and business outcomes by creating the best experiences for customers and employees. Through Genesys Cloud, the #1 AI-powered experience orchestration platform, Genesys delivers the future of CX to organizations of all sizes so they can provide empathetic, personalized experience at scale. As the trusted, all-in-one platform born in the cloud, Genesys Cloud accelerates growth for organizations by enabling them to differentiate with the right customer experience at the right time, while driving stronger workforce engagement, efficiency and operational improvements.
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] |
[] |
[] |
[
""
] | null |
[] |
2022-11-08T00:58:42
|
Contact us to discuss how we can help you achieve your digital care ambitions. We’re here to help!
|
en
|
/icons/favicon.ico
|
https://business.amwell.com/contact-us
|
Who We Serve
We connect providers, payers and innovators, working alongside them to create an ecosystem of care that spans across in-person, virtual and automated care.
What We Offer
It starts with our future-ready platform—a convergence of technologies, services and devices that enables care delivery at scale, anytime and any place.
About Us
At Amwell, we digitally empower our clients’ healthcare ambitions, enabling better outcomes for all.
Learn more
Resources
Explore Amwell's content library. Improve the delivery of care with ideas and how-to practical information found in our blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, webinars, videos, etc.
Explore our Resource Center
Who We Serve
We connect providers, payers and innovators, working alongside them to create an ecosystem of care that spans across in-person, virtual and automated care.
What We Offer
It starts with our future-ready platform—a convergence of technologies, services and devices that enables care delivery at scale, anytime and any place.
About Us
At Amwell, we digitally empower our clients’ healthcare ambitions, enabling better outcomes for all.
Learn more
|
|||||
9034
|
dbpedia
|
1
| 6
|
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/emergencies.html
|
en
|
Emergencies
|
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Emergencies
|
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External Link
You are about to leave travel.state.gov for an external website that is not maintained by the U.S. Department of State.
Links to external websites are provided as a convenience and should not be construed as an endorsement by the U.S. Department of State of the views or products contained therein. If you wish to remain on travel.state.gov, click the "cancel" message.
You are about to visit:
|
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9034
|
dbpedia
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0
| 24
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https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/traveladvisories/israel-west-bank-and-gaza-travel-advisory.html
|
en
|
Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Travel Advisory
|
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/apps/tsg-rwd/components/content/resources/favicon.ico
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Updated to reflect U.S. government restrictions on travel to Northern Israel, and information for U.S. citizens, Lawful Permanent Residents and qualifying immediate family members seeking assistance in Gaza.
Do Not Travel To:
Gaza due to terrorism and armed conflict
Northern Israel within 2.5 miles of the Lebanese and Syrian borders due to the rising tensions between Hizballah and Israel
Reconsider Travel To:
Israel due to terrorism and civil unrest
West Bank due to terrorism and civil unrest
Country Summary: Terrorist groups, lone-actor terrorists and other violent extremists continue plotting possible attacks in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Terrorists and violent extremists may attack with little or no warning, targeting tourist locations, transportation hubs, markets/shopping malls, and local government facilities. Violence can occur in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza without warning.
Some areas have increased risk. Read the country information page for additional information on travel to Israel and the West Bank, and Gaza.
Visit the CDC page for the latest Travel Health Information related to your travel.
If you decide to travel to Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.
Visit our website for Travel to High-Risk Areas.
Check the most recent Alerts at the Embassy website for the latest information on travel in all of these areas.
Maintain a high degree of situational awareness and exercise caution at all times, especially at checkpoints and other areas with a significant presence of security forces.
Avoid demonstrations and crowds.
Follow the instructions of security and emergency response officials.
Beware of and report suspicious activities, including unattended items, to local police.
Learn the location of the nearest bomb shelter or other hardened shelter. Download the Home Front Command Red Alert application for mobile devices (available on devices within Israel) to receive real time alerts for rocket attacks.
Obtain comprehensive travel medical insurance that includes medical evacuation prior to travel. Most travel insurance packages do not cover mental health related illnesses/care.
Enroll in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) to receive Alerts and make it easier to locate you in an emergency.
Follow the Department of State on Facebook and X/Twitter.
Review the Country Security Report for Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.
