Kuhn's Legacy: Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, and Pragmatism 9780231520744

Citation preview

KU H N ’ S L E G AC Y

KUHN’S LEGACY E P I S T E M O L O G Y, M E T A P H I L O S O P H Y, and

P R AG M AT I S M

B OJA N A M L A D E N OV I Ć

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-231-14668-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-52074-4 (e-book)

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America

Cover design: Jordan Wannemacher

F O R KO N S TA N T I N , P E T R A , A N D D A N I C A

•

There would be no philosophy without traditions. —Thomas Kuhn

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION

xiii 1

1. AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

8

Kuhn’s Model of Scientific Development Early Science Normal Science Anomalies, Crisis, and Revolutionary Science Scientific Revolutions The General Pattern of Scientific Change

10 10 11 14 17 18

Clarifications The Concept of a Paradigm Incommensurability “World Changes”

18 19 20 22

PA R T I : H I STO RY 2. THE ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY

27

X CO NTENTS

Historiography and the Philosophy of Science Presentist Historiography and the Received View in the Philosophy of Science Hermeneutic Historiography and Kuhn’s Philosophy

28

The Model in Structure: Interpretations and Objections Bird’s Interpretation Sharrock and Read’s Interpretation

35 36 39

The Model in Structure: A Weberian Interpretation Weber’s “Ideal-Type Concepts” Structure as a Weberian Explanatory Model Philosophy and History in Kuhn’s Model

43 44 47 51

3. “MUCKRAKING” IN HISTORY

28 33

54

The Interpretive Problem of Kuhn’s “First Principles” Common Interpretive Attitudes Kindi’s Interpretation

54 55 56

“Muckraking” in History and “First Principles” The Challenge Kuhn’s Response

61 62 66

Metaphilosophical Implications A Developmental View of Kuhn’s Thought Monistic and Pluralistic Metaphilosophy of Science

70 70 74

PA R T I I : R AT I O N A L I T Y 4. KUHN’S ANTIRELATIVISM

85

Kuhn’s Rejection of the Classical Conception of Scientific Rationality The Classical Conception of Scientific Rationality Kuhn’s Rejection of the Classical Conception

86 87 88

Hoyningen-Huene’s Instrumentalist Reconstruction Hoyningen-Huene’s Amendment Against the Goal of Science

91 91 93

CO NTENTS X I

Brown’s Kuhn-Inspired Conception of Rationality Science as Paradigmatically Rational Problems with Brown’s General Theory of Rationality Problems with Brown’s Understanding of Scientific Rationality Detachability

96 96 100 102 104

5. COLLECTIVE RATIONALITY OF SCIENCE

106

Scientific Communities Kuhn’s Shift from Individual to Collective Agents Individual Differences Shared Scientific Values Group Reasoning and Decision Making

106 106 108 110 111

Collective Rationality Scientific Rationality as Collective Rationality Justification Revolutionary Changes as Rationally Warranted

114 114 116 121

Absolute Requirements for the Rationality of Science Prohibitions of Inconsistency and Ineffectiveness Prohibition Against Suspension of Inquiry Requirement for Reason Responsiveness The Scope and Nature of Absolute Requirements

123 123 124 127 127

Antirelativism Defended First Set of Objections First Set of Replies The Radical Objection, Unanswered

129 130 131 133

6. LOOKING BACK: PROGRESS IN SCIENCE

136

Shared Belief in Scientific Progress The Prevailing Perception of Science as Progressive The Received View’s Model of Scientific Progress Problems for Kuhn

136 136 137 139

Progress in Structure Criticism of the Classical Model Kuhn’s Reconceptualization of Progress

140 140 144

X IICO NTENTS

Second Thoughts on Progress Specialization as Speciation Local Incommensurability and the Disunity of Science

146 146 148

A Kuhnian Model of Scientific Progress Evolutionary Metaphors Revolutions The Unity and Disunity of Science Pluralism and the Contingency of Progress The Practical Success of Science Pure and Applied Sciences

152 152 153 154 157 158 160

PA R T I I I : P R AG M AT I S M 7. KUHN’S PRAGMATIST ROOTS

167

Pragmatist Epistemology Reorientation “Default-and-Challenge” Structure Inquiry Fallibilism Scientific Practice Complexity The Pragmatist Rejection of Sharp Dichotomies

168 171 172 174 178 180 181 183

The Intellectual Lineage from Peirce to Kuhn Classical Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism Sources of Kuhn’s Pragmatism Kuhn’s Orthodox Pragmatism

184 185 187 192

Epistemology from Below

193

Notes Bibliography Index

197 219 227

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T

he diffuse influence of American pragmatism is visible throughout this book, in Kuhn’s thought as well as in my own. For introducing me to this tradition, long ago in a country that is no more, I thank Svetlana Knjazeva; for deepening my appreciation of its richness, I thank Lisa Lloyd and Daniel O’Connor. I have received many useful comments on various parts of Kuhn’s Legacy from Bridget Clarke, Catherine Z. Elgin, Steven Gerrard, Rachana Kamtekar, Paul Muench, Rupert Read, and especially Mane Hajdin. Stephen Hailey is—as always—in a category by himself: he read every line of multiple drafts and provided invaluable philosophical and stylistic suggestions. This book would not be what it is without him. In a very different way, this book simply would not be without my conversations with Robert Spiro. His curiosity and humor as well as his unfailing support made its completion enjoyable and actual at last. I wish that I could thank in person every family member who was so centrally important to me during the years that this book took shape. Vida, Miloš, Danica, Petra, Konstantin, and, of course, General Lux de Lux MicMuffin helped in a number of incalculable ways. I am grateful for their being a vital part of my life. My writing and revisions took a long time, frequently halted by unavoidable interruptions, only some of which were welcome. I thank Wendy

X IVAC K NOW LE D GM E N TS

Lochner, my wonderful editor at Columbia University Press, for her extraordinary patience and understanding. Finally, I thank MIT, the publisher of the journal Perspectives on Science, for permission to use in chapters 2 and 3 the material from my article “‘Muckraking in History’: The Role of the History of Science in Kuhn’s Philosophy,” Perspectives on Science 15, no. 3 (2007): 261–94.

KU H N ’ S L E G AC Y

INTRODUCTION

T

homas S. Kuhn was one of the most important philosophers of science of the twentieth century and certainly the decisive figure in the so-called historical turn the discipline has taken. He is also one of the few philosophers who in our era of specialization has attracted lively interest outside of philosophy departments and professional journals. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his best-known work, is still an academic best seller. It is widely read and frequently cited and continues to be among the books most often assigned to undergraduate students in the United States. Its central terms, such as paradigm, normal science, and incommensurability have entered into both academic and public discourse and are now often used without any reference to Kuhn. These are unquestionable measures of success but, sadly, not of understanding. Despite the enormous popularity of Kuhn’s work, there is still no broad consensus on the interpretation of his thought, much less on its appraisal. Kuhn is seen sometimes as a philosopher of science who effected a veritable “paradigm change” in the discipline and sometimes as a historian or a sociologist of science whose contribution to philosophy was minimal. Interpreters who see him primarily as a philosopher have very different views about the content and the value of his philosophical ideas and arguments. To complicate matters further, Kuhn’s views developed over the years, but his later comments on Structure—the book that made him

2INTRO D U CTIO N

famous—were not always clearly announced as clarifications, refinements, or substantial modifications. In this book, I offer a selective but detailed philosophical reconstruction of what I take to be Kuhn’s most important contributions to the philosophy of science. I aim to show that Kuhn offers a rich and attractive epistemology of science and that this epistemology is in the tradition of American pragmatism. Kuhn’s Legacy is thus a work in the history of philosophy, understood as the sympathetic recovery and analysis of those aspects of a philosopher’s thought that the historian deems most significant and valuable. In this spirit, I identify and remove some apparent tensions in Kuhn’s work. When these tasks require modifications of his considered position, I indicate that I am intervening rather than interpreting. All interventions, however, are constrained by what I take to be Kuhn’s main philosophical project and his deepest intellectual commitments. Historians of philosophy frequently face interpretive difficulties that arise from the paucity of information concerning the intellectual context of their subjects of study. For example, to understand Aristotle or Locke on his own terms, one has to recover the concepts, assumptions, and debates prevalent at the time each wrote, which are distant from those of the present day. In writing about Kuhn, I thankfully have faced no such difficulties, although I have had to contend with a problem of exactly the opposite sort. Kuhn, our contemporary, was used for several decades as little more than a punching bag, dearly cherished for the perceived unreasonableness of his position. Even now, when his original opponents’ views are no longer widely shared among philosophers of science, Kuhn is still often seen through their distorted lens as a critic of logical empiricists no less misguided than his targets, and so it is frequently argued that the two should sink together. New philosophies of science that arose from the perception of an excess on both sides are for the most part richer and deeper than either the caricature of logical empiricism or the caricature of Kuhn, both of which they dialectically reject. I argue that this achievement in philosophical complexity and soundness was in fact originally Kuhn’s. Indeed, properly understood, his legacy is an important and rich one that contemporary philosophers of science would do well to acknowledge and explore. There is a considerable body of interpretive and critical literature on Kuhn, and my discussion of it is of necessity limited in scope. For the most part, I do not respond to early criticisms of Kuhn because they were, in my

INTRO D U C TIO N3

view, based on deep misunderstandings of his work.1 The initial reception of Structure was strongly influenced by the then dominant assumptions about and within the philosophy of science, against which Kuhn reacted. Seen in that light, perhaps the initial misunderstanding of his ideas was only to be expected. I treat Kuhn’s first audience—the heirs of logical empiricism and the proponents of Karl Popper’s falsificationism—as representing what I refer to as the “received view” in the philosophy of science. True, the philosophers joined under this label would not willingly form a coalition. Their views differed in many respects, and disagreements among them were considerable and important. Any attempt to isolate a relatively small set of shared assumptions, views, goals, and methods as common to all of them risks becoming a distorting oversimplification. Since I nevertheless proceed to refer to the received view as if it constituted a single position, some cautionary as well as justificatory remarks may not be amiss. The focus of this book is on Kuhn. To appreciate his work properly, one has to carefully reconstruct the context in which he thought as well as his philosophical audience as he understood it. I have discovered to my chagrin that if one aims to understand Kuhn, a careful examination of the views defended by his opponents is actually rather less helpful than a fairly crude sketch of what may be represented as the broad set of assumptions that they shared. For, in fact, in developing his philosophy of science, Kuhn paid scant attention to his contemporaries’ views and almost none to his predecessors’. Later, when looking back on his earlier self—the author of Structure—Kuhn admitted this fact with some embarrassment: Whatever role the problems encountered by positivism may have played in the background for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, my knowledge of the literature that attempted to deal with those problems was decidedly sketchy when the book was written. In particular, I was almost totally innocent of the post-Aufbau Carnap, and discovering him has distressed me acutely. Part of my embarrassment results from my sense that responsibility required that I know my target better, but there is more. When I received the kind letter in which Carnap told me of his pleasure in my manuscript, I interpreted it as mere politeness, not as an indication that he and I might usefully talk. That reaction I repeated to my loss on a later occasion.2

4INTRO D U CTIO N

In order to set Kuhn’s philosophy into detailed relief, I have regrettably had to flatten out his contemporaries because he did so himself.3 Given this strategy, when I offer my summary descriptions of the received view, this should always be read as “the received view as Kuhn understood it.” Kuhn took the proponents of the received view to be a relatively homogenous group. He forcefully reacted against what he saw as that group’s shared philosophical ambitions, assumptions, problems, and argumentative strategies. To some extent, of course, his assessment was not completely mistaken, but it should be said now—because I do not elaborate on the point later—that no one seriously interested in logical empiricism should take as authoritative Kuhn’s descriptions and evaluations of that philosophical tradition. Largely due to Kuhn’s work, present-day philosophers of science have abandoned many of the claims and methods characteristic of the received view. Since that view shaped the early reception of Structure, its demise allowed a fresh approach to Kuhn’s philosophy, marked by a desire to understand his thought on its own terms.4 I situate my book within this new and largely sympathetic form of reconstructive engagement with Kuhn’s philosophy of science. After a preliminary discussion in chapter 1 of Kuhn’s model of scientific change as presented in Structure, I develop my interpretation of Kuhn in three stages. In part 1, I examine the status of his model of science and the role of the history of science in it. In part 2, I articulate and defend what I see as Kuhn’s novel conception of scientific rationality, and in part 3 I trace the main ideas of his epistemology of science back to their historical roots in American pragmatism. Throughout this book, I take Kuhn views in Structure as a starting point only: my main interest is in presenting what I take to be his considered, revised, and mature philosophy of science, for which there is no single locus classicus. Kuhn’s central post-Structure ideas are dispersed through a number of papers, book chapters, and lectures, some of which have yet to be published. I argue that Kuhn’s mature work aims to develop an attractive epistemology of science and that this epistemology is his most fruitful philosophical legacy. Kuhn’s metaphilosophical view of the proper relationship between the history of science and the philosophy of science is the subject of part 1, starting with chapter 2. Against some interpretations, I argue that Kuhn’s project was philosophical, not purely historiographical, in nature, while

INTRO D U CTIO N5

against other interpretations I argue that his project was inseparable from the history of science throughout Kuhn’s career, not merely during its early phase. I propose that Kuhn’s model of scientific change should be understood as having the logical status of a Weberian explanatory theory. The history and the philosophy of science were of equal importance in its development, and they enjoyed an equal status as well as constraining and shaping one another. However—as I argue in chapter 3—Kuhn’s metaphilosophical position on the proper relationship between the history and the philosophy of science changed in the 1990s in response to the relativism embraced by the new sociology of science—a relativism that was ironically based on Kuhn’s own premises. I analyze Kuhn’s seldom discussed appeal to what he called “first principles” and argue that this expression should be understood as marking the status of his response to the sociologists of science as a philosophical, not historiographical, response. At this time, Kuhn realized that his philosophy of science needed a full-blooded epistemology if he were to distance himself from those sociological studies of science he saw as untenable and irresponsible. His considered metaphilosophical position thus represents a shift from his earlier one in that it gives unquestionable primacy to philosophy over the history of science. I conclude chapter 3 by arguing that—contrary to what Kuhn thought—it would be more in keeping with the spirit of his philosophy to resist the temptation to try to specify the one and only way in which the history of science and the philosophy of science ought to be related to each other. We should instead, I suggest, adopt a version of metaphilosophical pluralism, suitably constrained by content, context, and purpose. The aim of part 2 is to reconstruct Kuhn’s epistemology as adumbrated in Structure and sketched in his last papers. I first make clear in chapter 4 that Kuhn was committed to a firm and consistent form of antirelativism. It should be noted that the term relativism in this book refers exclusively to epistemic relativism in the philosophy of science, the position according to which the choice between rival scientific theories cannot be rationally justified but is, rather, to be explained by various personal and social motives as well as by the beliefs and interests of the members of the scientific community in question. The winning theory is the one that has more social power behind it. I argue that Kuhn was not a relativist in that sense at all but was mistakenly seen as one because of the conception of scientific

6 INTRO D U C TIO N

rationality dominant at the time when Structure was published. Kuhn considerably advanced but did not complete in his lifetime the articulation of his rival conception of scientific rationality. Fortunately, there is sufficient textual evidence to show that his rationalism is of an entirely different kind from the rationalism of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries. By discussing Kuhn’s mature understanding of scientific communities in chapter 5, I lay the foundation for the claim that Kuhn’s basic model of the rationality of science is a model of collective rationality. As we shall see, at the purely formal level Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality prohibits obviously irrational beliefs and choices and requires reason responsiveness as well as the uninterrupted pursuit of inquiry. At the substantive, historicized level, it rests on a pragmatist mode of justification for scientific belief and choice. Kuhn’s new conception of scientific rationality and his insistence on a cognitive historiography of science require a suitably reworked but still robust understanding of scientific progress as a backward-looking concept, which I discuss in chapter 6. There is a tension between his early and later views of scientific progress, however. It could be argued that in his later writings Kuhn replaced scientific revolutions with an emphasis on the gradual evolution of sciences, characterized by increased specialization and thus analogous to speciation in biology. But I argue that Kuhn’s later writings on progress in science constitute a refinement, not a replacement, of his earlier position. The resulting view significantly enriches the Weberian explanatory structure discussed in part 1 and spotlights pluralism and the contingency of scientific progress. In chapter 7—the concluding chapter of this book and the only one in part 3—I consider the origins and the metaphilosophical status of Kuhn’s epistemology. I argue that it should be seen as a creative and fruitful continuation of the tradition of American pragmatism. Kuhn’s epistemology bears the marks of Charles Sanders Peirce’s communitarian, fallibilist, and open-ended understanding of inquiry; of William James’s epistemic justification of momentous, forced choice between two live hypotheses; and of John Dewey’s emphasis on the complexity of our reasoning as attributable to the heterogeneity of the values and standards that we perceive as relevant in particular problem situations. Kuhn extended the long-standing pragmatist interest in the nature of scientific inquiry by analyzing specific patterns of scientific change. His major contributions were, first, the

INTRO D U C TIO N7

articulation of the concept of incommensurability, not available in earlier pragmatist epistemologies, and, second, the development of the ideal-type concepts of normal science, crisis, revolution, and specialization. Kuhn’s considered metaphilosophical position does not accord to epistemology the status of “first philosophy,” as might be supposed from his recourse to so-called first principles. Rather, his epistemology is grounded in the particular details of scientific practice and emerges as a general model for science only through close examination of historically situated practices. I call it epistemology from below and conclude the book by presenting its content and status.

1 AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

K

uhn’s main contribution to the philosophy of science was not merely to give novel answers to the central questions posed by the tradition of thought that immediately preceded him—although he did give such answers, sometimes in great detail1—but rather to provide a dramatic break with the past. His true originality was to mount a serious, sustained, and largely successful attempt to revolutionize the whole field of the philosophy of science. Kuhn’s revolution involved a number of significant shifts. He asked new questions about previously neglected aspects of scientific practice and set out new criteria for a successful philosophy of science. This led him to reflect on a metaphilosophical level about the proper relation of the philosophy of science to epistemology and metaphysics, on the one hand, and to history and the sociology of science, on the other. Although his metaphilosophical position changed over the years, it remained opposed to the received view’s metaphilosophy. Kuhn’s philosophy and metaphilosophy jointly shaped the contours of the new philosophy of science as well as its central questions. This reorientation of the discipline is Kuhn’s most important philosophical legacy. We may find some of Kuhn’s answers and positions untenable, but as contemporary philosophers of science we still often ask his questions. Pre-Kuhnian philosophy of science focused on products of scientific activity, such as scientific hypotheses, theories, explanations, and laws.

AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE9

On the assumption that science was uniquely progressive in a cumulative, goal-directed way, proponents of the received view sought to discern and fully articulate the methodological principles to which science owes its spectacular success. The relationship between theory and evidence in confirmation and falsification was treated in a formal manner,2 with the aim of providing epistemic justifications for scientific reasoning and choice that were independent of their actual use in science. The received view’s philosophy of science was therefore formal, precise, and normative and was pursued to a large extent as a form of applied epistemology. The history and the sociology of science as well as of ethics and political philosophy were considered irrelevant for a properly philosophical understanding of scientific knowledge. This narrowly circumscribed, detail-oriented, and often technical philosophical work required a focus on simplified, almost schematic representations of scientific reasoning and choice. The resulting image of science was static, idealized, and unnaturally clear. Kuhn’s image is different. He does not focus on the products of scientific work but rather on the processes through which science emerges, changes, and grows. He is interested in patterns of scientific agreement and disagreement as well as in the ways in which scientific communities resolve internal tensions generated by the need for continuity within research traditions and the countervailing need for innovation. Kuhn eschews all formal and abstract reconstructions of scientific reasoning and offers instead a synoptic view of the historical development of science, supplemented by careful, close observations of actual scientific practice. Kuhn’s philosophy of science is thus diachronic, dynamic, and practice rather than theory oriented. It posits descriptive accuracy as its central desideratum. If there are larger epistemic lessons to be learned from the success of science, they will emerge from a careful examination of the norms and values that govern scientific practice in all its complexity. The history of science thus becomes indispensable for the philosophy of science,3 which seeks in turn to discover characteristic patterns of scientific development. Kuhn articulated such a view in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and then supplemented, refined, and sometimes even modified it in subsequent writings. The central idea remains, however, remarkably stable throughout his work: scientific development is not uniform but consists of two major phases, normal science and revolutionary science. Normal science is marked by consensus within the scientific community on all

10AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

fundamental matters. This consensus forms the basis on which normal science is able to produce coherent, cumulatively progressive results. When the consensus breaks down under the pressure of accumulated anomalies, the scientific community enters a period of revolutionary science, marked by competition among proponents of rival paradigms, or theoretical and practical frameworks for doing science. Rival paradigms are incommensurable, and the choice among them is not forced by either logic or empirical evidence. Scientific revolutions are thus disruptive episodes of fundamental reconfiguration through which scientific knowledge develops in a noncumulative way. The first section in this chapter offers a brief overview of Kuhn’s developmental model of science; I then address some of the more frequent misunderstandings of his key ideas. The interpretive and philosophical problems of Kuhn’s philosophy of science are discussed in subsequent chapters.

KUH N’S MODEL OF SCIENTIF IC DEV ELOP MEN T Early Science

Most sciences have their roots in general attempts to understand and control nature. Myth, ritual, philosophy, early observations of nature, and practical crafts such as traditional medicine, agriculture, and navigation are a few among the historical sources of the kinds of highly specialized and technical scientific research with which we are now familiar. This process of development was slow and gradual. During the earlier stages in the development of a science, different inquirers unsystematically collect different readily observable facts, which they tend to structure and interpret differently. This process eventually gives rise over time to the formation of numerous rival scientific schools investigating roughly the same aspect of the world. Each school proceeds differently from its rivals, and communication among them is rare and imperfect, mainly because the schools differ in the implicit metaphysical commitments that ground their taxonomic systems. For example, Kuhn points out that before Sir Isaac Newton, the nature of light was understood differently by competing scientific schools; these schools were “espousing one variant or another of

AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE11

Epicurean, Aristotelian, or Platonic theory.”4 Each school generates its own well-defined questions and methods for answering them. The precise boundaries of a given field of inquiry vary from school to school, as do the central problems and the criteria for the evaluation of proposed solutions. Numerous rival research traditions thus compete against one another without being able to agree even about the fundamental aspects of their inquiries. Debates about fundamentals are frequent and spirited but futile. They distract from detailed, collaborative scientific work, and they do not ultimately lead to consensus. Scientists of different schools cannot fruitfully communicate with one another, nor are they capable of relying on one another’s successful research results. This kind of uneasy coexistence among rival schools of thought effectively isolated from one another has always been characteristic of philosophy—and, in Kuhn’s view, of contemporary social science as well. In the natural sciences, however, mature scientific work becomes possible once scientists in a given field have reached consensus on their fundamental assumptions and methods. Normal Science

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

12AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

all aspects of research during normal science. It presupposes a metaphysical worldview and an ontology 6 as well as certain disciplinary boundaries among different branches of science. It selects, categorizes, and arranges the phenomena to be investigated through its lexical structure and basic laws. Above all, it provides the framework necessary for precise technical work, including criteria for selecting legitimate scientific problems and a range of accepted methods for their solution. It thus structures the space of scientific questions and provides shared standards for the evaluation of answers and results. Paradigms are holistic. The meanings of scientific terms within a paradigm (such as planet, temperature, phlogiston, mass, and charge) are interconnected. They are learned in clusters and through use in scientific work. So the received view’s distinction between observational and theoretical terms has no place in Kuhn’s philosophy. He insists that all scientific observation is paradigm guided and, in that sense, theory laden. The dominant paradigm specifies what the relevant phenomena to be observed are as well as what their expected behavior is; all scientific observation is thus guided by the gestalt imposed by the paradigm. For example, where an Aristotelian scientist saw constrained fall, a Galilean scientist saw a pendulum; Lavoisier saw oxygen where Priestley had seen dephlogisticated air—and, Kuhn adds wryly, “where others had seen nothing at all.”7 Scientific work must rely on empirical observations, but to make those observations scientists are trained to see the phenomena as phenomena of a certain scientific kind. Scientific kinds in mature natural sciences typically differ from the kinds available in ordinary natural languages. Scientific facts are thus already saturated with paradigm-specific classifications and interpretations: they cannot be collected or interpreted without the training that the paradigm provides. For this reason, a paradigm is never simply falsified by empirical results or rejected on the grounds of internal inconsistencies. On the contrary, all results of individual research must conform to the canons and expectations set by the paradigm; when they do not, it is the researcher who is deemed at fault. Normal science generates puzzles that the scientific community aims to solve, constrained and guided by the community’s paradigm. Scientific knowledge about a particular segment of the world grows through puzzle solving, and the paradigm becomes enriched by new taxonomic categories, regularities, and explanations. Paradigms are thus

AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE13

essentially unfinished objects and therefore in need of further articulation and application. The further development of a paradigm requires intricate, collaborative work, which thrives only in the absence of serious dissent—that is, only when a shared set of beliefs, procedures, and evaluative standards is in place. Conservatism is thus an inevitable aspect of normal science, but it cannot be sustained without institutional support. To provide it, scientific communities establish relatively rigid systems of education and advancement and are generally intolerant of any radical critique of the existing paradigm. For example, becoming a member of a scientific community is an important achievement, depending on validation from older experts, and is thus a process that encourages work along already accepted lines. Even at later points in their careers, scientists who challenge the fundamentals of normal science are often marginalized or completely excluded, and their work is ignored and thus rendered irrelevant for the scientific community’s ongoing research. A successful career for a normal scientist essentially involves the further articulation, development, and application of the current paradigm, not attempts to put the paradigm to the test or to call it into question by proposing an alternative. A talented normal scientist offers ingenious solutions to intricate scientific puzzles and thereby contributes to the cumulative growth of knowledge. A paradigm in science is an indispensable but fluid guide to practice. Unlike a paradigm in a grammar book, a paradigm in science typically requires creative adjustments here and there. To a surprising extent, the paradigm is adhered to tacitly.8 Certainly, normal scientists share many beliefs, rely on the same definitions and axioms, and assume the same metaphysical picture of the world, but it is much more important that their unity as a group is marked by their unarticulated knowledge, visible in practical skills for doing science and in the ease with which they collaborate— in a laboratory setting, for example—without having to agree on a number of theoretical issues.9 The consensus found in periods of normal science is thus primarily a consensus on how to do science: how to collect and classify observations, how to set up a laboratory and design experiments, how to produce relevant calculations, use instruments, or repair a piece of equipment. The cumulative growth of knowledge in normal science is driven more forcefully by practice and its problems than by theoretical questions and considerations.

14AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Anomalies, Crisis, and Revolutionary Science

The puzzle-solving work of normal science proceeds under the assumption that the guiding paradigm will continue to provide the framework for all scientific explanations, predictions, and interventions, but this expectation is sometimes frustrated. To accommodate solution-resistant puzzles, the scientific community initially devises ad hoc modifications to its theory and practice, or it simply brushes the puzzles aside in the hope that they will be successfully solved at a later stage. Such anomalies are always present in normal science. They neither refute the paradigm nor undermine scientific confidence in it as long as the bulk of normal scientific research proceeds smoothly and fruitfully.10 This, however, is not always the case. Normal science periodically generates puzzles that cannot be either solved or ignored. Despite the best efforts of the greatest experts in the field, some problems resist all attempts at solving them; some experiments consistently yield results at odds with the paradigm-based expectations; instruments malfunction under some conditions in ways that cannot be either explained or fixed; and so on. When the accumulation of such anomalies threatens to paralyze normal puzzle-solving work, the scientific community finds itself in crisis, and it urgently seeks a way out of it. Without the successful work that sustains scientists’ faith in the paradigm, the firm consensus that they share begins to evaporate. It is replaced with numerous and diverse challenges to the ruling paradigm. There is typically a proliferation of alternative constellations of scientific ideas, each developed around a significant but isolated achievement. Each of these constellations seeks to replace the old paradigm. This situation is similar to the competition among rival schools in preparadigmatic science, and it is unsustainable for the same reasons. After a while, the scientific community will identify a single powerful rival to the old paradigm and will do so on the basis of multiple and heterogeneous criteria. When a credible rival to the old paradigm gains wide—but not yet universal—support, the scientific community enters the period that Kuhn calls extraordinary or revolutionary science. At such times, the community effectively divides. Some scientists remain faithful to the old paradigm and urgently try to remove the anomalies that led to the crisis. Other scientists embrace the new paradigm and focus on articulating and expanding it further. This division of scientific work is temporarily useful: the new

AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE15

paradigm needs time and effort before it can show its scientific value in action. But the community as a whole must ultimately make the choice between rival paradigms. Successful scientific work requires enormous human and material resources, which are necessarily limited, so the scientific community naturally seeks to reunite and return to normal science under a single paradigm. It also seeks to make the right choice, but which choice is right is almost always a deeply contested matter. The difference between rival paradigms is radical. It has to be so if the new paradigm is to be successful in dealing with the anomalies that the old one was structurally incapable of solving. Kuhn calls this radical difference incommensurability. In his view, rival paradigms are incommensurable in at least four distinct ways: 1. Domain: Rival paradigms do not investigate exactly the same domain of natural phenomena, nor do they draw disciplinary boundaries at exactly the same places. Disciplinary focus also varies; peripheral problems under the old paradigm could become central problems for the new paradigm, and vice versa. 2. Conceptual framework: Different paradigms use different taxonomic systems for the classification of the phenomena they investigate. These taxonomies may individuate objects differently, and they certainly classify them differently. Taxonomic systems are relatively holistic; the meanings of the key terms depend on one another and must be learned in clusters. Classifications are not mere descriptions; they also give rise to different explanations and different expectations of regularities. 3. Exemplary solutions: Rival paradigms take different scientific solutions as exemplars of outstanding scientific achievement. Exemplars provide models and guides for scientific research by exhibiting a particular explanatory structure, degree of predictive accuracy, type of formalization, and so on. Different exemplars give rise to incompatible ways of doing science. 4. Scientific values: Although all scientific communities value accuracy, consistency, simplicity, broadness of scope, and fruitfulness, proponents of the rival paradigms typically interpret, rank, and apply these values in different ways. The fact of incommensurability between rival paradigms presents difficulties when it comes to scientific communication, reasoning, and

16AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

choice. As holistic guides for scientific work, paradigms select, shape, and structure every aspect of theory and evidence. There is no paradigmneutral way of describing and weighting the relevant facts; explanation and prediction are equally based on paradigm-specific individuation and categorization of objects. Observations, experiments, and laboratory data are not “the given.” On the contrary, they are collected and interpreted only within the framework of a particular paradigm and are thus not stable or easily transferable across paradigms. There is no empirical evidence on which proponents of rival paradigms can agree to rely in order to compare the paradigms’ merits in a straightforward and unproblematic way. In Kuhn’s words, “Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of belief.”11 Even the universally shared scientific values—accuracy, simplicity, consistency, wide scope, and fruitfulness—are differently interpreted, applied, and ranked by the partisans of rival paradigms. Thus, these values cannot be used as any sort of neutral standpoint from which the choice among rival paradigms can be determined. The proponents of rival paradigms differ in the questions they ask, in the concepts they use, and in the evaluative criteria they rely on. These deep differences prevent scientists from making the choice among the rivals on the basis of paradigm-neutral criteria. Such criteria do not exist; all scientific reasons in revolutionary or extraordinary science are paradigm relative. Kuhn is explicit on this point: “When paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm’s defense.”12 To add a certain vividness to his account of extraordinary science, Kuhn draws a parallel with political revolutions.13 Revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways prohibited by those institutions. The society is then divided between those who seek to uphold the old institutional order and those who seek to overthrow it and replace it with a new political structure. Appeals to legitimacy, frequently made by both sides, are unpersuasive because the criteria for legitimacy are contested and in crisis. Similarly, the choice among rival paradigms in science is a choice among incompatible modes of doing science; it cannot be made by any evaluative procedure of normal science since all evaluative criteria are bound to a particular paradigm. Each paradigm answers its own but not

AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE17

its rival’s central questions; each provides explanations that are considered satisfactory specifically from its own point of view. Overall, each paradigm satisfies the criteria for scientific excellence it deems decisive better than its rival does, and so debates between the proponents of competing paradigms are bound to be inconclusive and circular. When all the features of a paradigm are in dispute, the members of a scientific community often engage in philosophical arguments about the very foundations of their field. Such arguments, being paradigm bound, do not compel, but they sometimes persuade. Characteristically, if the new paradigm offers exciting new paths for research, proponents of the old paradigm may be won over and converted in a manner that Kuhn compares to a gestalt switch. Familiar phenomena are suddenly seen differently and contextualized within the new paradigm, and thus a new way of doing science becomes possible and attractive. Scientific Revolutions

Scientific revolutions consist in the replacement of the old paradigm with the new, incommensurable one. This replacement occurs when the majority of institutions within the scientific community—laboratories, journals, academic departments, research centers—switch to puzzle-solving work under the new paradigm. Completed revolutions are marked by a return to normal science. The old paradigm becomes obsolete, and when new generations of scientists are educated during the postrevolutionary period, the old ways of doing science are effectively lost.14 Scientific textbooks represent rejected paradigms as mistaken and their loyal proponents during the periods of extraordinary research as irrational and dogmatic. This is, of course, a presentist narrative, of the sort that gives evidence in favor of the winning paradigm that became available only long after the revolution was completed. This lack of historical awareness among the members of the scientific community contributes to their misunderstanding of scientific revolutions. They tend to think of them as short, glorious periods in which brilliant researchers discover some crucially important facts and courageously defend their discovery against dogmatic multitudes. Kuhn argues that revolutions, on the contrary, typically take a long time to unfold—sometimes even centuries—and that they come into being through the efforts

18AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

of the whole scientific community, not just of a few isolated geniuses. The new paradigm solves some of anomalies that were resistant to the old paradigm’s puzzle-solving attempts, but only by completely restructuring the field of research and by transforming practices of scientific observation, imagination, and reasoning. This process is typically slow, and it is always disruptive. As such, it is generally undesirable from a scientific point of view. Kuhn remarks: “As in manufacture so in science—retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it.”15 This explains why serious scientists never aim to produce a paradigm change. Their radical work emerges through attempts to solve the recalcitrant puzzles of the normal science into which they were initiated. Revolutions are thus unintended outcomes of the dedicated problem-solving activity of normal science. The General Pattern of Scientific Change

Once a revolution has taken place, the new paradigm—now normal science—will develop and accumulate anomalies of its own, and it, too, will eventually be replaced through a revolution. Kuhn thus thinks of scientific change as following a cyclical pattern. Nonetheless, for him it is still unambiguously unidirectional, at least in the sense that once-rejected scientific paradigms are never revived. Of course, some particular terms, methods, and results often do get carried from an older paradigm to its successor, and sometimes new and fruitful scientific ideas may even have their origins in much older, preparadigmatic ways of doing science.16 But because a particular paradigm must always be understood holistically— that is, as the general framework for solving theoretical and practical scientific puzzles—it never really makes a second appearance in the history of science once it is replaced.

CL A RIFICATIONS

Three important and related aspects of Kuhn’s philosophy have been at times seriously misunderstood: the concept of a paradigm, the concept of incommensurability, and the famous claim that revolutions bring about “world

AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE19

changes.” Recent scholarship has treated each of these topics extensively and, in my view, quite satisfactorily,17 so I do not discuss them here at any length greater than is necessary to clarify some common confusions. The Concept of a Paradigm

One of the central terms in Kuhn’s philosophy of science, paradigm, was poorly introduced in Structure and thoroughly misused by critics as well as by would-be followers. Kuhn was never wholly satisfied with his ability to elucidate and specify the meaning of either the term paradigm or the term incommensurability: he often wrote as if he felt that these concepts were capturing something important that he was still unable fully to articulate. He took different approaches to these difficulties, however. Until the end of his life, he believed that incommensurability was an indispensable aspect of scientific change, and he kept searching for the right way to explain the idea. With the term paradigm, however, he became much more easily discouraged, and after one serious attempt to distinguish the different meanings it might have, he decided to abandon it altogether.18 Since I will not follow him in this but will instead continue to speak of paradigms throughout this book, I briefly introduce the sense of paradigm that I use and explain my reasons for this decision. The term paradigm in this book stands for the global theoretical worldview, on the one hand, and the practice-guiding exemplary achievement, on the other. These are two aspects of the same phenomenon that I think Kuhn originally wanted to emphasize—namely, the flourishing of scientific research under the guidance of a largely unquestioned theoretical framework. To produce intricate, technical, and detailed work, many competent scientists need to collaborate with one another and to rely on one another’s results, which is possible only if they all are in a substantive sense engaged in the same project. The framework for their joint enterprise must have both theoretical and practical aspects as these aspects inform and shape one another, and it must contain explicit methodological rules as well as tacit skills in forming scientific judgments concerning the observation, interpretation, evaluation, and manipulation of professional working environments. Kuhn in fact recognized that paradigms in the sense of worldviews and paradigms in the sense of exemplars are co-constituted; that is, theoretical constellations are always configured around exemplary

20AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

achievements. This co-constitution of theoretical commitments and practical know-how exists at all levels of scientific work. My use of the term paradigm aims to capture this holistic codependency of theory and practice in normal science as well as to suggest that scientific paradigms deeply influence, in their most general aspects, the worldviews of the larger culture in which science develops. A scientific paradigm of a given period of normal science is thus constituted by everything the scientific community must share in order to continue with work in its existing research tradition. This includes a particular specification of the domain of the phenomena to be investigated as well as a taxonomic system for their classification and expectation of regularities in their behavior. This gives a paradigm an ontology and a general metaphysical image of what kinds of things there are in the world and how they interact. A scientific community shares and uses its paradigm by relying on canonical texts, exemplary solutions, customary techniques, and a whole system of explicit or tacit methodological rules and evaluative criteria. A successful paradigm uses apt metaphors and vivid images to model the regularities that it attributes to the natural phenomena that the community investigates.19 A paradigm in this broad sense typically encompasses several active theories, each dealing with a different subfield.20 The whole scientific world is shaped by the paradigm’s ontology, belief system, methodology, concepts, specialized language, and evaluative criteria as well as by its practitioners’ best work. Kuhn’s philosophy needs such a broad concept. Each of his post-Structure attempts to find a satisfactory substitute for paradigm—disciplinary matrix, exemplar, theory, and lexical structure—is a great deal narrower than paradigm in its broadest meaning. Moreover, none of them escapes conceptual problems similar to those that paradigm faced.21 So in my view, Kuhn’s original sense that his philosophy needed just such a broad concept was sound. To avoid conceptual confusions, this broad sense is the only sense in which I use the term.22 Incommensurability

Contrary to what some critics feared,23 incommensurability between rival paradigms does not imply total incomparability or the impossibility of communication or translation. In Kuhn’s own words,

AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE21

Most readers of my text have supposed that when I spoke of theories as incommensurable, I meant that they could not be compared. But “incommensurability” is a term borrowed from mathematics, and there it has no such implication. The hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle is incommensurable with its side, but the two can be compared to any required degree of precision. What is lacking is not comparability but a unit of length in terms of which both can be measured directly and exactly. In applying the term “incommensurability” to theories, I had intended only to insist that there was no common language within which both could be fully expressed and which could therefore be used in a point-by-point comparison between them.24

The new paradigm is articulated by scientists who started their careers by practicing under the old paradigm, and so they obviously are able to communicate with the faithful adherents of the old paradigm. In a similar vein, every scientist familiar with the old paradigm can learn to use the new one. Members of a scientific community during a period of revolutionary science may experience difficulties in communication but no insurmountable obstacles. The problem of incommensurability is more complicated for a historian of science who must rely only on such texts as are available without the benefit of conversations viva voce or active participation in scientific work. Such difficulties are well known to philologists who specialize in dead languages, but mastering such arcane areas of learning is clearly an achievable task. If successful, one becomes multilingual, able to translate ancient Greek and Latin texts into idiomatic English. Every translation will also be an interpretation, but different interpretations can be seen as more or less faithful. Analogously, a successful historian of science will have to become multiepistemic if he is to convey to his audience the structure and content of the scientific knowledge acquired under a paradigm that is different from the contemporary paradigm. Kuhn was keenly aware of the numerous hurdles such a historian has to overcome, but he was equally aware of historiographical narratives that had achieved success; in fact, he produced some of them.25 Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis thus does not imply that there can be no understanding or translation between rival paradigms, only that understanding is always partial and translation imperfect. The two main points

22AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

of the incommensurability thesis are, first, that there are no paradigmindependent reasons that compel the choice of one of the rivals on pain of irrationality, and, second, that after a revolution the new paradigm will have to reconstruct completely those elements of the old paradigm it wishes to save and incorporate. The new paradigm will not preserve all past knowledge, however, for the incommensurability of successive paradigms implies that some of the old paradigm’s achievements will be forsaken. Scientific development is thus not strictly cumulative: the revolutionary growth of knowledge cannot be effected without losses. “World Changes”

One of Structure’s most frequently cited passages is “when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.”26 However, the same chapter contains the claim that “the scientist after a revolution is still looking at the same world.”27 These two claims seem to contradict each other, but Kuhn was never willing to give up either one. His early attempts to harmonize them only confused many of his readers. For example, his claim that “though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world” reads like a restatement of the tension rather than its removal.28 Much has been said—interestingly and ingeniously, too—about Kuhn’s “world changes,” not least by Kuhn.29 Many of his realist critics and antirealist admirers thought that he was trying to develop a metaphysical position that embraced idealism or constructivism and that denied the existence of a mind-independent world. Kuhn strongly and repeatedly rejected such interpretations: Creatures with the same biological endowment may experience the world through lexicons that are here and there very differently structured. . . . Remarks like this suggest that the world is somehow mind-dependent, perhaps an invention or construction of the creatures which inhabit it, and in recent years such suggestions have been widely pursued. But the metaphors of invention, construction, and mind-dependence are in two respects grossly misleading. First, the world is not invented or constructed. The creatures to whom this responsibility is imputed, in fact, find the world already in place, its rudiments at their birth and its increasingly full

AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE23

actuality during their educational socialization, a socialization in which examples of the way the world is play an essential part. The world, furthermore, has been experientially given, in part to the new inhabitants directly, and in part indirectly, by inheritance, embodying the experience of their forebears. As such, it is entirely solid: not in the least respectful of an observer’s wishes and desires; quite capable of providing decisive evidence against invented hypotheses which fail to match its behavior. Creatures born into it must take it as they find it. . . . [W]hat people can effect or invent is not the world but changes in some aspect of it.30

Kuhn was equally resolute in rejecting the sort of naive empiricist view that he thought inspired his early critics.31 In his view, the categories that we use to orient ourselves in the world are of our own making, designed to serve our purposes; the ones that we use now are not the only ones that can enable such orientation. The world can be differently described, its elements differently categorized and even differently individuated. Some human systems of categorizing are probably biologically entrenched;32 some are cultural and linguistic; and some are scientific. Scientific taxonomies change over time, together with the understanding of regularities in nature that such taxonomies allow us to expect. Kuhn’s phrase “different worlds” could then be read as “different systems for understanding the world and interacting with it.” In trying to describe the relation between scientific paradigms and nature, Kuhn rejected the metaphor of representation and passive mirroring as well as the metaphor of constructing and active making. He did not, unfortunately, offer his own apt metaphor instead, and thus his relatively simple point was seriously and consistently misunderstood.33 In contrast to many convoluted readings of Kuhn’s remarks on world changes, the interpretation proposed by Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read stands out as especially persuasive precisely because it aims to deflate the problem. After a careful but critical examination of Kuhn’s three different attempts to express his point unambiguously and persuasively, Sharrock and Read argue that Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between “thick” and “thin” descriptions dissolves Kuhn’s tension: There really need be no compulsion to find, as Kuhn does, something of a puzzle as to how the Galilean and Aristotelian scientists can both be

24AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

looking at the same thing and “seeing something different.” They are, of course, seeing the same thing thinly described, namely, the stone swinging on the end of a piece of string, but they are observing the swinging stone with respect to its motion. The motion of the stone is not to be given, for scientific purposes, by a thin description such as “swinging back and forth,” for they—the two scientists—differ over the kind of motion “swinging back and forth” is, whether it is constrained fall or pendulum motion. . . . Being thick descriptions, because they are both paradigm based, Galileo’s and Aristotle’s are rival descriptions, and they cannot be treated as jointly compatible with the same observations. . . . There is no scientifically useful observation which is neutral between the two rival descriptions.35

Thus, Kuhn’s “world change” statements should not be understood as statements of metaphysical constructivism. Instead, they are only vivid ways of expressing Kuhn’s view that different scientific communities employ importantly different frameworks. This does not, of course, affect the world, except insofar as different understandings of what the world is like suggest different ways of changing it. Guided by the new paradigm, scientists ask new questions, look for answers in different places, develop new instruments, and design new experiments, applications, and methodological procedures. They see the world of their research differently than they did before, and they change the world that their work affects in a manner radically different from the manner in which the old paradigm enabled them to act on the world. But this, then, is really a point about the nature of scientific work, not a contribution to the old philosophical debate between scientific realists and constructivists.

I H ISTO RY

F

2 THE ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY

K

uhn’s Structure was a crucial contribution to what came to be known as “the historical turn” in the philosophy of science.1 It proclaims the central importance of the history of science in the very first sentence: “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.”2 It is acknowledged on all hands that Kuhn saw the philosophy of science and the history of science as inextricably bound together, but the nature of that union is still a matter of controversy in the interpretation of his thought. In part 1, I survey this controversy, keeping Kuhn’s overall project in view. I discuss a necessarily selective sample of different interpretations of Kuhn on the role of the history of science and propose that we should understand Kuhn’s model of scientific change as a Weberian explanatory structure, grounded in the history of science. The history and the philosophy of science are equally important in this model and mutually influential in generating proper understanding of science. I should mention two related qualifications about the scope of part 1. First, Kuhn’s important work in the history of science notwithstanding, here I focus exclusively on his philosophical writings, for it is only from them that we can understand his metaphilosophical position concerning the proper relationship between the history and the philosophy of science. Second, throughout part 1, I engage with a number of issues that concern

28H ISTO RY

the nature and limits of historical interpretation. I do not canvas the enormous literature on this topic, however, since I discuss only those schools of historiography that influenced Kuhn’s thought and only in the manner in which he understood them.

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Presentist Historiography and the Received View in the Philosophy of Science

Structure urges a full integration of the history and the philosophy of science, but only after a serious transformation of both of these two fields. Kuhn saw most historians and virtually all philosophers as irresponsibly ignorant of the actual science on which they purported to report and reflect. Familiarity with the complicated, multifaceted nature of actual scientific practice, with its discontinuous, contingent history and its increasingly technical modes of expression, is, for Kuhn, absolutely required for both the history and the philosophy of science. At the time Structure was written, however, such familiarity was extremely rare. Often written by scientists for pedagogical purposes, the history of science in the mid–twentieth century was studied, in Kuhn’s view, in a shockingly anachronistic way.3 The main objective was not to understand past forms of acquiring and systematizing knowledge but only to explain the success of present-day scientific theories. Seen through such a presentist lens, past science was distorted into a series of colossal mistakes punctuated by what present-day science considered partial solutions or stepping stones to contemporary forms of knowledge. In that approach, past scientists were naturally portrayed either as talented precursors of present-day practitioners or as stubborn obstacles to progress. The latter’s views were never seriously engaged with; rather, they were dismissively explained by reference to the biasing influence of nonscientific beliefs or by appeal to errors in reasoning. At the same time, the actual beliefs and choices of purported precursors were rarely reconstructed and examined; because they were deemed rational and progressive, their efforts were not seen as in need of any further explanation. This anachronistic treatment of past

ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY29

scientists and of their disagreements did not illuminate the reasoning or motivation of any past inquirer, be he considered a rational contributor to the development of present-day science or a hindrance in its way. Similarly, this anachronistic way of studying the history of science did not pay attention to the historical development of scientific disciplines, theories, and methods. Projecting the present-day understanding of science onto the past, it ultimately failed to explain the complicated and contingent processes to which current science owes its existence and structure. This was caused by more than a lack of serious interest in past science. Historians, Kuhn lamented, seemed to be intellectually unprepared to study science in a serious way—that is, through close engagement with technically complex primary sources; and, worse, they were apparently also unwilling to learn.4 Although they were aware of the importance of scientific developments for intellectual history and of the importance of intellectual history for history tout court, they nevertheless limited their research to merely secondary sources or to the prefatory and programmatic writings of the most important scientists of the past.5 They made no detailed investigation of the context in which scientific thought evolved and never engaged seriously with scientific ideas in their highly technical, precise formulations. Such superficiality put the standards of the history of science considerably below the standards of competence taken for granted in all other branches of history. A historian of science was deemed to be “not quite a historian” by his colleagues because he typically produced only presentist narratives.6 Naturally, well-trained historians considered “presentist history” an oxymoron. A historian of political thought or an art historian, for example, was typically able to understand the most complicated texts and works of her period as well as the larger disciplinary context within which these works were created. Historians rely on both context and a detailed understanding of exemplary works when writing their historical narratives.7 Why should the standards for historians of science be so much lower? Why should they treat past science as a “foreign territory” into which they would not venture instead of familiarizing themselves with “the terrain and the natives” about which they produced their narratives?8 Kuhn thought that this difference existed because historians of science generally lacked advanced mathematical knowledge, indispensable for doing serious work on the development of the physical sciences after

30 H ISTO RY

1750. Primary sources in that area are highly technical. “As a result . . . the recent literature of the history of science tends to end at the point where the technical source materials cease to be accessible to a man with elementary college scientific training.”9 Kuhn pointed out that there are excellent studies of mathematics up to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, of physics up to Sir Isaac Newton, and of chemistry up to John Dalton, but he stressed that at the time he was writing (and, it should be added, in English), there was no historical work of comparable quality on mathematical physics since the eighteenth century or on any physical science since the nineteenth century. Effectively exempting itself from the prevailing standards and methods in properly historical disciplines, the history of science needed to open itself to the influence of other disciplines. Most notably, presentist history of science played an important role in the education of scientists and, to a lesser extent, philosophers of science. Kuhn saw that presentist historiography of science is not always intellectually pernicious; it is exactly what future scientists need in their education and training. Their task is to discover and solve the scientific problems of their own time. Understanding the now obsolete paradigms of times past, with their different patterns of defining and solving problems, is a time-consuming project, the completion of which would not contribute to young scientists’ competency to pursue fruitful research under the paradigm that will eventually define their own work.10 Kuhn noted that “the sciences are unique among creative disciplines in the extent to which they cut themselves off from their past, substituting for it a systematic reconstruction.”11 The philosophy of science, however, makes no contribution to science proper. Its task is to understand science—a human practice with a long and complicated history. A philosopher of science cannot afford to remain ignorant of that history, or all of her attempts to understand science will come to naught. This was Kuhn’s novel idea, which he developed in opposition to the philosophical project of the received view in the mid–twentieth century. Different as pre-Kuhnian philosophers of science were in many respects, they all shared the same aim: to articulate a normatively robust canon of scientific methodology. This canon would both explain the exemplary cognitive success of science—the fact of scientific progress—and guide future scientific research. In this project, the actual history of science was not of central importance: a detailed tracing of the meandering path from past

ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY31

to the present was of no interest to anyone who wanted to explain only the emergence and victory of successful present-day scientific theories. Philosophers instead articulated what they took to be epistemically and methodologically justified canons of reasoning and choice and proposed to explain the success of science by schematized case studies in which the preferred canon of reasoning seems to have been respected and instrumental in leading to the right choice. The real philosophical work was thus in selecting and justifying the rules of reasoning and choice; application to science was merely a helpful illustration of epistemic norms in action. Most philosophers of science took this normative project for granted and regarded their discipline as a sort of applied epistemology. These normative ambitions of the received view have often led to its being misleadingly characterized as “ahistorical” in character. Properly speaking, there is no such thing: every philosophy of science must position itself with respect to the history of science because it takes science as its subject matter and because science is a practice with a long and complicated history. Thus, no philosophy of science—the received view not exempted—can be truly indifferent to the history of the practice. The important difference between the received view and the historicist approach to the philosophy of science championed by Kuhn lies in the kind of historiography each relies on and the role that historiography plays in each one’s overall account. The received view relied on presentist historiographical narratives and used them to substantiate its faith in the strictly cumulative, goal-directed growth of scientific knowledge. The actual history of science was thus simplified to the point of distortion and made subservient to normative methodologies of science as developed by philosophers. Imre Lakatos famously sought to justify this project.12 Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lakatos was fully aware of the gap between actual history of science and its “rational reconstructions,” but he found only the latter philosophically useful. He thus supported the received view’s normative project by insisting that the main tasks of the philosophy of science are to develop substantive theories of scientific rationality and progress and to support them by evidence drawn from the “internal history” of science. Internal history explains how the history of science should have developed according to the theory of scientific rationality that history subserves. “External history”—the actual history—is always richer than rational reconstructions, but in Lakatos’s view its philosophical use is limited:

3 2H ISTO RY

it should be relied on to explain only “residual non-rational factors” in the development of science.13 Such explanations, for Lakatos, do not contribute to the philosophical project of reconstructing the growth of scientific knowledge as rational and cumulative: “One way to indicate discrepancies between history and its rational reconstruction is to relate the internal history in the text, and indicate in the footnotes how actual history ‘misbehaved’ in light of its rational reconstruction.”14 Although Lakatos insisted on the importance of the history of science for the philosophy of science, his peculiar concept of internal history remained deliberately anachronistic and normative. Presentist historiographies were thus strongly supported as well as badly needed for the received view’s understanding of science as rational, objective, and progressive in a cumulative way. The empiricist assumption that facts are in some sense “given” independently of the theory or the narrative in which they may feature was common to both fields. Presentist narratives attributed the discovery of such facts to individual scientists and explained their achievements as in large measure due to their personal talent or “genius.” This type of explanation probably influenced and certainly supported the way in which philosophers of science demarcated their field. The received view concerned itself exclusively with the “context of justification” of already formulated scientific hypotheses and theories because it was possible to formulate general methodological rules for evaluating them. The “context of discovery” was excluded from the philosophy of science because scrutinizing it seemed unlikely to yield any methodological rules that could reliably lead researchers to significant discoveries. Perhaps psychology can explain scientific talent, but philosophy should simply take it as given. On the metaphilosophical level, then, the relationship between the philosophy and the history of science was understood as follows: history was to provide the data that would confirm the received view’s basic assumptions about the rationality and objectivity of science and its steady course of cumulative progress; beyond that, history was to provide instructive examples of good and bad scientific reasoning to be used in philosophical analyses of ideal scientific reasoning. Thus, certain philosophical views about the nature and relevance of historical phenomena profoundly shaped presentist historiography of science as well as the manner in which that historiography constructed its narratives. Presentist historiography,

ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY33

in turn, provided the necessary evidence for the basic tenets of the received view as well as the source of illustrative examples to be used in epistemological debates among philosophers. Well before the “historical turn,” then, the history of science and the philosophy of science substantially relied on one another, although they did not reflect on their mutual interdependence. Hermeneutic Historiography and Kuhn’s Philosophy

Kuhn saw very clearly that the normative-methodological project of the received view and the kind of presentist historiography of science dominant in the mid–twentieth century were mutually reinforcing. They were jointly implicated in the creation of the distorted image of science that he wanted to replace with a properly diachronic and descriptively accurate image of his own. To do this successfully, he had to propose deep changes in both the history and the philosophy of science and especially in the relationship between the two disciplines. To become a respectable branch of history, the history of science had to eschew anachronisms and simplified sources. It had to rely on evidence from a variety of technically complicated primary sources, with a view to offering in its narratives a faithful sense of what the pursuit of various kinds of knowledge was like in the past. Some European thinkers had adopted this essentially hermeneutic approach. In Kuhn’s view, the best history of science of his time was produced not by historians or by scientists but by philosophers whose formation was in the German and French traditions. In these traditions, Kuhn remarked, “the divide between history and philosophy is by no means so deep as in the English-speaking world.”15 The historiography of science that inspired Kuhn’s historical and philosophical work is essentially marked by a hermeneutic attitude to the past.16 Its goal is to understand the structure and development of past systems of knowledge on their own terms and through their own conceptual frameworks. Its objects of study are thus a variety of primary sources, textual as well as material. Understanding the meaning of texts and the use of instruments requires mastery of a long-lost language with only partial connections to the language of current science. A historian’s interpretive effort is thus akin to translation, which inevitably requires selection and interpretation. Hermeneutic historical narratives strive for explanatory

34H ISTO RY

success through maximal consistency, completeness, and avoidance of anachronistic explanatory categories and distinctions. Passages that seem mistaken or even absurd to the present-day reader are not to be brushed off, as they were by presentist historians. On the contrary, these passages are “the royal road” to meanings and patterns of significance that would otherwise remain lost and forgotten. They are, as it were, the essential puzzles for a historian to solve: to understand the quest for knowledge in the past, the historian must “get into the heads” of those who were engaged in it. To do so, the historian cannot limit himself to the writings of the most celebrated thinkers of the past. He must re-create in his narrative the web of commonly shared beliefs and conceptions, typical argumentative strategies, nodes of disagreement, the intended audience of scientific writings, and so on. This kind of historical reconstruction requires familiarity with a wide range of texts and authors as well as, of course, the skills to follow technical notation and argumentation. An individual scientist’s thought and work are contextualized within the web of beliefs and practices of his time. According to Kuhn, serious historical narratives are thus constructed primarily about scientific communities, not about individual scientists or isolated discoveries. Kuhn’s reliance on hermeneutic historiography led him to develop a new image of science, which he then modified, refined, and enriched for decades after the publication of Structure in 1962. This image had a profound effect on his philosophical thought. In his effort to make philosophical sense of the development of science as he saw it, he argued that neither at the level of observation and experiment nor at the level of relatively abstract criteria for choice could any paradigm-independent terra firma be found that would be sufficient to determine scientific choice. Hermeneutic historiography does not project our present understanding of scientific rationality onto the past. Rather, by discovering reasonable grounds for long-rejected views, it inclines a philosopher of science to understand scientific rationality as changing over time through both collaborative scientific work and scientific disagreements. This, for Kuhn, implied that the philosophy of science should eschew its erstwhile normative pretensions: the history of science is simply too discontinuous and too self-directed for the norms articulated and justified within an “epistemically pure inquiry” to be useful either in understanding or in guiding science.

ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY35

So in the marriage between the history of science and the philosophy of science envisaged in Structure, both partners are transformed from what they had been for logical empiricists and Popperian critical rationalists. A hermeneutic approach to the history of science replaces presentism and thereby reveals discontinuities along numerous axes. It requires a novel philosophical understanding of scientific rationality and the growth of knowledge because of the discovery that epistemic canons of justification and rationality change through the actual history of science. At the same time, the philosophy of science shapes the agenda for the practice of the history of science by selecting certain cognitive categories as essential for understanding scientific practice.

THE MODEL IN ST RUCTURE: I NT ERPRETATION S A N D OB J EC T I ON S

The history of science and the philosophy of science, Kuhn argued, fertilize each other; reinforcement goes in both directions. In many critics’ view, however, this understanding of the relationship between the two fields does not yield a properly historicized philosophy of science but instead results in a confused view in which the historical and the philosophical elements are not clearly distinguished. Ever since the publication of Structure, the logical status of the model of scientific change it presents has been debated. Some have taken the model to have the status of an empirical theory of history. Others—for instance, Paul Feyerabend—have taken it to be a methodological proposal for the way science should develop, but with normative requirements intentionally obscured as descriptions of how science does work. Feyerabend accused Kuhn of doing “disservice both to history and to philosophy” by a mode of exposition in which the descriptive and the normative are not clearly distinguished. He took Kuhn to be arguing on methodological grounds for the desirability of so-called normal science by presenting it as the inevitable result of scientific development.17 I address Feyerabend’s objection later in this chapter, after I consider in some detail two very different interpretations of Kuhn’s project. According to Alexander Bird, Kuhn proposed an empirical theory of history that

36 H ISTO RY

is of some philosophical interest but little philosophical substance. In contrast, Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read offer a Wittgensteinian reading of Kuhn according to which Kuhn’s philosophical project is a purely negative, “therapeutic” one. Clearly, the two approaches understand the role of the history of science in Kuhn’s work very differently. I argue against each of these readings and propose that we should understand Kuhn’s project as instead offering a Weberian explanatory model of the process of scientific development. Bird’s Interpretation

In his stimulating book Thomas Kuhn, Alexander Bird argues that Structure, although of interest to philosophers, is not itself a philosophical work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a work in the theoretical history of science. It is not philosophy, although Kuhn’s theoretical standpoint meant that he had to engage deeply with philosophy. . . . Kuhn’s treatment of the history of science . . . can be regarded as having two aspects. The first we may call descriptive—he details what he sees as pattern or regularity in the development of the various sciences—the cycle of normal science, crisis and revolution. The second aspect is the explanatory side in which he tries to find an underlying explanation, some general feature of science that accounts for the pattern—this is Kuhn’s theory of paradigms. Kuhn himself did not clearly distinguish between the two elements of his project, instead combining the two as a single picture of science and its workings.18

Bird’s first step is thus to tease apart what he takes to be the “descriptive” and the “explanatory” strands of Kuhn’s project and to evaluate them separately. In Bird’s view, neither strand is philosophical in nature or indeed finally persuasive. In arguing against what he sees as the descriptive strand in Kuhn’s model, Bird assumes that this model is an empirical generalization with universal scope. According to Bird, when Kuhn says that revolutions emerge from periods of crisis, involve substantial conceptual shifts, and end with a new paradigm that shapes the work that will be done during the ensuing period of normal science, we should understand him to be saying

ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY37

that all scientific change follows this pattern exactly. If it does not, Bird thinks, Kuhn’s theory has been refuted. Bird then offers a series of counterexamples that show that scientific change can be produced without a crisis, that it can be gradual rather than revolutionary, and that it need not involve sudden incommensurable shifts. Hence, he argues, revolutions and normal science cannot be sharply distinguished, and in general there is a continuum of conceptual changes in science from insignificant to revolutionary.19 Some of his arguments consist in sketching actual historical cases, and others are articulations of likely or even merely possible patterns of change. Bird concludes that Kuhn’s descriptive claims are thus “badly mistaken” and thus that his explanatory theory is that much less likely to be true.20 There are several problems with Bird’s criticism. First, Bird does not provide a justification for his interpretation of Kuhn’s claims as universal in scope, nor does he discuss textual evidence that shows that Kuhn in fact allowed for gradual changes, small-scale revolutions, partial revolutions, and the like. Although there are passages in Bird’s book that acknowledge that Kuhn’s model is not, in fact, as crude as Bird represents it to be, Bird makes no argumentative use of the subtler position Kuhn actually developed. On the contrary, he seems to object to it: “While thinking in terms of the simple model is encouraged if we think especially of famous major revolutions, Kuhn does do greater justice to the intricacies of the historical facts and so adds much detail to the model. But at the same time this robs the model of much of its force.”21 The point of this criticism is unclear. On the one hand, Bird objects to what he takes to be the inability of Kuhn’s model to handle “the intricacies” of actual historical cases; on the other hand, he seems to think that only a model sufficiently schematized as to be incapable of accommodating such intricacies has sufficient “force.” An interpretatively sounder approach would be to refine one’s initial understanding of what the model is and credit Kuhn with a nuanced and appropriately flexible view concerning the development of science. Second, Bird’s claim that Kuhn “did not clearly distinguish” between the “descriptive” and the “explanatory” sides of his theory rests on the conviction that such distinctions can and should be drawn sharply. Kuhn did not share this conviction. Bird should have provided some reasons to persuade us that we should side with him rather than with Kuhn on this issue. Kuhn’s whole philosophical strategy in Structure rests on a refusal to

3 8 H ISTO RY

accept the dichotomies that marked previous philosophies of science. As much as Kuhn rejects a sharp distinction between the descriptive and the evaluative, he implicitly rejects any clear boundary between interpretively selected and arranged historical narratives on the one side and more general historical explanatory models on the other. To insist that this boundary must be firm and unyielding requires serious engagement with Kuhn’s reasons for relaxing it—reasons that Bird does not propose to give. Relatedly—and this is my third point—Bird’s method of evaluating Kuhn’s theory relies on a rather unsophisticated, empiricist understanding of the nature of historical evidence. He compares Kuhn’s “theory of science” to what he implicitly takes to be objective, theory-independent historical facts. He never problematizes the historical claims and interpretations that select and arrange these facts into historical narratives. The only way Bird might justify his method of evaluation is to show that historical case studies are indeed the “objective facts” a theory of history has to account for and that in general such facts are the only acceptable reasons for or against such a theory. This assumption may appear reasonable, but it does need to be justified in this case because the theory under criticism is the theory that says that historical facts are open to interpretation.22 According to Kuhn, “actual history” is a myth: “The pool of all data potentially relevant to history cannot be either identified or scanned. More to the point, the data in most parts of the pool are not, until after much interpretation, the facts which appear in historical narratives. . . . History is interpretative throughout.”23 Kuhn was neither radical nor original on this issue. On the contrary, it was standard historical practice at the time to acknowledge the profound interdependency of historical facts and historical interpretations. E. H. Carr’s famous metaphor captures the prevalent view: “The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use—these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.”24 Bird does not argue against this prevalent view but writes as if Kuhn were simply confused when he accepted it. Of course, Kuhn may have been wrong in his choice of historical method or the manner in which he applied it, or perhaps he may have been

ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY39

wrong to advocate the particular model of scientific change he presented in Structure. To refute Kuhn here, Bird had several options, none of which he seriously pursued. For example, he could have argued against the prevalent understanding of historical facts as interest and narrative dependent, or he could have tried to expose some internal inconsistencies in Kuhn’s view, or he could have shown that the historical episodes that he offers as counterexamples to Kuhn’s model cannot plausibly be presented as supporting rather than refuting that model. Unfortunately, Bird’s case studies do not exhibit real hermeneutic depth and nuance and thus cannot be of much use in achieving the purpose for which Bird employs them—namely, as refutations of Kuhn. Bird does not show that Kuhn’s “theory of history” fails on its own terms or that its terms are untenable, and thus his criticism falls short, especially when it relies on merely imaginable patterns of scientific change. However, Bird’s counterexamples do have a point if used constructively rather than as attempted refutations. Recall that in Kuhn’s view a scientific theory selects a domain of phenomena, and even within that selected domain it perennially faces anomalies of smaller or greater magnitude and significance. The counterexamples Bird offers might more charitably be treated as just such anomalies in Kuhn’s theory of scientific change. I return to this point in the third section of this chapter. Sharrock and Read’s Interpretation

In contrast to Bird, Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read take Kuhn’s project to be deeply philosophical.25 According to them, Kuhn at his best is a “negative” philosopher whose thought offers “therapeutic” possibilities for abandoning philosophical questions altogether, urging us rather to derive our understanding of science from the history of science and from science itself. Nonetheless, Sharrock and Read do not go so far as to claim that Kuhn’s work is always consistently Wittgensteinian in this sense. For example, the concluding chapter of their book Kuhn, Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions details different strands in his thought, some of which are unquestionably involved with developing an ambitious positive project for the philosophy of science.26 Although acknowledging the existence of such constructive tendencies, Sharrock and Read nevertheless argue that a philosophically satisfactory understanding of Kuhn’s work would set these tendencies aside and thereby achieve the philosophically most plausible reading.

40 H ISTO RY

The role of history in their reading of Kuhn is suitably reconstructed. Structure is by their lights not a piece of historiography, not a theory of history, and not even a model of scientific change in the usual sense. So any counterexamples proposed to refute “the model” are beside the point: there was no positive model that Kuhn was proposing. Rather, Structure offers a mere sketch of history to be used as a source of powerful correctives for dispelling the false but deeply rooted image of science “by which we are possessed,” as Kuhn claims in the first sentence of his book.27 Sharrock and Read take Kuhn to be offering a richer diet of examples— to use Ludwig Wittgenstein’s expression—in order to dislodge the belief that there is some way in which science must develop. Although Kuhn employed a particular set of historical examples in order to dislodge a certain image of science—that of the received view—his point, in Sharrock and Read’s view, is perfectly general: there is no “right” image we should endorse instead because all philosophies of science seriously distort science in efforts to explain and systematize it. Sharrock and Read argue that Kuhn’s therapeutic method of reflecting on precisely those examples that do not fit the theory can—and should—be used against any theory of science whatever and that Kuhn, in his better moments if not always, intended this. According to Sharrock and Read, the primary role that the history of science plays in Kuhn’s project—that of freeing us from false general pictures—is supplemented by a secondary one: if the philosophical therapy is successful, it will “leave science as it is.” The history of science, not the philosophy of science, will then be the main source for our understanding of scientific developments. However, because the sources of philosophical delusion run deep, they are very difficult to eradicate entirely. “Leaving science as it is” is possibly an endless project, and hence Kuhn’s important contribution to our thinking is not likely to be one of short duration.28 We can see now that the disagreement between Bird, on the one hand, and Sharrock and Read, on the other, can be represented as a burden-ofproof argument. Bird takes Kuhn to be proposing a model of scientific change that aspires to describe and explain all changes in science. Clearly, the burden of proof would be on Kuhn to demonstrate that his model is capable of doing these things, and in that case historical counterexamples would be highly relevant. In contrast, Sharrock and Read take the received view to be proposing a model of change according to which all changes are

ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY41

cumulative. The burden of proof would then be on the received view, and Kuhn’s counterexamples would be highly relevant. In this respect, Sharrock and Read are certainly right: the general ambitions of the received view were never in doubt. Particular case studies, plausibly described in detail, can then legitimately be used against the received view’s image of science. I also find plausible Sharrock and Read’s negative claim—that Structure does not propose an empirical theory of history—as well as their focus on Kuhn’s philosophical use of historical case studies against the image of science that was his target. However, I find serious difficulties with their overall reading, to which I now turn. First, Kuhn’s writings do not reveal the consistently negative, “therapeutic” philosopher that Sharrock and Read portray. The number of significant passages that contradict their interpretation cannot simply be fenced off as Kuhn’s inconsistency, as Sharrock and Read too often suggest. Kuhn was not really a negative philosopher of science,29 and Sharrock and Read know it. Nonetheless, they rather too often forcefully imply that their Wittgensteinian Kuhn is the real Kuhn. Although they do not fail to acknowledge the existence of a substantial body of textual evidence that contradicts their reading, they do not use that evidence to provide a coherent, integrated interpretation of Kuhn. On the contrary, they conclude their book with a chapter titled “The Unresolved Tension,” in which they argue that there are conflicting philosophical strands in Kuhn’s thought and that only the negative, Wittgensteinian strand is truly philosophically revolutionary and worthy of respect. This means that the best evidence Sharrock and Read can offer in favor of their reading of Kuhn is not textual but philosophical. Rather than present their interpretation as correct overall, they should frankly acknowledge that they are trying to isolate only one strand of Kuhn’s thought, which they develop and improve upon by bringing it as close as possible to their understanding of the later Wittgenstein. Of course, they would then have to offer strong arguments in support of the view that a “therapeutic” understanding of Kuhn—and of later Wittgenstein—is indeed philosophically the best. In the absence of such compelling arguments, Sharrock and Read’s approach to Kuhn will remain thought provoking but of limited appeal. Although their reading foregrounds an important, previously neglected aspect of Kuhn’s philosophy, it falls short of providing a sound understanding of the complexities of Kuhn’s overall project. I hope to

42H ISTO RY

show that this project was a coherent one and that it was both critical and constructive. My second objection to their reading is this: philosophy cannot simply “leave history as it is” because history itself requires substantive philosophical assumptions that ground the individuation of historical phenomena and the selection of explanatory categories for use in historical narratives. History, of course, can leave these assumptions unexamined, but that will not make them any less philosophical. Mutatis mutandis, the same is true of “leaving science as it is.” At any given time, science rests on a number of metaphysical assumptions, even though these assumptions change over time.30 For example, much of modern science assumes the uniformity of nature, some principle of causality, and some version of a materialist ontology. Disagreements about the proper analysis of causation or of the nature of matter nevertheless persist and involve both scientists and philosophers. A number of theoretical debates in particular sciences—about the nature of time in physics, about the unit of selection in evolutionary biology, and about reductionism in medicine, among others—are debates with significant philosophical aspects. Philosophical evaluation and reasoning are also involved in examining a number of methodological questions in science, in analyzing the nature and use of central scientific concepts (such as “law of nature”), and in establishing the proper role of values in science. Philosophy permeates scientific reasoning at multiple levels, and thus even “leaving science as it is” does not sever the ties between science and philosophy. Finally, I think that Kuhn had both a negative project and a positive project in Structure. The two projects are so closely related that it is extremely difficult to have succeeded in one without having succeeded in the other. My own reasons for this reading are interpretive, and such reasons—although generally acknowledged by Sharrock and Read—are not sufficient to persuade them to expand their preferred image of Kuhn as a “negative philosopher” to include a reconstruction of his positive project. The following paragraph thus attempts to offer a reason congenial to their approach, which might move them to see Kuhn as simultaneously demolishing the received view’s image of science and proposing his own. One might think thus of Kuhn’s predicament: There are clear ways of arguing against the various claims, conceptions, narratives, and theories of the received view, and Kuhn tried to do that, but one cannot exactly argue against an image or a metaphor. The image of science painted by

ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY43

presentist historiography and the received view—an image of cumulative progress on the road to the ultimate goal of scientific inquiry—is a powerful one. When in its grip, one sees it simultaneously confirmed by the history and the philosophy of science, and one is thus naturally led to believe that the image is simply an accurate representation of science itself, derived from an objective description of its workings. Kuhn could not hope to be successful in erasing that image by producing specific arguments, however sound, against particular historiographical or philosophical claims and assumptions. Deeply entrenched images of this sort do not just fade away when deprived of evidence to support them, for the simple reason that images are not supported by evidence. Rather, they inspire us and guide us in searching for corroborative evidence and for reasons of a congenial sort. In fact, pictures, metaphors, and schematic representations of all kinds are deeply rooted in our thinking, so that we cannot change that thinking without confronting these more archaic images. To be successful, therefore, Kuhn had to address the image of science on its own terms: the way to resist a powerful metaphor is to offer a different one; the way to obliterate a powerful image from our minds is to paint a new one over it. I thus believe that there are both textual and philosophical reasons to take Kuhn in Structure to be simultaneously engaged in two related philosophical tasks: the negative task of doing away with the dominant image of science and the positive task of developing a different image to replace the old one. Sharrock and Read are likely to object that Kuhn’s positive philosophy of science cannot but disappoint. In their view, every image of science will to some extent be schematic and thus distorting in its simplicity; used as a tool to explain complex phenomena, it cannot but fail. I discuss this point in the next section, in which I show how Kuhn’s new image of science can be understood as schematic in some sense but not as distorting in any sense.

THE MODEL IN ST RUCTURE: A WEBERIAN IN TERPRETAT I ON

Kuhn used historical case studies for two purposes: the negative one, to dislodge the deeply rooted image of science created by both presentist

44H ISTO RY

historiography and the philosophy of the received view, and a positive one, to introduce and support his model of scientific change. This model was suggested by but not inductively derived from the internalist historiographical case studies Kuhn read and wrote. The status of his model is, then, in need of analysis. I propose that it should be conceived of as an explanatory theory, constructed in accordance with Max Weber’s methodological principles. I claim the following virtues for this reading. First, it can accommodate the negative use of historical examples Sharrock and Read focus on. Second, it can explain why Kuhn treated objections to his model based on case studies that do not seem to follow the developmental pattern presented in Structure as requests for the refinement of his explanatory pattern and not as refutations, as his critics clearly intended. Third, this reading allows Kuhn to draw the distinction that Feyerabend insisted upon, between explanatory and normative accounts, albeit in his own way. Finally, the reading is at least somewhat textually supported by the fact that Kuhn acknowledged Weber’s influence on his thought: “I read a couple of Max Weber’s methodological essays . . . as well as some relevant chapters from Ernst Cassirer’s Essay on Man. What I found in them thrilled and encouraged me. These eminent authors were describing the social sciences in ways that closely paralleled the sort of description I hoped to provide for the physical sciences.”31 Kuhn’s model of scientific change, if seen in a Weberian light, can retain its connection to internal historiography, resist Feyerabend’s objection, and show why no actual scientific change should be expected to proceed exactly as scientific change is described in the model. Weber’s “Ideal-Type Concepts”

Weber’s basic methodological tool is the “ideal-type concept.” Its use is strictly heuristic. To understand complex social and historical phenomena, we must go beyond the mere enumeration of historical facts. A historical narrative requires the identification of the historically significant phenomena that are to be explained as well as the explanatory context that highlights some features as explanatorily relevant. According to both Weber and Kuhn, there can be no “presuppositionless” history. To select the relevant phenomena and construct its narratives, history must use a criterion of significance. It is much better to do this explicitly and through

ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY45

concepts that are precisely and unambiguously defined—a task that, in Weber’s view, only ideal-type concepts can accomplish.32 An ideal-type concept is a heuristic device for forming hypotheses. It is not a complete description of reality but rather an accentuation of certain of its elements. The process of developing an ideal-type concept involves the differentiation of observed features, integration of the most significant ones into a consistent “logical whole,” abstraction from concrete situations in which the features were initially observed, and application of the model for explanatory purposes, which will often take the form of a historical narrative. Thus, although ideal-type concepts must originate in careful observations of culture or history, there is no requirement that the ideal type should correspond to or have perfect instantiations in empirical events. In fact, it cannot: it is a logical construct, internally consistent and made up only of features deemed essential for the task at hand.33 As Weber was careful to stress, “In its conceptual purity, this mental construct cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality.” An ideal-type concept does not stand alone: it is presented “within a logical structure of the conceptual system” that includes other, relevantly related ideal-type concepts.34 This structure is the proposed explanatory theory in its schematic form, and ideal-type concepts are its elements. Full explanation will, of course, use this explanatory schema to select and arrange important features of the phenomena to be explained in a historical narrative. An example may be helpful here. Weber’s ideal-type concept of bureaucracy has the following features. Bureaucracies are goal-oriented organizations designed in accordance with rational principles of behavior, which promote the attainment of their goals. A bureaucracy is characterized by hierarchy of authority, highly specialized offices and division of labor, standardized procedures, promotion based on achievement, impersonal rules, efficiency, and some other characteristics of a similar level of generality. No bureaucracy exhibits all and only the features of Weber’s ideal type, yet a theory that relies on his ideal-type concept of bureaucracy can do much to explain the growth of bureaucratic power in the modern world. It would thus be no objection to Weber to point out that, for example, promotion in the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union depended more on political orthodoxy than on achievement or that some bureaucracies do not involve a specialized division of labor. Such incongruities between his theory and observations are explicitly predicted by the theory and tolerated as long

46 H ISTO RY

as its ideal-type concepts adequately explain, within a historical narrative, the features of the world that the inquirers in question find significant. Significance is in fact the criterion for the selection of the essential features of an ideal-type concept. Weber recognized that for any set of historical phenomena a number of different ideal-type concepts can be proposed as explanatory devices. Each may highlight different elements of a complex set of empirical phenomena and deem them significant. Empirical evidence alone will not help us choose between rival explanatory theories: no ideal type can be observed in empirical reality in its pure form, and each selects some features of reality at the expense of others. In Kuhnian terms, then, rival explanatory structures are underdetermined by facts and possibly incommensurable. Weber’s response to the problem of choice between rival explanatory theories was pragmatic and thus ultimately pluralistic: historical research can be conducted from many points of view, with different background assumptions and many different explanatory interests. The significance of a feature—and thus of the explanation itself— is context dependent, where the context is shaped by the historical situation one seeks to explain, by one’s background knowledge, and especially by one’s main explanatory interest. An ideal-type concept is always used comparatively. When the empirical situation is compared to the ideal type, both the similarities and the differences are explanatorily significant. Similarities reveal the expected structure of historical phenomena and thus explain them; differences show in which respects the phenomena remain unexplained by the selected ideal-type concept and so require additional explanation. Thus, the idealtype concept’s failure to explain certain phenomena is actually a useful result, for it guides the framing of further explanatory requests and proposals. “If it [the ideal-type concept] leads to this result, it fulfills its logical purpose, even though, in doing so, it demonstrates its divergence from reality.”35 Of course, the evaluation of an ideal-type concept as explanatorily successful or not must also be undertaken on a pragmatic basis: the evaluation will depend in some measure on our prior explanatory interest in some particular features of reality. Weber pointed out an important danger in the use of the ideal-type concepts. In introducing an ideal-type concept for the purposes of explanation, the historian must justify the claim that it is abstracted from reality rather than plucked out of thin air. To do this, he will use “concrete

ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY47

illustrative material drawn from empirical-historical reality”—real historical phenomena that are to be compared to the ideal-type concept.36 This mode of presentation can be confusing, however. It may appear that the historian claims that in these illustrative cases the ideal type is perfectly realized in reality, which it cannot be. More dangerously yet, it may appear that the historian selects supportive evidence for his theoretical construct, treating the construct as if it were an empirical generalization. The difficulties are not confined to the reader’s side: the historian may “mix theory with history and indeed confuse them with each other.” This is especially likely to happen when the object of study is a diachronic entity. The series of ideal-type structures, appropriately used for comparison with different developmental stages of the diachronic entity, may appear “as an historical sequence unrolling with the necessity of law”: “The logical classification of analytical concepts on the one hand and the empirical arrangements of the events thus conceptualized in space, time, and causal relationship, on the other, appear to be so bound up together that there is an almost irresistible temptation to do violence to reality in order to prove the real validity of the construct.”37 Thus, Weber cautioned both against the naive empiricist belief in the historical phenomena as an unproblematic “given” and against speculative theory building that confuses its own explanatory tools with reality. I next argue that Kuhn intended to do the same, although he perhaps did not always succeed. Structure as a Weberian Explanatory Model

We can now see a number of very close parallels between Kuhn’s project in Structure and Weber’s use of ideal-type concepts as heuristic explanatory devices. I propose that we treat paradigm, normal science, crisis, scientific revolution, and other key terms in Structure as denoting Weberian ideal-type concepts, which Kuhn used for explanatory purposes in the positive aspect of his project. Without detailed historical research, the articulation of an ideal-type concept is impossible. One must be familiar with the phenomena one seeks to explain in order to accentuate the features important for their explanation. However, the ideal-type concept is neither an empirical generalization from all of the observed features that for this reason a single counterexample may refute nor something that can ever be found realized in its pure form. That is, Kuhn’s explanatory concepts

48H ISTO RY

in Structure are neither derived from nor imposed upon the history of science. Grounded is perhaps the word that best captures the relation that Kuhn’s model of scientific development bears to the history of science. Kuhn’s selection of ideal-type concepts is a reflection of his explanatory interest: he wanted to understand why and how science develops and what the changes in the course of that development imply from a philosophical point of view. To do that, he had to be deeply involved with the history of science, but to construct his model he had to abstract only some features of the observed historical reality. To get a better sense of Kuhn’s model as a Weberian explanatory theory, let us consider his notion of a scientific revolution as an ideal-type concept. The concept he employs is internally consistent and empirically grounded by reference to major, systematic disciplinary changes such as the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. Incommensurability between rival paradigms is central to Kuhn’s understanding of scientific revolutions. However, as his post-Structure work demonstrates, Kuhn is very much aware that scientific change is often anything but swiftly and decisively brought about. It often happens over a long period of time; it accelerates and slows down; and it creates changing patterns of partial communication among scientists: thus, incommensurability, like scientific change itself, comes in degrees. Nevertheless, Kuhn’s idea of revolution is a useful ideal-type concept that accentuates incommensurability in taking it to be a highly relevant feature for our understanding of scientific change: its presence explains disagreements among scientists as reasonable, as I stress in part 2 of this book. Similar applications of Weber’s theory can be provided for other key terms in Kuhn’s model. For our present purposes, it is important to note that the value of the whole model must be assessed on three distinct levels. First, the explanatory schema must consist of logically consistent idealtype concepts. Second, the schema—Kuhn’s two-phase model—has to capture the general pattern of scientific change without entering into details of particular historical episodes. Finally, these episodes have to be explained through historical narratives, so constructed that the ideal-type concepts such as “revolution,” “crisis,” and “normal science” illuminate and help organize the events into meaningful causal series. This does not mean that the ideal-type concepts have to be explicitly employed in the narratives. For example, neither of Kuhn’s two major studies in the history of

ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY49

science—The Copernican Revolution and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity—relies on his model from Structure, yet both studies reveal incommensurabilities articulated in that model. We can now see that the objections advanced by Feyerabend and Bird miss their mark precisely because they misidentify the nature of Kuhn’s project. Against Feyerabend, it can be said that the ideal-type concept of so-called normal science, which he took to be a hidden—and pernicious— normative requirement for science, is nothing of the sort: it is a logically consistent set of features that actual scientific communities exhibit only in some and not always the same respects. Feyerabend could accept the heuristic value of “normal science” as an ideal-type concept for explaining scientific change and still think that, comparatively speaking, periods of revolutionary science are much more intellectually exciting. The concept has no normative implications with which this evaluation would be in tension. Weber is very clear in saying that an ideal-type concept is ideal only in a “strictly logical” sense: it has no evaluative implications. “There are ideal types of brothels as well as of religions; there are also ideal types of those kinds of brothels which are technically ‘expedient’ from the point of view of police ethics as well as those of which the exact opposite is the case.”38 According to Weber, value judgments, such as Feyerabend’s, depend on the subjective point of view; as long as they do not intrude into the explanation proper, they have an important role to play in the social domain. Although it is probably true that Kuhn’s intellectual taste did not run parallel to Feyerabend’s and that he regarded normal science as immensely cognitively exciting, his ideal-type explanation was not dependent on his preferences. There is, however, a normative aspect of Kuhn’s model of scientific change. To see what it is, we should carefully distinguish between the logical status of Kuhn’s model and the philosophical use to which he puts it. If I am right in analyzing the logical structure of his model in terms of Weberian ideal types, then neither “normal science” nor any of Kuhn’s other central concepts should be taken to have normative, behavior-guiding features in any absolute sense. Rather, the normative force of his model is strictly hypothetical. Kuhn thinks that his model should be used to explain the enormous cognitive success of science; to say that it does so adequately is in itself not a normative claim, but it may have normative implications. If this set of ideal-type concepts correctly accentuates the features of

5 0 H ISTO RY

scientific reasoning and practice that are causally responsible for the success of science, and if we find it desirable that science should continue to flourish, then it is also desirable that future scientific developments should follow a course similar to the general pattern given by the explanatory model, with characteristic phases such as “normal science” and “revolution.” Kuhn is very careful to note that this desirability is contingent: it holds unless scientists develop a different way of producing equally impressive cognitive results and, implicitly, only as long as we continue to value science as our best cognitive practice.39 It is this last point that concerns Feyerabend, especially in his later, post-Popperian work.40 He sees the exalted position that science enjoys in our society as rationally unjustified and politically harmful. In his view, the dominant “ideology of science” marginalizes or obliterates rich rival traditions of thought, such as myth, religion, and traditional medicine. Moreover, science’s privileged social position—reflected in access to funds, in education, and in policy making—encourages complacency and dogmatism among scientists. If scientists were required to argue for the intellectual credentials of their research projects against attractive rivals, they would produce more interesting and better-supported results. Feyerabend thus passionately advocates for a “separation of science and state” in which all kinds of ideas would compete for acceptance and funding. This would stimulate and encourage original scientific research while at the same time allowing many different cognitive practices to flourish.41 Kuhn, in contrast, unquestionably considers science to be our best cognitive practice and thinks that it should have even more social power than it has now. This is a major difference between him and Feyerabend, which is related to their disagreement about the proper focus of the philosophy of science. Feyerabend is deeply interested in the philosophical examination of external aspects of science: in science’s role in society as a whole and in its ties to political power. Kuhn pays almost no attention to these issues. He assumes a relatively firm boundary between science and society and then focuses on internal aspects of scientific reasoning and practice. It is in this internal context that Kuhn places the ideal-type concept of normal science with all the dogmatism that such a stable research tradition entails. Feyerabend need not and in fact does not deny that such dogmatism exists within traditions.42 What he objects to is that, in his view, Kuhn wishes to recommend dogmatism as the best way of producing knowledge. As we have seen, this is a misunderstanding. Kuhn thinks that periods of normal

ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY51

science have thus far been immensely useful in creating the context for solving increasingly difficult, intricate technical problems in science. But he also thinks that revolutionary discontinuities have been cognitively fruitful, and he allows for the possibility that a different pattern of development may replace the one uncovered by his historical research. Similarly, if we look at Kuhn’s model through the Weberian lens that I have proposed, we will be able to rescue Bird’s valuable insights from the context of his largely unsuccessful objections. His examples of scientific changes that do not appear to be illuminated by Kuhn’s ideal-type concepts can now be used as a source of enrichment for Kuhn’s model. We might develop different ideal-type concepts that highlight the most salient features of such cases.43 The need to do this, however, does not call into question the use of the terms paradigm and revolution in those explanations in which these ideal-type concepts work well. Taking Kuhn’s account not as a set of statements with universal scope but as a set of Weberian explanatory tools will help us see both the usefulness of their employment in the situations in which they work well and the limits of their application. Kuhn was regrettably not explicit about the logical status of the model presented in Structure, which led to various misunderstandings of his view. It is also possible that, in Structure at least, he did not heed Weber’s cautionary advice and yielded to the temptation “to do violence to reality in order to prove the real validity of the construct.” Instead of treating the central concepts of his model as Weberian ideal-type concepts, he sometimes wrote as if his general model of scientific change ought to fit at least some episodes in the history of science exactly. But even if this is a fair assessment of some passages in Structure, Kuhn’s subsequent writings document his consistent efforts to refine the model in response to persuasive case studies that it could not initially explain. For example, his late writings on scientific change introduce a new idea—a new ideal-type concept, I would say—designed to explain the increased number of specialized fields that emerge after a revolution.44 Nothing in his theory prohibits further refinements. Philosophy and History in Kuhn’s Model

Philosophical purists may still wonder whether a Weberian explanatory structure deserves to be called a philosophical explanation. To a certain extent, there will always be room for disagreements concerning the status

52H ISTO RY

of methodological proposals and abstract explanatory structures. On the one hand, they are part of the field for which they were developed and to which they are to apply—in this case, part of the history of science. On the other hand, their structure and logical status, together with their claim to explanatory success, qualify them as philosophical constructs. However that may be, the case for the philosophical nature of Kuhn’s positive project in Structure does not rest exclusively on the classification of ideal-type constructs as philosophical models. Kuhn’s work contains a number of philosophical claims concerning the nature and epistemic status of observation, the relation of observation to theory, the criteria for theory choice, and the incommensurability thesis. These claims play important roles in Kuhn’s philosophical understanding of scientific rationality. The history of science is not just the source of inspiration for his philosophical views: it also affects their content and scope in at least two ways. First, it provides the grounding for Kuhn’s philosophical ideas and for his model of scientific change. In that sense, his philosophy is deeply historicist. Second, as Paul Hoyningen-Huene points out, the history of science constrains “the realm of questions that can, in a sociological or philosophical perspective, be sensibly asked with respect to science.”45 For example, most methodological questions that proponents of the received view asked cannot be seen as “sensible,” given that they assume the existence of a timeless, universal scientific method and that they conceptualize scientific progress as the cumulative, goal-directed growth of knowledge. Hermeneutic historiography shows such assumptions to be unwarranted and thus shapes the scope of the philosophy of science as well as the nature of the projects undertaken within it. The most important way in which Kuhn’s project is philosophical is by being metaphilosophical in nature: it aims to specify the right relationship between the history of science and the philosophy of science and to exemplify that relationship. In Structure and until the 1990s, Kuhn took it to be desirable that the two fields should be intertwined, shaping one another. The relevance criterion for individuating significant phenomena and periods in the history of science comes from the explanatory interest of the philosophy of science, which favors cognitive explanatory categories; historiography thus undertakes research that results in historical narratives. These narratives constrain the questions that philosophers may legitimately ask about science. Philosophy articulates a general model for

ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY53

the explanation of the historical narratives themselves and pursues in its own domain philosophical questions concerning meaning, communication, rationality, knowledge, and reality that the explanatory theory raises. Kuhn’s philosophy of science is thus a deeply historical philosophy of science, but no less philosophical for that reason.