Prepare a contingency plan for emergency situations. Review the Traveler’s Checklist.
Gaza – Do Not Travel
Do not travel due to terrorism and armed conflict.
The U.S. government is unable to provide routine or emergency consular services to U.S. citizens in Gaza as U.S. government employees are prohibited from traveling there. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are conducting large-scale military operations in Gaza against Hamas, a U.S. government-designated foreign terrorist organization, which was responsible for the October 7 attack on Israel. As a result of the armed conflict, the security environment within Gaza and on its borders is extremely dangerous and volatile. The pedestrian crossing between Gaza and Israel was damaged on October 7 and remains closed, and the pedestrian crossing between Egypt and Gaza has been closed since May 7 and it is unknown when it will re-open. There are sporadic telecommunication and internet outages within Gaza further inhibiting the ability of residents to obtain information.
If a U.S. citizen, Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR), or qualified immediate family member desires our assistance and has not already provided their information to the Department of State, please email U.S. Embassy Jerusalem at JerusalemACS@state.gov with a copy of the individual’s travel document as well as an explanation or proof of relationship.
Visit our website for Travel to High Risk Areas.
If you decide to travel to Gaza:
Be prepared for an indefinite stay as the crossings between Gaza with Israel and Egypt can close without advance notice and for long periods during times of unrest and armed conflict.
Have a plan for entering and departing Gaza that does not rely on U.S. government assistance.
Households with infants and young children should plan for food and supplies, such as diapers and wipes, formula or baby food, and a change of clothing.
If you take medication, make sure to have at least five days’ worth at any given time – if you can, we encourage enough for two weeks beyond your scheduled trip and have a copy of your prescriptions handy.
If you use assistive or medical devices that require a power supply, be sure to find backup power or other ways that will sustain your device or equipment during a power outage.
Draft a will and designate appropriate insurance beneficiaries and/or power of attorney.
Discuss a plan with loved ones regarding care/custody of children, pets, property, belongings, non-liquid assets (collections, artwork, etc.), funeral wishes, etc.
Leave DNA samples with your medical provider in case it is necessary for your family to access them.
Please be sure to visit our website for How to Prepare for a Crisis for information that may be helpful.
Israel – Reconsider Travel (see below for specific advice on travel within 2.5 miles of Lebanese and Syrian borders)
Reconsider travel due to terrorism and civil unrest.
The security situation remains unpredictable, and U.S. citizens are reminded to remain vigilant and take appropriate steps to increase their security awareness as security incidents, including mortar and rocket fire, often take place without warning.
U.S. government employees in Israel under Chief of Mission security responsibility are currently restricted from personal travel to the following locations:
Within seven miles of the Gaza demarcation line, as well as the cities of Ashdod and Ashkelon; and
Within 1.5 miles of the Israel-Egypt border.
Additional travel restrictions may be imposed on U.S. government employees under Chief of Mission security responsibility, with little to no notice due to increased security issues or threats.
Northern Israel (within 2.5 miles of Lebanese and Syrian borders) – Do Not Travel
U.S. government employees in Israel under Chief of Mission security responsibility are currently restricted from personal travel within 2.5 miles of the Lebanese and Syrian borders. Any U.S. government travel to this area is done in full coordination with Israeli security forces.
Due to the ongoing active hostilities between Israel and Hizballah, the U.S. Embassy strongly recommends that U.S. citizens do not travel within 2.5 miles of the Lebanese and Syrian borders. Cross-border rocket, missile, and drone strikes continue to impact this area daily and have resulted in casualties. The Israeli authorities already restrict travel to these areas.
West Bank – Reconsider Travel
Reconsider travel due to terrorism and civil unrest.
U.S. government employees in Israel under Chief of Mission security responsibility are currently restricted from all personal travel to the West Bank, except:
U.S. government employees can use Routes 1, 90, and 443 at any time.
U.S. government employees are permitted personal daylight travel to Jericho and Bethlehem, including Beit Jala and Beit Sahour. Given continued closures of checkpoints throughout the West Bank, the only permitted and accessible route into Bethlehem for U.S. government employees and their family members is through Checkpoint 300 near Rachel’s Tomb.