3 “MUCKRAKING” IN HISTORY

T H E I NTERPRETIVE PROBL EM OF KU HN ’S “FIRST PRINCIPL ES”

Kuhn became famous early in his career for arguing that the history and the philosophy of science should interpenetrate one another if either is to be a sound and fruitful discipline. In his later writings, however, we find some surprising passages that would appear to deny the importance of the history of science for the philosophy of science. In his Rothschild Lecture, given at Harvard University in 1991,1 Kuhn acknowledged his influence on the emergence of the new “historical philosophy of science” but dissociated himself from it. Some commentators took this to mean that Kuhn had equally repudiated his earlier historicist self. However, as I argue later in this chapter, Kuhn’s expression is misleading: he does not object to historically informed philosophy of science but only to some particular schools of the historical sociology of science. In speaking of “historical philosophy of science,” Kuhn was referring to the strong program in the sociology of science and to much of the work then being done within the science studies.2 To avoid confusion with Kuhn’s position, which I take to be at once historical and philosophical, I refer to his new rivals as the sociological school. In the historically oriented climate that now prevails, the purple passages in Kuhn’s corpus are no longer those passages in Structure in which

“M U CK RAK ING” IN H ISTO RY55

he seems to say that scientists working under mutually incommensurable paradigms “live in different worlds.” Rather, the purple passages to a contemporary eye are passages such as the following: Given what I shall call the historical perspective, one can reach many of the central conclusions we drew with scarcely a glance at the historical record itself.3 Many of the most central conclusions we drew from the historical record can be derived instead from first principles. Approaching them in that way reduces their apparent contingency, making them harder to dismiss as a product of muckraking investigation by those hostile to science.4

The interpretation of Kuhn’s “first principles” in the context of his philosophy of science is difficult primarily because he invokes them rarely and without a detailed explanation and secondarily because they seem prima facie to contradict his previous claims about the indispensability of the history of science for a viable philosophy of science. An analysis of the role of first principles in Kuhn’s mature thought is nevertheless needed if we are to understand his considered metaphilosophical position concerning the proper relationship between the history and the philosophy of science. In this chapter, I first briefly present some of the more common— and typically dismissive—attitudes that interpreters have toward Kuhn’s first principles. I also examine one interpretation that takes them seriously and argue that this interpretation is unsatisfactory. I then offer my own analysis of the nature and role of first principles in Kuhn’s later writings and argue that their employment resulted in a significant shift in his metaphilosophical position. Common Interpretive Attitudes

Most interpreters have found Kuhn’s appeal to first principles unfortunate and have dismissed it without analysis. For example, Paul HoyningenHuene does not discuss it in his otherwise comprehensive and detailed book Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions.5 Alexander Bird mentions that Kuhn sought to reach the conclusions previously derived from the history of science “in a Kantian manner, from first principles,” and immediately

5 6 H ISTO RY

concludes, “This was Kuhn’s wrong turning,” without explaining the nature and role of first principles in Kuhn’s later philosophy.6 Hanne Andersen outlines the interpretive problem first principles present but concludes that their role and nature cannot be reconstructed on the basis of Kuhn’s scant remarks: “Just what the nature of these ‘first principles’ would be remained an unsolved problem in Kuhn’s philosophy of science.”7 Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read diagnose Kuhn’s later reliance on first principles as an “overreaction” against misreadings of his work promulgated by sociologists of science and as a consequence of Kuhn’s desire to be taken seriously as a philosopher “by philosophers like [Dudley] Shapere, [Hilary] Putnam, [Karl] Popper and [W.  V.  O.] Quine.”8 Sharrock and Read thus think that Kuhn’s position on the proper relationship between the history and the philosophy of science had changed over the years, but their diagnosis does not explain why Kuhn felt that the change was needed. After all, “misreadings” can be exposed as such, and modifying one’s position in response to them is both self-defeating and unlikely to prevent further misunderstandings. In contrast to Sharrock and Read, I argue that Kuhn felt forced to change his metaphilosophical position precisely because the new sociology of science correctly understood some of the implications of his initial position. Sharrock and Read’s second explanatory factor fares no better than the first: Kuhn’s desire to be accepted as an equal by Popper, Shapere, Quine, Putnam, and other analytic philosophers does not make his introduction of first principles any more palatable. Necessary principles, knowable a priori, play no role in the philosophical projects of any of the philosophers Sharrock and Read name. Moreover, Quine forcefully and explicitly rejects the epistemic availability and philosophical fruitfulness of such principles. I argue next that Kuhn’s reference to first principles was in fact shorthand for the philosophical position he needed to develop against the relativism and “muckraking” in history to be found in the new sociology of science. Kindi’s Interpretation

Although most commentators on Kuhn’s work were dismayed by what they saw as Kuhn’s replacement of careful historical findings with insufficiently elucidated first principles, there are exceptions. Vasso Kindi argues that Kuhn’s advertence to first principles makes explicit the project he had

“M U C K RAK ING” IN H ISTO RY57

consistently pursued since Structure, which is, in her view, strictly philosophical and not historiographical in nature. Her contention is that “his project is a transcendental one, offering the conditions of possibility of science.” She writes: “Kuhn is interested in investigating the connections between the concepts that comprise the phenomenon we call science. These connections are not to be construed as simply causal but as logical and in that sense necessary and a priori. His whole model can then be taken as an articulation of these kinds of connections.”9 On her reading, normal science, crisis, and revolution are necessary stages in the development of science, which can be deduced a priori without any substantive historical research or interpretation. In the same vein, she thinks that the claim that two successive paradigms separated by a revolution are incommensurable cannot be either supported or refuted by a close examination of historical record: the claim is necessarily true and knowable a priori. Kuhn’s historiographical work was, in Kindi’s view, causally relevant for the articulation of his model of science, but the history of science was not needed for the justification of the model. Kuhn’s transcendental arguments show that science must develop in the manner specified by his model: “The study of historical facts wasn’t at all necessary. It may have helped genetically, but logically it wasn’t needed at all. They could reach the same conclusions if they just considered science from a historical perspective, which requires to look at things as developing over time. Given this perspective, the static image of science would be immediately replaced by a dynamic one. All the rest, i.e. the crucial parts of the model, would then follow.” In Kindi’s interpretation, the “historical perspective” does not require familiarity with any hermeneutically sound and detailed historiographical narrative of the development of science. On the contrary, the history of science, in her view, plays no role in Kuhn’s philosophical project. His model is derived from first principles, and the derivation is transcendentally justified. Thus, Kindi argues, Kuhn’s model cannot be challenged by historical evidence, irrespective of its magnitude and significance.10 Kuhn’s frequent use of historical case studies should be seen, Kindi argues, as his use of a series of tools for “dislodging” the dominant image of science developed by the received view.11 Different examples from the history of science show that the received view is mistaken in being committed to the meaning invariance of observational terms and to cumulative, goal-directed conceptions of scientific progress. But, beyond that,

5 8H ISTO RY

history plays no role in the articulation or support of Kuhn’s own model of scientific development. Kindi is explicit on this point: “Kuhn’s philosophical model does not rely on history.”12 There are several serious problems with Kindi’s interpretation. First, she takes Kuhn’s introduction of first principles to be an important element of evidence for the transcendental nature of his project but offers no analysis of what exactly the content of these first principles amounts to. Second, she does not even sketch, let alone reconstruct premise by premise, the actual transcendental argument that she attributes to Kuhn. In the absence of the argument itself, we cannot assess either its validity or its soundness, for we literally do not know what the argument is supposed to be. All Kindi gives us is what she sees as the starting point of Kuhn’s purported transcendental argument—a diachronic understanding of “science”—and the conclusion, which is his well-known model presented in Structure. As I argue in a moment, even her starting point is extremely problematic since it is either incapable of leading to Kuhn’s conclusion or already deeply informed by the detailed historiographical narratives that Kindi presents as irrelevant for Kuhn’s model. The mere conceptual truth that every developmental process requires something in the developing object to change and something else to remain the same cannot constitute a transcendental argument, as Kindi herself recognizes. It is also too meager to yield Kuhn’s particular model of scientific change through normal science, crisis, and revolution. To dispel this impression of triviality, Kindi adds that the starting point of the argument should not be just “science” but “science as we know it.”13 In her view, starting from this one observation of actual science, we should be able to derive the necessary features for such a practice to exist. In Kindi’s view, Kuhn was the only philosopher of science who correctly made this derivation, proposing his model of scientific change as the inevitable conclusion of his analysis of “science.” This amendment does not help much. “Science as we know it”—the starting point of Kindi’s imagined transcendental argument—brings either too little or too much into the argument. If we do not specify what precisely one must know if one “knows science,” the Kuhnian model cannot be derived because there are many mutually incompatible ways of understanding science as developing through time. For example, the proponents of the received view thought that science changes as scientific

“MUCKRAKING” IN HISTORY59

theories supplant one another; science nevertheless remains the same activity because its goal and the scientific method remain the same. “Science as we know it,” understood in this way, brings too little into the argument to allow us to derive the specifically Kuhnian conclusions. If, however, we are to take “science as we know it” to mean “science as Kuhn but not the proponents of the received view knew it,” then the argument cannot even get off the ground without the substantive historical commitments that distinguished Kuhn’s understanding of science from others then circulating. Detailed, historiographically very rich and hermeneutically sound narratives will then become indispensable for the very first step of the argument Kindi attributes to Kuhn, contrary to what she claims. Thus, however the argument proceeds from that point on, its conclusion will not be transcendental: any proper historical narrative that gives us an understanding of science is clearly a narrative about contingent matters of fact not knowable a priori. Part of Kindi’s philosophical motivation for reconstructing Kuhn as a transcendental philosopher of science is her desire to secure his model from “falsification” by means of historical counterexamples of the sort Alexander Bird advances: “Kuhn clearly lays emphasis on first principles to avoid the problems he would face had he given prominence to the empirical aspect of his work,” Kindi states. “This move puts him ‘safely’ on the philosopher’s side. He avoids contingency and all the criticism mentioned above (underdetermination, self-refutation, limited empirical basis).”14 Unfortunately, her reading makes Kuhn’s position even more vulnerable to objections than a reading that treats his model as an empirical generalization. Whereas empirical generalizations are vulnerable to actual historical counterexamples, modal claims about the necessity of a particular pattern of scientific development are vulnerable not only to actual counterexamples but also to mere possibilities.15 If Kuhn were really making a transcendental claim, any logically coherent view of scientific development would have refuted him. Such views, as is well known, are abundant. Science could have developed inductively or through Popperian conjectures and refutations; it could have grown cumulatively, without revolutions as essentially destructive and restructuring events; or it could have developed without distinct periods of normal science, crisis, and revolutions, perhaps by exhibiting at all times the dynamic interplay between tenacity and proliferation, as Feyerabend claims. The evaluation of rival

6 0 H ISTO RY

philosophies of science is a complex and intricate matter, in which metamethodological principles have to be explicated and defended and then used in comparative evaluation. On Kindi’s reading—contrary to her intentions—Kuhn’s philosophy of science would appear refuted at its birth by the mere coherence of the views that it sought to supplant. In fact, however, Kuhn’s position is much better grounded and more powerfully fortified than Kindi’s transcendental reading allows. In addition to being philosophically problematic, Kindi’s reconstruction of Kuhn’s project is also interpretively untenable. Her claim that the history of science “may have helped genetically, but logically it wasn’t needed at all” for the formulation and defense of Kuhn’s model of scientific change reintroduces the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification into a philosophy of science founded on the rejection of this distinction. Kuhn thus emerges as a thinker ultimately unconcerned with actual scientific practice and exclusively focused on concepts and their relations. This portrayal depicts him as uncomfortably close to having the same preoccupations as some early proponents of the received view, which he justifiably rejected. Kuhn explicitly aimed to offer a philosophy of science that will “emerge from the historical record” of science.16 To reconstruct his view as ultimately unconcerned throughout his career with the real history of science is to do violence to his deepest intellectual commitments. Although I fully reject Kindi’s reconstruction of Kuhn’s positive project, I do find it philosophically useful for identifying some metaphilosophical commitments that stand in the way of a correct appraisal of Kuhn’s work. On the one hand, Kindi finds Kuhn’s thought philosophically stimulating and fertile, and so she is motivated to offer a sympathetic reading of his texts. On the other hand, she seems to think that Kuhn’s historically grounded model of scientific change both faces serious empirical problems and disqualifies him as a philosopher. Her solution is to deny the importance of the history of science for Kuhn’s philosophy and to reconstruct him as a philosopher exclusively interested in a transcendental project. It is noteworthy that for all their disagreements about the exact nature of Kuhn’s project, Bird and Kindi agree on the metaphilosophical level to the following extent: a project can be either philosophical or historical, but not both. In other respects, however, Bird’s and Kindi’s metaphilosophical views could not be more different. What Bird values most in Kuhn’s work

“M U CK RAK ING” IN H ISTO RY61

is what he calls Kuhn’s naturalizing tendency, which Bird endorses as his own philosophical project. Kindi completely ignores this tendency. In her metaphilosophy, naturalism would not qualify Kuhn as a philosopher. Bird allows that historical projects can have philosophical relevance, and Kindi accepts that philosophy needs to understand that a diachronic object of inquiry, such as science, develops and changes through time, but this is all. Neither takes Kuhn’s problematization of historiography as an essential aspect of his philosophy, and hence they both miss the rich metaphilosophical considerations that are at the heart of his philosophical thinking.

“MUCK RA K IN G” IN HISTORY A N D “F IRST PRIN CIPL E S”

Let me now turn to my own interpretation of Kuhn’s first principles. My strategy is this: rather than assume what “first principles” must stand for and how they relate to Kuhn’s earlier work, I start by contextualizing them within the overall argumentative structure of the paper in which they most prominently figure. We shall see that historiographical worries are not too far away and that they carry serious philosophical implications. On my reading, the main purpose of Kuhn’s Rothschild Lecture was to provide a philosophical justification for rejecting the new image of science developed through the historiographical research of the new sociology of science. That image brought along with it a serious threat of relativism that Kuhn simply found unacceptable. My conclusion is that Kuhn’s expression “first principles” was intended to mark the status of his response to this threat as a philosophical response rather than a historiographical or a sociological one. In this section, I first explain the nature of the challenge presented by the historiographical and philosophical aspects of the new sociology of science and support the claim that Kuhn had excellent reasons—given his understanding of the challenge—to offer an exclusively philosophical response to it.17 I then do no more than identify the type of the philosophical response that he gives and explain the role that first principles play in it. Finally, I argue not only that Kuhn’s response was made possible by his

6 2H ISTO RY

previous understanding of the interdependency between the history and the philosophy of science but also that this response generated a significant shift in his metaphilosophical position concerning the relationship between the two disciplines. The Challenge

We have seen that Kuhn’s earlier metaphilosophical position required a deep interdependence between the history of science and the philosophy of science. The Weberian model of scientific change that Kuhn presented was supported simultaneously by its explanatory value in accounting for the episodes in the history of science that the internal historiography revealed and by Kuhn’s philosophical theses of meaning holism, underdetermination, and incommensurability. Thus, the model was capable of replacing the image of science as portrayed by presentist historiography and the received view. However, the historiographical and philosophical underpinnings of his model had effects that Kuhn did not intend: they were adopted by the new sociology of science, whose proponents were interested in offering a model of scientific development substantially different from Kuhn’s. The first part of Kuhn’s lecture was thus devoted to a detailed explanation of the manner in which both his historiographical methodology and his philosophical views were appropriated by the sociological school and developed in a direction that he neither anticipated nor approved. His dissatisfaction is unmistakable: I am among those who have found the claims of the strong program absurd: an example of deconstruction gone mad. And the more qualified sociological and historical formulations that currently strive to replace it are, in my view, scarcely more satisfactory. These newer formulations freely acknowledge that observations of nature do play a role in scientific development. But they remain almost totally uninformative about that role—about the way, that is, in which nature enters the negotiations that produce beliefs about it.18

The central thesis of the strong program is the so-called symmetry postulate: “All beliefs are on a par with one another with respect to the causes of their credibility.”19 Evaluating a belief as true, false, rational, or irrational

“M U CK RAK ING” IN H ISTO RY63

does nothing to explain why it was accepted or rejected; rather, all explanations of belief must be causal. The explanation should cite specific, local causes of the belief ’s credibility. In the work of the proponents of the strong program—as well as in the work of the sociological historiography they inspired—the causes invoked to explain scientific belief, discovery, methodology, theory choice, and so on tended to be almost exclusively psychological, social, and political. In Kuhn’s view, post-1970s sociology of science, although criticizing some of the assumptions of the strong program,20 only deepened its commitment to a narrow set of sociological explanatory categories. It portrayed scientists as motivated by personal interest and engaged in negotiations that result in the “construction” of scientific facts. The starting point was located in “biographical” individual differences between scientists,21 who were taken to be governed by personal and class interest. Negotiation among such self-interested agents was assumed to be closer to bargaining than to reasoning and persuasion, and its outcome was seen as determined by authority and political power.22 Such accounts left no room for the importance of empirical observations and experiment,23 nor did they make clear how a process of negotiation, dependent on individual contingencies, could result in justifiable conclusions about reality.24 In fact, in the sociological school’s view, science does not provide justifiable conclusions about reality. Most of the time, personal interests and preferences guide scientific research, and social prejudices shape the selection of scientific questions, evaluations, and conclusions. This view thus naturally leads to relativism, and the sociological school endorses it without qualms: science is just one system of belief among many, neither better nor worse than any other struggle for power and with no greater cognitive authority than myth or magic. Although Kuhn specifically identified the strong program as one of his targets, he thought that the main ideas that inspired it were widely shared and pernicious. However, his criticism does not extend to all work in the history, the sociology, or the philosophy of science that rests on the observation that science is a social activity and therefore neither insulated from political forces within the society in which it thrives nor immune to the values, prejudices, and biases of its day and age. We should distinguish here between at least three different positions, all of which accept the social and political embeddedness of science. For some, science is unavoidably political and thus not rational. For others, prejudices and biases exist in

6 4H ISTO RY

science, but they can and should be removed or diminished through systematic exposure and criticism; this aim is considered both reachable and desirable. Finally, there are those who claim that the existence of political values in scientific reasoning and choice is not incompatible with the objectivity and the rationality of science. Kuhn’s position is hostile to the first group, largely indifferent to the concerns of the second, and close in spirit to the third. The proponents and followers of the strong program offered, in Kuhn’s view, an unacceptable image of science, even worse than the image painted by the received view. His insistence on hermeneutic historiography against the presentist historiography of the received view was motivated by a desire to understand all past scientific reasoning as rational. However, the sociological historiography was as opposed to anachronism as Kuhn’s own historiography: it was equally dedicated to the hermeneutic approach to original texts and as scrupulous in respecting the symmetry principle in explanation of beliefs and choices of past scientists, whether their views ultimately emerged as victorious or not. By choosing different explanatory categories—personal and political instead of strictly cognitive—the historians of the sociological school concluded that no scientific reasoning could legitimately be represented as primarily responsive to evidence and argument. Kuhn could not fault the sociological school for the quality of its historiographical methodology. Asked about the historical scholarship of the strong program and its descendants, Kuhn replied: “The scholarship is often damned good! You and I have talked about Leviathan and the Air Pump, in which I think the scholarship is very good, and I think it’s quite a fascinating book. It upsets all hell out of me that they [the authors] can’t understand what everybody now learns in high school, or even elementary school about the theory of the barometer. . . . They talk basically about the ‘emptiness’ of the dialogues between Hobbes and Boyle, and they get it all very badly wrong.”25 To phrase Kuhn’s predicament in a way familiar from his own philosophy, explanatory models of scientific development are underdetermined by the principles of hermeneutic historiography, and so these principles cannot be of any help against rival, equally hermeneutically sound explanatory models. Weberian methodology is similarly incapable of defending the integrity of cognitive explanatory categories against the encroachment of sociological ones, and so it is powerless against the resulting relativism. As we have seen, it is explicitly pluralistic in allowing

“M U C K RAK ING” IN H ISTO RY65

for different legitimate explanations of the same empirical phenomena. Thus, Kuhn was no longer able to see his cognitivist philosophy of science as naturally flowing from serious historiography. Different kinds of philosophies of science could legitimately claim to do so. What Kuhn wanted was a principled reason sufficient to show that only a cognitive internal historiography can provide the basis for a philosophical understanding of science. Not finding such a reason among either historiographical or sociological methodological principles, he concluded that only a wellarticulated philosophical position would enable him not to dispense with historiography altogether but to select the right one. Unfortunately for Kuhn, the philosophical views that he had explicitly formulated in Structure were equally appropriated by the sociological school and pressed into the service of that school’s arguments for relativism. For example, by insisting that neither logic nor empirical evidence determines the choice between rival hypotheses or paradigms, Kuhn thought that he was only making room for understanding past scientific disagreements as disagreements between rational people, who legitimately interpret evidence and apply scientific values in different ways. The emergence of the sociological school demonstrated to Kuhn that he had left a space open for factors other than logic or evidence to determine the choice. The sociological school argued that in the absence of compelling evidence, scientific choice must be explained as determined by personal idiosyncrasies, ambitions, and interests. Under the explanatory model of the sociological school, the history of ideas in general and the history of science in particular became essentially similar to histories of the struggle for political dominance. Kuhn correctly took this to imply a skeptical conclusion about the cognitive authority of science. We can hear in his response to this threat an echo of many an enemy of skepticism: “The strong program and its descendants have repeatedly been dismissed as uncontrolled expressions of hostility to authority in general and science in particular. For some years I reacted somewhat that way myself. But I now think that easy evaluation ignores a real philosophical challenge. There’s a continuous line (or continuous slippery-slope) from the inescapable initial observations that underlie microsociological studies to their still entirely unacceptable conclusions.”26 It is not clear what exactly Kuhn means here by “inescapable initial observations.” He is probably not referring to empirical observations that “microsociologists” make in the laboratory

6 6 H ISTO RY

since he does not believe that there is anything inescapable about the collection, precise description, and narrative arrangement of any set of facts. I suppose that he had in mind here his own views: first, that scientific paradigms are incommensurable and, second, that facts and theories are interdependent. Kuhn held that both of these claims naturally emerge from a careful study of the history of science; these claims the sociological school also endorsed. One may wonder whether Kuhn should have seen any observational result or aspect of theorizing as inescapable, given his views about incommensurability and underdetermination. I propose that we treat the expression “inescapable initial observations” as a rhetorical exaggeration. Kuhn probably meant that some observations of historical facts, of aspects of a practice, and of patterns in the development of science are natural and striking. For the purposes at hand, it is enough to see that he shared the sociological school’s starting points but not its conclusions. The “slippery-slope” Kuhn refers to is the road from such philosophical theses and an understanding of scientific development as contingent, discontinuous, and reliant on the unforced judgment of scientific communities to the relativism of the strong program. Because both Kuhn’s historiographical method and his philosophical theses were appropriated by the sociological school, with whose conclusions Kuhn could never reconcile himself, he was left without obvious resources to reject the sociological image of science as inadequate. He was thus moved to offer a new philosophical understanding of knowledge, truth, reality, scientific rationality, and scientific progress in the hope that these philosophical reconceptualizations would expose the whole project of the sociology of science as based on unwarranted assumptions and thus simply wrong. Kuhn’s Response

Kuhn provided no more than a sketch of the philosophical position he thought capable of withstanding the threat of relativism while preserving the central features of his historically sensitive philosophy of science.27 I develop and fill in Kuhn’s mature view in part 2. For now, his sketch serves well enough to show three important things. First, it gives us a sense of the general direction in which Kuhn wanted to go in developing his post-Structure philosophy. I present its contours in the remainder of

“M U CK RAK ING” IN H ISTO RY67

this section and provide a more detailed reconstruction of some of its aspects in the chapters that follow. Second, by using the phrase “first principles,” Kuhn adverted to the status of these theories as philosophical. Finally, neither the content nor the status of his philosophical views threatened the relevance of the history of science for a sound philosophy of science, although Kuhn’s considered metaphilosophical position accords unquestionable primacy to philosophy. As we have seen, Kuhn had to show that the sociological school was advancing an unacceptable image of science, but his position had to be guarded. If he were to invoke an absolute canon of scientific rationality or to justify the cognitive authority of science by appealing to the cumulative growth of knowledge, he would fall back into the received view’s position. His early philosophy encouraged rather than blocked relativist conclusions. He was thus motivated to turn with greater focus and depth to his previously implicit metaphysical and epistemological views in an attempt to justify his principled resistance to relativism. Kuhn’s first move in this project was diagnostic. Following Marcello Pera, Kuhn characterized the relativism of the sociological school as stemming from an imperfect break with the received view’s understanding of knowledge: The authors of microsociological studies are, he [Pera] suggests, taking the traditional view of scientific knowledge too much for granted. They seem, that is, to feel that traditional philosophy of science was correct in its understanding of what knowledge must be. Facts must come first, and inescapable conclusions, at least about probabilities, must be based upon them. If science doesn’t produce knowledge in that sense, they conclude, it cannot be producing knowledge at all. It is possible, however, that the tradition was wrong not simply about the methods by which knowledge was obtained, but also about the nature of knowledge itself.28

Thus, the first step of Kuhn’s response to the sociological school consisted in his claim that this school should be seen not as a natural extension of his own thought but as an unreflective endorsement of the received view’s understanding of knowledge and its related concepts, such as truth, reality, scientific rationality, justification, and progress. His second step then consisted in reconceptualizing these crucial notions, which led to a fuller

6 8 H ISTO RY

articulation of his general epistemology, which I discuss at greater length in part 2. For now, let us take a somewhat closer look at Kuhn’s diagnostic and reconstructive moves, as sketched in his Rothschild Lecture. First, on Kuhn’s analysis, both the proponents of the received view and the members of the sociological school assumed that the authority of scientific knowledge must rest on the following two “pillars”: 1. The belief that facts are “given,” epistemically secure, intersubjectively available, and independent of the theory for which they serve as evidence 2. The belief that science produces “truths, probable truths, or approximations to the truth about a mind-and-culture-independent world”29

An understanding of “knowledge” as a kind of fit between our beliefs and the mind-independent facts leads to relativism when the existence or epistemic availability of such facts is denied, as it is in the sociological school. Kuhn believed that to avoid relativism and reject the claim that there are theory-independent, epistemically secure facts, we need a novel understanding of scientific knowledge. We cannot see it as an ever closer approximation to a perfect fit between our beliefs and reality, for “only a fixed, rigid Archimedean platform could supply a base from which to measure the distance between current belief and true belief.”30 The received view assumes that such a platform is epistemically accessible and hence that the evaluation of past and current scientific belief as true, approximately true, or false is possible. The sociological school denies the availability of such a platform but still deems it necessary for the evaluation of beliefs as true or false. In its absence, beliefs can be only causally explained but not normatively evaluated. Yet Kuhn rejects precisely this requirement: in his view, truth cannot be understood as the correspondence of our beliefs to reality because both “reality” and “truth” are concepts that need to be problematized and reworked. What is fundamentally at stake is  .  .  . the correspondence theory of truth, the notion that the goal, when evaluating scientific laws or theories, is to determine whether or not they correspond to an external, mind-independent world. It is that notion, whether in an absolute or

“M U CK RAK ING” IN H ISTO RY69

probabilistic form, that I am persuaded must vanish together with foundationalism. What replaces it will still require a strong conception of truth, but not, except in the most trivial sense, correspondence truth.31

In order for Kuhn’s conceptions of knowledge and truth to remain robust enough to justify his assessment of science as our best cognitive practice and of scientific development as genuinely progressive, Kuhn needs to offer a different understanding of “rationality,” “justification,” and “scientific progress.”32 To do so, he rejects the foundationalists’ “fixed Archimedean platform” and seeks to replace it with “sets of beliefs actually in place in the historical situation”: “First, the Archimedean platform outside of history, outside of time and space, is gone beyond recall. Second, in its absence, comparative evaluation is all there is.”33 Rather than inquire into the truth, rationality, or credibility of a scientific belief as such, Kuhn thinks that changes of belief need to be explained as rational. Accepting a new claim to knowledge typically requires the adjustment of other beliefs. Scientists must thus compare the advantages and disadvantages of such adjustments, and their decision, although typically based on good reasons, will never have the status of being an inevitable conclusion or the only rational choice. Kuhn is quite clear on both the philosophical nature and the historiographical relevance of his reconceptualizations: “I’ve reached that position from principles that must govern all developmental processes, without, that is, needing to call upon actual examples of scientific behavior. Nothing along that route has suggested replacing evidence and reason by power and interest. Of course power and interest play a role in scientific development, but there’s room for a great deal else besides.”34 So Kuhn’s reworked epistemic and metaphysical concepts should be able to restore some “badly needed bite” to the idea of cognitive evaluation of scientific conclusions, which enables him to reject on philosophical grounds the claim that the explanations in terms of power and interest are the only available explanations of scientific change.35 Kuhn’s philosophical conclusions were not derived from the historical record in that they were not generalizations of various instances of observed scientific behavior. But neither were they deduced a priori. When Kuhn says that they were arrived at through “first principles,” he means to mark the status of his analyses of the concepts of reality, knowledge,

70 H ISTO RY

rationality, and so on as philosophical reconceptualizations. Arguments in support of these reconceptualizations had to be, of course, philosophical, not historical in nature. Thus, a proper understanding of Kuhn’s philosophy of science requires a detailed reconstruction of his epistemology and metaphysics, implicit in Structure and developed in his later writings. Some very important work on Kuhn’s metaphysics has already been done. For example, Hoyningen-Huene as well as Sharrock and Read offer philosophically interesting—albeit quite different—reconstructions of Kuhn’s understanding of “reality.”36 In this book, I do not contribute to such discussions of Kuhn’s metaphysics. I instead offer in subsequent chapters a reconstruction of Kuhn’s epistemology. Although greatly influenced by a number of postpositivist philosophers who rejected, among other things, the dichotomy between absolutism and relativism, Kuhn’s epistemology bears the mark of his life-long concern with the specific problems of scientific knowledge. His preferred epistemological stance, selected from among the intellectually available postpositivist alternatives, is at all times constrained, on the one hand, by his need to see science as cognitively successful and progressive and, on the other hand, by his understanding of the development of science derived from his historiographical work. So Kuhn’s first principles—contrary to what most interpreters believe—do not in any way represent a rejection of the claim that the history of science can effect a “decisive transformation” in our understanding of science. On the contrary, Kuhn’s purpose in invoking first principles was to highlight the claim that his epistemology and metaphysics favor cognitive internal historiography while supporting the judgment that sociological historiography produces only “muckraking investigation” of the historical record, incapable of extending or deepening our understanding of science.

METAPHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS A Developmental View of Kuhn’s Thought

We have seen that Kuhn’s introduction of first principles—his reconceptualization of key epistemological and metaphysical notions—was motivated by the challenge to the integrity of his own position issued by

“M U C K RAK ING” IN H ISTO RY7 1

the sociological school. The challenge he faced was issued on two fronts: historiographical and philosophical. In this respect, it resembled the challenge presented by the old image of science, with its roots in both presentist historiography and the received view in the philosophy of science. As we have seen in chapter 2, Kuhn then responded simultaneously on the historiographical and the philosophical fronts but saw himself as unable to do so against the new rival. His strategy against the image of science painted by the united efforts of sociological historiography and relativism was exclusively philosophical. This response was made possible by Kuhn’s previous integration of the history and the philosophy of science on the metaphilosophical level. At that earlier stage, Kuhn already had begun to revise his conception of scientific progress. He soon realized that his philosophy would also need reworked conceptions of reality and scientific rationality. In response to the relativism of the sociological school, he undertook the task of further articulating these philosophical ideas and complementing them with reconceptualizations of other, related notions. His project was thus transformed from a search for a viable philosophy of science, constrained by hermeneutic internal historiography, into an attempt to articulate a plausible epistemology and metaphysics. This transformation was tantamount to a revision of his previous metaphilosophical characterization of the proper relationship between the history and the philosophy of science. This relationship is seen as unequal in Kuhn’s mature work, with philosophy playing the dominant role. Instead of treating hermeneutic historiography and his philosophy of science as constraining and mutually shaping one another, Kuhn came to think in the 1990s that general philosophical theories in epistemology and metaphysics must justify both the internal historiographical narratives and the Weberian explanatory model presented in Structure: “I think of my project as a return . . . to the philosophical problems left over from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But it might better be described more generally, as a study of the problems raised by the transition to what’s sometimes called the historical . . . philosophy of science.”37 The general problems that Kuhn refers to are both philosophical and metaphilosophical. The solution of the relevant philosophical problems, as we have seen, requires the development of an epistemology and metaphysics capable of withstanding relativism. On the metaphilosophical level, Kuhn was pressed to explain the role that

72H ISTO RY

history plays in an overall position now dominated by philosophy. Thus, to understand the overall role of the history of science in Kuhn’s philosophy, we must take a developmental view not only of science but of Kuhn’s own thought as well. What such a view shows is, if not unity and strict consistency, at least continuity and appropriate revisions at the different stages of his intellectual development. For many years after Structure was published, Kuhn was deeply involved with the philosophy of language, seeking the right way to formulate his incommensurability thesis. The problems of rationality and realism raised by Structure equally preoccupied him until the end of his life. His project was to understand science as rational and as our best source of knowledge about the world, but his description of its workings was incompatible with all of the existing theories of rationality and reality known to him. Internal historiography thus led him to rethink a number of philosophical problems together with the evaluative standards for assessing their solutions. This project was not completed in Structure, however. Over the years, his views on these and related philosophical matters gained an increasingly clear shape and in turn reinforced his commitment to the principles of internal historiography: it is only to such a history of science that his philosophy of science can apply. Both the specific philosophical reconceptualizations and the shift in the metaphilosophical position became fully articulated in Kuhn’s thought only after the sociological school challenged his conviction that the interdependence of the history and the philosophy of science is sufficient to prevent the distortion of our understanding of scientific reasoning, practice, and change. His insistence that all evaluation is comparative thus has a welcome self-referential ring: it was fully articulated only when a rival to Kuhn’s own internalist historiography presented itself as a serious alternative—and not before. Kuhn’s mature metaphilosophical position thus aims to preserve the crucial philosophical insights of his earlier period and to make them simultaneously informed by the history of science and not in need of justificatory support from specific historical narratives. To achieve this purpose, Kuhn introduced the notion of historical perspective, which, in his considered view, must inform all philosophical thinking about science. A historical perspective is an outlook, a way of seeing, developed through a deep involvement with internalist historiography but argumentatively unencumbered by a historian’s concern to produce explanatory

“M U C K RAK ING” IN H ISTO RY73

narratives of particular events. In retrospect, Kuhn came to see his initial rejection of the received view not as something forced upon him by a careful consideration of specific historical case studies but as a natural result of a well-developed historical sensibility formed by such consideration. The historical perspective that Kuhn had in mind would not be available to a philosopher of science familiar only with presentist narratives or to a historian whose explanatory categories were decidedly not cognitive in nature. In Kuhn’s view, the desirable historical perspective could be achieved only through a deep involvement with a cognitivist internal historiography that aims to reconstruct past scientists’ problems, goals, ideas, and intentions. Once acquired, the historical perspective naturally suggests important philosophical ideas, but the full articulation and defense of these ideas should be pursued in a philosophical, not a historiographical, framework. Kuhn’s epistemology and metaphysics thus acquired the status of first principles: an evaluation of their plausibility and viability did not require a detailed comparison with the historical record. Nevertheless, as we shall see later on, epistemology and metaphysics are always constrained by a properly historicized philosophy of science. In other words, in searching for an adequate philosophical position, Kuhn was exclusively interested in those epistemological and metaphysical problems that can legitimately be raised within the context of the philosophy of science as he understood it. As a consequence, he was interested only in those accounts of knowledge, rationality, and reality that relevantly illuminated the cognitive aspects of real scientific practice. Perhaps Kuhn underestimated the power of hermeneutic historiography to provide a principled resistance to the sociological school’s project. This school represents scientists as engaged primarily in political or social power struggles and pays no attention to their self-understanding as explorers of nature. This, Kuhn could have argued, is at variance with the principles of hermeneutic historiography, which seeks to explain the past through a faithful recovery of the intentions, ideas, problems, and goals held by historical agents. Although a sociological explanation of past science may helpfully involve the larger sociopolitical context, it should not eschew all reference to scientists’ beliefs, projects, and ambitions. A sound historiography of science thus requires at least some serious employment of cognitive explanatory categories. In order to offer a genuine understanding of science, it must be internalist as well as intentionalist in its approach.38

74H ISTO RY

Monistic and Pluralistic Metaphilosophy of Science

The content of Kuhn’s metaphilosophical position thus changed from the view that history and philosophy of science should constrain, direct, and reinforce one another to the view that both need to be embedded within fully developed metaphysics and epistemology. Yet the nature of his metaphilosophical interest remained stable throughout his life. Kuhn always sought to articulate the correct metaphilosophical prescription as to how the history of science and the philosophy of science ought to be done and how the two should be related to one another.39 Kuhn was thus a monist in his metaphilosophy. As I use this term, a metaphilosophical monist in the philosophy of science believes that there is only one correct relationship between the philosophy of science and related disciplines, such as the history and the sociology of science. A metaphilosophical pluralist, in contrast, holds that different philosophies of science legitimately accord different roles to history and to other disciplines. For a pluralist, philosophers of science can legitimately draw the boundaries between the philosophy, history, and sociology of science in different places and with different degrees of firmness. I argue that metaphilosophical pluralism is both a more plausible position than metaphilosophical monism and that it is a position that better fits Kuhn’s mature thought—despite his conviction to the contrary. It is not surprising that Kuhn himself assumed metaphilosophical monism. Most of his contemporaries were implicit metaphilosophical monists. They typically treated the philosophy of science as a branch of epistemology and saw the history of science as merely a source of illustrative examples.40 As we have seen, Imre Lakatos went one step further than most in being explicit on this issue. He argued that the only way a philosophy of science should involve history is through “rational reconstructions” of historical episodes, which require that the historian omit “everything in the historical record that appears irrational in light of his rationality theory.”41 Kuhn argued against those who denied the importance of the history of science for the philosophy of science, but he implicitly shared their metaphilosophical monism. The question that preoccupied him throughout his career—“What is the role that the history of science should play in a viable philosophy of science?”—assumes that

“M U C K RAK ING” IN H ISTO RY75

there is one correct answer. Kuhn’s different answers to this question, given at different stages of his development as a thinker, do not suggest that he ever thought that more than one answer could be legitimate— quite the contrary. His attack on the received view was based on the conviction that hermeneutic history of science must play a central role in a plausible philosophy of science. In the same spirit, his response to the sociological school did not consist only in distancing himself from their use of political explanatory categories; he was equally determined to show that the sociological program in the studies of science results in worthless “muckraking” in history and unacceptable cognitive relativism. These aspects of Kuhn’s thought strongly suggest that he was a metaphilosophical monist throughout his life, prescribing one model as to how philosophy of science ought to be done if it is to be done well and leaving no room for alternative uses of the history of science by philosophers. In this respect, both his critics and his defenders follow suit: their mutual disagreements are often best understood as disagreements among metaphilosophical monists who see differently the proper role of the history of science in the philosophy of science.42 This clash of metaphilosophical monisms is, however, neither inevitable nor desirable—especially not for Kuhn. Although Kuhn’s epistemology and metaphysics reject relativism and favor cognitivist internal historiography of science, they do not compel metaphilosophical monism. On the contrary, metaphilosophical pluralism is in the spirit of Kuhn’s mature philosophy, and Kuhn should have endorsed it as a natural extension of his sensitivity to pragmatic aspects of history. As we saw in chapter 2, Kuhn argued that “history is interpretive throughout.”43 According to the historiography he embraced, historical facts are never simply “given.” They have to be individuated, selected, and arranged in response to the historian’s specific explanatory interest. Different historical explanations of the same complex phenomenon (such as the French Revolution, bureaucracy, gender roles—or science) are underdetermined by historical facts. Of course, rival historical explanations can be directly compared with one another but only if they share at least roughly the same background information, explanatory context, and explanatory interest. Different historical narratives will, however, frequently differ in a deeper way: historical research is conducted from many different

76 H ISTO RY

points of view in response to differently specified why and how questions. Such narratives are not in direct competition with one another. Rather, they illuminate different aspects of complex historical phenomena. This prevalent view of historical narratives, defended by Weber and actually endorsed by Kuhn, should extend to metaphilosophical specifications of the relationship between the history and the philosophy of science: it favors pluralism rather than monism. In this context, specific projects and questions in the philosophy of science play the role of historical interest and point of view. Different philosophical problems concerning science will naturally require different approaches to the history of science. One may thus select an inappropriate kind of historiography for one’s philosophical project but not an inappropriate kind of historiography tout court. In this respect, the role of the history of science for philosophers of science is not dissimilar to the role of the history of philosophy for philosophers of all persuasions and orientations: it can play multiple roles. A parallel with the way philosophers use the history of philosophy may be helpful. Bernard Williams’s excellent book Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry and Harry Frankfurt’s book Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes’ “Meditations” are written with very limited attention to the intellectual and scientific contexts in which Descartes wrote the Meditations on First Philosophy. The focus is, rather, on the precise analysis of the nature and scope of Descartes’s claims and on the reconstruction and evaluation of his arguments as arguments that can claim our acceptance now. In contrast, Margaret Dauler Wilson’s book Descartes traces the deep influence of medieval thought on Descartes’s philosophical revolution, and Daniel Garber’s work Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics contextualizes and explains Descartes’s philosophical views by reference to the scientific debates of the time, in which Descartes was an active contributor.44 Descartes is thus sometimes used as an active interlocutor who has something important to say about our philosophical concerns; in that role, he suffers translation into our philosophical idiom remarkably well. When, however, philosophical interest is focused mainly on understanding his thought on its own terms—a form of thinking that is in some of its aspects alien to us because our connections with medieval philosophy and seventeenth-century science have been effectively cut off—the reconstruction of the original web of

“M U CK RAK ING” IN H ISTO RY77

concepts, assumptions, beliefs, and argumentative patterns that Descartes deemed sound is indispensable for yielding a correct understanding. Presentist efforts at translation and appropriation stand in the way of such a project. To differentiate between these two philosophical uses of past philosophy is not to say that one of them should force the other out of the field. On the contrary, philosophy flourishes in part through multiple uses of its history. I suggest that the philosophy of science would flourish in the same way if it were to tolerate different approaches to and uses of the history of science. The thesis of metaphilosophical monism rests on the assumption that there is only one right kind of project for the philosophy of science, connected thus and so with the history of science. However, on Kuhn’s own premises, we may think that there are many different legitimate pursuits in the philosophy of science, which have different uses for differently constructed historical narratives. Metaphilosophical pluralism allows that there are different issues, questions, contexts, and purposes in the philosophy of science, which legitimate different kinds of historiography and different uses of historiographical research. Thus, metaphilosophical pluralism allows us to recognize this diversity while retaining sufficient normative robustness necessary for excluding some context- and purposeinappropriate uses of the history of science.45 Kuhn himself noted that in the context of scientific education, simplified, presentist historical narratives are perfectly appropriate and very useful. He should have extended this point to the education of philosophers. First steps in mastering contemporary philosophy of science are hindered rather than facilitated by detailed, reliable, well-documented historical narratives. For introductory pedagogical purposes, the history of science is better used as a source of rather simplified case studies. To understand various aspects of contemporary debates concerning, for example, confirmation, explanation, or the structure of scientific theories, a student should first master the necessary philosophical vocabulary, the nature of the questions, and the geography of opposed philosophical positions. At the early stages of this learning process, the history of science may legitimately be presented in a simplified form as merely providing the unproblematized, raw material for philosophical analysis and arguments. Even professional philosophy of science may thrive without any deep historical understanding of scientific development. Many projects in the

78 H ISTO RY

philosophy of particular sciences—for example, the philosophy of physics, the philosophy of biology, and the philosophy of cognitive science—focus on conceptual and evidential issues in contemporary scientific research. Philosophers working in these areas do not sharply demarcate their contributions from the contributions of working scientists. Metaphilosophically, they see the philosophy of science as tightly linked not to the history of science but to current science. There is no reason to suppose that Kuhn ever tried to give, much less succeeded in providing, metaphilosophical arguments against this kind of project in the philosophy of science, for which the history of science is but of marginal importance. Rather, Kuhn persuasively argued against the received view’s dehistoricized general philosophy of science. As subsequent developments confirmed, he was right in believing that serious engagement with the history of science would effect a decisive transformation of the field. Nevertheless, it would be hasty to assume that logical empiricists and Popperian critical rationalists had no significant philosophical legacy to bequeath to post-Kuhnian philosophers of science. Present-day philosophical discussions concerning the nature and structure of scientific theories, hypotheses, evidence, explanation, laws of nature, and so on still bear the influence of the ways in which the proponents of the received view thought about these issues. Their general philosophy of science did not survive the “historical turn,” but their intricate work on various aspects of scientific concepts and reasoning is still important and valuable. It is difficult to imagine this kind of work as emerging exclusively from within a historicist perspective on science. True, the proponents of the received view were interested in socially and historically decontextualized, idealized aspects of scientific thinking and choice. Their image of science was static, and their focus was typically narrow—but it was also sharp. When properly contextualized, qualified, and presented as an account of some important aspects of a particular scientific field at a certain stage of its historical development, the detailed work on scientific concepts and methods is well served by such a sharp and narrow focus, to which hermeneutic internal historiography has little to contribute. Contemporary philosophers of science who continue the tradition of the received view treat the history of science as marginal to the content and concerns of their work, and as long as that work uniquely illuminates some aspects of science, they are right to do so. Kuhn’s own synoptic, historicist image shows significant patterns in the

“M U CK RAK ING” IN H ISTO RY79

development of scientific disciplines; it explains how particular sciences emerged and how they changed through history. Although this explanatory interest naturally favors investigations of how scientific concepts, methods, values, and assumptions came into prominence as well as how they transformed through time, nothing in Kuhn’s philosophy of science stands in the way of the acceptability of much more narrowly construed investigations. There are still other legitimate philosophical uses of the history of science. For example, the history of science might be mined as a source of counterexamples against particular historiographical narratives or philosophical views. As Sharrock, Read, and Kindi point out, Kuhn sometimes used the history of science for just such a purpose. Feyerabend’s philosophy of science actually exemplifies this use of history in a much clearer way. Feyerabend explicitly refuses to adopt a positive view in either the philosophy of science or in metaphilosophy, and his historical narratives are presented as possible and plausible, not as definitive in any sense. For example, his portrayal of Galileo as a bold irrationalist in Against Method does not assume that any responsible historiographical narrative would reach the same conclusion.46 Feyerabend does not even think that judgments concerning the rationality of past science must be grounded in proper historical understanding. On the contrary, he uses the history of science only as a rich source of counternarratives to any philosophical or historical position. Such argumentative use of the history of science is essentially skeptical: positive views are endorsed only provisionally as weapons against particular opponents, to be easily replaced with other, incompatible views (or historical explanations) in other contexts. This use of history shows no preference for either a particular kind of historiography or epistemological and metaphysical justifications. Feyerabend extended his playful “Anything goes!” slogan to metaphilosophical concerns: no conceivable relationship between the history and the philosophy of science is to be rejected in principle. Finally—pace Kuhn—a philosophical interest in science need not be confined to the understanding of the internal workings of the practice through time. History can legitimately be used to trace the influence of social, political, ethical, and even aesthetic beliefs and practices on scientific work. Situating the history of science within a larger sociopolitical history and the history of ideas is both illuminating in itself and compatible

8 0 H ISTO RY

with internalist cognitive historiography. Anglo-American philosophy of science during the better part of the twentieth century was indeed largely uninterested in the social embeddedness of science. This indifference to all external influences on science was, however, not characteristic of contemporary European philosophy.47 Feminism was a decisive influence in turning the tide in English-language philosophy of science, which now pays more attention to the ethical, social, and political values and assumptions that often permeate science.48 Whatever Kuhn’s intellectual preferences may have been in this regard, his philosophy has no resources—and no reason either—to eschew ethical considerations of scientific development as philosophically wrong-headed or to chastise politically oriented historiographical narratives as having nothing important at all to say about any aspect of scientific development. They do; the fact that such narratives cannot answer Kuhn’s questions does not prevent them from answering equally legitimate questions of a different sort. Philosophies of science developed by the sociological school, by feminists, and by many European philosophers of science not only highlighted previously neglected links between science and the societies that cultivate it but also raised some challenging, novel questions about mutual influences between moral and political beliefs, on the one hand, and scientific theories, on the other. Insofar as the philosophy of science falls under the general domain of traditional epistemology and metaphysics, Kuhn’s antipathy toward these new approaches to science is not surprising. However, the philosophy of science can equally legitimately be pursued under the general umbrella of moral and political philosophy since science is an important cultural institution, increasingly shaping socially shared values, beliefs, and decisions. In that context, sociological inquiry into the values and assumptions that shape scientific research is highly relevant and welcome. This means that a comprehensive understanding of science cannot ignore its close ties to society. The imagined boundary between the purely cognitive goals of science and the larger context of social needs, presuppositions, values, and interests turns out to be porous and permeable in both directions: science both influences and is influenced by the messy and conflicted world in which it develops. To achieve a truly general understanding of their subject matter, philosophers of science should resist the pull of cognitive internalism, to which Kuhn, together with his

“M U CK RAK ING” IN H ISTO RY81

contemporaries and predecessors, fell prey. Unlike them, however, Kuhn, both as a careful historian and as a postpositivist philosopher, had reasons and resources to think of the distinction between internal and external approaches to science as neither sharp nor essential. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, Kuhn’s mature thought began to weaken the opposition between theoretical and practical rationality, between facts and values. This path, originating in the ideas of American pragmatism, should have led him to replace his monism with a pluralistic, open-minded metaphilosophical attitude with which we might hope to answer different kinds of philosophical questions about science as well as to understand their mutual relations.

II R AT IO NAL ITY

F

4 KUHN’S ANTIRELATIVISM

G

enerations of philosophers have been raised on a relativistic reading of Structure.1 For decades, Kuhn’s attempts to correct this serious misunderstanding proved to be futile. His antirelativist stance—in the rare cases in which it was recognized—has been used only to show that relativism cannot be sincerely endorsed and successfully defended even by philosophers actually committed to it. It was often thought that in the wake of devastating criticisms of Structure, Kuhn offered a belated and weak retraction of the views that made him famous. He was then criticized both for being a relativist and for refusing to be one. For example, Alan Musgrave complained in 1971, “Kuhn’s Postscript left me feeling a little disappointed. I find the new, more real Kuhn who emerges in it but a pale reflection of the old, revolutionary Kuhn. Perhaps this revolutionary never really existed—but then it was necessary to invent him.”2 Rather than suspecting that they misunderstood him, Kuhn’s critics regretted what they saw as softening of his radical stance and continued to engage with the caricatured view they attributed to him. As we saw in part 1, it was the emergence of the sociological school that finally persuaded Kuhn that his philosophy could legitimately be seen as a source of relativism and that he therefore needed to offer more than just a careful analysis of scientific development coupled with an unproblematized faith in the rationality of science. Kuhn realized that his consistent antirelativist stance needed the support of a philosophical conception of

8 6 RATIO NALITY

scientific rationality, capable of showing that scientific change, as explained by his model in Structure, is both rationally warranted and compatible with the view that science is progressive. This was his main philosophical project after Structure, which I discuss in the chapters in part 2. In this chapter, I argue not only that Kuhn’s rationalism is not of the same sort as that of the received view but also that it is not properly understood by either Paul Hoyningen-Huene or Harold Brown, even though both correctly reject the prevalent view that Kuhn is a relativist.

KUH N ’ S REJECTION OF THE C LASSI C A L CO NC EPTION OF SCIENTIF IC R AT I ON A LI T Y

Kuhn often stated in no ambiguous terms that he had never endorsed irrationalism or relativism in the philosophy of science. On the contrary, he argued for science’s exemplary cognitive authority and insisted that the rationality of science can be demonstrated successfully only if we correctly describe and analyze its internal dynamics and its historical development. Kuhn himself bears some responsibility for the fact that his firm antirelativism was seldom taken seriously.3 As he admitted with due apologies, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was not perfectly clear on many philosophically important issues. In fact, the book contains many formulations that, as Kuhn later put it, “subvert essential aspects” of the position he really wanted to defend, precisely by inviting charges of relativism and irrationalism.4 However, the persistent charge that Kuhn is a radical relativist about science cannot be exclusively attributed to the lack of explicitness on this point in his early writings or to his critics’ unsympathetic fascination with the controversial and the flashy. It is important to expose misunderstandings of Kuhn for what they are,5 but it is also important to understand the reasons that led to at least some of these misunderstandings. In my view, they are not attributable primarily to superficial readings or to uncharitable interpretations of Structure. Rather, the more interesting misunderstandings are those that can be seen as reasonable and natural under a certain set of assumptions that I delineate in this section.

KU H N’S ANTIRE LATIVIS M87

The Classical Conception of Scientific Rationality

The main reason, then, for the enduring perception of Kuhn as a relativist is to be found in the conception of scientific rationality dominant at the time Structure was published. This conception is still alive today among some philosophers of science. I call it the classical conception of scientific rationality.6 Its general structure is that of an instrumental conception of rationality: science is rational if and only if it has a goal and some reliable means—or methods—for reaching or approximating that goal. Moreover, it is a conception of theoretical as opposed to practical rationality because it always sees the goal of science as cognitive. Truth, knowledge, verisimilitude, predictive success, and empirical adequacy are the best-known philosophical specifications of that goal.7 The classical conception demands that if science is to be rational, the criteria for the evaluation of rival hypotheses, theories, and paradigms must be justified independently of the fact that they are used in science. The justification must be epistemic as opposed to pragmatic— that is, connected in the right way to the cognitive goal of science. Given the classical conception, rationalists were convinced that such independent justifications could be offered; they accordingly sought an absolute, universal canon of scientific reasoning and choice, justified as rational through epistemic principles independent of the scientific inquiry. For their part, relativists also fully accepted the classical conception’s set of requirements for the rationality of science, though of course they denied that any scientific discipline met these requirements. In their view, belief in the existence of an independently justifiable canon of scientific reasoning is an illusion. The classical rationalist saw science as unquestionably successful and progressive in a cumulative way. To explain scientific progress as the result of the rationality of science, he or she had to satisfy two types of requirement, normative and descriptive. On the normative side, a rationalist account had to be epistemically justified: it had to demonstrate that the rationalist’s favored method provides the epistemically best means for advancing toward the postulated cognitive goal of science. More specifically, in situations where a choice between theories has to be made, the method of making that choice should provide unambiguous, theory-neutral criteria, which will always favor the better theory over its rival.8 This means

88 RATIO NALITY

that rival theories must be comparable in an unproblematic way: first, on the basis of theory-independent empirical evidence and, second, by employment of objective, epistemically justified evaluative criteria. On the descriptive side, the classical rationalist had to show that his or her preferred methodology and evaluative criteria have been operative in all successful science. Relativists who adhered to the classical conception quickly saw that the normative and the descriptive requirements had not been jointly satisfied by any proposed rationalist methodology. Feyerabend famously argued for an even stronger claim: any conceivable rationalist methodology could be shown to have been violated at some point, and this violation was in fact responsible for the success of science, however the rationalist might define success. The sociological school argued that there are no theory-neutral, independently justifiable criteria for choice between incommensurable paradigms or theories. It concluded that to explain scientific choices, we must resort to psychological and political motives and causes, which was tantamount to saying that science was not rational in the relevant epistemic sense.9 Although it is true that some of Kuhn’s formulations in Structure unfortunately suggest that he wanted to replace epistemic justifications of scientific choice with psychosociological causal explanations, we have seen that in his later writings he clearly rejected any such replacement and made his antirelativism unambiguous. Kuhn’s Rejection of the Classical Conception

Had Kuhn accepted his critics’ crucial and at the time unquestioned assumption—that the only way of successfully showing that science is rational is to show that it satisfies the requirements of the classical conception— then the charges against him would have been fair and accurate. In fact, it is precisely this assumption that Kuhn rejected. If he is to be seen as a defender of scientific rationality, his defense must be understood as having little in common with the classical rationalist project. In fact, Kuhn did not think that science has an overarching cognitive goal, nor did he believe that scientific rationality consists in the systematic application of a timeless, universal, epistemically justified method of reasoning and choice. Nonetheless, he saw science as the best example we have of a rational search for knowledge.

KUHN’S ANTIRELATIVISM89

Let us first consider in some detail an important passage from Kuhn’s essay “Reflections on My Critics.” Responding to the early charges that his philosophy of science results in irrationality, relativism, and “mob rule” in science,10 Kuhn, in near exasperation, retorted: I am not sanguine in this matter, however, for I have not previously and do not now understand quite what my critics mean when they employ terms like “irrational” and “irrationality” to characterize my views. . . . My difficulties in understanding are, however, even clearer and more acute when these terms are used not to criticize my position but in its defense. Obviously there is much in the last part of Feyerabend’s paper with which I agree, but to describe the argument as a defense of irrationality in science seems to me not only absurd but vaguely obscene. I would describe it, together with my own, as an attempt to show that existing theories of rationality are not quite right and that we must readjust or change them to explain why science works as it does. To suppose, instead, that we possess criteria of rationality which are independent of our understanding of the essentials of the scientific process is to open the door to cloud-cuckoo land.11

To understand the reasons for Kuhn’s exasperation, we must note that he did not discuss the possibility—clearly intended by his critics—that, given that he should concur with the common view of science as rational, his description of its workings must be mistaken. Instead, faithful to his own description, he characterized anyone who would use the word irrational for the practice of science as he described it as saying something “absurd” and “vaguely obscene.” To be sure, “obscene” is added merely for rhetorical flavor, but the flavor it adds is not irrelevant: according to Kuhn, to say that science is irrational is to say something offensive and repulsive, to insult the cognitive authority of science and scientific communities, and to commit the kind of hubris in which Feyerabend delighted. Kuhn believed the cognitive authority of science to be so unimpeachable that denying it was, to him, a seriously reproachable offense. Years later he returned to this point: “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.”12

9 0 RATIO NALITY

The most interesting aspect of Kuhn’s reaction against his critics is that he did not charge them with being wrong in their conclusion that Structure portrays science as an irrational enterprise. He said instead that he did not understand what they meant when they “employ[ed] terms like ‘irrational’ and ‘irrationality’” to characterize his views, and he added that their claim was “absurd.” This choice of words indicates that his response should be understood as the countercharge that his critics were using the terms rational and irrational in an illegitimate way. Such an interpretation of his claim is supported by his hint that the meaning his opponents ascribed to the correlative pair rational/irrational was derived from prevailing “philosophical theories of rationality.” Kuhn explicitly stated that these theories are not “quite right” and thus need to be “readjusted” or “changed.” Of course, it might be retorted that whatever Kuhn might have taken such theories and their mistakes to be, they are still close enough to the standards governing ascriptions of rationality in ordinary language that Kuhn himself—contrary to what he said—must have understood perfectly well what he was being charged with. After all, he did not react as if he were, say, accused of proposing a false, immoral, or metaphysical philosophy of science, nor did he appear to be genuinely at a loss about the proper interpretation of the objections leveled against his position. Yet he insisted that those who read him as an irrationalist and a relativist were saying something that cannot be understood—something that is absurd to say—not because of what his views are but because of what rationality is. “No process essential to scientific development can be labeled ‘irrational’ without vast violence to the term,”13 he remarked in “Notes on Lakatos.” Rather than modify his description of scientific developments so that it would fit with his critics’ understanding of what rationality requires, Kuhn thought that it is precisely this understanding that is at fault and in need of replacement by an account better suited to the actual workings of science: “If history or any other empirical discipline leads us to believe that the development of science depends essentially on behavior that we have previously thought to be irrational, then we should conclude not that science is irrational but that our notion of rationality needs adjustment here and there.”14 These passages show that Kuhn should not be read as a moderate relativist, as some of his sympathetic interpreters proposed. His philosophy represents a radical philosophical shift, a break not only with absolutist

KU H N’S ANTIRE LATIVIS M91

rationalism and the anything-goes relativism of the received view but also with the entire framework of assumptions upon which these two alternatives could be coherently posed. Although he did not provide detailed arguments against that general framework, his dissatisfaction with it is evident. He rejected not only the extremes of absolutism and radical relativism but equally all positions between these two extremes. Unfortunately, he did not fully articulate the novel conception of scientific rationality that was to replace the classical one, so that conception must be reconstructed from hints, disconnected passages, and the general thrust of his thought. Before I undertake that task, however, I consider two attempts at a sympathetic reconstruction of Kuhn’s rationalism. I argue that both ultimately fail but that each offers some important insights worth preserving within a new interpretation of Kuhn’s understanding of scientific rationality, which I offer in the next chapter.

H OY NINGEN -HUENE’ S IN STR U MEN TA LI ST RECONSTRUCTION

The first reconstruction I consider is Paul Hoyningen-Huene’s. He offers one of the most detailed nonrelativist readings of Kuhn, in which he justly emphasizes the role of scientific values in Kuhn’s understanding of the rationality of science. Unfortunately, he seems to believe that the classical conception is the only possible conception of scientific rationality. He thus proposes to add to Kuhn’s philosophy an ultimate goal of science because an instrumental conception of rationality must postulate such a goal. This proposal, as I argue here, is both interpretatively and philosophically misguided. Hoyningen-Huene’s Amendment

Hoyningen-Huene believes that Kuhn is right to think of shared scientific values as the basis of rational agreement and disagreement among scientists. However, the existence of a shared set of values is not, in HoyningenHuene’s view, sufficient to warrant the claim that science is rational:

92RATIO NALITY

“Obviously, the fact that the decision can be justified with recourse to cognitive values, is not by itself sufficient for its rationality. Rather, the cognitive values themselves must be good reasons, ‘rational’ reasons which make the decision a rational one. . . . The justification of cognitive values has to have recourse to an ultimate goal of science: the commitment to cognitive values is then the means which guarantees that theory choice is made in accordance with this ultimate goal.”15 Hoyningen-Huene proposes to add to Kuhn’s philosophy a conception of the ultimate goal of science posited by Carl Gustav “Peter” Hempel, not by Kuhn. It is “an increasingly comprehensive, systematically organized, world view that is explanatory and predictive.”16 This goal is conceived of as timeless, “beyond historical change,” in contrast to “historically relative” scientific values.17 Scientific values are differently interpreted and differently ranked across revolutionary divides; it is even possible for scientists working under the same paradigm to understand the values that govern their research in somewhat different ways. In contrast, the goal of science that Hoyningen-Huene wishes to import into Kuhn’s philosophy is supposed to be historically stable and endorsed by all scientists. This goal allows for a strictly hierarchical structure of justification, deemed necessary by the classical conception: particular scientific decisions and beliefs are justified by an appeal to shared values, which are in turn justified as the best means for achieving the postulated cognitive goal of science. This neat model unfortunately fails both as an interpretation of Kuhn and as a philosophical improvement on his thought. The philosophical difficulties can be stated briefly. If Hoyningen-Huene’s ultimate goal of science were to be understood as a purely formal one, without any substantive interpretation of the desiderata that it contains, it would indeed be possible to imagine it being universally accepted. However, such a formal goal is theoretically and deliberatively useless. It cannot guide scientific choice; it cannot help resolve scientific disagreements; nor can it serve as the basis for the evaluation of competing philosophies of science. If it is to serve some useful purpose, it needs to be fleshed out. Notoriously, all interpretations of the key desiderata of Hoyningen-Huene’s postulated goal are as open to different, historically situated interpretations as are the values that this goal is supposed to select and justify. For example, the criteria for explanatory success are notoriously paradigm dependent, as are the grounds for the comparative evaluation of rival paradigms in

KU H N’S ANTIRELATIVIS M93

terms of their comprehensiveness and systematicity. Hoyningen-Huene’s amendment thus cannot shield Kuhn from charges of relativism, justified under the classical conception. If these charges are justly leveled against Kuhn’s understanding of scientific values, they will equally justly be directed against the goal of science Hoyningen-Huene proposes. Worse, the proposed goal does not improve upon Kuhn’s account of scientific values even on purely formal grounds. It is nothing else but the conjunction of comprehensiveness, systematicity, explanatory power, and predictive power. These values correspond to Kuhn’s scope, simplicity, and accuracy and are subject to the same degree of variability in interpretation and comparative ranking. I believe that such difficulties await any proposal to articulate an ultimate goal of science. At best, such a goal will be descriptively and epistemically inert in Kuhn’s philosophy, even if it could be made compatible with it; his work reads better without it. There can be no doubt that Hoyningen-Huene recognizes that for Kuhn any adequate understanding of science must be historically situated; after all, Hoyningen-Huene discusses this feature of Kuhn’s philosophy in great detail. The failure of his interpretation comes not from a superficial reading of Kuhn’s texts but from Hoyningen-Huene’s own residual faithfulness to the received view and its conception of scientific rationality. My claim that a timeless goal of science cannot be postulated in Kuhn’s philosophy of science without going against its spirit is the claim Hoyningen-Huene should, in fact, find congenial to his overall reading of Kuhn. Against the Goal of Science

To see this, let us consider the philosophical purposes for which a postulated goal of science is typically used. First, it is sometimes thought that a goal of science must be postulated in order to demarcate science from other practices that serve other goals. Second, if one adheres to the classical conception, the justification of scientific choice requires an ultimate goal. Kuhn, however, has no need to postulate the goal of science for either of these two purposes. Kuhn does not need to postulate a distinct goal of science in order to differentiate between science and other human practices. He believes that the term science, like many such terms of this kind, is learned as a member “of one or another contrast set.”18 For example, to learn the term liquid, one

9 4RATIO NALITY

must master the terms solid and gas. Similarly, the meaning of science is learned through similarities and contrasts with other relevant practices. One recognizes a group’s activity as scientific . . . in part by its resemblance to other fields in the same cluster and in part by its difference from the activities belonging to other disciplinary clusters. To learn to use the term ‘science,’ one must therefore learn also to use some other disciplinary terms like ‘art,’ ‘engineering,’ ‘medicine,’ ‘philosophy,’ and perhaps ‘theology.’ . . . To know that position among the disciplines is to know what the term ‘science’ means or, equivalently, what a science is.19

One may think that science differs from other practices precisely through its cognitive goal—however specified—but Kuhn does not. Rather, he points to much more fine-grained features of scientific education and work to bring out the crucial differences between science and art, science and religion, science and philosophy. An “empirically derived taxonomy of disciplines” is all we need, he thinks, to understand the meaning of “science.”20 It may nevertheless appear that Kuhn postulates increasing precision and accuracy in puzzle solving as the goal of science. Although he uses such locutions, it is important to note that his claim is of a different nature from the claim that truth or empirical adequacy or predictive power or verisimilitude is the goal of science: whereas the latter are advanced as claims about the purpose of scientific practice as a whole, Kuhn’s claim has no such ambitions. By designating a mundane, frequently successful aspect of scientific work as “the goal of science,” Kuhn implies that to specify an overarching goal of scientific practice as a whole is either unnecessary or unavailable or both. Why might Kuhn have refused to engage in the philosophical debate concerning the goal of science? He probably realized that scientists, no less than philosophers, differ greatly in their identification of the ultimate goal of science. However, that disagreement does not cause any tension in the scientific community. In contrast, differences in the interpretation, ranking, and application of scientific values cannot remain both radical and stable: scientific communities exert great pressure on their members to reach a consensus concerning the understanding and use of such values. As long as the interpretation and especially practical application of scientific values remains reasonably uniform, even considerably different

KUHN’S ANTIRELATIVISM95

identifications of the ultimate goal of science will not affect scientific cooperation in any way. A proper identification of the goal of science (assuming that there is one) would simply be irrelevant for the success of science. Of course, to be a successful scientist, one must have a clear understanding of the goal one is trying to achieve—one must know what counts as success in one’s work. However, this understanding does not require the correct identification of an overarching goal of science. Rather, one must know how to complete specific scientific tasks: design an experiment to test a particular hypothesis, conduct a longitudinal study, repair a piece of equipment, write a grant proposal, interpret the results of a completed research, and so on. According to Arthur Fine, understanding science requires understanding its multiple “minigoals”: “I would suggest that science is like life. It shows its multiple—and mini—aims daily. But the quest for a general aim, like the quest for the meaning of life, is just hermeneuticism run amok.”21 If we want to identify what counts as success in science, we must look closer at the daily work of active scientists. Such a closer look will reveal that by giving up on an overarching goal of science, we are only giving up a philosophical overinterpretation of a practice that proceeds perfectly well without it. We can now see why Kuhn’s claim that puzzle solving is the goal of science should not be understood as a claim on par with the claims that the goal of science is truth, empirical adequacy, verisimilitude, and so on; by speaking about puzzle solving, Kuhn wants to avoid all references to such a “reconstruction” of scientific behavior and point to the behavior itself: Whether or not individual practitioners are aware of it, they are trained 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. That is what they are trained to do and what, to the extent that they retain control of their time, they spend most of their professional life doing. Its great fascination— which to outsiders often seems an obsession—is more than sufficient to make it an end in itself. For those engaged in it, no other goal is needed, though individuals often have a number of them.22

Hoyningen-Huene might respond to the arguments I have just presented by saying that he urges an ultimate goal of science for justificatory not

9 6 RATIO NALITY

descriptive purposes: although science may be correctly described without discovering or postulating such a timeless goal, it cannot be evaluated as rational without it. However, this is so only on the classical model of scientific rationality that Kuhn was at great pains to replace with the one better suited to actual scientific practice. His understanding of justification differed considerably from the top-down, practice-independent model of justification his predecessors assumed; it should be situated within a very different model of scientific rationality. In the next chapter, I argue that Kuhn’s account of justification requires a model of collective rationality, the main features of which I describe there in some detail.

BROWN ’ S KUHN-IN SPIRED CON C EP T I ON OF RATION A L ITY

Harold Brown’s book Rationality offers a very different account of Kuhn’s rationalism from the one proposed by Hoyningen-Huene and seeks to extend its reach from the domain of science so as to make of it a perfectly general philosophical theory of rationality.23 Brown rightly observed, at a time when almost no one else did, that Kuhn rejected the prevalent understanding of what scientific rationality requires and that he sought to replace it with an understanding derived from scientific practice itself. However, Brown’s reading of Kuhn suffers from some serious interpretive flaws, and his general theory of rationality, based on that reading, faces philosophical problems that Kuhn’s own position avoids. Science as Paradigmatically Rational

Brown starts by offering a schematic model that he calls the classical conception of rationality and that he claims is widespread in Western epistemology. According to Brown, this model (a) (b) (c)

takes rational beliefs and decisions as primary and rational agents as derivative; demands that beliefs and decisions obey universal, algorithmic rules of right reasoning and choice if they are to be deemed rational; and justifies these rules within a foundationalist epistemology.

KU H N’S ANTIRE LATIVIS M97

Brown then rejects this model because the rules it postulates cannot be justified outside of some version of foundationalism, and foundationalism, he argues, is untenable. He then proposes instead a Kuhn-inspired model of rationality, which does not presuppose foundationalism and which replaces algorithmic rules with expert judgments. Whatever the merits of Brown’s own theory of rationality are, it should be noted at the outset that he presents the classical model as too demanding and rigid and thus as an implausibly easy target. Philosophical theories of rationality are varied, typically more nuanced and more sensitive to the different contexts and standards that govern ascriptions of rationality than Brown’s schematic model allows. This is so even for theories of specifically scientific rationality, which may be supposed to be more demanding than, for example, those that underlie moral or political philosophy. For example, the classical conception of scientific rationality that I presented in the opening section of this chapter does not involve inflexible rules, nor must it be situated within a foundationalist epistemology. This is so, first, because many of its proponents allow that not all rational reasoning is rule governed and, second, because classical rationalism does not require foundationalism. Although there certainly is a strong affinity between the two, there is no entailment from classical rationalism to foundationalism: a coherentist, for example, may legitimately be an adherent of the classical conception of scientific rationality, as I have described it. This objection against Brown is of course merely a preliminary one and not decisive against his new theory of rationality. That theory might prove to be preferable to the classical rationalism as I have described it, so let us now consider its main features. It is not surprising that in Brown’s Kuhn-inspired general theory of rationality, science has a central place, which he justifies in the following way: An adequate model of rationality should be exemplified by those disciplines that we take to be paradigm cases of rational endeavors. To be sure, our present views as to which disciplines are rational are not infallible, and we might be led to reconsider these views as a result of further reflection on the nature of rationality. Still, our understanding of rationality is in part a function of the paradigm cases to which we apply this concept, and a model that preserves these central instances is prima facie preferable to one that forces us to abandon them. In the case of rationality,

9 8RATIO NALITY

science provides a crucial test case, since science, and particularly physical science, currently stands as our clearest example of a rational enterprise; if a model of rationality were to entail that science is not rational, we would have good reason for questioning the adequacy of that model.24

Although Brown initially states that being able to account for the rationality of science is an important virtue of a general theory of rationality, he quickly slips into a more dogmatic position, according to which this ability is a necessary condition for the acceptability of any philosophical theory of rationality. Because the classical model of rationality does not satisfy this condition, he rejects it as inadequate.25 He reads Kuhn as sharing this strong position: “Kuhn consistently maintains that the choice of science as a paradigmatically rational activity is more reliable than any views we may have as to what it is that makes science rational. If our model of rationality is at odds with the way science proceeds, then it is this model that will have to go.”26 Brown takes Kuhn to have argued that our understanding of what rationality in general requires must be derived from an accurate description of scientific practice. Under this interpretation, Kuhn’s conception of rationality would consist of two components: call them the linguistic and the descriptive components. The linguistic component can be described as follows: (a)

(b) (c)

In order to understand the predicate rational (as well as its derivatives and its contrast class), we should start from paradigmatic cases of its application. A paradigmatic application of rational is to science. It is thus trivially true that science is rational, but what precisely constitutes the rationality of science will be discovered by a detailed examination of the ways science works and develops: this is where the descriptive component of the account is to be plugged in.

Brown’s theory of rationality is based solely on his analysis of science and does not take into consideration any other paradigmatic applications of “rational.” The whole model depends on the details of its descriptive component, which specifies how science works and develops. Brown gets this account from Kuhn and consequently states that scientific change

KU H N’S ANTIRE LATIVIS M99

follows a global cyclical pattern: normal science → anomalies → crisis → revolution → normal science. Scientific reasoning in such a model cannot be seen as algorithmic, but only as judgment based. Competent scientists may differ in their judgments without either party being less rational than the other. Given that Kuhn identified these features as essential aspects of science, Brown deems them to be the indispensable starting points for the development of a viable general theory of rationality. Brown’s new theory of rationality takes the concept of a rational agent as fundamental and the concepts of rational belief and rational decision as derivative. A rational belief, for example, is defined as a belief arrived at by a rational agent.27 Not all reasonable people are rational agents in Brown’s sense, however. According to him, one’s rationality consists in one’s (a) (b)

forming an expert judgment on the issue at hand and submitting it for evaluation to a community of other experts in the relevant domain.

Condition (a) thus requires expertise (or at least competence) for the rationality of judgments. Condition (b) implies that isolated individuals— whether physically isolated from all other people or only cut off from interaction with other experts—can never be said to be rational. Brown wholeheartedly endorses these implications: For a belief based on judgment to be a rational one, it must be submitted to the community of those who share the relevant expertise for evaluation against their own judgments. . . . In these terms, Robinson Crusoe alone on his island could exercise judgment, but he would not be able to achieve rationality. This is not because of some failing in his faculties, but rather for a reason akin to the reason why he could not play baseball, even though he could throw balls in the air, hit them with a bat, and run bases. On the model I am proposing, rationality requires other people—and not just any people, but other people who have the skills needed to exercise judgment in the case at hand.28

In Brown’s theory, rationality can be ascribed exclusively to individual members of expert communities. Communities, whether expert or not, cannot be considered rational or irrational: “The predicate ‘rational’ characterizes

10 0 RATIO NALITY

an individual’s decision and beliefs, it does not characterize propositions and it does not characterize communities. A community of individuals with the appropriate expertise is, on this model, necessary for an individual to arrive at a rational belief, but it is the individual’s belief that is rational, not the community.”29 Thus—in contrast to Kuhn, as we shall see in the next chapter—Brown thinks that scientific rationality consists in the rationality of individual scientists. To exercise it, they must belong to a group of experts to which they submit their informed judgments, but the group itself cannot be deemed rational. Problems with Brown’s General Theory of Rationality

Brown’s reading of Kuhn may appear plausible at a first glance, especially in light of Kuhn’s assertion that denials of the rationality of science are absurd rather than merely wrong. However, Brown’s interpretation is misguided in important respects. A different, richer, and far subtler account of the rationality of science is implicit in Kuhn’s work; any general theory of rationality is conspicuously absent. Brown’s theory faces difficulties precisely because it is derived from the highly specific context of science, and then implausibly extended to a general theory of rationality. His first move is to privilege science as the paradigmatically rational human practice. Although he does not say so, the structure of his work plainly shows that scientific rationality serves as his only source of objections against the classical conception as well as the only source of positive ideas for the general theory of rationality that he proposes. In that theory, algorithmic rules are replaced with informed judgments, allowing for more than one party in a disagreement to be considered rational. These are important virtues of his theory, but, as I argue in the next chapter, they need to be preserved within a very differently structured theory of rationality. There are well-known difficulties associated with analyses of meaning that rely primarily on the paradigmatic applications of a term; rationality seems to be particularly ill suited for such a treatment. The term is used for the evaluation of beliefs, decisions, people, views, plans, and so on. There is no evidence that the paradigmatic application of rational is to a practice, much less to the practice of science. Many human practices are indeed generally considered rational—law, family planning, philosophy, chess, military

KUHN’S ANTIRELATIVISM101

strategy, and, of course, science—but none is usefully taken as supplying the paradigm of rationality. Moreover, people typically master the use of the predicate rational without understanding the inner workings of any particular social practice. This shows that Brown’s theory of rationality is not a theory that elucidates our present-day concept of rationality but rather a theory that revises it. Conceptual revisions are sometimes welcome, but they need to be recognized and argued for as such. Instead of offering such arguments, Brown misleadingly presents his theory as rooted in our contemporary commonsense understanding of rationality. What is significant about science is not its paradigmatic status in our understanding of rationality but its excellent credentials in satisfying what we antecedently think are the right canons of reasoning and choice. To be sure, these canons are themselves developed in part by science. But they are also at every point of their history influenced by nonscientific views about rational constraints on belief and action. If science is not to be seen as a socially isolated practice, then its boundaries must be understood as permeable in both directions. As much as scientific canons of reasoning will influence our everyday expectations of, say, sufficient evidence or a good explanation, our everyday views about rationality will in some measure influence the scientific canons of reasoning. For this reason, there are no philosophically significant paradigmatic applications of the term rational—to science or any other single human practice—such that we will have acquired a completely sound grasp of what rationality is simply by understanding the inner workings of the practice. To say this is not to say that there is some eternal concept of rationality knowable a priori and untouched by the nature of various human pursuits that in different periods of history were taken to be rational. Quite the contrary. There are numerous, highly varied contexts for ascriptions of rationality and irrationality, each having its own fine-tuned standards. A general theory of rationality would have to take as its starting point a representative survey of these different contexts. To complicate matters further, ascriptions of rationality are typically dependent on more informative, richer, context-dependent characterizations of irrationality. A belief, a decision, a person, or a group may fail to satisfy the standards of rationality in a number of ways, and the standards themselves are different in different contexts. To explain and justify one’s evaluation, then, one has to be more specific and invoke a specific

102RATIO NALITY

epistemic or deliberative failing. For example, one may be irrational for failing to see the obvious implications of one’s theoretical position or the natural objections to it; for being akratic or self-deceived; for focusing on irrelevant as opposed to central features of the situation; for inadequately appreciating the available evidence; for committing glaring inconsistency; for choosing clearly the wrong means for one’s end; or even for having inappropriate emotions.30 Evaluations of rationality and irrationality are highly dependent on context and purpose and deeply rooted in contingent, historically situated cultural beliefs, values, and practices. It is thus an open question whether a transhistorical, coherent, elegant, and philosophically illuminating general theory of rationality can ever be developed. For our purposes, however, it is important to note that Kuhn’s focus was intentionally a much narrower one. He wanted to explain the rationality of science without distorting his description of the practice. To do this, he had, first, to reject the classical conception of scientific rationality under which his views appeared inescapably relativistic and, second, to provide a theory of scientific rationality under which he could claim that science is rational. An accurate description of actual scientific behavior and reasoning was thus indispensable for his project, but it is important to bear in mind that, precisely because the intricacies of scientific practice play such a central role in Kuhn’s account of the rationality of science, this account does not easily generalize to other practices. Problems with Brown’s Understanding of Scientific Rationality

The linguistic component of Brown’s general theory makes the rationality of science trivially true. This unwelcome feature of the theory cannot be traced back to Kuhn. Certainly, Kuhn sought an account of scientific rationality capable of allowing rational disagreements but not an account that would mandate as a matter of definition that every scientific disagreement must be seen as rational. I believe that Brown does not wish to claim that the rationality of science is just a brute fact about our language, a linguistic convention of sorts. Although he does not explicitly say so, it is clear that he thinks that extralinguistic reasons explain why science came to be seen as paradigmatically rational. These reasons are likely to be found in the enormous cognitive and practical success of science. However, if such

KU H N’S ANTIRE LATIVIS M1 03

reasons are persuasive, they are sufficient by themselves to show that science is rational. If they are not persuasive,31 a linguistic fiat will not establish the rationality of science. In either case, the linguistic component of Brown’s theory of rationality does not do any philosophically useful work, either in general or in the specific case of science. Brown’s theory fails even in its privileged domain of science: even there Brown cannot make sense of some important types of judgments of irrationality that are internal to science, whether applied to individuals or to scientific communities. To see this, recall that, according to Brown, only individual agents can be characterized as rational and that they always should be so characterized if they submit their expert judgments to the relevant community of other experts. In other words, submitting one’s own expert judgment to the evaluation of other experts is not only necessary but also sufficient for rationality. Consider, for instance, Peter Duesberg, a full professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, a National Cancer Institute award winner, and an expert in the field of virology by any standard. Since 1987, Duesberg has publicly argued that HIV is a harmless virus that does not cause AIDS; rather, in his view, AIDS is caused by recreational drugs and other risk factors attributable to “lifestyle.”32 In the judgment of his peers, Duesberg has no evidence for his claim and ignores the overwhelming evidence accumulated against his position. Brown’s conception of rationality would nonetheless deem Duesberg rational, whereas most of his colleagues would not.33 Thus, Brown’s theory cannot make sense of some important judgments internal to science: scientific communities do have a need to evaluate some of their members as wrong and others as irrational. The two criticisms are by no means the same, and both are vital. Worse, Brown’s account implies not only that an evidence-denying virologist is a rational scientist but also that a dogmatic creationist is rational if he has proper educational credentials and if he is willing to submit his judgments to contemporary paleontologists and biologists. Brown’s theory of rationality does not require that individuals submitting their judgments to the community of experts remain responsive to reasons and evidence that the community generates. Thus, Brown cannot maintain the properly firm boundaries between relatively cohesive scientific

10 4RATIO NALITY

communities with their shared pool of reasons, standards, methods, and devices, on the one hand, and various kinds of eccentrics and outliers who submit their judgments to the relevant expert communities in bad faith and with determined close-mindedness, on the other.34 Brown’s theory does need such boundaries, however: if scientific practice is to be the paradigmatic centerpiece of a theory of rationality, it has to be demarcated from pseudoscience, for example. Without a defensible criterion of demarcation between science and pseudoscience, Brown’s theory must collapse. This is not to say that any sound philosophy of science must provide a firm criterion of demarcation between science and pseudoscience or that Kuhn’s philosophy of science attempts to do so. The point is only that Brown’s theory of rationality requires such a criterion but fails to provide it. The same problem emerges at the collective level. Scientific communities need to differentiate between various kinds of sound and unsound research traditions. Negative judgments can be couched in terms of inaccurate results, poor experiment design, problematic background assumptions, fruitlessness of the direction a research program has taken, and so on. In some circumstances, judgments of irrationality may legitimately be rendered about whole research groups or traditions. Scientists, historians of science, and philosophers all need to be able to evaluate some scientific communities as wrong but rational and others as irrational tout court. The latter type of evaluation is not available under Brown’s theory, which means that it cannot accommodate important types of evaluation that both scientists and historians of science very much need to make. Detachability

Brown attributed to Kuhn a conception of rationality consisting of what I have called linguistic and descriptive components. The linguistic component makes science rational by definition and is thus untenable. The descriptive component, however, is fully detachable from the linguistic one. Situated within a different overall framework and modified so that “scientific rationality” is predicated of scientific communities, not of individual scientists, it proves indispensable for a sound reconstruction of Kuhn’s rationalism. I have argued in this chapter that we should take seriously Kuhn’s explicit antirelativist stance and that we cannot do so under the classical

KU H N’S ANTIRELATIVIS M1 05

conception of scientific rationality. A conception of rationality that simply assumes that science is rational would not yield an attractive philosophical position, either. We must thus start afresh from a careful analysis of the key points of Kuhn’s dynamic model of science; it is from such considerations, unencumbered by philosophical presuppositions and expectations, that Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality emerges.

5 COLLECTIVE RATIONALITY OF SCIENCE

T

he main textual sources for articulating Kuhn’s novel conception of scientific rationality are his post-Structure papers in which he developed an account of internal dynamics of scientific communities. Starting there, I reconstruct and develop his conception of scientific rationality as a specific form of collective rationality. At the purely formal level, Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality prohibits glaringly irrational belief and choice and requires reason responsiveness and uninterrupted pursuit of inquiry. At the substantive, historicized level, it provides a pragmatist type of justification for change of established beliefs or practices. I argue that this conception of scientific rationality, so reconstructed, allows for judgments of irrationality to be rendered both against individual scientists and against scientific communities by using the historically changing criteria internal to science. In that manner, Kuhn’s philosophy of science escapes both the charge of relativism and a collapse into the view that science is rational by definition.

SCIEN TIFIC COMMUN I T I ES Kuhn’s Shift from Individual to Collective Agents

To properly appreciate Kuhn’s novel conception of scientific rationality, we must start from his crucial observation that science is an irreducibly

CO LLECTIVE RATIO NALITY O F SCI EN CE1 07

social practice. Earlier philosophy of science approached the problem of scientific rationality in terms of beliefs and choices of an idealized epistemic agent—a “scientist qua scientist”—who was then construed theoretically as an ideal reasoner and a perfect appraiser of evidence, free of any personal biases, social prejudices, and even unwarranted but understandable commonsense assumptions; no limit was placed on his reasoning abilities; his goal was taken to be purely cognitive and sufficiently motivational; and his patterns of reasoning and standards of evaluation were assumed to be well ordered and exclusively epistemic in nature. Scientific communities, if rational, would simply follow in public discussions the pattern of reasoning and deliberation of such an idealized agent. Kuhn saw that such an account could not explain the rationality of science. On the one hand, motivations, reasons, and choices of actual scientists considerably differ from those of an ideal epistemic agent. As a consequence, the questions concerning the rationality of actual scientific practice cannot be answered by describing the reasoning in which scientists do not typically engage. “There are,” he said, “no ideal minds, and the psychology of the ideal mind is therefore unavailable as a basis for explanation.”1 On the other hand, the individual agent model is also incapable of capturing the dynamic complexity of interactions within scientific communities. In order to understand both scientific agreements and disagreements as rational, we must take “the normal group rather than the normal mind as a unit.”2 A proper understanding of the behavior of scientific groups faced with, for example, theory choice will then yield a proper account of scientific rationality: Take a group of the ablest available people with the most appropriate motivation; train them in some science and in the specialties relevant to the choice at hand; imbue them with the value system, the ideology, current in their discipline (and to a great extent in other scientific fields as well); and finally, let them make the choice. If that technique does not account for scientific development as we know it, then no other will. There can be no set of rules of choice adequate to dictate desired individual behavior in the concrete cases that scientists will meet in the course of their careers. Whatever scientific progress may be, we must account for it by examining the nature of the scientific group, discovering what it values, what it tolerates, and what it disdains.3

10 8 RATIO NALITY

Thus, Kuhn does not need to portray individual scientists as detached, disinterested, unprejudiced, and objective pursuers of knowledge in order to claim those virtues for science. Scientific communities, through proper training, canonical research strategies, peer review, and public debates, can ensure that the diversity of human motivations and abilities, when properly socialized and institutionalized, will manage to correct individual mistakes and produce rationally warranted consensus.4 This is made possible by social mechanisms that prevent individuals from carrying the day on the basis of rhetoric alone. However motivated, individuals must produce arguments capable of withstanding the scrutiny of those motivated differently. The personal, the religious, or the political dimensions of human life need not be absent from a scientist’s professional thinking, but they are neutralized by the fact that they are not shared across the community. Community members share the facts and standards internal to science, and whichever conclusion the community reaches, it will be reached on the basis of these internal features alone. In that way, Kuhn can retain a robust and demanding conception of scientific rationality without denying the obvious embeddedness of science within a larger social web and without locating it in the reasoning procedures of each individual scientist. Individual Differences

To understand how Kuhn sees individual differences among scientists, we should not—contrary to standard interpretations of Structure—emphasize the strictly personal differences between them.5 Although he never denied that different political, religious, or personal interests motivate individual scientists, he was always interested primarily in the differences they exhibit qua scientists—hence the enormous importance he attributed to scientific education, postdoctoral research, and the microcommunity within which scientists spend their daily working lives. An analogy with virtue ethics, although imperfect, may help us envisage the kind of thought process that, in Kuhn’s view, results in the formation of a scientific mind. In contrast with rule-based moral systems, virtue ethics emphasizes moral education, motivation, and development of character— habitual ways of seeing, feeling, judging, and reacting in morally relevant

COLLE CTIVE RATIO NALITY O F SCI EN CE1 09

situations. Education for a good, ethical life does not consist simply in the acceptance of well-articulated and fully justified moral rules and principles: ethical knowledge is to a large extent tacit, and ethical action relies on habits more than on deliberation. A well-developed ethical character thus requires, although it does not simply consist in, a reliable skill of seeing the ethically salient features of a situation. Seeing people, acts, or situations as just, kind, cruel, unfair, and so on is in a sense immediate, although this immediacy is not available to an uncultivated mind. It is a result of moral education, just as a certain kind of attentive listening and hearing are results of musical education. Mature moral judgment rests on moral perception as well as on moral practices, habitual reactions, and critical reflections. Although a certain kind of personal and educational history is necessary for the development of moral judgment, the judgment does not carry its history on its sleeve: it appears to be immediate, spontaneous, even obvious—things simply strike the ethical agent in a certain way. But in order to be struck that way, one must be ethically developed and often morally sophisticated. This feature of ethics—that a certain kind or degree of experience is necessary for certain perceptions to be possible—does not guarantee that the same situation will be perceived or judged in the same way by everyone who has had the requisite education. Disagreements between ethically sensitive people are notorious even among the members of the same culture and are due in part to the complexity of the criteria people use for descriptions such as “honest response,” “harsh punishment,” and the like.6 Similarly, in Kuhn’s view, scientists often simply see whatever problem they are concerned with as a problem of a certain kind, judge it interesting or irrelevant, and quickly evaluate possible paths to its solution, without always thinking a great deal about it.7 To be able to form such quick and seemingly spontaneous but reliable judgments is a mark of expertise in the field. To achieve it, scientists develop, through many years of education and intellectual maturation, certain habits of mind, which then influence their perception, reasoning, choice, and action. This fixation of scientific character through experience of a particular, specialized sort is largely responsible for the fact that scientific revolutions are effected mostly by a younger generation of scientists, whose ways of seeing and thinking are still somewhat unformed.8 Fixation of the scientific mind is thus a necessary

110 RATIO NALITY

condition for expertise in one’s field, highly desirable during the periods of normal science. However, should the field enter into a crisis and subsequent revolution, the very same scientist, with the very same skills, knowledge, and habits of mind—actually, precisely because of them—may come to be seen as dogmatic by some later-day historians. Historical evaluation of a scientific character is thus context dependent. The very same ways of thinking, choosing, and acting may constitute exemplary intellectual virtue in the context of normal science but may appear to be unnecessarily dogmatic in the context of a revolution. This shows in yet another way why Kuhn thought that the philosophy of science ought to analyze scientific communities diachronically: in science, as in ethics, no one character is a character suitable for all times. Shared Scientific Values

This understanding of individual differences among scientists helps explain how Kuhn can see both scientific agreement and scientific disagreement as rational. All scientists make use of accuracy, simplicity, consistency, and other scientific values in their daily work. The differences in the ways in which these values are interpreted, ranked, and applied explain scientific disagreements in the times of crisis, whereas their stability over time and the fact that they are shared by all members of all scientific communities—however imperfectly—explain the ultimate consensus. Scientific rationality consists in part in the use of scientific values as reasons in discussions and deliberations, both during the periods of normal science and during the periods of revolutionary science. For Kuhn, rationality does not compel the scientific choice, although it restricts scientific reasoning to the use of what he identified as scientific values. Paul Hoyningen-Huene justly stresses that for Kuhn even the ultimate consensus leaves intact some differences in understanding and using of scientific values: But the new consensus has to be qualified in two respects. First, the same result in the individual decision processes which constitutes the end of the disagreement does not imply that the individual choices are also based on exactly the same reasons. Rather, the individually varying values still

CO LLE CTIVE RATIO NALITY O F SCI EN CE1 1 1

contribute to the choices, and they function as additional (or rather integrated) reasons for choice. But after the phase of disagreement, so many arguments in favor of one candidate have piled up that whatever the individual value system consists in, everybody makes the same choice.9

I propose a slight amendment to Hoyningen-Huene’s reading of Kuhn: we should put some explicit constraints on the range of reasons that can lead to consensus, for otherwise we may attribute to Kuhn a view of scientific communities that subverts his intention to take them as bearers and producers of scientific rationality. For example, there are no constraints on reasons that may motivate an electorate: a candidate may win the election handsomely, although the various reasons cited by his voters are different to the point of incompatibility. Scientific decisions, in contrast, cannot be thought of as rational if portrayed as an aggregate outcome of any kind of reason. Kuhn identifies at least two processes in science that prevent the decisive influence of idiosyncratic reasons on scientific choice. First, contemporary demand for public display of reasons immediately sifts out the purely personal and scientifically irrelevant. Second, the postrevolutionary period brings about selection and solidification of reasons deemed best for the choice that was made. Although vigorous debates end with the consensus concerning the choice of the paradigm, low-grade disagreements will continue until consensus about reasons is reached as well. The agreed upon justification of the already made choice often consists in only a subset of reasons that were offered in the period of revolutionary science in favor of the eventually winning paradigm. Also, retrospective justification of this choice comprises the reasons that became available well after the paradigm had been chosen and pursued for a considerable period of time. The consensus on the best justificatory reasons for choice is thus not needed for the choice to be made; it is needed in the ensuing period of normal science as an important exemplar of scientific reasoning. Group Reasoning and Decision Making

Although Kuhn modified or even completely abandoned later on certain ideas that he defended in Structure, his insistence on the centrality of scientific communities for our understanding of the rationality of science

112RATIO NALITY

remained unchanged. He undertook all later revisions of the view presented in Structure with the aim of preserving this vital insight: The mistake is to treat groups as individuals writ large or else individuals as groups writ small. It results, at its crudest, in talk of the group mind (or group interest) and, in its subtler forms, in attributing to the group a characteristic shared by all or most of its members. The most egregious example of this mistake in Structure is my repeated talk of gestalt switches as characteristic of the experiences undergone by the group. In all these cases the error is grammatical. A group would not experience a gestalt switch even in the unlikely event that every one of its members did so. A group does not have a mind (or interests), though each of its members presumably does. By the same token, it does not make choices or decisions even if each of its members does so. The outcome of a vote, for example, may result from the thoughts, interests, and decisions of group members, but neither the vote or [sic] its outcome is a decision. If, as has traditionally been taken for granted, a group were nothing but the aggregate of its individual atomic members, this grammatical error would be inconsequential. But it is increasingly recognized that a group is not just a sum of its parts and that an individual’s identity in part consists in (not just: is determined by) the groups of which he or she is a member.10

This understanding of scientific communities, however, presents serious difficulties for Kuhn’s overall project. On the one hand, if groups do not have minds, if they cannot even be said to think or decide, then we cannot evaluate them as rational or irrational, either. Only minded, intentional agents can be so characterized. On the other hand, Kuhn ascribes scientific rationality to communities, not to individual scientists. If this ascription is to do the philosophical work Kuhn needs it to do, it cannot simply function as a metaphor or as an indirect way of ascribing rationality to individual scientists. Hence, to make his position consistent, Kuhn must relinquish the claim—often repeated in his later writings—that groups do not think or decide. They must do that, in some sense, as a necessary condition of their being the proper subjects of ascriptions of rationality.11 How did Kuhn come to think about a central concept in his philosophy of science in such an unclear way? Throughout his career, he was deeply

CO LLE CTIVE RATIO NALITY O F SCI EN CE1 1 3

disturbed by various misunderstandings of Structure. Especially troublesome for him was the nearly universal perception of the book as advocating a replacement of philosophical inquiry into scientific reasoning with a psychological and sociological inquiry into individual scientists’ motives and personal interests. He was in particular criticized for explanations of scientific change in terms of “gestalt switches” and “conversion,” and he came to think that by using these terms he bore some responsibility for the misunderstandings his work provoked.12 He thus continued to emphasize that the real subject of science is a scientific group, but in his efforts to dissociate himself from all vestiges of individualist accounts of scientific rationality, he went too far in denying that there are any features common to a person and a group. Paradoxically, the denial that groups have minds sits much better with those individualist accounts of rationality that Kuhn rejected than with his own communitarian view. So in order to consistently claim that scientific rationality is properly predicated of scientific communities, Kuhn must allow that such communities have beliefs and values and that they reason and make decisions. He does not need to see groups as minded in a full-blooded sense, displaying rational unity and consistent intentional attitudes over time—although perhaps this kind of view would serve him best.13 He can avoid the inconsistency with something less than that: to speak of collective beliefs or collective decisions is not simply to speak metaphorically. Indeed, when not preoccupied with his critics, Kuhn seems to be leaning in this direction: “Groups like this should, I suggest, be regarded as the units which produce scientific knowledge. They could not, of course, function without individuals as members, but the very idea of scientific knowledge as a private product presents the same intrinsic problems as the notion of a private language.”14 Kuhn’s central idea here is that scientific knowledge is public; we shall see in a moment that it is also inevitably distributed. Scientific knowledge is public in at least three related but distinct senses. First, it is acquired through a specific form of socialization in which a number of practical and intellectual skills are developed through interaction with recognized experts in the field. The experts exemplify scientific virtues, share their knowledge, and correct their apprentices’ mistakes. Second, mature sciences depend on division of cognitive labor and on increased specialization. Present-day scientific knowledge can be neither produced nor possessed by any single person. Third, Kuhn thought of both

114RATIO NALITY

scientific knowledge and scientific rationality as products of group interaction. The views and practices of a hypothetical isolated scientist— however knowledgeable and reasonable—would not penetrate and thus not influence any scientific community, nor would the ideas and arguments presented by other scientists reach her and play a role in her considerations. Although an isolated scientist can be a rational person, her rationality would not contribute to the rationality of science. I thus propose the following modification of Kuhn’s account of scientific rationality. A community does not become scientific because its members are scientists; it is not a sum of its parts, where the parts can, as it were, leave the community and retain their scientific identities. On the contrary, individuals become scientists by becoming a part of a scientific community: their scientific rationality exists exclusively through their membership in the group. Scientific communities thus need not be seen as minded in a full-blooded sense. For Kuhn’s purposes, it is sufficient to define individuals as scientists in terms of their membership in a scientific community. A scientific group is, in its turn, defined by the publicly accessible conditions of membership, patterns of interaction, and typical goals, values, reasons, activities, and projects. Kuhn should have said that as a condition of good standing in this group an individual must both share its goals, values, and projects and publicly display his or her own research and reasoning. The sum total of publicly available reasons, research results, hypotheses, explanations, predictions, and so on is available to all scientists, and each scientist contributes to it as a condition of his or her remaining an active member of the community.