U.S. government employees are permitted daylight travel to: Inn of the Good Samaritan, An-Nabi Musa, Wadi Qelt Nature Preserve, and St. George’s Monastery along Route 1; and Qumran, Kalia Beach, St. Gerasimos/Khogla Monastery, Al Auju, and Qasr al-Yaud baptismal site along Route 90.
Over the past few months, there has been an increase in settler violence, Israeli military operations, and terrorist attacks.
Additional travel restrictions may be imposed on U.S. government employees under Chief of Mission security responsibility with little to no notice due to increased security issues or threats.
|
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9034
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dbpedia
|
3
| 4
|
https://corky.net/dotan/log/2004/03/telefon-tel-aviv.html
|
en
|
Telefon Tel Aviv – Distractions
|
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[
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[] | null |
en
|
https://corky.net/dotan/log/2004/03/telefon-tel-aviv.html
|
Telefon Tel Aviv is an ambient duo from the US. Here is an excerpt from an interview they gave Joel Bordeaux:
JB:
Is there any significance of the name "Telefon Tel Aviv," other than the consonance?
Charles:
Just the poetic quality. We wanted it to be something to invoke imagery. I don’t think we need a meaning. But we were invited to go play in outside Tel Aviv, in the desert. It looked like The Last Temptation of Christ, which was really cool.
JB:
Did you do it?
Josh:
No. We got kind of scared, what with the suicide bombers and all that. We didn’t think two American Catholic boys would fare well over there with both sides trying to put an end to it. I’d probably the only person in the entire Middle East with dreadlocks.
How charming when "Tel Aviv" becomes just an exotic word, like "Tokyo", "Singapore" or "California". Then you remember that "Beirut" and "Sudan" are also just exotic words to most people.
|
|||||||
9034
|
dbpedia
|
0
| 32
|
https://www.elal.com/en/usa/Pages/default.aspx
|
en
|
Flights to Israel: Non-Stop & Flexible Flights to Tel Aviv
|
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Visit Israel with EL AL - Affordable and convenient ways to order airline tickets online, for attractive prices! Your next vacation in Israel begins here!
|
en
|
/_layouts/15/images/Matrix.Elal.com/favicon.png
|
https://www.elal.com/en/USA/Pages/default.aspx
|
Your tier is Top Platinum
You've earned _CreditPointsForPreserving_ from _TotalPointsRequiredForPreserving_ points to save your tier as TOP PLATINUM
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EL AL's South Florida service is expanding!
|
|||||
9034
|
dbpedia
|
3
| 30
|
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Telefon_Tel_Aviv
|
en
|
Telefon Tel Aviv
|
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[] |
[] |
[
""
] | null |
[] | null |
Telefon Tel Aviv is an American electronic music act formed in 1999 by musicians Charles Cooper and Joshua Eustis. Since Cooper's accidental death in 2009, Telefon Tel Aviv has continued with Eustis as the sole official member.
|
en
|
Wikiwand
|
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Telefon_Tel_Aviv
|
American electronic music project / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Telefon Tel Aviv?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
SHOW ALL QUESTIONS
|
|||||
9034
|
dbpedia
|
2
| 1
|
https://earth-agency.com/artist/telefon-tel-aviv/
|
en
|
Telefon Tel Aviv
|
[
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] |
[] |
[] |
[
""
] | null |
[] |
2014-04-26T11:21:52+00:00
|
Telefon Tel Aviv is an experimental electronic duo formed in 1999 by two New Orleans high-school friends, Joshua Eustis and Charles Cooper. Following years of playing in various local bands and learning the ropes of electronic music production, Eustis and Cooper wrote the demos for what would become Telefon Tel Aviv in 1999. After sending […]
|
en
|
Earth Agency
|
https://earth-agency.com/artist/telefon-tel-aviv/
| ||||||
9034
|
dbpedia
|
0
| 12
|
https://www.bpitch.de/en/artist/telefon-tel-aviv/
|
en
|
Telefon Tel Aviv
|
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[] |
[] |
[
""
] | null |
[] |
2016-09-22T15:15:53+00:00
|
we started making this record in early 2007, without a very specific direction. we knew that it would be created almost entirely with analog synths, and that we were ready to burn the rhodes. a disinterest in guitars followed quickly – they do not appear on the record at all, which is a strange thing for us. we slowly began […]
|
en
|
https://www.bpitch.de/wp-content/themes/bpc-wp-theme/assets/images/favicon/favicon.ico
|
BPitch Control
|
https://www.bpitch.de/artist/telefon-tel-aviv/
|
we started making this record in early 2007, without a very specific direction. we knew that it would be created almost entirely with analog synths, and that we were ready to burn the rhodes. a disinterest in guitars followed quickly – they do not appear on the record at all, which is a strange thing for us. we slowly began the process of writing the songs, lazily, for nearly a year, while working on other music and playing some one-off shows which were mostly in support of the remix record which came out in may 07. this was the first time that we actually demoed the songs first, performed them live, etc. we concentrated first on obvious things like lyrics and melodies, thinking that we’d add the scattered electronic flourishes later. admittedly, a creeping suspicion arose in our minds that perhaps we wouldn’t go through with it again. we realize that we are strange for thinking that the most basic approach to making music is, well, strange.