COL L ECTIVE RATIONA LI T Y Scientific Rationality as Collective Rationality

I propose that scientific rationality is, for Kuhn, a form of collective rationality. Under such a conception, rational justification does not consist merely in showing effective means–ends reasoning. Rather, justification and the possibility of persuasion are conceptually intertwined: both require reliance on a commonly accepted set of reasons, argumentative patterns, methodological rules, canons of evidence, and the like. The possibility of

CO LLE CTIVE RATIO NALITY O F SCI EN CE1 1 5

persuasion thus depends on the existence of a commonly shared set of standards and values; the emergence and durability of this set depends on its collective acceptance. Collective rationality thus aims at genuine consensus that legitimizes collective decisions. In light of the inescapable empirical fact that such consensus sometimes fails to obtain, a conception of collective rationality must provide an illuminating and plausible account of disagreements. Such a conception must also allow that some communities that have achieved nearly perfect unanimity may nevertheless not have achieved full rationality.15 The model of collective rationality is familiar from political philosophy, but there are important differences. In the political domain, collective reasoning is typically in the service of cooperation. We humans are social animals, and our need to live together requires a fair amount of coordination and consideration for different views and needs of others. To come to a fair or good communal life, many political societies engage in collective reasoning, aimed at discovering and adopting the best procedures for decision making under the conditions of their members’ different needs, beliefs, and values. In science, the situation is rather the reverse: cooperation is primarily in the service of collective reasoning, which produces in the periods of normal science a relatively stable consensus on substantive, methodological, and practical issues that shape and guide scientific work. Collective rationality of political communities is negatively affected by the community’s size: such reasoning works best in small, local groups capable of face-to-face discussions. Collective reasoning of scientific communities is, on the contrary, improved by a community’s large size. A large scientific community encourages greater division of cognitive labor and better distribution of epistemic risks. A shared paradigm ensures that differences between small research groups will not extend to disagreements about fundamental aspects of theory or practice. Contemporary means of communication—conferences, peer-reviewed journals, and Internet postings—allow for swift exchange of information and ideas without creating the close personal bonds that mark collaboration in small groups. Such conditions favor unbiased evaluation of research and its widespread use. Cooperation is necessary for production of scientific knowledge, which Kuhn understood both as theoretical and practical. It requires public

116 RATIO NALITY

exchange and public evaluation of hypotheses, motivating and supportive reasons, and the sharing of devices, techniques, and the like. It is rational for individual scientists to cooperate with other members of the community because all scientific work relies on the relevant work of others and because best scientific results follow from research undertaken by a group (such as a laboratory group). It is rational for scientific communities to tolerate a measure of disagreement among their members because such disagreements typically lead to interesting debates that enrich and refine the set of reasons, justifications, arguments, and counterarguments available to all, thereby improving the reasoning of each member who makes use of that public set. Limited, localized dissent is thus welcome even in the periods of normal science because it typically results in the improvement of all community members’ reasoning and practice. In this respect, the public good of a common set of reasons and practices is the opposite of a scarce resource: the more one contributes, the more there is to go around.16 It is also rational for a scientific community to press for moderate consensus on the fundamental aspects of the current paradigm, which helps it avoid fragmentation and ensures that the size of the community will not dangerously decrease, that detailed, specific work within the paradigm will continue to be done, and that the set of reasons will remain genuinely public through general use. Justification

The key point to appreciate in Kuhn’s novel understanding of scientific rationality concerns justification. He rejected the classical conception’s requirement that scientific beliefs and values stand in need of a justification from a neutral, objective standpoint external to science: “First, the Archimedean platform outside of history, outside of time and space, is gone beyond recall. Second, in its absence, comparative evaluation is all there is.”17 Kuhn thus explicitly rejected the foundationalist theory of justification that privileges some beliefs as self-justifying, immune to revision, and indispensable for justification of other beliefs. What did he offer in place of foundationalism? First, we should note that the scope of Kuhn’s account of justification is not the same as the scope of the foundationalist account. In one way, it is

CO LLE CTIVE RATIO NALITY O F SCI EN CE1 1 7

narrower: whereas foundationalism offers a perfectly general theory of justification, Kuhn limits his theory to scientific reasoning and practice. In another way, his scope is much wider: his model of justification is not limited to the justification of beliefs. In Kuhn’s view, science is constituted by a system of values and practices at least as much as it is constituted by a system of beliefs. It always contains a number of assumptions, techniques, metaphors, values, methods, practical devices, and so on. Scientific work under a paradigm relies on an enormous cognitive and practical background that remains largely undifferentiated and tacit. Second, no scientific tenet—tacit or articulated—is in principle immune from revision, yet a large body of such tenets must be assumed for any justification to take place.18 Thus, in place of an absolute, timeless, independently justified canon of reasoning and epistemically secure “basic statements,” Kuhn introduced a “moving, historically situated Archimedean platform” of relatively stable scientific tenets that change slowly over time, always in response to specific theoretical or practical concerns. These concerns are appraised as warranting the change by an appeal to those beliefs and values that are not challenged at the time: “The very large body of beliefs unaffected by the change provides a basis on which discussion of the desirability of change can rest.”19 Let us consider this new image in some detail by analyzing a rarely explicit passage from Kuhn’s later work: On the developmental view, scientific knowledge claims are necessarily evaluated from a moving, historically situated, Archimedean platform. What requires evaluation cannot be an individual proposition embodying a knowledge claim in isolation: embracing a new knowledge claim typically requires adjustment of other beliefs as well. Nor is it the entire body of knowledge claims that would result if that proposition were accepted. Rather, what’s to be evaluated is the desirability of a particular change-of-belief, a change which would alter the existing body of knowledge claims so as to incorporate, with minimum disruption, the new claim as well. Judgments of this sort are necessarily comparative: which of two bodies of knowledge—the original or the proposed alternative—is better for doing whatever it is that scientists do. . . . In comparative judgments

118 RATIO NALITY

of the kind just sketched, shared beliefs are left in place: they serve as the given for purposes of the current evaluation; they provide a replacement for the traditional Archimedean platform. . . . A number of classic problems in philosophy of science . . . turn out on this view to be due not to the nature of scientific knowledge but to a misperception of what justification of belief is all about. Justification does not aim at a goal external to the historical situation but simply, in that situation, at improving tools available for the job at hand.20

At any given moment in the history of science, a whole system of beliefs and practices is already in place, tightly interwoven with various norms that designate exemplary solutions, reliable evidence, fruitful developments, and so on. Kuhn’s epistemology of science thus begins in the middle of things, with accepted beliefs, practices, techniques, values, and canons of reasoning. Any proposed change of any of these tenets must be evaluated against the relatively stable background of other tenets, which are not simultaneously called into question. Because each scientific tenet may at some time be replaced, none enjoys absolute epistemic security. Yet not all tenets can be replaced at once: some must remain stable in order to be used as the justificatory background necessary for legitimizing any particular proposed change. The fact that the whole background may in time become substantially revised through incremental changes does not call into question the rationality of any particular change or the rationality of scientific development in general: It is simply irrelevant that some or all of those beliefs may be set aside at some future time. To provide a basis for rational discussion they . . . need only be shared by the discussants. There is no higher criterion of the rationality of discussion than that. The historical perspective, thus, also invokes an Archimedean platform, but it is not fixed. Rather, it moves with time and changes with community and sub-community, with culture and sub-culture. Neither of those sorts of change interferes with its providing a basis for reasoned discussions and evaluations of proposed changes in the body of belief current in a given community at a given time.21

CO LLE CTIVE RATIO NALITY O F SCI EN CE1 1 9

Moreover, although any particular tenet of science can be called into question and subsequently abandoned, all such challenges must themselves be justified by an appeal to the scientific community’s common set of reasons. Thus, perfectly general demands for justification—issued by a skeptic or a radical relativist, for example—would not and should not be heeded. To make an impression on the scientific community, the demand for justification must rest on its accepted reasoning and detail the specific scientific problems that the challenged tenet is thought to present. Finally, even well-justified objections are idle if not advanced in light of an alternative: without a rival, even a deeply problematic paradigm or its element is still serviceable for “the job at hand” and thus is rational to retain.22 Exceptionally for Kuhn, here rational means “rationally required”: scientific communities should, on the pains of irrationality, retain even deeply troubled paradigms or problematic methods and beliefs until a better alternative becomes available. Thus, rather than follow his predecessors and focus on evaluation of scientific beliefs for their truth, probability, or utility, Kuhn aimed to offer an explanatory and justificatory account of changes in scientific practice and belief system. The warrant for a proposed change will be judged against the beliefs and practices that are for the time being stable, and the judgment will always be a comparative one: To ask which of the two bodies of belief is more accurate, displays fewer inconsistencies, has a wider range of applications, or achieves these goals with the simpler machinery does not eliminate all ground for disagreement, but the comparative judgment is clearly far more tractable than the traditional one from which it derives. Especially since what must be compared are only sets of beliefs actually in place in the historical situation. For that comparison, even a somewhat equivocal set of criteria may over time be adequate.23

Of course, comparative judgments may differ. Kuhn’s account of justification does not aim to select at most one of them as the rational evaluation; rather, his point is that all competent judgments on scientific issues must make use of the commonly shared background, consisting of those tenets of science that are not debated at that point in history. They “serve as the

120 RATIO NALITY

given” in a particular situation and for the purposes of a particular comparative evaluation. Collective rationality of science consists precisely in this body of shared beliefs, values, practices, and principles of reasoning, which provide the necessary background against which both agreement and disagreement can be justified as rational. To see this, consider the conditions under which disagreements occur in revolutionary science. In this period, the current paradigm faces anomalies that are not being resolved despite concentrated and long-standing efforts; the anomalies are significant and cannot be ignored. There is a collective agreement concerning the existence of a serious problem; the differences and disagreements concern rival solutions. Again, there is wide agreement that any viable solution must excel on some evaluative criteria shared by the scientific community. This is tantamount to saying that even the greatest revolutionaries in science must rely on the community’s collective set of reasons and values both to formulate and to defend their innovation. Accuracy, consistency, simplicity, and other scientific values are used as criteria for comparative evaluation of rival hypotheses, theories, or paradigms. According to Kuhn, these criteria require no justification as long as there is a broad collective agreement on their interpretation and employment. But even the broad agreement will not make scientific reasoning uniform. Scientific values form a heterogeneous set; scientific problems are often complex and multifaceted; and different scientists have developed different outlooks and ways of solving problems in the course of their specialized careers. Naturally, then, scientific judgments may not agree with one another even in the periods of normal science. Revolutionary science sharpens the problem by effectively dividing the community: the proponents of different paradigms differ in their selection of the most important phenomena the field should study, in the solutions they deem exemplary, in their interpretations of scientific values, and on a number of other peripheral and fundamental issues. It is a central feature of Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality that no precise algorithm—and no rule of thumb either—can be used for adjudication of potentially conflicting values and scientific judgments. Evaluation and justification in science are inseparable from the specific features of the problem under consideration. Different contents and contexts favor

CO LLE CTIVE RATIO NALITY O F SCI EN CE1 21

different procedures for adjudicating scientific disagreements. As long as scientific judgment seeks a solution for a recognizably scientific problem through employment of publicly available scientific methods and evaluative criteria, the differences in judgments can be seen as exhibiting scientific rationality at work. This enables scientific communities to differentiate between the disagreements in which all parties scrupulously rely on the best current scientific standards of evidence and reasoning and the disagreements in which they do not. Only the latter invite a justified charge of irrationality. Although there is no neutral ground from which to justify either scientific values in abstracto or their particular interpretations, rankings, and applications, the fact that these values—and not others—are actually accepted by all scientists is sufficient for the justification of the rationality of their continuous use. Indeed, if we follow Kuhn in relinquishing foundationalist dreams, the question of ultimate and independent justification of scientific values cannot even be posed. We can now answer the question that Kuhn’s critics have repeatedly asked: How can Kuhn justify actual scientific values as the rational values for science to have? The answer is contingent: these values have thus far served scientists better than any alternative evaluative criteria. Comparative evaluation—being all there is—extends to the criteria of evaluation: their survival is their justification.24 Revolutionary Changes as Rationally Warranted

How could Kuhn account for revolutionary change as rationally warranted if the proponents of rival paradigms differ in their very understanding and employment of all scientific evaluative criteria? This question has always been the firmest foothold for relativistic readings of Kuhn, but it was always equally clear that he saw scientific revolutions as rationally warranted. Kuhn did not think of scientific revolutions as swift and complete changes. Incommensurability between rival paradigms is always partial and developed over a long period of time during which an overlapping series of facts and values remains relatively stable. Historically, the new paradigm comes into being by a series of gradual transformations of the

122RATIO NALITY

old paradigm’s concepts and principles.25 At any point in time, the old paradigm and the new paradigm have many empirical, normative, and conceptual features in common. The new paradigm is motivated by the anomalies that it deems irresolvable within the framework of the old paradigm. It proposes resolution of the anomalies by reconceptualizing the entire framework. Discontinuity is thus obvious, but continuity is present in equal measure. The old paradigm’s anomalies and achievements make the new paradigm historically possible: to reconceptualize, the new paradigm must use the old concepts and focus on at least some of the old paradigm’s problems. Should the new paradigm win the struggle, it will recover even more of the old paradigm’s successes. Revolutions thus may appear to be swift, decisive, and complete only from a considerable historical distance, which Kuhn adopted in Structure. He made clear in his later writings that he understood the actual unfolding of scientific revolutions as slow, incremental, and partial. Thus, to evaluate scientific revolutions as rationally warranted, we need not appeal to the criteria of rationality external to science: collective rationality will suffice. Members of a scientific community propose, debate, and effect the change, offering reasons that are—as a condition of the members’ remaining respectable community members—internal to science and recognized by other members as carrying some weight. Of course, according to Kuhn, the reasons are not decisive: they incline rather than compel. They may sometimes persuade those who initially favored a rival solution, but not always and certainly not on pains of irrationality.26 To appreciate this point is to appreciate both the nature and the limits of Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality as a form of collective rationality. The common set of publicly shared values, beliefs, methods, and so on makes persuasive arguments possible. Persuasion is enough: it is not indoctrination, trickery, manipulation, or force. Persuasion is not a form of negotiation either. Negotiation, irrespective of the outcome, typically leaves one’s views and wishes intact; persuasion changes them by relying on reasons that one shares with one’s interlocutor. Of course, persuasive reasons abound on both sides during the periods of revolutionary science. They do not always convince everyone, but they do sharpen and refine the scientific debate of the period. Scientific rationality as collective rationality requires that all of the offered reasons be internal to science—in other

CO LLE CTIVE RATIO NALITY O F SCI EN CE1 23

words, to be to some degree recognized as having legitimacy by proponents of both paradigms. It is in the nature of inclining reasons that they will not carry the same weight for everyone. If a scientific revolution takes place, it is consequently a rationally permissible outcome of a serious problem situation rather than the rationally required solution to it.27

ABSOLUTE REQUIREMEN TS FOR T HE RATION A L ITY OF SC I EN C E

I have argued that Kuhn’s attribution of scientific rationality to scientific communities results in an overall model of collective rationality of science. A model of instrumental rationality is subordinated under it, restricted to the best means for achieving the daily minigoals of active scientific research. Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality is two tiered in another sense, too. In addition to the historically changeable sets of substantive requirements for the rationality of scientific research that are locally developed and upheld, Kuhn recognized a minimal set of universal but purely formal requirements of scientific rationality. This aspect of his philosophy passed unnoticed because it is by itself insufficient to resist the charges of relativism. Properly understood, however, it is an important element of Kuhn’s new rationalism. Kuhn famously stated that scientific choice is not compelled by either logic or empirical evidence. But this assertion does not mean that for him the choice is not constrained in any way. There is a minimal set of rational requirements for any scientific community at any point in the history of science. Most of these requirements are best understood negatively as prohibitions. Prohibitions of Inconsistency and Ineffectiveness

The set of minimal, formal requirements for the rationality of science contains, first of all, two essential prohibitions: against obvious inconsistencies and against self-defeating ineffectiveness. Kuhn’s unsympathetic readers sometimes missed these points, so he felt that he needed to be very explicit on both of them: “The sort of thing I now say, and was not very far from

124RATIO NALITY

saying in the last chapter of Structure, is that truth, at least in the form of a law of noncontradiction, is absolutely essential. You can’t have reasonable negotiation or discourse about what to say about a particular knowledge claim if you believe that it could be both true and false.”28 He further clarified: Now suppose . . . that the scientist’s aim in selecting theories is to maximize efficiency in what I have elsewhere called “puzzle solving”. . . . Clearly, a scientist who subscribed to this goal would be behaving irrationally if he sincerely said, “Replacing traditional theory X with new theory Y reduces the accuracy of puzzle solutions but has no effect with respect to other criteria by which I judge theories; nevertheless, I shall select theory Y, setting X aside.” Given the goal and the evaluation, the choice is obviously self-defeating. . . . There is no clearer sign of irrationality.29

It is not surprising that in this quote Kuhn’s example is imaginary and not historical: to choose theory Y although one considers it worse than its rival in every respect is to violate a universal rational prohibition against choosing in defiance of one’s best judgment. In science, Kuhn thought, the person who would make such a choice “is simply opting out of the scientific language game.”30 Prohibition Against Suspension of Inquiry

Next, scientific rationality requires that a choice between rivals must be made even if the comparative evaluation is inconclusive. In contrast with the prohibitions of glaring inconsistency and self-defeating ineffectiveness, this requirement does not constrain every rational choice. For example, there are situations in ordinary life when insufficient evidence recommends suspension of belief as the most rational option. Similarly, a philosophical inquiry that aims primarily to avoid error—such as Descartes’s—should often end in the same state if carried out consistently. Science, however, cannot be conducted either on the basis of ordinary life’s rules of thumb or on the principles of a foundationalist epistemic inquiry. According to Kuhn, scientific research in mature sciences can proceed only under a shared paradigm. To choose neither of the rival paradigms because the available evidence and reasons do not clearly favor one of

CO LLE CTIVE RATIO NALITY O F SCI EN CE1 25

them is effectively to suspend all research altogether. Under the circumstances, this would be the only absolutely irrational thing a scientific community can do. As Kuhn puts it in Structure, “To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.”31 Scientific rationality thus requires what traditionally understood epistemic inquiry forbids: the choice of one of the rival paradigms without sufficient evidence of its superiority. Justified in this manner, the prohibition against suspension of judgment concerning rival paradigms is based on logically necessary conditions for the existence of science: if the choice were not made, scientific research would cease. There is, however, an additional epistemic reason for saying that the choice must be made, familiar from the work of William James. In “The Will to Believe,” James argues: There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of opinion—ways entirely different, and yet ways about whose difference the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very little concern.—We must know the truth; and we must avoid error—these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws. Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the truth A, we escape as an incidental consequence from believing the falsehood B, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving B we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as bad as B; or we may escape B by not believing anything at all, not even A. Believe truth! Shun error!—these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life.32

Although Kuhn never explicitly made the same point, it not only coheres well with his overall view but also can be seen as implicit in it. His insistence that mature science must proceed under a paradigm despite the anomalies it has accumulated is motivated by his Jamesian perception that the risk of error is unavoidable in a scientific inquiry. In a similar vein, Kuhn believed that the choice of one of the rival paradigms is rationally required even if rational deliberations as to which paradigm should be preferred remain inconclusive.

126 RATIO NALITY

Thomas Nickles agrees that “the method of belief ” that James advocated is better suited for science than Descartes’s “method of doubt.” However, he does not credit Kuhn with the same insight: “Question: Where does Kuhn himself stand in the debate over the method of belief versus the method of doubt? Answer: Kuhn feels strongly both ways! Writing as a disengaged philosopher-historian, he retains the method of doubt. Hence his central point about the logical and empirical underdetermination, and therefore inevitable failure, of any particular paradigm.”33 But, contrary to what Nickles believes, Kuhn completely rejected anything resembling a “method of doubt” within his philosophy of science. First, he argued that scientific communities do not cultivate principled skepticism but are in fact successful and innovative in their research due to a large extent to cultivated dogmatism during the periods of normal science. Second, in his own philosophical practice Kuhn equally eschewed skepticism either as a tool or as a threat. James’s “method of belief ” is perfectly suited to Kuhn’s philosophy of science as well as to his metaphilosophical position. It applies precisely in the circumstances that Kuhn describes as underdetermined. Nickles is right in pointing out that Kuhn’s analysis of scientific development stresses logical and empirical underdetermination of rival paradigms. This means that the choice between them cannot be determined by logic and empirical evidence. Nor can the choice be determined by an appeal to scientific values because proponents of rival paradigms differently interpret and rank these values. But Nickles is wrong in thinking that underdetermination is an obstacle to Kuhn’s adoption of James’s method. On the contrary: if there were any way to rationally determine the choice, James’s methodological principle would have been beside the point. It applies precisely to the situations in which both hypotheses (or paradigms) are live—that is, when neither is so clearly superior to the other that it must be rationally preferred. In such circumstances, James says, “each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.”34 This is exactly similar to the situation of choice between rival paradigms, each of which does rather well on some criteria for theory choice but not on all. Both are live options for the scientific community. When one paradigm becomes clearly superior, the other is dead; the community has made its choice. While both paradigms are live, however, comparative reasons for and against each are included in the common set of reasons available to all

CO LLE CTIVE RATIO NALITY O F SCI EN CE1 27

members of the scientific community facing the choice. This point is crucial because for the community the choice is momentous: James so characterizes a choice in which the stake is great, the opportunity unique, and the choice, once made, irreversible.35 Finally, to fall under James’s rule, the choice must be forced. This means that the dilemma is based on a “complete logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing.”36 For James, then, the “method of belief ” applies precisely to situations of momentous and forced choice between two live hypotheses.37 Although James was concerned mainly with religious belief, his epistemology is perfectly suited for the philosophy of science, which can then understand scientific revolutions as the rational results of forced but undetermined choices. Requirement for Reason Responsiveness

The last formal requirement for the rationality of science that we can detect in Kuhn’s writings is best understood not as a prohibition but as a demand that the practice be reason governed and reason responsive. In a model of collective rationality, this demand should be understood as the demand for publicity of research results, reasons, and choices; for existence of a canon of scientific reasoning in general and a canon of evidence in particular; and for a right balance between the tenacity of scientific beliefs and practices and the awareness of fallibility and openness of scientific inquiry. Reason responsiveness is still a formal requirement because it does not specify the nature of the reasons. Scientific values, canons of evidence, relevant data, authoritative texts, exemplary solutions, and so on vary among different scientific fields and through history. The Scope and Nature of Absolute Requirements

Although minimalist, this formal set of requirements for scientific rationality is nevertheless informative both in its content and in its underlying claim that there is not anything else to be said at that level of generality. Richer substantive conceptions of scientific reasoning are both available and desirable, but they are to be found at the local level through careful research into the forms of reasoning employed in particular sciences at specific stages of their historical developments.

128 RATIO NALITY

Let me add two clarifications to this two-tiered reconstruction of Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality. First, we should not think of the two tiers—the substantive and the formal—as matching Kuhn’s distinction between normal and revolutionary science. In revolutionary science, we do not have just the set of formal rational requirements governing the discussion among the proponents of rival paradigms. Rather, what we have are two partially overlapping yet different substantive canons of rationality at work against one another. Formal requirements, of course, are present in revolutionary science, but so they are in normal science. In fact, some prohibitions of the formal set are perfectly general and practice unspecific; science respects them on the pains of irrationality because everything must. Second, although Kuhn’s two-tiered account of scientific rationality may recall Rudolf Carnap’s distinction between internal and external questions,38 the similarities are only superficial. For Carnap, internal questions—that is, questions asked within a framework—are theoretical questions with cognitive content. The answers to these questions are capable of being true or false. In contrast, external questions have no cognitive content. They are meaningful only if understood as questions concerning the choice of a framework. Although the choice is influenced by considerations of comparative simplicity, fruitfulness, and efficacy of a linguistic framework, the decision to accept a framework is not a cognitive act. It is a practical choice to be defended or criticized on the basis of its expediency. Carnap thus insists on a sharp demarcation between theoretical rationality and practical rationality. They are confined to the different domains: theoretical rationality applies locally to internal questions and determines belief; practical rationality applies at the global, external level, at which the choice between rival frameworks must be made. Kuhn’s view is very different. Kuhn does not treat the question of scientific rationality as falling neatly under the general epistemic problem of warranted belief. Having highlighted the ineliminably practical aspects of scientific education and work, he rejects the assumption that the rationality of science falls under the constraints of theoretical rationality alone. Scientific reasoning and choice thus cannot be fully understood within the confines of traditional epistemology. But the alternative model of practical rationality is insufficient as well. Although it allows for the rationality of choice under uncertainty,

COLLECTIVE RATIO NALITY O F SCI EN CE1 29

even under ignorance, and although it can accommodate myriad practical reasons, values, and considerations operative in science, it cannot place any constraints on the standards of choice, evaluative criteria, or goals that shape and guide scientific decision making. Thus, if we start from the premise that theoretical and practical rationality (the rationality of belief and the rationality of action) are mutually exclusive and exhaustive, we will encounter great difficulties in trying to subsume scientific reasoning and choices as described by Kuhn under either of the two traditional conceptions of rationality. If, however, we take Kuhn’s description of scientific practice as our starting point, we will see that various cognitive and practical goals and values depend on one another and in fact are typically jointly employed. This observation should incline us to revisit the well-established philosophical distinction between theoretical and practical rationality and to admit it into Kuhn’s philosophy of science in a contextualized and rather tentative form. For Kuhn, the very distinction between “the epistemic” and “the pragmatic” as well as the related distinction between theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning should not be sharply drawn in the context of science. The two tiers in Kuhn’s account of scientific rationality—the formal and the substantive—do not employ substantially different types of justification, the theoretical and the practical. On the contrary, the justifications are on both levels of the same type, theoretical and practical—in other words, pragmatic.

ANTIREL ATIVISM DEFEN DED

Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality, as previously reconstructed, must show that it possesses enough normative robustness to distinguish between good and bad reasoning, effective and self-defeating action. In general, it must allow that it is possible—in principle at least—to say of a scientific community that it is irrational in some respect, else the conception would collapse into a definitional fiat fatal to Brown’s theory. In this section, I first briefly sketch four different types of situation in which we may be inclined to say that a scientific community is irrational and then offer two Kuhnian responses to these examples. Both responses acknowledge,

13 0 RATIO NALITY

as they should, the possibility of judging scientific communities as irrational. However, such judgments have to be justified. The nature of the justification offered in their support will show that they are importantly internal to science and thus a part of the collective rationality of the practice. First Set of Objections

Let us consider some situations in which the characterizations of group irrationality in science would seem prima facie to be in order. First, think of a period of normal science in which anomalies accumulate, the paradigm does not yield new research strategies, and there are no important discoveries or theoretical breakthroughs. Although no individual scientist can be faulted for failing to articulate an alternative, it may be thought that the scientific community is guilty of irrationality for continuing to work under such a moribund paradigm. Second, distribution of epistemic risks by simultaneous pursuit of both rival paradigms is a rational course for a community to adopt in the period of revolutionary science; return to normal science is the desirable goal. In different sciences, scientific communities have historically been differently disposed toward the costs and benefits of these opposing tendencies. One may think that in some historical cases there was rather too much haste to return to normal science and in others that there was too much tolerance of rival theories, leading to the fragmentation of resources. In both types of cases, it seems that one may advance the judgment that a scientific community was irrational in acting as it did. Third, think of various kinds of political pressures a political regime may impose upon a scientific community, demanding that certain values (ideological or religious) be incorporated in the practice of science as a condition of its continuation. Alternatively, think of commercial funding for science that not only favors some areas of research over others as potentially more profitable but also demands that the research be designed so that certain hypotheses be confirmed rather than refuted or vice versa. Pressure of this sort affects the domain of publicly presented reasons, commonly shared values, and the scope of available research opportunities rather than the private reasoning of individual scientists. As a consequence, the collective rationality of a group that yields to such pressures may be

CO LLE CTIVE RATIO NALITY O F SCI EN CE1 31

seen as less than the rationality of a group that resists them or that does not face such pressures. Finally, scientific theories—especially in social and life sciences—are vulnerable to the biasing influence of widespread prescientific assumptions, values, and beliefs. These assumptions, values, and beliefs may be genuinely shared by nearly all members of a scientific community if they belong to the same social group. Precisely because science cannot develop without any prescientific assumptions, the collective rationality of science may at times be no greater than the collective rationality of the society that produces it. First Set of Replies

Kuhnian philosophy of science has resources for evaluating cases of alleged collective irrationality in science. The first move for a Kuhnian is to point out that the plausibility of any such allegation depends on the standards and values that the critic endorses. These standards and values, however, are not external to science—typically, the critic shares them with the scientific community she is evaluating. Kuhn can thus say that the criticism of scientific communities may well sometimes be justified but that the justification relies on the set of reasons and values internal to science and is thus included in the collective rationality of the practice. To see that the necessary resources for criticism are internal to science, reconsider the cases described earlier. First, the need for an alternative paradigm is generally felt within a scientific community well before a new paradigm is proposed, and this shared feeling of dissatisfaction with the dominant paradigm is causally relevant for the eventual emergence of the new paradigm. Second, members of the community rarely judge the opposing impulses in revolutionary science—toward consensus versus toward further pursuit of each of the rivals—to be perfectly balanced. To say that one unjustifiably trumps the other is, in fact, to enter the scientific debate, not to assess it from some neutral point of view. Similarly, scientific communities forced to accept externally imposed values into their discourse are certainly negatively affected by that imposition, but this is so on their own judgment. While it is correct to say that a scientific community that gives in to such pressures has something wrong with it—and,

13 2RATIO NALITY

parenthetically, epithets other than irrationality come to mind when diagnosing what exactly went wrong—the members of the community would presumably be the first to say so because they would be the segment of a larger society most motivated to put a stop to such interferences. Finally, the criticism of shared social biases in science must rest on current scientific knowledge and methodology in order to document the claim that the evidence was evaluated in a biased manner. The criticism thus depends on the evidential standards of current science. Moreover, shared biases—like those that gave us phrenology, for example—cannot be prevented or criticized if they are not detected. To detect them, one often needs to be at some historical distance from the society that generated them. The critic’s allegedly external standpoint is thus, in fact, a presentist standpoint. Presentism is not “presuppositionless”—it presupposes presentday evaluative standards shared by the current scientific community and the society at large. The criteria of evaluation it uses for judging past research as biased are the criteria internal to the present-day science and, like all such criteria, may someday be found wanting and reinterpreted or replaced. There is thus nothing in Kuhn’s account to prevent us from criticizing past or present scientific communities as failing to reach full scientific rationality.39 However, our intellectual resources for doing this plausibly and effectively must depend on the canons of reasoning constitutive of the collective rationality of science: in advancing our objections, we are not merely observing and evaluating scientific discourse; we are participating in it. The second and more important Kuhnian response to the alleged examples of scientific irrationality rests on his claim that in the absence of an Archimedean platform, “comparative evaluation is all there is.” Scientific communities cannot be deemed irrational for not choosing an option that was not available at the time of their choice. We have seen that to ask “What is the proper justification for a particular belief, hypothesis, or theory?” is to ask a wrong question within Kuhn’s understanding of scientific reasoning: scientists always evaluate comparatively. What they compare are “sets of beliefs actually in place in the historical situation,” sets of already articulated options. Kuhn writes: “If I sometimes say that any choice made by scientists on the basis of their past experience and in conformity with their traditional values is ipso facto valid science for its time, I am only underscoring a tautology. Decisions made in other ways or decisions that could

CO LLE CTIVE RATIO NALITY O F SCI EN CE1 33

not be made in this way provide no basis for science and would not be scientific.”40 Like American pragmatists before him, Kuhn is very much an epistemologist of the possible, where the possibilities are not to be thought of as merely logical or conceivable. A possible choice for a scientific community to make is a historically possible choice between actually articulated alternatives. Possible reasons for choice are similarly the reasons publicly available within the scientific community that had to make the choice. A community cannot be seen as irrational for not taking into consideration the reasons it was not aware of. The choice, then, must be made among the available options, motivated by available reasons, and in accordance with the available standards. This process, of course, is not enough to guarantee truth, but it is sufficient for collective rationality. It might be tempting to think that the understanding of scientific rationality that I have developed here on Kuhn’s behalf mistakes general consensus for rational justification. Not so. It is important to differentiate between political consensus, in principle constrained only by the participants in the discourse and the procedures that they decide to adopt, and scientific consensus, significantly constrained at all times by the world that scientists seek to understand. Kuhn is explicit on this point: “No part of the argument here or in my book implies that scientists may choose any theory they like so long as they agree in their choice and thereafter enforce it. Most of the puzzles of normal science are directly presented by nature, and all involve nature indirectly. Though different solutions have been received as valid at different times, nature cannot be forced into an arbitrary set of conceptual boxes.”41 Accuracy is an essential value of science. It comprises both the predictive and the explanatory power of a paradigm. However interpreted and however ranked relative to other values, it remains both highly desirable and difficult to achieve. There is no corresponding value in political discourse capable of seriously limiting the space for consensus. Collective rationality in science can thus never degenerate into “Anything goes!” agreement. The Radical Objection, Unanswered

Let us now turn to a related, frequently issued challenge to Kuhn’s philosophy of science. In order to escape relativism, it is argued, Kuhn must show not only that science is rational according to its own criteria of rationality

134RATIO NALITY

but also that it is rational tout court. Different practices respect different canons of reasoning; each practice is successful according to its own internal criteria of success. What makes science better than myth, religion, or magic? How can Kuhn think that internal justification is all there is to scientific rationality and yet believe that science is cognitively superior to other human pursuits?42 Although Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality supplies the resources necessary for a response to radical relativism, he never tried to articulate it.43 In all his writings, he took for granted the indispensability of science for society and its enormous influence on the canons of rationality by which we evaluate cognitive claims. In a way, he was simply uninterested in the questions derived from a long tradition of skepticism. This lack of interest may be taken as the best evidence we have of the depth of his break with traditional epistemology and its Cartesian ambition to provide secure foundations for science. Such questions, in Kuhn’s view, should not be asked—not only because they implicitly assume an Archimedean “platform” that, within the traditional epistemology, is itself perennially open to skeptical undermining but also, more importantly, because answers to such questions neither deepen nor enrich our understanding of science, the central object of Kuhn’s epistemological reflection.

R The reconstruction of Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality I have offered here shows that no charge of relativism, radical or moderate, can justifiably be leveled against him. In addition to avoiding relativism, his understanding of collective rationality allows two features desirable for a philosophy of science to have. First, it shows both scientific disagreements and scientific consensus to be potentially rational. Second, it allows for judgments of irrationality as internal judgments a scientific community applies to the reasoning and choices made by some of its members or research traditions. Some critics of Kuhn see him as insulating scientific practice from all possibility of criticism, but nothing in his work suggests such a point of view. His only requirements are that the criticism be competent enough to be taken seriously by scientists and that it be constructive enough to offer a viable alternative.

COLLECTIVE RATIONALITY OF SCIENCE135

Kuhn is thus a rationalist whose intellectual roots should be sought in the epistemology developed by American pragmatists, as I argue in chapter 7. It should also be noted that Kuhn’s understanding of the publicity of reasons and values as well as of their constitutive nature for a practice is decidedly Wittgensteinian. These and related ideas are visible in the works of many twentieth-century philosophers. Kuhn was by no means unique in appreciating their power in overcoming the legacy of Cartesian foundationalism and the skeptical worries it invites. His greatest achievement, rather, was to realize that science could not be exempt from the general reconceptualization of rationality that was under way at the time.

6 LOOKING BACK

Progress in Science

C

ontrary to what most readers of Kuhn have assumed—and despite the way in which Kuhn sometimes expressed himself—his philosophy of science is fully compatible with an understanding of science as progressive. In arguing for this claim, I start by briefly outlining the classical model of scientific progress as cumulative and goal directed. Kuhn rejected this model while retaining some of its elements within a novel understanding of progress as a backward-looking concept. In his later writings, he further explored the model of evolutionary development that first inspired his reconceptualization of progress. This led him to formulate an account of scientific development apparently at odds with the views he defended in Structure. I argue that the later version should be modified so that it amounts to a refinement, not a replacement, of Kuhn’s earlier position. The resulting view significantly enriches the Weberian explanatory structure I presented earlier on and highlights pluralism and the contingency of progress.

S H ARED BEL IEF IN SCIENTIF I C P R OGRESS The Prevailing Perception of Science as Progressive

It is generally taken as obvious that science is uniquely progressive. Unlike works of art or philosophy, later scientific theories are better than the

LO O K ING BACK : P RO GRESS IN SCI EN CE1 37

earlier ones. We now know more about the structure and the regularities of nature than our ancestors did, and we have reason to suppose that our descendants will know even more than we do. Scientific methods and instruments constantly improve as well, and the practical applications of research results are increasingly wide and ever more imaginative. The advancement of science, incomparable to that of any other human practice, is largely responsible for the shapes our contemporary lives have taken. Every philosophy of science must come to terms with this prevailing view of science as progressive either by supporting it or by explaining why it is both widespread and mistaken. To do this, of course, a philosophy of science has to explain the precise sense in which modern science is—or is not—better than the science of earlier times. The Received View’s Model of Scientific Progress

The proponents of the received view reasonably thought that the progressive success of science is due neither to luck nor to a miracle.1 In fact, this conviction motivated their inquiries into the specifics of rational scientific methodology, to which the consistent progress of science was attributed. The whole philosophical project of the received view can thus be represented as an elaborate inference to the best explanation of scientific progress, which gives us what I call the classical model of scientific progress: 1. Scientific progress is an indisputable fact. 2. Progress should be understood as a steady movement of successive scientific theories toward the cognitive goal of science. 3. To explain progress, we must assume that science is in possession of methodological means and evaluative criteria of choice for reaching or approximating its cognitive goal. 4. Scientific progress is cumulative: a new scientific theory incorporates the achievements of its predecessor, corrects its mistakes, and adds new discoveries.

Although classical rationalists differently identify the goal of science and propose different methodologies, all of them adopt the classical model of progress, which takes progress to be strictly cumulative. Sophisticated versions of this view can easily handle many of the objections raised against

13 8 RATIO NALITY

naive cumulativism. First, whereas naive cumulativism considers the goal of science to be reachable, more sophisticated versions recognize that the vastness of the universe coupled with human finitude and fallibility imply that the goal of science will never actually be reached. The goal of science is then understood as an exclusively heuristic goal that successive scientific theories increasingly approximate and toward which they converge.2 Second, the history of science is by no means a history of unqualified success—scientific failures and mistakes have been both pervasive and massive. Worse, all past theories have been abandoned as inadequate, which gives rise to the pessimistic induction: we have no reason to believe that either our current theories or our future ones will be empirically adequate or true. However, a sophisticated cumulativist would not be deeply impressed by this objection, and rightly so. Past failures and mistakes are now recognizable as such precisely because they have been detected and removed. The cumulativist view does not require that we treat our current scientific theories as substantively or methodologically perfect; it is enough to show that they are closer approximations to the goal of science than their predecessors have been and to offer some reasons in support of our expectation that this trend will continue in the future. Finally, a sophisticated cumulativist can accommodate the historical observation that scientific methods, values, and canons of reasoning change through time. He can argue that these changes are progressive and cumulative as well.3 All of these much-needed refinements, however, leave intact the basic characterization of scientific progress as cumulative and goal directed— precisely the features that Kuhn’s philosophy of science would not assimilate. This has often been missed. Assuming that any account of scientific rationality and progress must fit the classical model, a number of interpreters have wrongly attributed to Kuhn the view that the goal of science is to maximize its puzzle-solving capacities and a matching view of scientific progress according to which later scientific theories solve more significant and difficult scientific problems.4 This view of progress was not Kuhn’s, however. It was explicitly stated and defended by Larry Laudan.5 Unfortunately for both philosophers, Laudan’s work is frequently treated merely as a coda to Kuhn’s. Although Laudan certainly did find inspiration in Kuhn’s philosophy, the account of progress that he offers is his own. As we have seen, Kuhn’s philosophy does not postulate an overarching goal of science.

LOOKING BACK: PROGRESS IN SCIENCE139

In its absence, the concept of progress has to be differently structured than the concept used by the classical rationalists and by Laudan. Problems for Kuhn

Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality as collective rationality has neither need nor use for an ultimate goal of science, and his understanding of scientific revolutions, always involving incommensurability, clearly implies that scientific change is discontinuous: it simply cannot be strictly cumulative. Nevertheless, the common perception of scientific progress, endorsed by Kuhn himself, exercises pressure upon his thought. Progress is an evaluative term: it stands for a change that constitutes an improvement. If Kuhn is to be seen as a rationalist and a firm defender of the cognitive authority of science, then his philosophy cannot portray scientific developments as akin to mere changes in fashion or style. How can Kuhn account for progress as opposed to a mere development? Which criteria of evaluation ground his judgments of progressive change? Kuhn’s philosophy faces two related problems here. The first is the familiar problem of evaluative comparison between rival paradigms. If there are no paradigm-neutral, rationally compelling reasons for choosing one of the rivals, if there is no evaluative neutral standpoint between them, how can the choice of one of them be constitutive of scientific progress? We have seen that, for Kuhn, revolutions are rational in the weak sense of being rationally permissible, not in the strong sense of being rationally required. This view again seems to be in tension with his view that the choice that was in fact made constituted progress: if that choice was the progressive one, why was it not rationally required in the first place? Alternatively, if it is rationally permissible to choose either of the rival paradigms, then no matter what the scientific community ends up deciding, its decision should be deemed progressive. This conclusion seems to rob the notion of progress of its strongly evaluative meaning. The second problem concerns the progressive trajectory of science as a whole. Kuhn seems to share with the rest of us not only the hope but also the expectation that science will continue to progress. What justifies this expectation? If the confidence that scientific choices will lead to scientific growth is more than an article of faith, what are the grounds for it? How

140 RATIO NALITY

can Kuhn justify faith in progress as opposed to the unproblematic expectation of the further development of science, that something or other will happen? It is not surprising that Kuhn anticipated these natural objections: If this description has at all caught the essential structure of a science’s continuing evolution, it will simultaneously have posed a special problem: Why should the enterprise sketched above move steadily ahead in ways that, say, art, political theory, or philosophy does not? Why is progress a perquisite reserved almost exclusively for the activities we call science? The most usual answers to that question have been denied in the body of this essay. We must conclude it by asking whether substitutes can be found.6

PROGRESS IN ST RUCTURE

Kuhn’s response in Structure to the anticipated objections that his philosophy of science cannot account for scientific progress falls into two parts. The first part is negative, pointing out the flaws of the received view’s model of scientific progress. The second part is positive: Kuhn offered a reconceptualization of “progress” as a movement away from modest preparadigmatic beginnings rather than as a movement toward a distant goal of science. Criticism of the Classical Model

Kuhn diagnosed the inadequacies of the classical model of progress as stemming from two mistakes, both akin to a perceptual illusion. First, the natural sciences are not uniquely progressive: cumulative growth in the social sciences, arts, and humanities is difficult to see, but it does exist. Second, natural science does progress cumulatively, but only some of the time; focusing on normal scientific research hides from view the discontinuities that characterize revolutions. Let us look at these two points more carefully. First, Kuhn argues that there is cumulative growth in any discipline or school characterized by a

LO O K ING BACK : P RO GRESS IN SCI EN CE1 41

fundamental agreement of its practitioners. This growth is often missed because only in the natural sciences do such agreements extend to the whole field. In normal periods of natural science, the shared agreement on fundamentals is exceptionless; trained scientists who no longer accept the paradigm’s basic tenets are effectively excommunicated. In all other disciplines—including, for Kuhn, the social sciences—full agreement on fundamentals exists only within specific schools, not among them. Such schools are thus individually progressive but mutually antagonistic and incapable of contributing to each other’s research. This leads to the misperception that there is no progress in the discipline as a whole. For example, philosophical traditions agreeing on basic substantive and methodological issues make progress in producing refined and argumentatively bettersupported views. In a similar vein, painting in the Renaissance cumulatively progressed through a series of inventions by different painting studios—from foreshortening to chiaroscuro—that improved all educated painters’ ability to represent nature.7 Our impression that science is uniquely progressive is thus mistaken, although that mistake is in some sense natural. The absence of alternatives to the dominant paradigm in normal science directs the eye, as it were, to the cumulative growth of knowledge and skill; in other disciplines, the presence of disagreement among schools distracts from detailed perception of the steady improvement within each of them and creates the illusion that there is no progress whatsoever within the larger field. Other creative fields display progress of the same sort. The theologian who articulates dogma or the philosopher who refines the Kantian imperatives contributes to progress, if only to that of the group that shares his premises.  .  .  . If we doubt, as many do, that non-scientific fields make progress, that cannot be because individual schools make none. Rather, it must be because there are always competing schools, each of which constantly questions the very foundations of the others. The man who argues that philosophy, for example, has made no progress emphasizes that there are still Aristotelians, not that Aristotelianism has failed to progress.8

The classical model’s second error is the assumption that natural science progresses only in a cumulative way. Kuhn points out that the perception of cumulative growth during the periods of normal science is perfectly

142RATIO NALITY

justified: the cumulative growth of knowledge is a consequence of scientific communities’ collective rationality. A group of practitioners cannot hope to advance their field if there is no agreement on the fundamental issues and no shared sense of how to proceed. On the argumentative or theoretical side, this basic agreement enables qualifications and subtle improvements of the public set of reasons.9 On the more practical side, it provides the basis for effective, relatively uniform scientific training and makes possible the solution of a great many intricate problems by distributing them throughout the community. In a similar vein, the advancements in technology and instrumentation would be neither as speedy nor as impressive as they often are if there were no reason to suppose that the products of such inventive labors would be used by a great number of scientific research centers. Although such an analysis of progress as cumulative fits periods of normal science well, a close look at periods of extraordinary science and at all manners of conceptual, methodological, and technological “retooling” after a revolution shows that the cumulativist model has only limited applicability. Scientific revolutions involve a whole series of shifts: some previously important scientific problems will be expelled from the field, and others will be solved by means unavailable under the old paradigm. The new paradigm will be in part continuous with the old one, but in a weak sense: the preservation of previous empirical content, explanations, devices, interpretation of scientific values, and so on requires reinterpretation, rearrangement, reclassification, and refocusing. What is most important is that scientific work will be differently organized after a revolution, with different research goals and standards, different settings, novel instruments, and a fresh set of mostly tacit practical skills. Although such changes—with all of the losses that they entail—cannot be considered cumulative, they should still be seen as progressive. To see this, let us consider again, now from a somewhat different angle, the collective rationality at work in periods of crisis and extraordinary science. Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions in Structure highlights the incommensurability between rival paradigms and portrays disagreements among the members of a divided scientific community as resolvable only through persuasion in which neither side has rationally compelling arguments. In thinking about scientific progress, we should highlight instead a number of shared substantive and procedural preconditions for such

LO O K ING BACK : P RO GRESS IN SCI EN CE1 43

disagreements to occur. The final disagreement between the proponents of the old paradigm and the new paradigm will always be played out against the background of important agreements, which provide serious constraints on the choice that the scientific community will ultimately make. First, it will be generally felt that the anomalies of the old paradigm are halting the cumulative growth that characterized earlier stages of the paradigm’s pursuit. Second, among many competing reconceptualizations proposed during the crisis, typically only one rival will emerge as successful enough to deserve serious attention and win a substantial number of proponents. That new paradigm will thus be accepted by the whole scientific community as the best rival to the old paradigm, even if not everyone judges it superior. To prevail, the new paradigm will have to salvage some of the old paradigm’s problem-solving capacity, to resolve the paralyzing anomalies,10 and to offer realistic possibilities for fruitful future research. Both of the alternatives are in good shape: each is always perceived as valuable even if not as the best candidate according to paradigm-bound standards. The victory of one of the two rival paradigms—both of which passed a number of the community’s demanding tests and evaluations—should legitimately be seen as progress, whichever paradigm wins. The difference would not be in whether such a development was progressive or not but in the nature of progress that it exhibited. Progress will be largely cumulative if the old paradigm wins and revolutionary if the community selects the new paradigm; in the latter case, it will be, in retrospect, perceived as consisting precisely in the rejection of the old paradigm’s assumptions and ontology and in the bold reconceptualization of that paradigm’s problems and exemplary solutions. It is now easy to see how Kuhn can respect the evaluative demandingness of “progress” while still allowing for a plurality of progressive outcomes. The relevant contrast is not between rival paradigms themselves, in which one choice would be progressive, but the other would not; rather, the relevant contrast is between either of the rivals and the continuation of extraordinary science. Since both rivals are in very good shape compared to the now-discarded alternatives that proliferated during the crisis, either choice is better than these other proposals and better than an indefinite continuation of extraordinary science. Either choice is progressive with respect to the period of crisis, but on different criteria. From the point

144RATIO NALITY

of view of the scientific community that is in the midst of divisive and confusing extraordinary science, either choice is an improvement. Settling on one of the rival paradigms will allow the community to regain the cohesiveness necessary for collective scientific work and will mark the return to detailed, focused research. Whichever paradigm wins, some of the old problems will be resolved in one way or in another; some of the old achievements will be preserved to greater or lesser extent; and new research opportunities will open as a result of a successfully resolved crisis. Thus, both from the perspective of the scientific community in the period of extraordinary science and from the vantage point of the ensuing normal science, any choice between two strong rivals will justifiably be seen as progressive. The scientific community will eventually produce a retrospective account of the choice and will inevitably do so from the point of view of its current understanding of scientific achievement. In that sense, its evaluation of progress will be presentist to the extent to which it is shaped by current evaluative tools and standards. The postrevolutionary process of the solidification of scientific reasoning typically involves presenting the choice that was actually made as the only progressive choice that could have been made. However, as a careful historian and philosopher of science, Kuhn did not need to share in this conclusion with working scientists. Without pretending to rely on an absolute and timeless standard of progress, he recognized both the reality of scientific progress and the multiplicity of ways in which it could have happened. Kuhn’s Reconceptualization of Progress

The classical rationalists, with their instrumental model of scientific rationality and their cumulativism, understood progress as a movement toward the goal of science. “Progress” for them was an essentially future-oriented concept, akin in this respect to “plan” or “hope.” In contrast, Kuhn argued that a proper analysis of progress does not require reference to any future state. Rather, it is a measure of the distance between the starting point and the present state. Kuhn thus reoriented “progress” from a forward-looking to a backward-looking concept: “The developmental process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings—a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed

LOO K ING BACK : P RO GRESS IN SCI EN CE1 45

and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything.”11 “Scientific development,” he emphasized, “must be seen as a process driven from behind, not pulled from ahead—as evolution from, rather than evolution toward.”12 Kuhn’s basic idea for this reconceptualization of “progress” came from Charles Darwin’s theory. Darwin differed from other evolutionists of his time precisely by his rejection of the idea that evolution is in any sense a goal-directed process. Rival versions of the evolutionary theory assumed that organisms evolve in accordance with the divine plan, driven by an internal, innate tendency toward perfection. In contrast, Darwin understood the process of evolution as entirely due to natural causes and thus “driven from behind.” His theory effectively banished teleological explanations from evolutionary biology, as well as the task of ranking organisms as being closer or farther away from some imagined biologically perfect state. In Kuhn’s view, scientific development is, like evolution in biology, a nonteleological, unidirectional, and irreversible process. Unfortunately, Kuhn’s reconceptualization of scientific progress was often ignored.13 He was deeply disappointed by this fact; a year before his death, he said, “I would argue very strongly that the Darwinian metaphor at the end of the book is right, and should have been taken more seriously than it was, and nobody took it seriously. People passed it right by.”14 Kuhn’s reconceptualization of progress in Structure not only was significant in its own right but also united three important tendencies of his thought. The first tendency was his naturalism. Faced with the pressure to explain scientific progress, Kuhn turned to evolutionary biology: the source of his idea was thus science itself. This idea had to be adapted to cohere with his historical understanding of science as well as with his judgment that scientific development is progressive. The evolutionary idea was thus brought into harmony with the second tendency of Kuhn’s thought: his historical orientation. Kuhn’s concept of progress was not a concept of a social visionary who measures the present achievement against a distant utopia but ultimately a historian’s concept according to which one measures the present achievement against the achievements of the past. The third and central aspect of Kuhn’s thought was his philosophical project, crucial for an evaluation of science as progressive. As discussed in the preceding chapter, Kuhn’s account of justification and evaluation in science admits only comparative judgments based on a public, commonly shared set of

146 RATIO NALITY

reasons and practices. Such a background changes slowly over time, and evaluative standards thus may change as well. One consequence of this philosophical position is that it will have no room for the notion of absolute progress, understood as an approximation to a fixed goal or as an improvement on a scale of fixed values. The notion of progress that Kuhn’s philosophy offers is a notion of comparative progress, a directed change from a situation commonly perceived as less desirable to either of the two well-articulated, better options. Kuhn’s backward-looking concept of progress, embedded within his conception of scientific rationality, gives his philosophy an aesthetically pleasing symmetry of open-endedness at both ends. On the one end, there is no natural starting point for scientific inquiry, nor is there an epistemologically “given” beginning for philosophical reflections on science. On the other end, there is equally nothing determinate: no goal of inquiry, no grand paradigm that will explain everything and answer all questions, no inevitable pattern of progress. Just as there is no natural beginning for either science or for epistemology, there is no natural end, either. The end, when it comes, will be externally imposed and in that sense unnatural.

S E CON D THOUGHTS ON P R OGRESS

Kuhn found that the model of progress borrowed from the theory of evolution was very fruitful for his thought. He returned to it in his later writings, developing and expanding it. His ambition was to offer a view of scientific progress that takes into account the importance of increased specialization in science. In articulating this pattern of change, Kuhn came to think somewhat differently of a central concept in his philosophy: incommensurability. Specialization as Speciation

In his later writings, Kuhn took the evolutionary analogy further than he did in Structure. He came to think that the biological process of speciation has an analogue of sorts in the proliferation of scientific specialties. He no longer identified scientific revolutions primarily as periods in which a new paradigm replaces an old one but as periods in which an old paradigm

LO O K ING BACK : P RO GRESS IN SCI EN CE1 47

effectively splinters into a number of newly formed specialties.15 The old paradigm’s domain of phenomena is thus divided, as are the basic methods, problems, and solutions that survive the revolution. In this image, revolutions should be visualized as the speciation-event nodes on the phylogenetic tree; the resulting specialties are the branches that shoot off from such nodes. These branches, in Kuhn’s view, never reunite.16 As before, Kuhn did not think of this type of development as unique to science: The point is empirical and the evidence, once faced, is overwhelming: the development of human culture, including that of the sciences, has been characterized since the beginning of history by a vast and still accelerating proliferation of specialties. That pattern is apparently prerequisite to the continuing development of scientific knowledge. The transition to a new lexical structure, to a revised set of kinds, permits the resolution of problems with which the previous structure was unable to deal. But the domain of the new structure is regularly narrower than that of the old, sometimes a great deal narrower. What is outside of it becomes the domain of another scientific specialty. . . . This is the pattern that led me . . . to speak of specialization as speciation.17

The basic idea is simple, plausible, and traceable at least as far back as Weber’s analysis of the rise of bureaucracy in modern societies: precise solutions of intricate problems require the division of tasks and consequent specialization. Indeed, various human practices that exhibit progress exhibit increased specialization as well, science perhaps most of all.18 Ecology, genetics, biochemistry, evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, historical geology, computer science, sociology, quantum physics—to name just few of the many scientific disciplines that we have today—did not exist until quite recently. Unquestionably, this is a change from the way in which seventeenth-century scientists charted their fields, but, in Kuhn’s view, it is progress as well. We now know more about those aspects of the world that first motivated scientific inquiry, such as the generation of animals and the motions of celestial bodies, but we also know more about aspects of the world our predecessors did not suppose existed. There is no need to think of scientific progress as consisting only in the amount of information we have been able to amass in response to some particular questions that we—or our predecessors—have asked. Learning to ask

148RATIO NALITY

new, more specific questions and questions with novel presuppositions is no less an important advance. New questions sometimes concern recently discovered entities, such as cells or previously unknown metals or planets; new questions are sometimes about the properties and behavior of the entities a particular science has postulated, such as quarks or forces. The new questions sometimes, however, arise as a result of scientific revolutions: conceptual changes, changes in basic assumptions, or changes in the accepted model of scientific explanation generate scientific questions novel in both content and form. Some of the old questions survive, but postrevolutionary scientists have to tease them apart in order to understand and pursue them better. This occurs through the development of new scientific disciplines, each of which devotes all of its resources to a very narrow range of phenomena. In Kuhn’s view, this narrowing of focus and increase in precision will be seen as progress in accuracy. We might add that it is progress in fruitfulness, too, as new specialties open new avenues for intricate research projects and new spaces for now more narrowly defined forms of expertise. In his later writings, Kuhn argued that the increased cognitive power of science as a whole could have been achieved only through continuous and progressive specialization: “It is by these divisions . . . that knowledge grows.”19 The proliferation of scientific specialties and the cognitive progress that this process brings about is an important feature of science that should be taken into account by any philosophy of science that aims at descriptive accuracy. Kuhn’s attempt to extend his earlier model of scientific change to include gradual developments that lead to increased specialization is thus both welcome and sound. As an additional advantage, this evolutionary model offers the possibility of a more precise articulation of fruitfulness, a value that Kuhn thought was of central importance in the comparative evaluation of rival paradigms. We can now say that a paradigm is more fruitful than its rival if it is likely to generate more lineages of viable scientific specialties in a shorter period of time than its rival. Local Incommensurability and the Disunity of Science

The role of incommensurability in Kuhn’s new model of scientific change is extended as well: it now obtains not only between the old paradigm and the new specialties but also among the new specialties themselves. Each

LO O K ING BACK : P RO GRESS IN SCI EN CE1 49

will study its own domain of phenomena, with very small areas of overlap with the others; each will develop a complete structured lexicon, incommensurable with the other disciples’ structured lexicons. By “structured lexicon,” Kuhn means a framework of projectable kind terms. Such terms form a system of scientific categories constructed so that there is no overlap between any of the kinds. Taxonomic structures are holistic: kind terms have significance and use only in relation to one another. Structured lexicons are learned through numerous exposures and applications and always in clusters. Mastering a kind term requires mastering other kind terms in the same taxonomic cluster as well as mastering contrasting clusters within the same lexical structure. The method of learning as well as the whole functioning of lexical structures depend on relations of similarity and dissimilarity between the phenomena. Each lexical structure highlights those similarity relations central to its research interests, and so lexical structures of different specialties naturally differ from one another. Structured lexicons in science are thus taxonomic systems not limited to the classification of pretheoretically individuated objects, such as whales or planets. Rather, all scientific taxonomies introduce kind terms for predictive and explanatory purposes; the entities falling under them cannot all be easily construed as individuals. For example, Kuhn says, force, wave front, and personality are such kind terms. In his phrase, kind terms “populate the world as well as divide up a preexisting population.”20 Kind terms of a structured lexicon carry a set of expectations concerning the regularities in the world: they are projectable. Different specialties with different taxonomies highlight incommensurable patterns of similarity and dissimilarity relations and expect different regularities on the basis of them. This, in Kuhn’s view, causes communicative isolation between different specialties, analogous to the reproductive isolating mechanism in the evolutionary model: Kind terms supply the categories prerequisite to description and generalization about the world. If two communities differ in their conceptual vocabularies, their members will describe the world differently and make different generalizations about it. . . . Some of the kinds that populate the worlds of the two communities are then irreconcilably different, and the difference is no longer between descriptions but between the populations

15 0 RATIO NALITY

described. Is it, in these circumstances, inappropriate to say that the members of the two communities live in different worlds?21

Local incommensurability between sister specialties does not make communication or comparison impossible: any individual scientist can learn the structured lexicon of a specialty not her own. Scientific bilingualism is as possible as the initial mastering of the lexicon of one’s own specialty and by the same means.22 However, Kuhn thought that such bilingualism is rare because it is not perceived as useful for scientific work. Scientists, given the demands on their time and the focused thinking that they need to cultivate, familiarize themselves only with those lexicons and research results that are relevant for their projects. Local incommensurability thus presents an additional impediment to the wholesale assimilation of the old paradigm by the new disciplines. Each new discipline selects the most useful aspects of the old paradigm and reinterprets them without regard to the reconfigurations carried out in now different domains. The problems, exemplary solutions, methods, and instruments grow farther apart as each specialty pursues its own domain-specific research. The demand for increased precision in research results has also the effect of increasing the communicative distance between scientific communities, now effectively divided. With the enormous amount of scientific work carried out in numerous, dispersed research centers around the world, consistently keeping abreast of the literature in one’s own narrowly defined field is already more than most scientists can accomplish. In Kuhn’s view, knowledge of the achievements and debates in the neighboring fields is usually not necessary for the successful solution of one’s chosen problem. Scientists who try to attain such general knowledge would thereby be distracted from their appointed tasks. Alternative structured lexicons typically have no application in a field facing its own problems, so the practitioners in that field largely ignore them. Of course, Kuhn was very much aware of the interdisciplinary nature of many scientific research projects. A number of scientists as well as philosophers of science think that this kind of work leads to the unity of science, but Kuhn did not. In his view, emergent interdisciplinary fields offer only more evidence of the inevitable process of specialization:

LO O K ING BACK : P RO GRESS IN SCI EN CE1 51

After a revolution, there are usually (perhaps always) more cognitive specialties or fields of knowledge than there were before. Either a new branch has split off from the parent trunk, as scientific specialties have repeatedly split off in the past from philosophy and from medicine. Or else a new specialty has been born at an area of apparent overlap between two preexisting specialties, as occurred, for example, in the cases of physical chemistry and molecular biology. At the time of its occurrence this second sort of split is often hailed as a reunification of the sciences. . . . As the time goes on, however, one notices that the new school seldom or never gets assimilated to either of its parents. Instead, it becomes one more specialty, gradually acquiring its own new specialists’ journals, a new professional society, and often also new university chairs, laboratories, and even departments.23

Fragmentation of the old paradigm into specialized fields is thus likely to become deeper with the passage of time, and all attempts to bridge the boundaries between new specialties will only create new, increasingly independent specializations. The speedy development of each specialty and the increasing demand for technical competence create a situation in which scientists are well served by not attempting unification with adjoining fields: such attempts distract from the problems at hand and are in Kuhn’s view fated to fail due to the local incommensurability that obtains between lexical structures of different fields. In addition, new fields are likely to divide further under the pressure of the anomalies that each will accumulate. To think of a development thus described as progressive, one would have to be willing to trade away the unity of knowledge for the increased precision and accuracy of the solutions possible under these conditions: To anyone who values the unity of knowledge, this aspect of specialization—lexical or taxonomic divergence, with consequent limitations on communication—is a condition to be deplored. But such unity may be in principle an unattainable goal, and its energetic pursuit might well place the growth of knowledge at risk. Lexical diversity and the principled limit it imposes on communication may be the isolating mechanism required for the development of knowledge. Very likely it is the specialization consequent on lexical diversity that permits the sciences,

152RATIO NALITY

viewed collectively, to solve the puzzles posed by a wider range of natural phenomena than a lexically homogeneous science could achieve.24

So here is yet another startling novelty in Kuhn’s philosophy of science: whereas the received view took the unity of science to be a highly desirable goal and a mark of cognitive success, Kuhn, on the contrary, thought that the disunity of science is a necessary consequence of its progress. In the next section, I argue that this claim is too strong and ought to be rejected.

A KUH NIA N MODEL OF SCIENTI FI C P ROG RESS

Kuhn’s later model of scientific progress has several attractive features, but it also invites objections, both on its own terms and in relation to the earlier model with which it appears inconsistent. In this section, I identify the greatest difficulties facing Kuhn’s revised view of progress and deal with them through several clarifications and modifications. Although Kuhn’s later model of progress cannot be defended as it stands, it contains important insights that I incorporate into what I argue is a plausible Kuhnian model of progress. Evolutionary Metaphors

In both his early and his later philosophy, Kuhn found inspiration for his model of scientific progress in the theory of evolution. However, it would be a mistake to take literally either Kuhn’s evolutionary metaphor in Structure or his later analogy between specialization and speciation. In both cases, the theory of evolution merely offered a familiar, clear, and hence useful image for Kuhn’s purposes, helping him to highlight previously unappreciated aspects of scientific change. Obviously, the differences between the evolutionary process of speciation and specialization in science are numerous and considerable, in terms of both their causes and mechanisms of diversification. Contextually, the most important difference between the two stems from Kuhn’s commitment to an internalist historiography of science. History is not a natural process, and so

LOOKING BACK: PROGRESS IN SCIENCE153

internalist historiography depends on the attribution of intentions to historical agents, be they individual or collective. Narratives in the history of ideas have to be told in terms of problems, assumptions, beliefs, practices, goals, and values. Scientific development is indeed “driven from behind,” relying on inherited cognitive problems and research traditions, but it is driven by sophisticated, complex human intentions, not by random mutations and blind principles of natural selection. Kuhn used the theory of evolution as a source of powerful images, helpful in illustrating his idea that scientific development is complicated, contingent, and nonteleological. The importance of this image in his later writings does not warrant the conclusion that he replaced his early historicism with dubious naturalism. Rather than take Kuhn’s image literally, we should think of “specialization as speciation” merely as a useful metaphor. Revolutions

Kuhn’s new model of scientific change seems to lead to an understanding of scientific revolutions that is very different from the one defended in Structure. It may even appear that the concept of revolution has become useless in Kuhn’s later model. The emergence of scientific specialties after a revolution is minimally stressed in the earlier account but taken to be an absolutely essential feature of science in his later works. This shift considerably changes the image of scientific development at the heart of Kuhn’s philosophy. In place of the metaphor of a revolutionary change of scientific regime, the later writings suggest a metaphor of fragmentation of the scientific empire into comparatively small successor sciences. If Kuhn were right in predicting that this type of process will only increase in speed and frequency, the image of the sciences we are left with would resemble a geographical map of medieval fiefdoms. Revolutionary change and balkanization are very different outcomes of a crisis; if the latter metaphor is apt, the former is probably misleading. This leads to a potentially serious problem for Kuhn’s understanding of science as rational. The postrevolutionary consensus under the new paradigm, seen in Structure as both general and indispensable, is in the later writings problematized as partial. Kuhn saw this partiality of consensus as affecting scientific communication patterns to the point of incommensurability. The later model thus faces difficulties in justifying scientific

15 4RATIO NALITY

revolutions as rationally permissible, a problem that the earlier model did not have, as I have argued. According to the earlier model, a scientific community in a period of extraordinary science is rationally warranted in choosing the new paradigm in part because the revolution, once effected, will reestablish general consensus, communication, and collaboration. In Kuhn’s new model, however, such benefits are absent: gulfs in communication between different scientific subgroups are likely to become even deeper than they were during the period of extraordinary science. Reintroducing Kuhn’s early concept of the paradigm into his later account of progress should help with this problem. Broadly understood, a paradigm is a framework for shared scientific work. It contains metaphysical assumptions, exemplars of high scientific achievement, central questions, solution types, canons of evidence, as well as practical aspects of scientific work: institutions, settings, instruments, and necessary skills. Kuhn’s later model of scientific change needs the broad concept of a paradigm just as much as the earlier model did. By focusing exclusively on structured lexicons of different specialties in his later work, Kuhn seemingly lost sight of the need to explain moderate unity across sciences, fruitful exchanges between specialties, and the very emergence of interdisciplinary fields, all of which are made possible precisely by a shared general paradigm. The Unity and Disunity of Science

The second and related problem with Kuhn’s later model is that it portrays the disunity of science as an inevitable consequence of scientific progress. The proliferation of locally incommensurable, communicatively isolated specialties is presented as necessary for the production of precise and detailed scientific knowledge. Kuhn was both original and right in highlighting this process as important for our understanding of science. He was equally right in concluding that this portrayal is incompatible with the received view’s image of science as converging on one unified theory of the world. Nevertheless, his claim is too strong. Scientific specialization is one important way in which science progresses; interdisciplinary unification is the complementary process to which our increased knowledge of the world is no less indebted.

LO O K ING BAC K : P RO GRESS IN SCI EN CE1 55

As we have seen, Kuhn believed that unifications in science are apparent only because all attempted interdisciplinary research projects quickly turn into disciplines in their own right. This is true in the sociological sense that Kuhn highlighted: interdisciplinary projects often develop their own specialized journals, research centers, academic departments, and sources of funding. However, a philosopher of science interested in tracing cognitive pathways of scientific development should not consider specialized development as the most relevant aspect of science. In the important cognitive sense, interdisciplinary fields are not independent from the fields that surround them or from the ones from which they emerged. There is no useful parallel between reproductive isolation among different species and communicative isolation between scientific subcommunities. The latter is partial and surmountable. Under the pressure of the problems irresolvable by the resources of a narrowly defined discipline, scientists bridge the communicative gap to other, potentially helpful specialties without great difficulties. This linking is possible precisely because different specialties share the same paradigm in a broad sense: no insurmountable metaphysical, conceptual, or methodological clash impedes such communication and partial unifications. In contrast, no aspect of Aristotelian biology can be unified with any of the present-day biological specialties, nor can it offer any resources for the solution of intricate contemporary problems: the metaphysical, conceptual, and methodological cornerstones of Aristotle’s paradigm are too different from the cornerstones of our paradigm.25 Interdisciplinary research, when successful, is properly seen as a form of unification: some problems central to a field are solved with the aid of conceptual and methodological resources from other fields. The most important example of unification in our time is probably “the great evolutionary synthesis,” so dubbed by Julian Huxley,26 in which the genetics of inheritance and the process of evolution by natural selection were reconciled and unified. Modern evolutionary theory is thus a result of the unification of two branches of biology that developed relatively independently from one another and that were for a long time divided by different research interests and consequent debates.27 As Lindley Darden and Nancy Maull have argued, exclusive focus on scientific theories has obscured another way in which scientific work and

15 6 RATIO NALITY

its results can be unified: through so-called interfield theories.28 A field such as cytology, genetics, or biochemistry may embrace several different scientific theories, which Darden and Maull call intrafield theories. Different scientific fields may be related in different ways: they may explain different aspects of the same phenomenon, or one field may investigate entities causally relevant for another field, or one field may aim to explain the nature of entities postulated by another field. In all such cases, a bridge theory may be needed for the advancement of each of the fields: such bridges are what Darden and Maull call interfield theories. Interfield theories can connect different fields in different ways: for instance, they may provide answers to questions that arise in one field but cannot be answered within it alone, or they may focus attention on domain items not previously considered important, or they may predict new domain items for one or both fields.29 In general, modern science is unimaginable without numerous exchanges across theories, disciplines, and fields. Some of these exchanges amount to genuine unifications—conceptual, explanatory, methodological, technical.30 Many scientific problems cannot be solved without the benefit of knowledge concerning other, related aspects and subsets of the same domain. In a similar vein, methods, techniques, and instruments are freely borrowed between fields; scientific progress often depends on vibrant exchanges of this more practical sort. A Kuhnian philosophy of science ought to be able to accommodate the observations of both unifying and disunifying forces in science. Neither process can be understood without an appeal to the shared theoretical and practical context, supplied by the dominant paradigm. Within that paradigm, we can discern patterns of distancing and approximations among disciplines and theories. Any perception of interdisciplinary unity needs the concept of a paradigm to explain the possibility of reestablished communication and of joint interdisciplinary work on specific problems. Any perception of increased disunity in science needs the same concept of a paradigm to explain both the sense in which the incommensurability between the specialties is local and the persisting possibility of the emergence of new interdisciplinary areas. Scientific values, central to Kuhn’s philosophy of science, provide an equally hospitable framework for explaining the unifying and disunifying

LO O K ING BAC K : P RO GRESS IN SCI EN CE1 57

tendencies in science. On the one hand, the demands for increased accuracy, precision, quantification, and detailed understanding of the phenomena require specialization. On the other hand, the demands for explanatory generalizations and broadness of scope pull in the direction of unification. The two processes—specialization and unification—require one another to balance the demands that are difficult to satisfy simultaneously. For that reason, we could think of both the unity and the disunity of science as heuristic devices or fruitful ideals alternately guiding scientific research. Pluralism and the Contingency of Progress

All of the different patterns of scientific development—cumulative growth, revolutions, specializations, interdisciplinary unification, and so on— should be seen as potential patterns of progress as well. Of course, in any particular case, the final judgment on whether the change was progressive or not will depend on the details of the case, on the availability of alternatives, and on the standards used to evaluate the change. In general, however, each of these patterns could be progressive—and it often is. There are different types of progress and different methods of advancement in scientific knowledge. The same science progresses in different ways in different periods of its development: sometimes cumulatively, sometimes with a “Kuhn-loss” in empirical content, sometimes by discovery, sometimes by the reclassification of familiar phenomena, sometimes by division of a previously unified field, and sometimes by a reunification of previously distant fields. This means that the search for a single pattern of scientific progress is misguided; we need a pluralistic understanding of progress instead. This also means that progress is contingent in a strong sense. Our present sciences are not the only ones that could have emerged through scientific reasoning and choice; this particular development was not inevitable in any way. Had our predecessors asked different questions from the ones that they did in fact ask, had they been motivated by different cognitive and practical interests, or had they relied on different assumptions, categories, or instruments, contemporary scientific practice would have been different from what it now is. Not only could scientific development have

15 8RATIO NALITY

been different in its results, but it also could have occurred through differently patterned processes. There are no guarantees, either, that future scientific developments will follow the patterns that we can now discern in the past and in the present. After all, some of these patterns emerged only several centuries ago, and new ones may emerge in the future. This contingency is a consequence of Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality. Since scientific inquiry must always move forward on the pain of irrationality, even if there are no conclusive reasons to determine its course, scientific communities will sometimes make leaps. It may seem to us that the leaps that past scientific communities made were extraordinarily lucky. However, a leap in a different direction from the one that was in fact taken would have been equally rationally permissible. The moves and leaps subsequent to it could have been rationally permissible as well without ever becoming rationally required. Had past science faced a different series of choices from the ones it actually did face, present-day scientific choices would be different, too. If history is contingent, if the absolute requirements of rationality are minimal, and if progress can occur in more ways than one, then the progress from the past to the present that we are so keenly aware of is only one of the many ways in which scientific inquiry could have given us a better understanding of the world than the one that we started with. The Practical Success of Science

Kuhn’s model of progress would benefit from his insightful stress on scientific practice as more than mere application of theory and as the absolutely central force in constituting the shared world in which scientists work. Whereas the received view conceptualized scientific progress as the cumulative growth of mostly theoretical knowledge, with a new theory adding an increased number of important truths to the truths discovered by the theory it replaced, Kuhn’s philosophy of science can show that practical scientific progress is in fact observable from a paradigm-neutral point of view. This would also bring his view closer to the views of most people who are persuaded that science is uniquely progressive among human endeavors. This conviction does not stem so much from the appreciation of the theoretical advancement of science—of which the larger public sadly knows less than it should—but mainly from the uncontroversial

LOOKING BACK: PROGRESS IN SCIENCE159

observation that science is uniquely successful in increasing our ability to predict, manipulate, change, and create objects and processes in the world. Were it not for this impressive practical and technological success, scientific theories, with their mutual incommensurability, might not be seen as obviously progressive. Of course, practical and technological growth is not completely free of losses. Incommensurability between paradigms means that after a revolution the old ways of doing science will become obsolete and in time incomprehensible to all but historians of science. Old instruments, settings, and practices will be replaced, sometimes imperfectly. Nor is this loss limited to scientific communities. Societies that benefit most from rapid technological developments are the first to see old crafts and skills dying. Fewer and fewer people can now predict the weather by looking at the sky or use a sextant in navigation or know how floppy discs and telex work; there are fewer and fewer lace makers and programmers in Algol; we do not teach children penmanship as we used to; and map reading may soon become an antiquarian skill. Nonetheless, the widespread belief that the practical advances of science are on the whole progressive is justified. There is a clear sense in which the new instruments, tools, devices, and practices are preferable to the old ones, even with the losses taken into account: we clearly can now do much more than we used to, with more precision, and much more quickly. We should be careful not to conflate two different ways of thinking about “practical progress” as an evaluative expression. In a weaker sense, science is practically progressing if it can manipulate, change, and create new things in the world, whether these capacities lead to an ethically better world or not. In this sense, both the power of science to cure cancer and its power to develop biological weapons are marks of progress. A stronger sense of the term progress reserves it only for ethically and politically desirable scientific achievements. Determining what these achievements are, of course, is not nearly as easy as documenting practical progress in the weaker sense. The stronger sense is a natural one to use for a philosopher who examines social embeddedness of science and its ethical, social, and political dimensions. Kuhn’s cognitive, internalist philosophy of science, in contrast, needs only a weaker sense of progress. By keeping the description of what science can do separate from an evaluation of what it should do, Kuhn could account for the almost universal agreement on the growing

16 0 RATIO NALITY

practical power of science as well as for the fact that agreement concerning the benefits of this power is not easy to ensure. Pure and Applied Sciences

An analysis of progress in science that focuses on its practical and technological achievements must relax the supposed distinction between pure sciences and applied sciences. This distinction is usually drawn in the following way: 1. A pure science conducts cognitively significant research: it selects scientifically important questions and develops theories and models to answer them. In contrast, an applied science does no research of its own but relies on the research results obtained in pure sciences. Scientific revolutions and breakthroughs in science can thus be produced only by pure sciences. 2. Research in pure sciences is motivated exclusively by intellectual curiosity, the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and the desire to understand the world as it is in itself. In contrast, applied sciences are motivated by a desire to shape the world according to human needs and desires. As a consequence, they are limited: they explore only those results of basic research conducted by pure science that can be put to a practical use. But this sharp dichotomy simply does not hold. On the one hand, the so-called applied sciences increasingly develop their own research programs, experimental designs, and canons of evidence. For example, medical and pharmacological studies have already led to generally recognized breakthroughs in knowledge and have influenced the domain and methods of the so-called basic research in biology and chemistry. On the other hand, since all aspects of modern science require enormous social, institutional, and financial resources, research in pure sciences is frequently motivated by an estimate of its potential social usefulness, a feature likely to attract the necessary funding. Second, research and its applications are closely intertwined in all sciences. Most contemporary research requires sophisticated laboratory instruments, machines, chemicals, and other products of scientific

LO O K ING BACK : P RO GRESS IN SCI EN CE1 61

technology, which technological branches of science must develop. Although the technological development relies on previously acquired scientific knowledge, the “material culture” of science shapes to a considerable degree the choice of questions that will be investigated and the manner in which these questions will be approached in the pure sciences.31 Third, it is simply impossible to determine in advance which research programs will lead to scientific revolutions, which to socially significant practical applications, which to both, and which to neither. Such classifications can be offered retrospectively, not prospectively. Kuhn plausibly argues that a historical perspective shows that taxonomies of human practices that include “science” change over time: both the external boundaries between science and nonscience as well as the internal boundaries between particular sciences and kinds of sciences get drawn and redrawn after every major scientific revolution. This is the case with the distinction between pure and applied science, which became prominent only in the late nineteenth century as a justification for funding academic research that had no obvious social utility.32 These considerations suggest that we should reject the distinction between pure and applied science if it is understood as a sharp and significant distinction. Rather, we should think of scientific research and its applications on a model of a continuum, which could provisionally be visualized as having mathematical models on the one end and commercial products on the other. For example, medicine and biology do not fall clearly on either of the two poles: practical needs shape research projects in both disciplines, and both biologists and medical researchers can be motivated by intellectual curiosity or by the desire to improve the quality and duration of human life. Finally, it is perhaps time to put to rest the ancient idea at the root of the distinction between pure and applied science: the idea that knowledge for its own sake is somehow more valuable than knowledge pursued and acquired with the purpose of serving some other goal. All human quests for knowledge must identify some problems as significant and evaluate proposed solutions not only in terms of their truth value but also on the parameters of their relative importance and fruitfulness—else we would not be able to favor deep insights over accumulations of trivial facts. Judgments of relevance and significance are thus always necessary in the

16 2RATIO NALITY

pursuit of knowledge. They are a human contribution to the selective process of gaining an understanding of the world, so it is simply not clear why a science shaped largely by human theoretical, aesthetic, or abstract interests should be seen as cognitively superior to a science shaped largely by human interests in survival, reproduction, good health, a flourishing natural environment, speedy travel, enhanced communication, entertainment—or by any other practical interest that we share.

R I offered in this chapter a Kuhnian model of scientific progress, minimizing the differences that exist on this point between Structure and Kuhn’s later writings. Although it can reasonably be argued on strictly interpretive grounds that this difference is serious, amounting to a replacement of Structure’s account of scientific revolutions with an account of a slow evolutionary process characterized by specialization as speciation, I nonetheless believe that the best philosophical understanding of Kuhn would lead us to see the difference as being in focus and emphasis only. Throughout his career, Kuhn was fully committed to the view that scientific development should be seen in a nuanced way, which allows distinctions between different patterns of change. What changed for him in his later years is best understood as a change in the perspective from which he viewed scientific change. The earlier account took, as it were, a dramatic wide-angle tracking shot of the diachronic development of a single science, physics being Kuhn’s own paradigmatic instance, and drew conclusions from there. Thinking in terms of units of time as long as several centuries, Kuhn observed dramatic revolutionary changes among scientific paradigms. The historical perspective presented in the later account, in contrast, can be usefully likened to close-ups on the brief postrevolutionary moments when new specialties emerge. Seen within a short time frame of at most a few crucial decades, scientific change from this perspective appears both as gradual and as leading to the proliferation of locally incommensurable specialties. Kuhn gave support to this reading in saying that his later account of scientific change “cuts a synchronic slice across the sciences rather than a diachronic slice containing one of them.”33 An examination of a synchronic slice across disciplines shows specialization as an important feature of

LOO K ING BAC K : P RO GRESS IN SCI EN CE1 63

science, which no philosophy of science should ignore. It does not, however, dispense with the concept of scientific revolution understood as a replacement of one set of fundamental cognitive and practical commitments of a scientific community with a new set of such commitments incommensurable with the old one. In the end, the two accounts— revolutionary and evolutionary—are not only compatible but also mutually enriching since they offer alternative explanatory frameworks for any philosophy of science interested in being able to adjust its historical focus as appropriate.

III P R AGMAT ISM

F

7 KUHN’S PRAGMATIST ROOTS

T

he rich legacy that Kuhn bequeathed to contemporary philosophy of science was discussed in the previous chapters of this book. Now I want to recognize the debt that his thought owes to the legacy of American pragmatism. I argue in this chapter that Kuhn’s philosophy is properly appreciated only if it is seen as a creative and fruitful continuation of American pragmatism, but I do not wish to deny that there were many other influences on his work. Kuhn was an exceptionally erudite and intellectually curious man, whose thought naturally encompassed and responded to many heterogeneous ideas. First of all, his philosophy of science was shaped by his reaction against logical empiricism and Popperian falsificationism.1 Kuhn’s early training as a physicist led to his practice-oriented view of science, and his coteaching of an experimental course on the history of science with James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard University, was pivotal for the development of the hermeneutic historical perspective that he brought to his work. He was unusual in integrating this historical approach with ideas drawn from science itself, especially from evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics. Important philosophical influences were abundant as well: Kant’s first Critique,2 Ludwig Fleck’s unjustly neglected Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact,3 and, of course, the works by Kuhn’s contemporaries who shared his interest in historicist philosophies of science, such as Mary Hesse, Alistair

16 8 P RAGM ATIS M

Crombie, Paul Feyerabend, Russell Hanson, Stephan Toulmin, and possibly Michael Polanyi. Stanley Cavell was an extremely helpful interlocutor; he seems to have been one of the few people who understood and appreciated Kuhn’s ideas very early on and who, in a manner of speaking, transmitted to Kuhn a nuanced reading of later Wittgenstein.4 In the 1970s, conversations with Peter Hempel, Quentin Skinner, Richard Rorty, and Clifford Geertz probably left a trace or two on Kuhn’s thought, as did his wide reading in contemporary analytic philosophy.5 All these influences notwithstanding, I argue that when tracing philosophical lineages, we should situate Kuhn on a branch of American pragmatism. An obvious objection to this claim comes from Kuhn’s corpus itself: neither in his books and articles nor in the few interviews that he gave did he recognize American pragmatism as a formative influence on his thought. To my knowledge, he never even mentioned the philosophical works of Peirce, James, or Dewey.6 Yet Kuhn’s epistemology not only shows striking similarities to some distinctive and crucial aspects of their work but is also structurally a pragmatic epistemology. I present the evidence for this claim in the first section and offer in the second section an account of how the ideas of classical pragmatism came to influence Kuhn’s work despite his apparent innocence of the source material. This account, I hope, will be enough to show that the strong resemblances I find between Kuhn and the classical pragmatists are not merely coincidental.