at the very start of 2008, we looked at what we had, and realized that it was a record, with almost all of the writing done. we began the actual production of the record in january and completed it in april – again, lazily, as we were both working on other things here and there, and dealing with life and its myriad problems (both personal and global), exacerbated by the chicago winter. we finished nine songs, and with the help of friends, realized we needed one more to anchor it. a lyrical idea was brought to the table which spawned “helen of troy”. we knew then, after completing this song, that we were in fact finished with our record.
we also realized that without thinking about it, so much of our sound had changed, or been forsaken; left on the side of the road to wither in the sun. gone are all of the high-definition micro-edit minutiae in favor of a new approach to texture for us – long form. the arrival of a tape machine in our studio gave way to experiments that are decades old in practice but entirely new to us – creating loops of drums, string synths, etc., running them around microphone stands in the studio, and striping them back against themselves – timing off, tuning suspect, noise abundant, texture rich. so our attention to detail strayed from the micro and wandered into the macro – for example, things such as the tape loops of church music that i found with turk dietrich of belong, on an old reel that was given to him that neither of us had ever had the presence of mind to listen to in all these years, until this ripe time came upon us.
the record is still entirely telefon tel aviv, but through a cross-processed filter; saturated, grainy, distorted, dusty, distressed. the whole idea of modern sounds in an outdated setting became the sonic focal point of the whole record, and almost instinctually so. our meters were buried throughout the most reactionary and speedy mixdown of either of our careers. to use a hackneyed axiom as our own, we weren’t thinking – we were feeling. but it was in the dark without a torch, and running full speed for the nearest wall or the deepest unseen precipice.
the subject matter this time around is still based in what songs have been based in for decades – relationships, self-loathing, disgust, fear, beauty, wonder, and awe. the way they are treated is entirely new for us – in lieu of looking back wistfully or longingly, we felt that we were living it exactly as we were writing it, and that if we kept at whatever destructive lifestyles had nearly engulfed us, we would be destroyed. this is how inspiration arises for some musicians – for charlie, specifically, it’s the wonder or terror of the moment that strikes him dumb with ideas and makes him reach for a napkin and a pen. for me, it always comes later, in the form of a dream – sometimes waking, but it is never a conscious moment or a decision. it is always the result of a semi-lucid state – half asleep, 5 a.m., sleepwalking, restless ideas of sine waves yelling in my mind. i knew i was out on the wolds and the storm was coming and i had to make a tree for shelter or i would perish in the torrents, while charlie looked over the brink and considered another way out.
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https://www.kempinski.com/en/the-david-kempinski-tel-aviv
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The David Kempinski Tel Aviv
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Book a stay at The David Kempinski Tel Aviv located in Tel Aviv and enjoy 5 star luxury. Book direct for the best rates.
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https://www.kempinski.com/en/the-david-kempinski-tel-aviv
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Located in the heart of the renowned Tel Aviv Promenade, this luxurious five-star hotel with 250 sumptuous rooms and suites, delectable culinary offerings and a lavish spa, has established a new pinnacle of opulence in the city.
Our guests always travel the world in style. Share your own experiences using the username @Kempinski.telaviv.
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