PRAGMATIST EPISTEMOLOGY

American pragmatism developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the efforts of a number of thinkers working in different disciplines. The three most prominent philosophers among them— Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey—did not form a cohesive school. Moreover, each went through relatively distinct intellectual phases, displaying several different strands of thought over time. As a result, there is no unified set of classical pragmatist claims or arguments that can be summarized both briefly and faithfully.7 Peirce, the founding figure, thought of pragmatism as a method of analysis.8 His pragmatic maxim connects all our concepts—and, by extension, all our beliefs and

KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST RO OTS1 69

theories—to possible practical concerns and consequences.9 His highly original and philosophically rich work in logic, semiotics, and metaphysics is fairly technical and dispersed through hundreds of articles, so it sadly remains underappreciated. In contrast, his theory of inquiry—what we would call today Peirce’s epistemology and his philosophy of science—is succinctly presented in several seminal papers in a lively and clear manner.10 Unsurprisingly, these papers are among the best known and most influential of his writings. Kuhn’s epistemology of science has remarkable similarities to this aspect of Peirce’s thought, as we shall see in a moment. James’s engaging writing style and humanist concerns popularized pragmatism, sometimes beyond Peirce’s recognition or sympathy. His views were both easier to understand and easier to attack than the views and arguments of the philosophically much more complex and difficult Peirce. James’s version of pragmatism is to this day the best-known one; his infamous analysis of truth as a belief that it is useful or expedient to have is too often assumed to be characteristic of all pragmatists. In fact, James and Peirce differed especially sharply on this point. Another significant difference between them concerns the domains each found fruitful for philosophical reflection. James extended pragmatism not only to psychology and ethics but also—and, for him, crucially—to religious belief and mystical experience, topics that left the utterly secular Peirce cold and uninterested. It is in this context of religious thought that James rejected the traditional epistemology’s requirement that all doubtful beliefs should be suspended. He argued instead that when there is a forced and momentous choice between two or more live options, we are rationally warranted in believing one of them even in the absence of evidence and reason in its favor. This was the way, for James, to justify religious belief as rationally warranted in the absence of any evidence of God’s existence. As discussed in chapter 5, this Jamesian understanding of rational warrant is central to the epistemology that underlies Kuhn’s philosophy of science. Finally, Dewey was by far the most influential of the three founders of pragmatism. His interests ranged impressively from education, politics, and aesthetics to epistemology and the philosophy of science. He described his main philosophical project sometimes as an exploration of the logic and ethics of specifically scientific inquiry and sometimes as a perfectly general method of approaching and solving a wide variety of problems. It is a part of his integrative, synthetic approach to philosophy that the two

170 P RAGM ATIS M

formulations of his goal are fully compatible. Dewey’s central contributions to epistemology are his critique of representationalism—or, in his words, of the “spectator theory of knowledge”—and its replacement with an account of inquiry as a response to an “indeterminate” or “doubtful” situation that needs fixing. An inquiry is thus primarily an activity through which the world is changed at the same time as the inquirers are adapting to it. This understanding of inquiry finds resonance in Kuhn’s view of science as a puzzle-solving activity and of scientists as changing the world in which they work after a revolution. Despite the many differences and disagreements among its founding figures, pragmatism is nonetheless a distinct, recognizable approach to philosophy. Perhaps Hilary Putnam comes closest to its heart when he isolates four central theses common to Peirce, James, and Dewey: Cursorily summarized, those theses are (1) antiskepticism: pragmatists hold that doubt requires justification just as much as belief . . . (2) fallibilism: pragmatists hold that there is never a metaphysical guarantee to be had that such-and-such a belief will never need revision (that one can be both fallibilistic and antiskeptical is perhaps the unique insight of American pragmatism); (3) the thesis that there is no fundamental dichotomy between “facts” and “values”; and (4) the thesis that, in a certain sense, practice is primary in philosophy.11

To complete Putnam’s thought, we should say that practice is primary in the sense that it motivates, limits, and gives significance to philosophical problems and positions. I return to this point later in this section. For now, it is important to stress that the link between theory and practice in pragmatism is not best understood as a putative methodological rule or as a maxim for determining the meaning of concepts and propositions. Rather, this central idea should be seen as expressing a particular metaphilosophical attitude toward philosophy’s problems, methods, and legitimate ambitions as well as toward its boundaries and internal structure. Pragmatism demands a particular practice-related kind of justification for raising philosophical questions; it employs a characteristic lens for focusing in on them, through which images of many traditional problems disappear or change shape. It encourages philosophical reflection on all kinds of human concerns, allowing thought to move freely and fluidly between

KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST RO OTS1 7 1

philosophical theory and the practice it studies. In that sense, pragmatism is strongly nonhierarchical: it does not see philosophy as providing the rigorously examined foundation for all other human pursuits. On the contrary, pragmatism refuses to demarcate sharp boundaries between philosophical problems and the problems that emerge in science, law, art, ethics, or politics. As both a form of naturalism and a form of humanism, pragmatism is continuous with all kinds of fields, which, in turn, benefit from the critical examination of their assumptions, values, and goals. This attitude extends to philosophy itself. Pragmatism cheerfully ignores the traditional idea that a single philosophical discipline constitutes “the core,” whereas other disciplines are derivative or merely applied.12 In the same spirit, it denies the existence of some “eternal questions” that philosophy alone is supposed to address, and it eschews the aims of any “pure” philosophical inquiry abstracted from the contexts in which particular problems emerge. Reorientation

Kuhn’s epistemology is an heir to the pragmatist reorientation of the discipline. This reorientation involved—like a paradigm change—several significant shifts. Pragmatist epistemology differs from traditional epistemology in the domain of our cognitive lives that it takes as philosophically interesting, in the questions it deems central, in the standards it uses for the evaluation of the answers to these questions, and in the metaphilosophical understanding of the relationship between epistemology and other philosophical disciplines. The central issues for traditional epistemology were the problem of skepticism, the definition of knowledge, and, more generally, a concern with tracing the proper logical relations among cognitive concepts such as knowledge, belief, rationality, and justification. These issues were not important to either the classical pragmatists or to Kuhn. A pragmatist is uninterested in articulating the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge or in contrasting knowledge and belief. Knowledge requires truth, whereas a justified belief does not; in some contexts, this conceptual distinction is useful and indeed indispensable, but the context of scientific reasoning and practice, central for a pragmatist, is not such a context. For a philosopher of science interested in explaining scientific change as

172P RAGM ATIS M

rational, this distinction is useless because it is pragmatically irrelevant either for solving specific scientific problems or for understanding scientific change philosophically. It is thus natural for a pragmatist not to raise the question of whether scientific paradigms really constitute knowledge as opposed to systems of justified beliefs about nature. The central contrasts for a pragmatist epistemology are instead between belief and doubt and especially between different methods by which one may come to challenge, change, and replace beliefs. Rather than trying to demonstrate the very possibility of knowledge from the perspective of an isolated consciousness, as a traditional epistemologist such as Descartes or Russell would do, a pragmatist develops his epistemology by examining scientific inquiry as the best example of a communal, motivated, and largely successful search for knowledge. “Default-and-Challenge” Structure

The pragmatist reorientation of epistemology was not merely a matter of intellectual preference but a reasoned rejection of the traditional epistemological project, which was understood as a quest for certainty. Peirce argued not only that this quest cannot be completed but also that it cannot even get off the ground. In his view, a principled response to the skeptic, aiming at the removal of universal systematic doubt, cannot be an epistemologist’s first task: such doubt is literally impossible. Peirce’s argument is often understood as showing only that universal systematic doubt is psychologically impossible to sustain. In fact, Peirce was also arguing for the logical impossibility of such doubt. Had his point been only a psychological one, it would not have been either original or especially effective against the skeptic. Both Descartes and Hume—as well as many of their contemporaries and successors—readily acknowledged that radical skeptical conclusions have no perceptible influence on the way one conducts one’s life.13 However, they did not take this discrepancy between the conclusions of reasoned arguments and the assumptions unavoidable in practice as implying the untenability of skepticism. Quite the contrary. Our natural psychological propensity to stick to our beliefs despite our philosophical better judgment is, according to traditional epistemologists, a flaw. Some, such as Descartes, thought that this propensity is a correctible flaw: our superior theoretical judgment demands that we withhold

KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST RO OTS1 73

assent from the natural beliefs that we will reveal in action. Others, such as Hume—at least according to some interpreters—held that there is an ineradicable cognitive failure in our human makeup such that we must believe what we know we should not.14 Peirce’s first point is that we cannot empty our minds of all of our beliefs, nor can we call them into question in a systematic way by considering the mere possibility of their being false. In order to live and act, we must have a number of beliefs: this is our cognitively natural state. We are surprised and irritated when we discover that some of our beliefs are in conflict, that other people do not share them, or that our tacit expectations are frustrated. It is in these conditions that we experience the unpleasant “real and living” doubt about some of our beliefs.15 Doubt is an unpleasant, irritating mental state that occurs only within a rich context of unsuspected beliefs, habits, and commitments, and it is a state that must have local credible causes in order to be experienced. To disturb our epistemic confidence, a doubt must be felt, and it has to be specific and justified in light of the beliefs that it does not affect. We would not abandon our shared and reliable beliefs solely on the basis of hypothetical “paper doubts,” which are not doubts at all: “Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so, doubt has nothing to do with any serious business.”16 In a similar vein but with a somewhat different emphasis, Dewey argued that the only source of inquiry is a situation experienced as unsettled or doubtful; inquiry is the process by which a problem situation is resolved.17 In the absence of an actual, frustrating problem situation, however, our beliefs require no further justification. A pragmatist epistemology thus exhibits what Michael Williams, following Robert Brandom, has called a “default-and-challenge” structure: a whole set of beliefs always enjoys a default status, and only a credible challenge can lead to a temporary suspension of some beliefs.18 This restricts the challenges to those that are justifiable in light of the beliefs and standards that are not called into question and leaves us with an epistemically manageable comparative evaluation of reasonable epistemic options. The beliefs that are not reasonably challenged need no justification; if they are not actually doubted, in Peirce’s words, “they could not be more satisfactory than they are.”19 In a similar vein, Kuhn thinks that normal science legitimately brushes aside as idle all challenges to the fundamentals of a paradigm and turns its

174P RAGM ATIS M

practitioners’ attention to specific, motivated, and solvable scientific problems. Perhaps surprisingly, periods of extraordinary science are structurally similar. In such periods, accumulated anomalies seriously impede scientific work and raise justifiable doubts as to the old paradigm’s capacity to sustain and guide further research. Scientists can then be divided as to whether to fix the situation by revising or by replacing the old paradigm, but their doubts in the enduring power of the old paradigm in its current shape are locally justified by specific obstacles to productive work. To be a genuine impetus for inquiry, a problem must for Peirce “irritate,” for Dewey “unsettle,” and for Kuhn “fascinate”: the difference, if not strictly terminological, is certainly not epistemic. For all three philosophers, an all-encompassing skeptical challenge does not exercise any real pressure on our thought, nor should it. Here is then the logical rather than psychological point that Peirce was making: it is precisely by attempting to challenge all our beliefs that the skeptic fails to challenge any. That is, a great number of beliefs have to be held in place if the challenge to one of them is to be at all specific and justifiable. Peirce therefore claims that skeptical arguments are unreasonable even if not strictly meaningless. The distinction between a strictly speaking meaningless and a completely pointless challenge is not a distinction that a pragmatist makes: in either case, we have no good reason to take the challenge seriously. Inquiry

Thus, Peirce’s epistemology does not begin with a clean slate from which all doubt has been systematically expunged but with our struggle to regain belief concerning a particular issue. Our antecedent belief was unwillingly suspended, and we actively reach out to reaffirm or replace it. This active reaching out for belief is inquiry, and it is an ongoing process: “Since belief is a rule for action,” Peirce says, “the application of which involves further doubt and further thought, at the same time that it is a stopping-place, it is also a new starting-place for thought.”20 Dewey’s position is very close to Peirce’s on this matter. According to Dewey, all inquiry—in science as well as in everyday life, in ethics, or in politics—starts with “an indeterminate situation” that we perceive as a problem. We aim both to understand and to change the situation. To resolve a problem successfully, the inquirers must understand both the specificity of the problem situation and its

KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST RO OTS1 75

larger context. Different contexts will call for the employment of different methods; the standards by which the inquirers evaluate the adequacy of the proposed solutions will vary as well. A successful inquiry is, for Dewey, never a purely contemplative project: it solves the problem by transforming the problem situation and often the inquirers, too. In this process, it uses whatever cognitive, evaluative, and practical tools are available and most appropriate. Peirce’s central epistemological project was to discover the best method for conducting inquiry and adopting beliefs. Methods of inquiry are not just isolated pieces of reasoning or behavior; they are habits of the mind. Peirce argues that a formation of such a habit is “one of the ruling decisions” one can make in one’s life.21 As Christopher Hookway sees it, one’s choice of method determines one’s epistemic character.22 Adopting the right method for conducting inquiry is essential at both the individual level and the collective level. Kuhn had the same insight when he introduced a detailed analysis of scientific education into his philosophy of science, an unusual move at the time Structure was published. He argued that scientific expertise requires the acquisition of paradigm-specific skills and habits, displayed in perceiving, describing, approaching, and solving various kinds of problems. Normal science thus imposes the formation of a particular kind of epistemic character on its practitioners. In “The Fixation of Belief,” Peirce argues that each of the three common methods for forming and changing beliefs—the method of (personal) tenacity, the method of (social or political) authority, and the (metaphysical) a priori method—is self-defeating. None of them can be consistently and exclusively used in all areas of our lives. None of them can be reflectively endorsed either: in disagreements with others, we object to their reliance on any of these three methods and so come to distrust these methods in general. Thus, for Peirce, the dynamics of belief and doubt are essentially social: we seek agreement with others not only regarding the content of our beliefs but also regarding the method for forming, challenging, and revising those beliefs. Peirce says that the scientific method—which aims at truth and which consists in responsiveness to good reasons and evidence—is the only method that can be consistently employed and reflectively endorsed at both the individual level and the social level. He offers three reasons for this claim. First, he points out that the scientific method can be employed

176 P RAGM ATIS M

in all areas of one’s life. Clearly, he does not think of this method as exclusive to science. On the contrary, our everyday inquiries that aim at discovering truth must be responsive to evidence and reason; they are therefore conducted in accordance with the scientific method as Peirce understands it.23 Second, the scientific method provides the only commonly acceptable way for adjudicating differences of opinion among people: it relies neither on idiosyncratic preferences nor on force, but rather on objective evidence, which is independent of anyone’s wishes. Only if we employ the scientific method will our beliefs be caused “by something upon which thinking has no effect.”24 By being impartial between inquirers, the scientific method leads to conclusions that are in principle acceptable to all. Third, we can see that the effective employment of the scientific method essentially depends on interaction with others who use it as well. A solitary inquirer cannot easily distinguish between those beliefs that he holds by tenacity, by reliance on authority, a priori, or on the basis of good evidential reasons; he will sometimes need other people to correct his way of thinking. Reasons display their virtues and vices in action, which for Peirce means in a  dynamic exchange of arguments and counterarguments. An inquirer needs a community of inquirers to keep him epistemically honest; a consistent reliance on scientific method is thus possible only in a communal context. Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality as collective rationality is in this respect structurally similar to Peirce’s view of scientific method as inevitably communal. Moreover, Peirce’s arguments in favor of scientific method and against all other methods for fixing belief can supply a reasoned rejection of radical relativism about science, of which Kuhn was so unjustly accused. A radical relativist challenges Kuhn’s understanding of scientific rationality as collective rationality by raising the question of the external justification of the norms, values, and reasons that are operative in science. Other practices, such as myth, religion, or magic, the relativist argues, also appear rational to their initiates in light of their own internal standards. What then, if anything, distinguishes science as a practice that everyone ought to respect as rational? How can Kuhn show it to be such on the basis of evidence and reasons that do not already presuppose the cognitive authority of science? As discussed in chapter 5, Kuhn met that challenge, frequently attributed to Feyerabend, with complete silence. It would be easy to see this reaction

KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST RO OTS1 77

as essentially Peircian. Like Peirce, Kuhn refuses to engage with generalized, foundational doubts, seeing them as locally unjustified and pointless. He situates his epistemological project within the bounds of scientific inquiry, the existence and nature of which he never problematizes from an external, skeptical point of view. His epistemology thus starts in the middle of inquiry and does not seek to understand its ultimate foundation; it instead examines the patterns of historical change and evolved canons of good reasoning and accomplishments in science. Although pragmatism reasonably dismissed the challenge issued by a thoroughgoing skeptic, it is not clear that a radical relativist deserves a similar treatment. After all, the relativist’s objection does not rely on the mere possibility that our best-justified beliefs might turn out to be false. On the contrary, the relativist, like the pragmatist, is relying on actual, living human practices and their internal systems of justification to formulate the challenge to scientific rationality. An argument for the cognitive superiority of scientific rationality is indeed needed to distinguish consensus among scientific experts from consensus among practitioners of myth or magic or, for that matter, from political consensus. Kuhn’s epistemology has resources to provide such an argument, which would likely follow Peirce’s line of thought: consensus in science is at every stage strongly constrained by the world. In her detailed and interesting book The American Pragmatists, Cheryl Misak distinguishes between two kinds of pragmatism. One kind “tries to retain a place for objectivity and for our aspiration to get things right, while the other is not nearly committed to that.”25 It is very clear that Peirce belongs to the first kind of pragmatism, while James belongs to the second. Kuhn, whom Misak unfortunately does not recognize for the pragmatist that he is, has often been read as unable to account for the rationality, objectivity, and progress of scientific knowledge. One of the main claims of this book is that this reading of Kuhn is seriously mistaken. It is precisely in trying to make sense of scientific rationality, objectivity, and progress while faithfully describing actual scientific practice and its historical development that Kuhn felt the need for a pragmatist reorientation of epistemology and for reworked conceptions of scientific knowledge, achievements, rationality, values, and truth. It is important to remember that this philosophical project never led Kuhn to minimize the importance of the pressure that nature itself exercises on scientific work. He puts this

178 P RAGM ATIS M

point succinctly: “You are not talking about anything worth calling science if you leave out the role of nature.”26 Thus, for Kuhn—as well as for Peirce—epistemology is concerned with the dynamics of belief in a community of inquirers. The crucial epistemic relationship is not a dyadic one—between a solitary mind and the world— but triadic, consisting of an individual, other people, and the world.27 In such a structure, social consensus is most likely to be rationally warranted because it will be based on shared evidence and standards of reasoning. In that manner, a community of inquirers in part compensates for the considerable degree of individual fallibility. Kuhn understands scientific inquiry as at the same time irreducibly social and responsive to the world. In that respect, his pragmatism is Peircian rather than Jamesian. In another respect, however, Kuhn’s philosophy is indebted to James, who realized that the desire to maximize true beliefs requires high tolerance for epistemic risks and for the mistakes that such risks will unavoidably lead to. One of the most important differences between a pragmatist epistemology and a traditional one concerns the value of avoiding false beliefs. For a traditional epistemologist, that value is supreme—hence the traditional preoccupation with skepticism and with the proper specification of conditions under which one is entitled to claim that one has knowledge rather than mere justified belief. Avoidance of error has a lower value for a pragmatist. James is even more radical: according to his “method of belief,” high tolerance for mistakes is not only rationally acceptable but also rationally required; our knowledge would not extend beyond its present limits without this epistemic attitude.28 As we have seen in chapter 5, this insight was also a central feature of Kuhn’s account of the rationality of science since it justifies the choice of one of the rival paradigms even in the absence of conclusive, paradigm-neutral evidence and reasons. Fallibilism

Inquiry is inescapably fallible, even at the collective level that corrects individual mistakes and sifts out idiosyncratic ideas and biases. For Kuhn and other pragmatists, the acceptance of beliefs and practices as well as of the standards by which both are evaluated is always provisional: inquirers rely on them as long as they have no reason to call them into question, but they can revise any one of them should they be faced with a pressing reason to

KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST RO OTS1 79

do so. In principle, Peirce argued, every belief may be challenged and rejected. All our beliefs are fallible, but we should nevertheless hold on to them until they have been shown to have actually failed us. Since inquiry begins with a specific, motivated question or doubt, it presupposes a relatively stable background of assumptions, beliefs, and practices that are for the moment not challenged. For Kuhn, too, no aspect of science is in principle immune to revision, yet a relatively stable background of beliefs and practices must always be in place as the condition of acquiring new beliefs and of challenging the old ones. As noted in chapter 5, Kuhn uses the metaphor of “a moveable Archimedean platform” to capture the relative stability of scientific beliefs and practices. Peirce invokes a bog: “[Inquiry] is not standing upon a bedrock of fact. It is walking upon a bog, and can only say, this ground seems to hold for the present. Here I will stay till it begins to give way.”29 This is a central pragmatist idea: belief formation, modification, replacement, and doubt take place against a stable background that is both presupposed and revisable in a piecemeal manner. Peirce then naturally understands scientific change through history as gradual. Every scientific inquiry, he argues, starts with an inherited system of beliefs about nature as well as with a set of methodological and evaluative tools; it expands and revises both, leaving a somewhat different system of knowledge to the next generation. This view of scientific development, gradualist and implicitly cumulativist, appears to be very different from Kuhn’s two-phase model. Although Kuhn does describe scientific change in a Peircian gradualist manner when he is focused on small temporal units (whether within normal science periods or during extraordinary science), it remains true of course that when he compares different ways of doing science separated by centuries, he reveals scientific revolutions that do involve complete reconfigurations and incommensurability. Peirce’s philosophy has no such concept. On the contrary, Peirce is a cumulativist not only about scientific theories but also about the meaning of scientific terms: “How much more the word electricity means now than it did in the days of Franklin; how much more the term planet means now than it did in the time of Hipparchus. These words have acquired information.”30 However, Peirce’s thoroughgoing fallibilism not only allows but also opens a space for Kuhnian revolutions. To see this, consider: a serious fallibilism is not exhausted by the claim that none of our beliefs is certain; it also entails the claim that no aspect of our current

180 P RAGM ATIS M

science is immune to doubt. Specifically, even our best systems of categorization and our best patterns of explanation are open to revision under the pressure of experience. For a pragmatist, no single way of conceptualizing any aspect of the world can claim to be unique and fixed forever. Our experience of the world allows for many possible distinctions, conceptualizations, classifications, and models. Which of them we accept will depend in part on the system of beliefs that we were born into, for this will be our starting point; of course, the perceived adequacy of such a system will depend in part on our cognitive interests and practical needs. Sooner or later we will likely see some revisions as useful and fruitful for one reason or another. Given sufficient resistance from the world to our attempts to understand and change it, we may come to think that our whole cognitive system for dealing with a given domain was structured in a misguided and unhelpful way. That is how new paradigms are proposed: as completely reworked, restructured ways of thinking about the world and about our ways of changing it. Peirce’s fallibilist, default-and-challenge epistemology is thus open to the idea of incommensurability. It could be said that Kuhn significantly extended Peirce’s understanding of the diachronic nature of inquiry by realizing that noncumulative scientific change can be rationally warranted within a pragmatist epistemology. Scientific Practice

Kuhn is perhaps at his most pragmatist when he describes scientific development not in terms of increasingly accurate theoretical representations of the world but in terms of a series of structured practices for manipulating and changing the world. His philosophy foregrounds scientific training as skill acquisition and research as a puzzle-solving activity, while deemphasizing the role that axioms, covering laws, explicit hypotheses, and clear methodological rules play in science. His very notion of a paradigm was employed to explain scientific work guided by exemplary solutions, relying on skills and tacit knowledge more than on mastery of the intricate details of scientific theory. Joseph Rouse was the first to highlight this central aspect of Kuhn’s philosophy, which has often been insufficiently appreciated.31 In his words, “scientists use paradigms rather than believing them.”32 Kuhn was explicit in saying that paradigms are models “of the right way to do things” and that a paradigm provides “a scientific

KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST RO OTS1 81

tradition in which people agreed that this problem had been solved, although they could still disagree vehemently about whether there were atoms or not.”33 He credited Margaret Masterman with making his point clearly: “A paradigm is what you use when the theory isn’t there.”34 This is not to deny that paradigms also describe and represent some aspect of the world; they do. Nevertheless, representational use is only one use among many; it is perhaps dominant in educational or expository contexts, but it is usually peripheral in original scientific research. Scientific contributions emerge out of shared knowledge how, which exists even when there are theoretical disagreements. Scientists typically express recognition for each other’s achievements by citing and employing others’ results in their own work. This is the sense in which scientists live in the same world: a world in which they can do things together. Complexity

In contrast to most contemporary epistemologies, which tend to be developed on the basis of just one salient feature of our epistemic lives, a pragmatist epistemology makes a point of being irreducibly complex. This brings both some distinct advantages and some problems of its own. A pragmatist epistemology has the advantage of being descriptively more accurate than its rivals: unlike both traditional epistemology and the various single-minded attempts to replace it, it is faithful to the diversity and richness of epistemic phenomena. Traditional epistemology is foundationalist. Its central idea is that justification cannot be circular. The search for self-evident beliefs, which will serve as the indubitable basis for all justification, thus becomes foundationalism’s main project. In the opposite camp, as it were, is coherentism, a view that justly observes that our thinking relies on a whole system of beliefs and that the coherence of such a system is its important virtue; it then conceives of the justification of a belief as a function of its coherence with the system. In addition to foundationalism and coherentism, one might mention virtue epistemology, which takes the epistemic character of individual knowers as theoretically central; or social epistemology, which emphasizes the fact that human knowledge is distributed across a community of knowers; or, finally, historical epistemology, which highlights the historicity of our epistemic concepts and values such as knowledge, objectivity, explanation, and rationality.

182P RAGM ATIS M

Of course, these positions are rarely left in their naked forms because their insufficiency quickly becomes apparent. For example, Laurence BonJour’s coherentism tries to accommodate the epistemic centrality of direct observations and enlarges the notion of coherence to encompass what might better be called the explanatory unity of the system.35 Susan Haack’s “foundherentism” is even more explicitly a hybrid view that seeks to retain the attractiveness of both foundationalism and coherentism while avoiding the standard objections to each.36 In the same spirit, some versions of virtue epistemology seek to retain the traditional philosophical concern with belief and justification, while social epistemology reaches out both to historical epistemology and to coherentist or contextualist accounts of justification. Although refinements are always welcome, their necessity on the road to plausibility suggests that Dewey and Kuhn were right to resist the temptation to offer a simple model in the first place. Both Dewey and Kuhn insist that any kind of epistemological reflection starts with a consideration of the particular problems that the inquirers face, not with an attempt to articulate abstract principles of justification that ought to govern every inquiry. Both think of inquiry as a problemsolving activity that requires a versatile set of very different tools rather than as a system of universally binding justificatory rules. Both also claim that the evaluative standards at work in a problem situation are typically heterogeneous and conflicting; they cannot be simultaneously optimized. Without general rules to determine their relative ranking, the inquirers are left with unforced judgments that are likely to differ. A complex pragmatist epistemology allows that such disagreements are often reasonable. A difficulty for a fallibilist, pluralistic, and irreducibly complex pragmatist epistemology is that it lacks a rationally defensible metalevel principle for adjudication among conflicting beliefs and choices, each of which is favored by some of the accepted but heterogeneous values. Neither Dewey nor Kuhn offers such a clear principle or an inflexible procedural rule. Kuhn was content to place his epistemic trust in the community of scientific experts and to anticipate that their adjudication will always be reasonable in light of shared norms and values. From a nonpragmatist point of view, it is very natural to expect him to say much more about how exactly such adjudication should proceed. From his pragmatist point of view, however, it is natural not to attempt to offer any such general normative

KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST RO OTS1 83

rules. Not only are there multiple rationally permissible outcomes of a scientific deliberation, but there also are multiple rationally permissible methods of resolving the inevitable conflicts among heterogeneous scientific values, interpretations, beliefs, and practices. Although it may appear that Kuhn was sketching a procedural account of sorts when he described the complicated process of balancing, interpreting, and ranking scientific values, we should not be misled about the status of his claim. His description does not amount to a specification of a rule of procedural epistemology: it has no normative, behavior-guiding force that scientists would have to respect on pain of irrationality. Rather, Kuhn is offering a pattern for a retrospective explanation of how radical change in science is brought about. It is entirely possible that in some cases this pattern will not fit the change it seeks to explain; in such a case, we will have to produce a different explanatory model. All inquiry is, for Kuhn, genuinely open, including the inquiry that concerns the nature and pattern of scientific change. This means that he allows for the possibility that even our best procedures as well as our best philosophical explanations of them will someday be rationally revised. The Pragmatist Rejection of Sharp Dichotomies

Both Dewey and Kuhn cultivated a philosophical aversion to dualisms. Dewey rejected any principled opposition between fact and value, the material and the mental, sense and reason, the social and the private, organism and environment, as well as, crucially, between thought and action, theory and practice. He accepted redescriptions of these distinctions only as provisional, contextual, and changeable over time. Kuhn treated in a similar way the philosophical dualisms that came his way. For him, the context of discovery and the context of justification are not to be sharply demarcated; scientific values and empirical facts are closely intertwined, and the boundaries between the theoretical and the practical aspects of science are flexible and porous. As I argued in chapter 6, his philosophy of science favors a weakening of the distinction between pure and applied science as well. There is, however, one distinction that Dewey and Kuhn treat very differently: the distinction between the internal cognitive aspects of science

18 4P RAGM ATIS M

and its external social context. Kuhn, as we have seen, thought that this distinction is a sine qua non of his rationalism: without it, the historiography of science would turn into “muckraking,” and the philosophy of science would have no recourse against relativism. In this regard, Kuhn would have profited from Dewey’s integrative impulse, which led Dewey to consider scientific inquiry as shaped not only by cognitive values but also by ethical, social, and political values. Recent work in social and historical epistemology, in feminist philosophy of science, and in science studies has shown that a number of social values, assumptions, and expectations regularly influence and shape scientific research at all levels, from observation of phenomena to the interpretation of data, from hypothesis formation to its evaluation. Since science is perennially influenced by the aims, values, and standards of the society in which it develops, acknowledgment of their ubiquity is required of any philosophy of science purporting to be descriptively accurate. Such acknowledgment is compatible with a whole range of normative attitudes concerning the appropriate extent and the nature of such influences. Even within a cognitivist philosophy of science such as Kuhn’s, a faithful account of scientific practice should include all values actually operative in science, be they generated by scientists qua members of their scientific communities or shared among them qua members of a larger society. A Kuhnian philosophy of science eager to cast its descriptive net more widely than Kuhn has done would not have to abandon the centrality of cognitive categories, so important to Kuhn. Quite the contrary. But the nature of cognition—its causes, aims, and context—would naturally be reworked, as is to be expected within a truly pragmatist epistemology.

T H E INTEL L ECTUA L L INE AGE FR OM PEIRCE TO KUHN

Having established that the epistemologies developed by the classical pragmatists and by Kuhn have a shared focus and structure, I now wish to explain these shared features as a result of historical transmission.37 My explanation will have to be speculative to some extent since both a  detailed and well-researched intellectual biography of Kuhn and a

KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST RO OTS1 85

comprehensive history of twentieth-century American philosophy still remain to be written. We have recently seen a renewed interest in American pragmatism as well as the beginnings of a serious reappraisal of logical empiricism, from its genesis in Austrian and German contexts to its reception in the English-speaking world.38 Nevertheless, there is still an important lacuna to be filled concerning the interaction of these two philosophical movements.39 Let me, however, briefly explain my own sense of the dynamics of that relationship as it grew on American soil. Classical Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism

In the early twentieth century, pragmatism was the dominant philosophy in North America, shaped mostly by Dewey’s work. Peirce’s philosophy was not at the time well known or understood, unfortunately because it might have provided a formidable alternative to the logical empiricist’s version of scientific philosophy, which became dominant by the late 1930s. The reasons and causes of logical empiricism’s enormous and relatively swift success were multiple and, as is often the case, overdetermined the result. One important factor was the emigration of the central figures of logical empiricism from Germany and Austria, where Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, to the English-speaking world, where they published, taught, and traveled widely, thereby disseminating their ideas. Other philosophical schools and movements in Germany competed for the perceived honor of offering the best philosophical legitimation of Nazi ideology.40 The logical empiricists were a prominent group that did not; all of them either emigrated or did not survive. Moritz Schlick was a visiting professor at Stanford in 1929 and 1932; he was murdered by the Nazis in 1936. Kurt Gödel had a nervous breakdown caused by Schlick’s murder; he immigrated to the United States in 1940 and was at Princeton for a number of years. Herbert Fiegl immigrated to the United States in 1930 and taught at the University of Iowa and the University of Minnesota; he founded the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, the first such center in the world. Rudolf Carnap moved to the University of Chicago in 1936; he was at Harvard in 1940 and 1941 and later at Princeton and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Friedrich Waismann went to Cambridge University in 1937; Hans Reichenbach to UCLA in

186 P RAGM ATIS M

1938. In 1939, Peter Hempel came to the City College of New York; he later taught at Queens College, Yale, Princeton, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, Jerusalem, and Pittsburgh. Philipp Frank taught philosophy at Harvard between 1938 and 1966. Otto Neurath escaped first Berlin in 1924 and then Vienna in 1934, finally settling in England in 1940. Kurt Grelling was killed in Auschwitz because, as Hempel remembered, U.S. immigration officials distrusted his left-wing politics and did not allow him to enter the country. Another reason for the success of logical empiricism in America was a partial affinity between domestic pragmatism and imported logical empiricism: both movements had a disdain for speculative metaphysics; both took a central interest in scientific reasoning; and both were problem rather than system oriented. As Alan Richardson points out, the two movements also initially shared strong social and political commitments, goals, and aspirations.41 Fruitful cross-fertilizations between the two schools of thought were thus possible, and in the beginning the influence went in both directions.42 At the same time, the reception of logical empiricism in Great Britain brought different aspects of the movement into prominence as it occurred against the background of the then dominant forms of analytic philosophy. British philosophers—with whom their American colleagues always cultivated a lively exchange—were extremely hostile to pragmatism.43 According to W. B. Gallie, one of the rare admirers of Peirce in Britain, “Pragmatism has often been regarded, at any rate by British philosophers during the first half of this century, as an all too American product; with the implication, sometimes explicitly asserted, that it is a raw, almost backwoods doctrine such as would naturally arise in a new country where material interest and opportunities are paramount and the refinements and austerities of pure theory are little appreciated.”44 The British influence on the relations between logical empiricism and pragmatism in America was strong and not conducive to their fruitful interaction. Filtered through British philosophy of language, especially after the publication of A. J. Ayer’s widely read book Language, Truth, and Logic in 1936,45 logical empiricism drastically reduced its social and political ambitions. It instead helped to solidify the strong preference throughout analytic philosophy for the virtues of clarity and precision and for highly technical discussion of narrowly defined problems over the rather more integrative and contextualizing spirit of classical American pragmatism. By the 1950s, Peirce was all but

KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST RO OTS1 87

forgotten, James was ridiculed, and Dewey was simply dismissed as longwinded and woolly. All immediately visible traces of American pragmatism were obliterated in mainstream philosophical discourse and education. Pragmatism was rarely taught and seldom discussed in the professional journals. The boundaries between philosophy and other fields—with the notable exception of natural science—were sharply redrawn, as indeed were the boundaries between the various philosophical disciplines. Philosophy of language, logic, and the philosophy of science occupied pride of place as the core areas of philosophical inquiry. They were typically concerned with highly technical problems that were of small interest to nonspecialists. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think that even in this period pragmatism was completely forgotten. American philosophy continued to grow on a soil rich in pragmatist ideas, especially at Harvard and Chicago. The reaction to logical empiricism, when it came, was pragmatist in inspiration, even when not labeled as such. The most influential American philosophers of the first “postpositivist wave” were W. V. O. Quine, Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam, Wilfrid Sellars, Nicholas Rescher, and Donald Davidson. All reacted against logical empiricism from a pragmatist standpoint, broadly construed. At the time when Kuhn started to think about the ideas that would later appear in Structure, pragmatism was present as an important undercurrent in American philosophy, frequently mixed with logical empiricism and always expressed in its language. Sources of Kuhn’s Pragmatism

Kuhn never had a systematic philosophical education and was therefore— comparatively speaking—philosophically unformed when he started the work on Structure. Both in articulating the main ideas of the book and in refining them in later years, he had the intellectual freedom that a doctorate in philosophy at that time would have limited to a great extent. He was very much aware of this, saying that he was “in certain respects extremely glad” that he did not get a degree in philosophy. “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.”46 His mind was not formed by rigorous training in the core disciplines of logical empiricism; rather, his approach to the

188 P RAGM ATIS M

philosophy of science was informed by his training as a physicist and by his work as a historian of science. He was thus able to ignore a number of assumptions and distinctions entrenched in the philosophical discourse of his time as well as to make use of those ideas from his contemporaries that he found congenial and helpful. The extent to which these ideas were pragmatist is as remarkable as it is rarely recognized. One of Kuhn’s more perceptive colleagues did recognize it, however: Peter Hempel, with whom Kuhn developed a warm philosophical friendship while they were at Princeton. Until he met Kuhn, Hempel was known as one of the most prominent logical empiricists. He earned his doctorate under Hans Reichenbach in Berlin and later published in the United States a number of important articles in the philosophy of science, which exemplify what I have been calling the received view. In describing the change that Kuhn’s philosophy produced in his own thinking, Hempel said, “I was very much struck by his ideas. At first I found them strange and I had very great resistance to these ideas, his historicist, pragmatist approach to problems in the methodology of science, but I have changed my mind considerably about this since then. In fact, a good deal of the thinking and writing I did subsequently was in one way or another influenced by the problems and issues that have been raised by Kuhn’s writings.”47 Hempel subsequently referred to the position that he developed under Kuhn’s influence as “pragmatic empiricism.” Kuhn did not use such a label for his own views, but he probably should have done so. Any reservations about the appropriateness of the label would concern empiricism: after all, well-known forms of naive empiricism were among Kuhn’s most important philosophical targets.48 The label pragmatism, though, as I have argued, does accurately characterize the position from which Kuhn developed his original thinking about knowledge, truth, rationality, and justification and from which he criticized both the received view and the relativism of the sociological school. Kuhn’s pragmatist sources were dispersed throughout the works of postpositivist philosophers. Their reaction to logical empiricism, pragmatist in inspiration and lineage, emerged in the 1950s and continued to grow in subsequent decades. Although Richard Rorty was the most vocal among them in embracing pragmatism and rejecting logical empiricism, and although he was one of the very few philosophers who greatly appreciated

KUHN’S PRAGMATIST ROOTS189

Structure, his influence on Kuhn’s thought is not noticeable. Instead, Kuhn responded to the more Peircian pragmatist legacy in the works of Quine, Goodman, and Putnam. In “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Quine famously denied that any statement is in principle immune to revision. He argued that a “recalcitrant experience” may demand some revisions of our current web of beliefs but that it is rationally permissible to carry out the revisions in any number of ways: “Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system.”49 Nothing in the system compels our choice; the criteria that guide the choice between different logically and epistemologically possible revisions are pragmatic.50 Quine was explicit: Carnap, Lewis and others take a pragmatic stand on the question of choosing between language forms, scientific frameworks; but their pragmatism leaves off at the imagined boundary between the analytic and the synthetic. In repudiating such a boundary I espouse a more thorough pragmatism. Each man is given a scientific heritage plus a continuing barrage of sensory stimulation; and the considerations which guide him in warping his scientific heritage to fit his continuing sensory promptings are, where rational, pragmatic.51

We saw in the earlier chapters of this book that Kuhn’s reworked model of justification in science also relies on the idea of a web of mutually supporting, relatively unified, and coherent scientific tenets that form the necessary background for any proposed change. Although no tenet is in principle immune to revision, a necessary condition for any revision is that some tenets are temporarily taken as given. This Peircian idea, revived by Quine, forms the backbone of Kuhn’s mature epistemology of science.52 Of course, Quine’s body of work cannot justly be described as an expression of an undiluted pragmatism. He raised philosophical problems and approached them in the spirit and style most naturally identified with logical empiricism. It is thus significant that the only idea Kuhn borrowed from Quine is precisely this purely pragmatist one. Fact, Fiction, and Forecast by Nelson Goodman was likely another inspiration for Kuhn’s mature epistemology.53 In that seminal book, Goodman

19 0 P RAGM ATIS M

argues against the possibility of external justification for either deductive or inductive reasoning. Instead of trying to justify a form of reasoning without presupposing it, as a foundationalist would press us to do, Goodman argues that inferential practices can be justified only by appealing to inferential rules, while these rules can be justified only by appealing to our habitual inferential practices. Both directions of justification are sometimes unsuccessful and lead to revisions governed by heterogeneous desiderata. On the one hand, we want our inferential practices to be rule governed. On the other hand, we need the inferential rules to be coherent with one another, easy to apply, and capable of accommodating all types of inferences that emerge in practice as reliable and useful. The continuous process of fine-tuning rules and practices in light of one another ideally results in their temporary stability and harmony. This state is now known as the reflective equilibrium,54 a schematic but accurate description of what we aim for when providing justifications. The fact that our justificatory practice is largely successful in light of its own standards is the only explanation of its endurance and the only defense that it needs—or that it can get. This decidedly pragmatist model of justification has the same structure as Kuhn’s explanation of the ways in which scientific communities use and justify values such as accuracy, simplicity, coherence, fruitfulness, and scope. Scientific values guide research by providing a broad evaluative framework for it, but they emerge from successful practice and are differently interpreted and ranked under different paradigms. At all times, scientists adjudicate between them by considering their application in practice. Their enduring usefulness for scientific communities is the only justification that they need. Although Goodman’s inferential rules and Kuhn’s scientific values are different kinds of things, the process of bringing each in harmony with entrenched practice and especially the process of justifying them exhibit the same dialectical structure. Goodman’s later book, Ways of Worldmaking, develops the idea that there is no real difference between saying that there are many contrasting aspects of a single world and saying that there are many worlds, the collection of which is one: “The one world may be taken as many, or the many worlds taken as one; whether one or many depends on the way of talking.”55 According to Goodman, the important philosophical work is to

KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST RO OTS1 91

be done, first, in explaining how the worlds of music, perception, physics, abstract painting, and innumerable other symbolic worlds are made and, second, in articulating the specific standards of rightness that are appropriate to each world. Ways of Worldmaking was possibly influenced by Structure as much as by the sources it acknowledges—namely, works by James, Ernst Cassirer, and Kant. Kuhn’s enigmatic statement that after a revolution scientists work in a different world although at the same time the world does not change can be seen as motivating Goodman’s detailed account of what constitutes a “world-version.” At the same time, Goodman’s account likely played a helpful role in Kuhn’s post-Structure attempts to provide a fuller, better explanation of the relationship between a paradigm and the world. Without direct textual support, my belief that Ways of Worldmaking influenced Kuhn’s reformulations of the “world change” claim remains merely a hypothesis—a plausible one, I hope. Kuhn did, however, acknowledge the influence of a similar position developed by Putnam in the 1980s. Putnam called this view “internal realism.” In contrast to metaphysical realism, internal realism does not presuppose a structured world that our categories aim accurately to reflect, and, unlike social constructivism, it denies that the world is completely ontologically dependent on human concepts and values. To quote Putnam’s often used metaphor, “The mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world.”56 The mind imposes a functioning conceptual framework upon the causally independent world, thereby individuating and classifying objects in it. There are thus many correct descriptions of reality, according to the internal realist, and the choice among them will depend in part on the inquirers’ needs and values. Conceptual relativity is, on this view, not only compatible with realism but also indispensable for it: it is only through a particular, chosen conceptual scheme that we can describe the world in a clear, precise, and useful manner. Different purposes will naturally favor different conceptual schemes. Internal realism also offers a recognizably pragmatist understanding of scientific inquiry and its progress: the scientific community gradually improves its cognitive position, aiming for truth, which is defined as the view that the inquirers would adopt under ideal epistemic conditions. This is truly a Peircian view, as Cheryl Misak justly observes.57 It should be no surprise that internal realism was particularly appealing to

192P RAGM ATIS M

Kuhn, who saw the Putnam of that period as the only other philosopher seriously engaged in the same problems he was dealing with: “Hell, now he’s talking my language,” he exclaimed in an interview.58 The direction of influence among Goodman, Putnam, and Kuhn since the 1970s is complicated and not easy to ascertain; there was very probably some important cross-fertilization. Both Goodman and Putnam responded to Kuhn’s concerns regarding incommensurability and regarding the relationship between the natural world and the conceptual structure that science uses to describe and modify it. Kuhn’s mature philosophy, as increasingly pragmatist as Goodman’s and Putnam’s, probably both influenced their work and benefited from it,59 as much as it benefited from an abundance of imaginative pragmatist ideas to which American philosophy became hospitable in the last third of the twentieth century. Although logical empiricism and pragmatism were typically mixed in the works of his contemporaries, Kuhn responded favorably and constructively only to the pragmatist strand. It could be said that his philosophy acted as a filter that let through only pragmatist ideas in the amalgam of postpositivist analytic philosophy. Without directly relying on classical pragmatism, Kuhn nevertheless significantly contributed to its present-day return to the bloodstream of philosophy by making the pragmatist theory of inquiry once again vital for the philosophy of science.60 Kuhn’s Orthodox Pragmatism

The influence of American pragmatism on Kuhn’s philosophy is detectable but not foregrounded in Structure; it came into prominence in Kuhn’s mature work, which was published in the 1980s and 1990s, when he was developing a broader philosophical context for his philosophy of science. All of the revisions he made to his epistemology and metaphilosophy took a pragmatist turn. His mature epistemology, as we have seen, bears the marks of Peirce’s communitarian, fallibilist, and open-ended understanding of inquiry; of James’s epistemic justification of momentous, forced choice between two live hypotheses; and of Dewey’s emphasis on the complexity of our reasoning owing to the heterogeneity of the values and standards that we perceive as relevant in particular problem situations. Given the nondoctrinal, pluralistic, and context-sensitive nature of pragmatism, Kuhn was as orthodox a pragmatist as any, precisely because

KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST RO OTS1 93

he creatively used pragmatist ideas for his own purposes and reshaped them in the process. He took a further step than his classical predecessors toward developing a distinctive account of scientific rationality as collective rationality, and he found inspiration for his backward-looking concept of progress in the theory of evolution, which had also shaped Peirce’s and Dewey’s thinking. But Kuhn’s most important addition to pragmatism is, of course, his description of scientific inquiry as leading through revolutions that involve incommensurability. His philosophy differs from the epistemically optimistic incrementalism and meliorism of the classical pragmatists in its capacity to recognize that a successful quest for knowledge inevitably causes disruptions, conflict, and loss. To borrow Dewey’s phrase, pragmatism requires reorientation in philosophy. For different active minds, reorientation is needed at different places and yields different results. Kuhn’s contribution to the philosophy of science genuinely reshaped the field by turning its attention toward the history of science and its epistemology toward the rich legacy of American pragmatism.

EPISTEMOLOGY F ROM B ELOW

Kuhn’s considered metaphilosophical position, which we are now in position to appreciate, does not accord to epistemology the status of “first philosophy.” Rather, it is what I call an epistemology from below: a form of philosophical reflection that seeks a detailed understanding of a normatively rich cognitive practice, such as science. It can be conveniently summarized in two descriptions: 1. Negative description: Epistemology is not an a priori investigation of the possibility, origins, nature, and limits of our knowledge. It does not enjoy the status of the core discipline. It does not aim to articulate a substantive philosophical position that prescribes in advance the methods for the right conduct of our cognitive practices, and it is not justified independently of these practices. 2. Positive description: Epistemology involves philosophical reflection on human cognitive practices and their purposes, standards, and strategies.

19 4P RAGM ATIS M

An accurate description of these practices is thus necessary for epistemology to get off the ground. The normativity of epistemology consists, first, in its ability to explain why some epistemic problems, solutions, methods, and so on are better or worse than others in light of standards that are not completely independent from the standards of the practices under consideration and, second, in its ability to suggest ways for the further improvement of these standards and strategies, suggestions that must then be ratified in practice. Kuhn’s epistemology thus arises out of a detailed examination of heterogeneous, complex, and historically changing aspects of science. It provides a pragmatist framework for understanding scientific rationality. On the one hand, Kuhn gave priority to epistemology in his mature writings, but, on the other hand, he did not conceive of it as a purely normative philosophical theory of knowledge, justifying and legislating scientific norms and values. His undeniable descriptivism, historicism, and naturalism should not be understood as supporting a version of the replacement thesis, either: he did not believe that all normative epistemological questions ultimately resolve into descriptive questions about human cognition, to be answered by history or by science. In developing philosophical accounts of rationality and justification, for example, epistemology cannot ignore the understanding of human reasoning available through biology, psychology, sociology, and history, yet it equally cannot relinquish its central aim of evaluating, correcting, and improving our cognitive performance within the realm of the possible. Kuhn’s epistemology thus has both descriptive responsibilities and a normative bite: it uses the results of historical and scientific research whenever it finds them illuminating, but it treats history and science as sources of contributions to epistemology’s critical reflections, not as replacements for them. In much the same way, Kuhn’s metaphilosophical position cannot be sharply separated from the complicated work of articulating and evaluating the epistemology of science. Pragmatism’s strongly nonhierarchical nature extends to metaphilosophy, which, for Kuhn, turns out to be continuous with epistemology for science just as much as epistemology is continuous with science. Finally, Kuhn’s pragmatism applies reflexively to the appraisal of his own philosophical project. It is possible that his

KUHN’S PRAGMATIST ROOTS195

philosophy of science—fruitful and illuminating as it is now—may prove unequal to the problems that future scientific revolutions will pose for those who will reflect on them. Consistent fallibilism requires epistemic modesty with regard to the future. For the present, however, if Kuhn’s philosophy provides better epistemological resources than its rivals, it is doing as well as a pragmatist would wish it to do.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. 2.

3. 4.

Implicitly, of course, Kuhn’s Legacy constitutes an answer to the early critics. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure”: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 227. In all fairness, many proponents of the received view heartily returned the favor and flattened Kuhn almost out of shape. The crucial work of scholarship that turned the tide from critical to sympathetic interpretations of Kuhn was Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science, trans. Alexander T. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Our present rather better understanding of Kuhn is equally indebted to responsible early readings offered by Gerald Doppelt and Joseph Rouse as well as to Ian Hacking; Rom Harré and Michael Krausz; Thomas Nickles; Alexander Bird, Michael Friedman, Wes Sharrock, and Rupert Read; Peter Godfrey-Smith; and Hanne Andersen, Peter Barker, and Xiang Chen—to name just those authors whose work I have found particularly stimulating. Although this book was completed largely before Fred D’Agostino and K. Brad Wray’s books were published (Fred D’Agostino, Naturalizing Epistemology: Thomas Kuhn and the “Essential Tension” [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010]; K. Brad Wray, Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011]), both should be included in the list of significant and enlightening contributions to the study of Kuhn’s thought.

1981. AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

1. AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 1.

2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

For example, Kuhn’s criterion of demarcation between science and pseudoscience is original both in content and in the manner in which it is to be used. Kuhn also offers a novel analysis of the structure of scientific theories and their elements (such as scientific terms, problems, and laws). Most importantly, his understanding of the relationship between theory and evidence differs from any understanding defended by his predecessors or contemporaries. Nelson Goodman decisively demonstrated the hopelessness of this project in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (1955; reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), but it took a while for the larger philosophical community to fully absorb the lesson. I discuss in part 1 the precise role that the history of science played in different periods of Kuhn’s philosophical development. For now, it is important to note only that Kuhn always thought of this role as central while still insisting on firm disciplinary boundaries between the history and the philosophy of science. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), 4th ed., intro. Ian Hacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 12. I discuss in the next section the difficulties Kuhn had with the concept of a paradigm. I also explain how I use the term in this book. For example, Cartesian physics is mathematized, whereas Galilean is corpuscularian. Kuhn, Structure, 118. Kuhn borrowed the expression “tacit knowledge” from Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy (1958; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), but he distanced himself from Polanyi’s general philosophy of science. Joseph Rouse is the first to give central importance to scientific practice in an interpretation of Kuhn; see his book Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). Ian Hacking and Peter Galison develop Kuhn’s idea that scientific groups whose work is mostly “hands on”—experimental physicists, for example—neither need nor care to come to an agreement on controversial or open theoretical issues. See Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), as well as Peter Galison, How Experiments End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). There is no difference in principle between the scientific puzzles of normal science and the anomalies that contribute to the crisis. The distinction between puzzles and anomalies can be made only over time: puzzles are ultimately solved by talented normal scientists, whereas anomalies are not. In either case, Kuhn thinks, simple falsification has no role in science. Kuhn, Structure, 4. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 93–94. Historians of science are often able to partially reconstruct older ways of doing science from texts and material culture, but they achieve this reconstruction by going through a

1. AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE199

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

complex interpretive process. Historical narratives tell us how science was done in the past, but scientific knowledge how, the body of largely tacit practical knowledge developed in order to solve the older paradigm’s puzzles, is recovered only very rarely and imperfectly. Kuhn, Structure, 76. Paul Feyerabend was fond of pointing out that pre-Socratic philosophers first came up with the idea that the universe is composed of atoms. This, however, does not mean that modern physics revived ancient atomism. It merely borrowed the term atom from ancient philosophers, modifying its meaning and situating it within a theoretical and practical context of intricate scientific work that was unavailable to ancient atomists. Ancient and contemporary atomists may use the same term, but they are working with different concepts. The most glaring evidence for this claim is that the meaning of the ancient Greek adjective atomos is not merely distinct from but incompatible with the current scientific meaning of the term atom. Atomos means “indivisible.” “Subatomic particles” would sound to Democritus’s ear as strange as “wooden iron” sounds to ours. See, especially, Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science, trans. Alexander T. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn, Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); and Hanne Andersen, Peter Barker, and Xiang Chen, The Cognitive Status of Scientific Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See Thomas Kuhn, “Postscript—1969,” included in Structure starting with the second edition. See especially Thomas Kuhn, “Metaphor in Science,” reprinted as chapter 8 in The Road Since “Structure”: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). For example, theories in genetics, developmental biology, cytology, and so on fall under the contemporary paradigm in biology, dominated by the theory of evolution by natural selection. See Frederic Suppe, The Structure of Scientific Theories, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977). The misuse of the term paradigm by many contemporary writers should not be allowed to deprive Kuhn’s philosophy of the concept that best suits its purposes. For example, Israel Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity (1967; reprint, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1982); Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1974): 5–20. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 189. See especially Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957; reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912 (1979; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Kuhn, Structure, 111; see also 150. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 121.

2001. AN OVERVIEW OF KUHN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

On this issue, Kuhn sometimes wrote as an interpreter of a particularly difficult philosophical passage in someone else’s text. For interesting reconstructions of his position, see especially Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions, and Ian Hacking, “Working in a New World: The Taxonomic Solution,” in World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science, ed. Paul Horwich (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 275–310. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 101–2. Neither all logical empiricists nor all Popperians were naive empiricists. Kuhn seems not to respond here to more sophisticated positions that problematized the idea of empirical evidence in ways similar to his own position. For example, the distinction between members of one’s own species and members of other species, the distinction between edible and inedible things in the world, and so on. But see Sharrock and Read, Kuhn, Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions, 188–93, where the authors argue that Kuhn’s later metaphor of an “evolutionary niche” was not entirely unsuccessful in conveying his point. Ibid., 195–96, italics mine. Other authors propose similarly nonmetaphysical interpretations; see Rom Harré and Michael Krausz, Varieties of Relativism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 82–83, and Michael Williams, Problems of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 234–35.

2. THE ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY 1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Kuhn’s contemporaries who most significantly contributed to this reorientation in the philosophy of science were Paul Feyerabend, Russ Hanson, Mary Hesse, Michael Polanyi, and Stephen Toulmin. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), 4th ed., intro. Ian Hacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 1. The history of science, a branch of the history of ideas, developed relatively recently. George Sarton, the founder of the discipline, started the journals Isis in 1912 and Osiris in 1936. For his kind of historiography, see, for example, George Sarton, The Study of the History of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936). Kuhn reported that, in his experience, courses in the history of science did not attract history students but mostly scientists and philosophers. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 129. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 130. Ibid., 132–33, 154. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 111. There is, however, no indication anywhere in Kuhn’s writings that he thought that the history of science, if done in his preferred way, would actually be harmful for the

2. ROLE OF HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY201

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

education of a new generation of scientists. All he said was that anachronistic historiography was useful. Steve Fuller argues in Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) that Kuhn proposed a “double-truth doctrine,” according to which scientists are intentionally taught the optimistic presentist history, whereas the message of Structure is a secret message for the elite. In light of the enormous popularity of Structure—not always unwelcome to its author—this view seems to be absurd. Fuller here mistakes Kuhn’s sensitivity to the intended audience of a historical narrative—the pragmatics of historiography—for the “double-truth doctrine,” of which there is no trace in Kuhn’s work. For a response to Fuller, see Alexander Bird, “Three Conservative Kuhns,” Social Epistemology 17, nos. 2–3 (2003): 125–31, esp. 130. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure”: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 87. Especially in Imre Lakatos, “History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions,” in PSA 1970: In Memory of Rudolf Carnap, ed. Roger C. Buck and Robert S. Cohen, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 8 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971), 91–136. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 107, Lakatos’s italics. Kuhn, Essential Tension, 135. Kuhn was especially impressed by the works of Alexandre Koyré and Herbert Butterfield (see, for example, Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe [Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1957]; Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 [New York: Macmillan, 1959], and The Whig Interpretation of History [New York: Norton, 1931]). For a careful analysis of their influence on Kuhn, see Brendan Larvor, “Why Did Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Cause a Fuss?” Studies in the History and the Philosophy of Science 34 (2003): 369–90. Kuhn’s approach to the history of science was also influenced by Alistair Crombie, Hélène Metzger, Annelise Maier, and the philosopher Mary Hesse. Kuhn’s historical works testify to his endorsement of internal historiography. They suffer neither from presentist bias nor from any heavy-handed imposition of Kuhn’s own account of scientific development as presented in Structure. They are in fact undertheorized, stressing the particulars of the context and the perspective of those who were instrumental in effecting scientific changes. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957; reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912 (1979; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Paul Feyerabend to Thomas Kuhn, undated, in Paul Hoyningen-Huene, “Two Letters of Paul Feyerabend to Thomas S. Kuhn on a Draft of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Studies in the History and the Philosophy of Science 26, no. 3 (1995): 360. Alexander Bird, Thomas Kuhn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 29. Ibid., chap. 2. Ibid., 30, 49. Ibid., 62.

2022. ROLE OF HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN KUHN’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

More generally, in Kuhn’s philosophy empirical theories are not evaluated exclusively on the basis of their “fit” with the theory-independent phenomena they seek to explain. Thomas S. Kuhn, “The Halt and the Blind: Philosophy and History of Science,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 31 (1980): 184. E. H. Carr, What Is History? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 23. See Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn, Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), and “Does Thomas Kuhn Have a ‘Model’ of Science?” Social Epistemology 17, nos. 2–3 (2003): 125–31. Sharrock and Read take Kuhn’s positive project to have been a version of naturalism: in some moments, Kuhn aimed to offer a sort of biological or psychological theory of science (Kuhn, Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions). I agree with them—and with Bird, who sees this aspect of Kuhn’s work as the most valuable (Thomas Kuhn)—that there are naturalizing tendencies in Kuhn’s thought. However, I think of his positive project in rather different terms, as I explain in the next section of this chapter. Vasso Kindi fleshes out this interpretation in satisfying detail in “The Relation of History of Science to Philosophy of Science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Kuhn’s Later Philosophical Work,” Perspectives on Science 13, no. 4 (2005): 495–530. Her overall reading of Kuhn’s philosophical project is, however, very different from Sharrock and Read’s, as I show in chapter 3. I am grateful to Rupert Read for explaining this aspect of his view in private correspondence. Among post-Wittgensteinian philosophers of science, the label negative suits Feyerabend much better than Kuhn. E. A. Burtt offered an early powerful and sustained case against the logical empiricists’ contention that science flourishes only if it eschews metaphysics; see The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1924). Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 216. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949), 92. Ibid., 90, 93. Ibid., 90, 96. Ibid., 102. Ibid. Ibid., 102, 103. Ibid., 99. Kuhn seems to have been surprised by this connection. See The Road Since “Structure,” 129–30. See especially Paul Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society (London: Verso, 1978). Feyerabend’s philosophy of science is often perceived as critical, radical, and politically left leaning. In this respect, however, his position exhibits a politically conservative faith in the capacity of the “market of ideas” to regulate itself to the benefit of all. See Paul Feyerabend, “Consolation for the Specialist,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University

3. “M U CK RAK ING” IN H ISTO RY203

43.

44. 45.

Press, 1970), 197–230, in which Feyerabend contrasts the “principle of tenacity” with the “principle of proliferation” and argues that both are and should be simultaneously present in science. My claim is not that we should do this or that Weber’s ideal-type concepts provide the best structure for explaining scientific change. Rather, I am arguing that the status of Kuhn’s model is that of a Weberian explanatory schema and that such a model legitimately treats apparent counterexamples as requests for refinement as long as the model is explanatorily successful in the cases it deems central. See, for example, The Road Since “Structure,” chapters 4 and 11. I discuss at greater length in chapter 6 Kuhn’s concept of specialization as isomorphic to biological speciation. Paul Hoyningen-Huene, “The Interrelations Between the Philosophy, History, and Sociology of Science in Thomas Kuhn’s Theory of Scientific Development,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43, no. 4 (1992): 490.

3. “MUCKRAKING” IN HISTORY 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

The lecture is reprinted in Thomas S. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure”: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), as chapter 5, “The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science.” An informal interdisciplinary group from Edinburgh, the Strong Programme for the Sociology of Knowledge, emerged in the 1970s. Its main representatives were Barry Barnes and David Bloor. I refer to the group and its science studies followers as “the sociological school.” Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 111. Ibid., 111–12. Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science, trans. Alexander T. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Alexander Bird, Thomas Kuhn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 280. Hanne Andersen, On Kuhn (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth and Thomson Learning, 2001), 76. Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn, Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 199–200. Vasso Kindi, “The Relation of History of Science to Philosophy of Science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Kuhn’s Later Philosophical Work,” Perspectives on Science 13, no. 4 (2005): 513, 515. Ibid., 508, 512. In this respect—but in this respect alone—Kindi’s reading is explicitly Wittgensteinian and close to the reading offered by Sharrock and Read. Kindi, “Relation of History of Science,” 526. Ibid., 516, Kindi’s italics. Ibid., 509.

20 43. “M U CK RAK ING” IN HI STORY

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

For example, Kant’s transcendental philosophy cannot easily accommodate non-Euclidian geometries, nor can it make sense of any scientific development as revolutionary in Kuhn’s sense. In order to preserve its valuable aspects, one must first take it as refuted and then undertake to recover, if possible, some of its more important insights. For such a project, see Michael Friedman, Dynamics of Reason: The 1999 Kant Lectures at Stanford University (Stanford, CA: CSLI, 2001). Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), 4th ed., intro. Ian Hacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 1. Kuhn’s analysis of the main claims and the philosophical assumptions of the new sociology of science suffers from the same interpretive indifference to the variety of views developed within that school of thought, as did his treatment of the received view. I do not attempt to improve on his analysis here because my main concern is Kuhn’s thought. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 110. Barry Barnes and David Bloor, “Relativism, Rationalism, and the Sociology of Knowledge,” in Rationality and Relativism, ed. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 23. For an example, see Bruno Latour, “One More Turn After the Social Turn: Easing Science Studies Into the Non-modern World,” in The Social Dimension of Science, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 272–94. For a response, see David Bloor, “Anti-Latour,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 30 (1999): 81–112. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 109. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 316, Kuhn’s emphasis. Ibid., 111. In this sketch, Kuhn only hinted at the kinds of account he aimed to offer, promising a full explanation in his last book. Sadly, his untimely death prevented him from finishing it. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 111. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 95. Kuhn suggests that the correspondence theory of truth should be replaced with a redundancy theory of truth (ibid., 99) and in one of his rare references cites Paul Horwich, Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). A detailed reconstruction of Kuhn’s reconceptualization of “scientific rationality” and “justification” is offered in chapters 4 and 5 and one of “scientific progress” is given in chapter 6. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 115. Ibid., 115–16. Ibid., 91.

3 . “M U CK RAK ING” IN H ISTO RY205

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

See Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions, 267–71, and Sharrock and Read, Kuhn, Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions, chap. 5. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 90. I am grateful to Stephen Hailey for the main point of this paragraph. Kuhn also held metaphilosophical views concerning the proper relationship between philosophy and sociology of science, although he did not explicitly discuss them. Sociology of science fared even worse: it was deemed of no philosophical interest whatever. Imre Lakatos, “History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions,” in PSA 1970: In Memory of Rudolf Carnap, ed. Roger  C. Buck and Robert  S. Cohen, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 8 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971), 106. Earlier in this chapter we saw that some aspects of the disagreement between Alexander Bird and Vasso Kindi stem from the vast differences in their metaphilosophical positions. Similarly, Pearce Williams, Karl Popper, and Imre Lakatos contrast their understanding of the role that the history of science should play in the philosophy of science with what they take to be Kuhn’s understanding (see Pearce Williams, “Normal Science, Scientific Revolutions, and the History of Science”; Karl Popper, “Normal Science and Its Dangers”; and Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” all in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970], 49–50, 51–58, 91–196). Their argumentative strategies clearly imply that if they are correctly specifying that role, then Kuhn’s specification must be wrong—and vice versa. Metaphilosophical monism is also discernible in the work of a number of post-Kuhnian philosophers of science—for example, Larry Laudan, Beyond Positivism and Relativism: Theory, Method, and Evidence (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996); Harvey Siegal, “Rationality and Anemia (Response to Baigrie),” Philosophy of Science 55 (1988): 442–47; Michael Friedman, “Kant, Kuhn, and the Rationality of Science,” Philosophy of Science 69 (2002): 171–90, and Dynamics of Reason. Thomas S. Kuhn, “The Halt and the Blind: Philosophy and History of Science,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 31 (1980): 184. See Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978), rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005); Harry Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, and Madman: The Defense of Reason in Descartes’ “Meditations” (1970; reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Margaret Dauler Wilson, Descartes (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); and Daniel Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Mutatis mutandis, the same is true of the sociology and cultural studies of science. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge (1975), 3rd ed. (London: Verso, 1993). See, for example, Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon, 1984; originally published in French in 1934); Georges Canguilhem, Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988; originally published in French in 1977), and On the

20 6 3. “M U CK RAK ING” IN HI STORY

48.

Normal and the Pathological, trans. C. R. Fawcett (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1988; originally published in French in 1966); Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). For an interesting comparison between the French philosophy of science and Kuhn’s work, see Garry Gutting, “Thomas Kuhn and French Philosophy of Science,” in Thomas Kuhn, ed. Thomas Nickles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 45–64. Imre Hronszky, Márta Feher, and Balázs Dajka edited a representative collection of European work on social aspects of scientific knowledge: Scientific Knowledge Socialized: Selected Proceedings of the 5th Joint International Conference on the History and Philosophy of Science (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1988). Several collections offer a good overview of feminist philosophy of science. See, for example, Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, eds., Feminist Epistemologies (New York: Routledge, 1993); Heidi Grasswick, ed., Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge (Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media B.V., 2011); Sandra Harding, ed., Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen Longino, eds., Feminism and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Joyce Nielsen, ed., Feminist Research Methods (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990); Nancy Tuana, Feminism and Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). See also the following influential publications: Ruth Bleier, Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories on Women (New York: Pergamon, 1984); Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989); Sandra Harding The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), and Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.); Sarah Hrdy, The Woman That Never Evolved (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Ruth Hubbard, The Politics of Women’s Biology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (San Francisco: Freeman, 1983), and Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Elisabeth A. Lloyd, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Helen Longino, “In Search of Feminist Epistemology,” Monist 77 (1994): 472–85.

4. KUHN’S ANTIRELATIVISM 1.

2.

Some among many who understood Kuhn as a relativist are Dudley Shapere, Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, Alan Musgrave, Israel Scheffler, William H. Newton-Smith, James F. Harris, Larry Laudan, and Erich von Dietze. References to some of their works are listed in the bibliography. Alan Musgrave, “Kuhn’s Second Thoughts,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 22 (1971): 296.

4. KU H N’S ANTIRELATIVIS M207

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

There are exceptions. The clearest and most persuasive argumentation in favor of the view that Kuhn rejected the classical conception and so should not be seen as a relativist under it can be found in Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn, Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). However, as we have seen, Sharrock and Read do not think that Kuhn had a philosophically interesting theory of rationality to offer instead. Gurol Irzik notes that “one of Kuhn’s most important contributions is to redefine our notion of scientific rationality” (“Changing Conception of Rationality: From Logical Empiricism to Postpositivism,” in Logical Empiricism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Paolo Parrini, Wesley C. Salmon, and Merrilee H. Salmon [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003], 326), but his focus is on Rudolf Carnap’s work, and so he has comparatively little to say about Kuhn’s new conception. Peter Godfrey-Smith quite rightly observes that Kuhn is not a relativist in the sense that ought to matter most to a philosopher of science: Kuhn always believed in the cognitive superiority of science (Theory and Reality [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003]). Thomas S. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure”: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 231. An excellent account of these misunderstandings is to be found in the introduction to Sharrock and Read, Kuhn, Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions. A number of contemporary philosophers of science have described this conception of scientific rationality well. Although they may label it differently, they in general agree upon its contours and content. See, for example, W. H. Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), chap. 1, and Alexander Bird, Thomas Kuhn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), chap. 1. (Although I agree with Bird in counting Carnap, the early Hempel, and Popper among the major figures of “Old Rationalism,” I think that Lakatos should be seen as a transitional figure.) See also Miriam Solomon, Social Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), chap. 1; Helen Longino, The Fate of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), chap. 1; and Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality, chaps. 1–4. Both scientific realists and scientific antirealists used this model of scientific rationality; their differences concerned the specification of the goal of science—with the realists typically pointing to truth or knowledge and the antirealists focusing on predictive power or empirical adequacy. Of course, a theory is better in terms of the specified goal of science. The proponents of the sociological school of course assumed that scientists are rational in choosing adequate means for their personal or political ends. For the “mob rule” accusation, see Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 178. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 159. Kuhn refers to the criticism in Paul Feyerabend, “Consolation for the Specialist,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Lakatos and Musgrave, 197–230.

20 8 4. KU H N’S ANTIRELATI VI SM

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 228. Ibid., 127. Thomas S. Kuhn, “Notes on Lakatos,” in PSA 1970: In Memory of Rudolf Carnap, ed. Roger C. Buck and Robert S. Cohen, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 8 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971), 144. Paul Hoyningen-Huene, “The Interrelations Between the Philosophy, History, and Sociology of Science in Thomas Kuhn’s Theory of Scientific Development,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43, no. 4 (1992): 496–97, my italics. For an earlier statement of this classical rationalist objection to Kuhn, see Newton-Smith, Rationality of Science, chap. 5. This is Hempel’s formulation; see Hoyningen-Huene, “The Interrelations,” 498. Ibid., 500. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 230. Ibid., 213. One of Kuhn’s objections to the anachronistic historiography of science is that it applies the present-day taxonomy of disciplines to past science without regard for the fact that disciplinary boundaries change over time. “Until the end of the seventeenth century, much of science was philosophy,” he stated (Thomas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977], 10). Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 214. Arthur Fine, “Unnatural Attitudes: Realist and Instrumentalist Attachments to Science,” Mind 95 (1986): 174. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 251. Harold Brown, Rationality (London: Routledge, 1988). Ibid., 79. See ibid., esp. chap. 3. Ibid., 191. Ibid., 183. Ibid., 187. Ibid., 193. Each of these characterizations, of course, may still be contextually thin: to support one’s evaluation of irrationality, one usually has to describe in some detail the belief or behavior patterns of the entity deemed irrational (belief, decision, person, institution). Feyerabend led the way into this particular kind of skepticism, and many thinkers within the sociological school and science studies followed him there. See Peter Duesberg, “HIV and AIDS: Correlation Without Causation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 88 (1991): 1575–79, for a summary of Duesberg’s position, and “AIDS Acquired by Drug Consumption and Other Noncontagious Risk Factors,” Pharmacology and Therapeutics 55 (1992): 201–77, for the detailed argument. For an accessible overview of the criticism of Duesberg’s view and his evidence, see Jon Cohen, “The Duesberg Phenomenon,” Science 266 (1994): 1642–44. Even the best scientists can be dogmatic, but sometimes this means that they are irrational.

5. CO LLE CTIVE RATIO NALITY O F SCI EN CE209

5. COLLECTIVE RATIONALITY OF SCIENCE 1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure”: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 134. Ibid. Ibid., 131, Kuhn’s italics. Note that the group is defined narrowly: “The responsibility for applying shared scientific values, must be left to the specialists’ group. It may not even be extended to all scientists, much less to all educated laymen, much less to the mob” (ibid., 158). For post-Kuhnian developments of this idea, see especially David Hull, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science Without Legend, Objectivity Without Illusions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Miriam Solomon, Social Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). The sociological school saw these personal differences as crucially important in determining scientific choices, but Kuhn did not. For an interesting discussion of this point, see S. L. Hurley, Natural Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), chap. 3. Hurley argues that complex concepts such as “injustice” have a structured set of potentially conflicting criteria that, except in exemplary cases, may pull different users of the concept in different directions and thus result in legitimate disagreements. The similarity with Kuhn’s view of the nature and causes of scientific disagreements is striking. For a detailed discussion of “seeing as” and “seeing that” in Kuhn’s philosophy, see Alexander Bird, Thomas Kuhn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), chap. 4, esp. 108–14. The dominant—cynical—reading of Kuhn is that younger scientists have less to lose and everything to gain if the new paradigm wins. Their position in the scientific community will be exalted much sooner and much more securely than if they were to compete with recognized experts in the field. Although Kuhn did not say much to prevent such a reading, and although Structure in particular sometimes seems to invite it, we must note that his explanation of scientific disagreements places the emphasis on scientists’ different educational pathways and different specializations: they naturally lead to different ways of seeing scientific problems and solutions. Paul Hoyningen-Huene, “The Interrelations Between the Philosophy, History, and Sociology of Science in Thomas Kuhn’s Theory of Scientific Development,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43, no. 4 (1992): 496, Hoyningen-Huene’s italics. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 241–42. I am not taking into account here the logical possibility of making Kuhn’s account consistent by having him treat scientific rationality as reducible to rationality of individual scientists. It is clear from all of his writings that he would never endorse this position.

2 1 05 . CO LLE CTIVE RATIO NALITY OF SCI EN CE

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

Of course, Kuhn was right in retracting his explanation of group-effected change in terms of gestalt switches: a gestalt switch can only metaphorically happen to a group. But conversion is another matter. Groups convert from one religion to another, and the conversion affects both the group’s belief system and its way of life. Nothing in Kuhn’s understanding of science as developed by scientific communities prevents us from saying that a change in a community’s beliefs and practices may sometimes aptly be described as a conversion. For an articulation and defense of this view of the group mind in political philosophy, see Philip Pettit, The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 148. For example, a community in which tribal or national loyalties are strong and widespread and tolerance for dissent is low will have achieved cohesiveness and consensus, but its collective reasoning is nonetheless likely to be wanting. Christopher McMahon makes a similar point about collective reasoning in political communities in chapter 5 of Collective Rationality and Collective Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 115. I frequently use the term tenet rather than the more customary term belief because I want to include the practical aspects of science. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 115, 113. Ibid., 95–96, my italics. Ibid., 96. See Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn, Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 42. Sharrock and Read correctly link Kuhn’s claim in Structure that scientists never abandon theories except when they espouse other theories with the legacy of American pragmatism. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 114–15, Kuhn’s italics. This answer implies that a long-standing scientific value can be replaced if a rival proves itself better for the “job at hand” (see ibid., 130). For example, in some disciplines, complexity may come to replace simplicity as a shared scientific value. See, for example, ibid., 133. Sharrock and Read make this point clearly (Kuhn, Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions, 48). The other side of the same coin is that it is equally rationally permissible that a revolution should fail to happen and that a period of extraordinary science should end in the strengthening of the old paradigm. Skúli Sigurdsson, “The Nature of Scientific Knowledge: An Interview with Thomas S. Kuhn,” in Shifting Paradigms: Thomas S. Kuhn and the History of Science, ed. Alexander Blum, Kostas Gavrouglu, and Jürgen Renn (Berlin: Edition Open Access, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2016), 24. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 209. Ibid., 214.

6 . LO O K ING BAC K : P RO GRESS IN SCI EN CE21 1

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), 4th ed., intro. Ian Hacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 79. William James, “The Will to Believe” (1896), in Essays in Pragmatism, ed. and intro. Alburey Castell (New York: Hafner, 1957), 99–100, James’s italics. Thomas Nickles, “Kuhn, Historical Philosophy of Science, and Case-Based Reasoning,” Configurations 6 (1998): 55–56. James, “The Will to Believe,” 89. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 89. Although perhaps not uniquely, but that is a difficult interpretive problem I cannot discuss here. Rudolf Carnap, “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” in Meaning and Necessity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 205–21. Rationality may come in degrees: for example, satisfying the minimal absolute requirements of scientific rationality is a comparatively easy task. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 115. Ibid., 159. Paul Feyerabend’s book Science in a Free Society (London: Verso, 1978) is often interpreted in this way. Kuhn’s response would have been in the spirit of American pragmatism, which I discuss in chapter 7.

6. LOOKING BACK: PROGRESS IN SCIENCE 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

Even Feyerabend, who had little else but ridicule for the classical rationalist project, never denied the progress of science. Quite the contrary: he affirmed the existence of scientific progress but argued that no single methodology can provide an even passable explanation of it. The best-known position developed along these lines was Karl Popper’s. In his philosophy of science, the goal of science is truth, but it can be only partially achieved. To express this point, Popper introduced the term verisimilitude: later theories have more verisimilitude or contain more truth than the earlier ones. Charles Sanders Peirce, who is sometimes credited with being the first philosopher to postulate a heuristic goal of inquiry, should not, in my view, be seen as understanding the phrase “heuristic goal” in the manner typical of classical rationalists. Unfortunately, I cannot elaborate this point here. See Dudley Shapere, “Meaning and Scientific Change,” in Mind and Cosmos: Essays in Contemporary Science and Philosophy, ed. Robert G. Colodny (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966), 41–85. See, for example, W. H. Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 122–24. Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977).

2 1 26 . LO O K ING BAC K : P RO GRESS I N SCI EN CE

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), 4th ed., intro. Ian Hacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 160. Ibid., 161. Ibid., 162–63. It is thus a consequence of Kuhn’s view that when the fundamental tenets of a practice are challenged—as they sometimes must be—the quality of the debate decreases in some important respects. Kuhn, Structure, 169. Ibid., 170. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure”: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 96. A notable exception is K. Brad Wray, Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 307. Ibid., 97, 98, 250. Ibid., 97–98. Ibid., 250. As previously noted, Kuhn did not think that natural science is the only progressive human practice. Technology, logic, and mathematics should be seen as equally progressive. Less widespread but still not uncommon is the view that there is progress in the social sciences as well as in our understanding of history, the arts, languages, and other disciplines in the humanities. In some contexts and for some purposes, it is also natural to think of current political arrangements, legal systems, and moral beliefs and attitudes as constituting progress over earlier ones, especially in terms of the extension of relevant political, legal, and moral rights to individuals and groups previously excluded from those domains. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 101. Ibid., 229. Ibid., 233. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 98–99. Biologists, like other people, may read Aristotle’s work On the Parts of Animals with profit, but even if ancient Greek thought sometimes gives inspiration to modern research (a point that Feyerabend often stressed), the result is not a unification of any sort. Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: Allen and Unwin, 1942). For more on unification in modern evolutionary theory, see Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine, eds., The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification in Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Vassiliki B. Smocovitis, “Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology,” Journal of the History of Biology 25 (1992): 1–65. There are numerous examples of more recent, local unifications among scientific theories or among scientific fields. For the philosophical implications of some of

7. KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST RO OTS21 3

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

these unifications, see, for example, Lindley Darden and Nancy Maull, “Interfield Theories,” Philosophy of Science 44 (1977): 43–64; Philip Kitcher, “Unification as a Regulative Ideal,” Perspectives on Science 7 (1999): 337–48; and Margaret Morrison, Unifying Scientific Theories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Darden and Maull, “Interfield Theories.” Ibid., 43. I cannot discuss within the limits of this chapter the various ways in which philosophers of science have analyzed and documented the unity and the disunity of science. A representative list includes Jerry Fodor, “Special Sciences: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis,” Synthese 28 (1974): 97–115; Robert Causey, The Unity of Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977); Patrick Suppes, “The Plurality of Science,” in PSA 1978: Proceedings of the 1978 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, vol. 2, ed. Peter D. Asquith and Ian Hacking (East Lansing, MI: PSA, 1981), 3–16; Kenneth Schaffner, Discovery and Explanation in Biology and Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Peter Galison and David J. Stump, eds., The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Context, and Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Harold Kincaid, Individualism and the Unity of Science (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997); Allison Wylie, “Rethinking Unity as a Working Hypothesis: How Archaeologists Exploit the Disunities of Science,” Perspectives on Science 7 (1999): 293–317; and Todd A. Grantham, “Conceptualizing the (Dis)Unity of Science,” Philosophy of Science 71 (2004): 133–55. On the “material culture” of science, see Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). In “Pure Science and the Problem of Progress,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 46 (2014): 55–63, Heather Douglas presents a very illuminating historical narrative of the emergence of the distinction between pure science and applied science. She assumes, however, that Kuhn endorses this distinction, following Bertrand Russell rather than John Dewey. As I argue in this chapter and the next, Kuhn’s philosophy of science is surprisingly continuous with Dewey’s. It has neither the need nor the resources to demarcate between pure science and applied science. On the contrary, it invites a rejection of that distinction. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 97.

7. KUHN’S PRAGMATIST ROOTS 1. 2.

Alexander Bird, however, argues in Thomas Kuhn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) that Kuhn’s break with logical empiricism was only partial. Kuhn’s Kantianism is emphasized in Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science, trans. Alexander T. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Michael Friedman, “Remarks on the History of Science and the History of Philosophy,” in World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of

2147. KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST R OOTS

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

Science, ed. Paul Horwich (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 37–54, and “Kant, Kuhn, and the Rationality of Science,” Philosophy of Science 69 (2002): 171–90; and, in a way, Vasso Kindi, “The Relation of History of Science to Philosophy of Science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Kuhn’s Later Philosophical Work,” Perspectives on Science 13, no. 4 (2005): 495–530. Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. Fred B. Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), originally published in German in 1935. In Kuhn, Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read interpret Kuhn through a Wittgensteinian lens. For details of Kuhn’s intellectual development and shaping influences, see two interviews that he gave: Skúli Sigurdsson, “The Nature of Scientific Knowledge: An Interview with Thomas S. Kuhn,” in Shifting Paradigms: Thomas S. Kuhn and the History of Science, ed. Alexander Blum, Kostas Gavrouglu, and Jürgen Renn (Berlin: Edition Open Access, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2016), 17–30, and the interview that concludes Thomas S. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure”: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 255–323. Kuhn’s reference to James in Structure is to James’s work on psychology of perception, Shifting Paradigms Shifting Paradigms (see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1962], 4th ed., intro. Ian Hacking [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012], 113). Arthur O. Lovejoy identified no less than thirteen different versions of pragmatism, and that was in 1908. See “The Thirteen Pragmatisms,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 5, no. 1 (1908): 1–12. In my discussion throughout this chapter, I use the term pragmatism rather than Peirce’s awkward later term pragmaticism. Peirce’s pragmatic maxim is: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these is the whole of our conception of the object” (Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols., ed. Charles Hartshore and Paul Weiss [vols. 1–6] and Arthur W. Burks [vols. 7–8] [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958], 5:401; hereafter cited as Peirce, CP). Peirce’s most important papers on inquiry are “Fixation of Belief,” “The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism,” “Abduction and Induction,” “Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis,” “Methods for Attaining Truth,” and “The Probability of Induction.” Hilary Putnam, Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 152. Logic, metaphysics, rational theology, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and critical theory have at different times and by different philosophical schools been seen as forming the core of philosophy. I am here representing Hume in the customary manner: as a traditional epistemologist and a skeptic. My own interpretation of Hume rejects both of these characterizations, but I unfortunately cannot discuss this matter here.

7. KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST RO OTS21 5

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

For example, see Barry Stroud, Hume (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), esp. 247–50. Peirce, CP, 5:376. Ibid., 5:416. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Holt, 1938), 8. Michael Williams, Problems of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Peirce, CP, 5:376. Ibid., 5:397. Ibid., 5:387. Christopher Hookway, Truth, Rationality, and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 254. If, for example, I am searching for my keys, the methods of tenacity, authority, and the a priori method will be useless for the purpose. Only the scientific method will help—that is, active looking around. Peirce, CP, 5:386. Cheryl Misak, The American Pragmatists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 246. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 317. Fully spelled out, the relations are multiple because the phrase “other people” is just a placeholder for a wide variety of views. In Cheryl Misak’s words (in a different context but still applicable here), “the requirements of genuine belief require that we must, broadly speaking, be democratic inquirers” (Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation [London: Routledge, 2000], 106). It could reasonably be thought that Popper’s epistemology has some elements of pragmatism in its reliance on conjectures and refutations as well as in its characterization of “basic statements” as statements about which the inquirers have no difficulty agreeing. However, the overall structure of his epistemology—especially his understanding of falsification—is not a pragmatist one. Peirce, CP, 5:589. Ibid., 7:587. See Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). Joseph Rouse, “Kuhn’s Philosophy of Scientific Practice,” in Thomas Kuhn, ed. Thomas Nickles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 108. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 298. Ibid., 300. Laurence BonJour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). In the language of evolutionary biology, the similarity between classical pragmatism and Kuhn’s philosophy is homologous, or owing to historical connections, and not analogous, or indicating independent development that results in functionally similar features. The

216 7. KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST R OOTS

38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

classical pragmatists’ and Kuhn’s shared intellectual ancestry includes Kant’s philosophy and the theory of evolution. On the renewed interest in American pragmatism, see Christopher Hookway, Peirce (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), and Truth, Rationality, and Pragmatism; Ruth Anna Putnam, ed., The Cambridge Companion to James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Cheryl Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircian Account of Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), Truth, Politics, Morality, and American Pragmatists; Cheryl Misak, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Peirce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001); and Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). On the reappraisal of logical empiricism, see Ronald N. Giere and Alan Richardson, eds., Origins of Logical Empiricism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Michael Friedman, Dynamics of Reason: The 1999 Kant Lectures at Stanford University (Stanford, CA: CSLI, 2001); and Paolo Parrini, Wesley C. Salmon, and Merrilee H. Salmon, eds., Logical Empiricism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003). See Gary L. Hardcastle and Alan Richardson, eds., Logical Empiricism in North America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), an important collection that examines the North American reception of logical empiricism and its demise. See also Misak, American Pragmatists, chap. 9. For a detailed discussion, see Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Alan W. Richardson, “Engineering Philosophy of Science: American Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism in the 1930s,” Philosophy of Science 69 (2002): S36–S47. Although C. I. Lewis and Charles Morris are usually seen as pragmatists and Rudolf Carnap as a logical empiricist, the later philosophy of all three benefited in different ways and in different proportions from both traditions. For example, Bertrand Russell, who frequently visited the United States and who was widely read by American philosophers, was characteristically cutting and dismissive of pragmatism; a case in point is his essay “Transatlantic Truth,” Albany Review 2, no. 10 (1908): 393–410, reprinted as “William James’ Conception of Truth,” in Philosophical Essays (London: Longman, Green, 1910), 127–49. W. B. Gallie, Peirce and Pragmatism (London: Penguin, 1952), 12. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (London: Gollancz, 1936). Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 281. Carl Gustav Hempel, transcript of unknown document, Philosophisches Archiv Universitat Konstanz, p. 21, quoted in Gereon Wolters, “Carl Gustav Hempel: Pragmatic Empiricist,” in Logical Empiricism, ed. Parrini, Salmon, and Salmon, 115. Not all forms of empiricism are naive. I believe that there is a legitimate sense of the term empiricism that applies to Kuhn’s philosophy. W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 43.

7. KU H N’S P RAGM ATIST RO OTS21 7

50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

Although Quine says that “our natural tendency is to disturb the total system as little as possible” (ibid., 44), this statement should not be taken—as it sometimes is—to imply that Quine advocated a coherentist model of justification. According to both Quine and Kuhn, coherence is only one of the virtues we wish our cognitive systems to have. Ibid., 46. Kuhn said that “Two Dogmas” had a “considerable impact” on him (The Road Since “Structure,” 297). Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (1955; reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). The idea is Goodman’s, but John Rawls coined the term reflective equilibrium in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). Catherine Z. Elgin, Goodman’s important collaborator, fully developed an explicit use of the concept of reflective equilibrium within what she calls “imperfect procedural epistemology.” See Considered Judgment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), chaps. 1 and 4. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978), 2. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), xi. Misak, American Pragmatists, 238. Kuhn, The Road Since “Structure,” 312. Although recognizing the enormous importance of the problem of the relationship between mind and world for Kuhn’s philosophy of science, I set it aside in chapter 1 in order to focus on Kuhn’s mature epistemology and metaphilosophy. That being so, I am here merely suggesting that it may be illuminating to explore the patterns of influence among Kuhn, Goodman, and Putnam on this issue. This is David Wiggins’s phrase; see his excellent analysis of Peirce’s epistemology in “Reflections on Inquiry and Truth Arising from Peirce’s Method for the Fixation of Belief,” in The Cambridge Companion to Peirce, ed. Misak, 87–126.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WO R K S BY T H O M A S S . K U H N Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912. 1979. Reprint. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. 1957. Reprint. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. The Essential Tension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. “The Halt and the Blind: Philosophy and History of Science.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 31 (1980): 181–92. “Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?” In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, 1–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. “Notes on Lakatos.” In PSA 1970: In Memory of Rudolf Carnap, edited by Roger C. Buck and Robert S. Cohen, 137–46. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 8. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971. The Road Since “Structure”: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview. Edited by James Conant and John Haugeland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962. 4th ed. Introduced by Ian Hacking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

OT H E R R E F E R E N C E S Alcoff, Linda, and Elizabeth Potter, eds. Feminist Epistemologies. New York: Routledge, 1993. Andersen, Hanne. On Kuhn. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth and Thomson Learning, 2001.

220 BIBLIO GRAP H Y

Andersen, Hanne, Peter Barker, and Xiang Chen. The Cognitive Status of Scientific Revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Ayer, A. J. Language, Truth, and Logic. London: Gollancz, 1936. Bachelard, Gaston. The New Scientific Spirit. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Reprint. Boston: Beacon, 1984. Originally published in French in 1934. Barnes, Barry, and David Bloor. “Relativism, Rationalism, and the Sociology of Knowledge.” In Rationality and Relativism, edited by Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, 21–47. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982. Bernstein, Richard J. The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. Bird, Alexander. Thomas Kuhn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. ——. “Three Conservative Kuhns.” Social Epistemology 17, nos. 2–3 (2003): 125–31. Bleier, Ruth. Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories on Women. New York: Pergamon, 1984. Bloor, David. “Anti-Latour.” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 30 (1999): 81–112. BonJour, Laurence. The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Brandom, Robert. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Brown, Harold. Rationality. London: Routledge, 1988. Burtt, E. A. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1924. Butterfield, Herbert. The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800. New York: Macmillan, 1959. ——. The Whig Interpretation of History. New York: Norton, 1931. Canguilhem, Georges. Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Originally published in French in 1977. ——. On the Normal and the Pathological. Translated by C. R. Fawcett. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1988. Originally published in French in 1966. Carnap, Rudolf. “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology.” In Meaning and Necessity, 205–21. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950. Carr, E. H. What Is History? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961. Causey, Robert. The Unity of Science. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977. Cohen, Jon. “The Duesberg Phenomenon.” Science 266 (1994): 1642–44. D’Agostino, Fred. Naturalizing Epistemology: Thomas Kuhn and the “Essential Tension.” New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Darden, Lindley, and Nancy Maull. “Interfield Theories.” Philosophy of Science 44 (1977): 43–64. Davidson, Donald. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1974): 5–20. Dewey, John. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Holt, 1938. Douglas, Heather. “Pure Science and the Problem of Progress.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 46 (2014): 55–63. Duesberg, Peter H. “AIDS Acquired by Drug Consumption and Other Noncontagious Risk Factors.” Pharmacology and Therapeutics 55 (1992): 201–77.

BIBLIO GRAP H Y221

——. “HIV and AIDS: Correlation Without Causation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 88 (1991): 1575–79. Elgin, Catherine Z. Considered Judgment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Myths of Gender. New York: Basic Books, 1985. Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge. 1975. 3rd ed. London: Verso, 1993. ——. “Consolation for the Specialist.” In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, 197–230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. ——. Science in a Free Society. London: Verso, 1978. Fine, Arthur. “Unnatural Attitudes: Realist and Instrumentalist Attachments to Science.” Mind 95 (1986): 149–79. Fleck, Ludwig. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Translated by Fred B. Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Originally published in German in 1935. Fodor, Jerry. “Special Sciences: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis.” Synthese 28 (1974): 97–115. Fox Keller, Evelyn. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. San Francisco: Freeman, 1983. ——. Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Fox Keller, Evelyn, and Helen Longino, eds. Feminism and Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Frankfurt, Harry. Demons, Dreamers, and Madman: The Defense of Reason in Descartes’ Meditations. 1970. Reprint. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Friedman, Michael. Dynamics of Reason: The 1999 Kant Lectures at Stanford University. Stanford, CA: CSLI, 2001. ——. “Kant, Kuhn, and the Rationality of Science.” Philosophy of Science 69 (2002): 171–90. ——. “Remarks on the History of Science and the History of Philosophy.” In World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science, edited by Paul Horwich, 37–54. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Galison, Peter. How Experiments End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ——. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Galison, Peter, and David J. Stump, eds. The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Context, and Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Gallie, W. B. Peirce and Pragmatism. London: Penguin, 1952. Garber, Daniel. Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Giere, Ronald N., and Alan Richardson, eds. Origins of Logical Empiricism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Theory and Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Goodman, Nelson. Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. 1955. Reprint. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.

222BIBLIO GRAP H Y

——. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978. Grantham, Todd A. “Conceptualizing the (Dis)Unity of Science.” Philosophy of Science 71 (2004): 133–55. Grasswick, Heidi, ed. Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media B.V., 2011. Gutting, Garry. “Thomas Kuhn and French Philosophy of Science.” In Thomas Kuhn, edited by Thomas Nickles, 45–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Haack, Susan. Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Hacking, Ian. Representing and Intervening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ——. “Working in a New World: The Taxonomic Solution.” In World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science, edited by Paul Horwich, 275–310. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989. Hardcastle, Gary L., and Alan Richardson, eds. Logical Empiricism in North America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Harding, Sandra. Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. ——. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. ——. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Harré, Rom, and Michael Krausz. Varieties of Relativism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Harris, James F. Against Relativism: A Philosophical Defense of Method. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1992. Hookway, Christopher. Peirce. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. ——. Truth, Rationality, and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Horwich, Paul. Truth. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. ——, ed. World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Hoyningen-Huene, Paul. “The Interrelations Between the Philosophy, History, and Sociology of Science in Thomas Kuhn’s Theory of Scientific Development.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43, no. 4 (1992): 487–501. ——. Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science. Translated by Alexander T. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ——. “Two Letters of Paul Feyerabend to Thomas S. Kuhn on a Draft of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Studies in the History and the Philosophy of Science 26, no. 3 (1995): 353–87. Hrdy, Sarah. The Woman That Never Evolved. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Hronszky, Imre, Márta Feher, and Balázs Dajka, eds. Scientific Knowledge Socialized: Selected Proceedings of the 5th Joint International Conference on the History and Philosophy of Science. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1988. Hubbard, Ruth. The Politics of Women’s Biology. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

BIBLIO GRAP H Y223

Hull, David. Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Hurley, S. L. Natural Reasons: Personality and Polity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Huxley, Julian. Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. London: Allen and Unwin, 1942. Irzik, Gurol. “Changing Conception of Rationality: From Logical Empiricism to Postpositivism.” In Logical Empiricism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Paolo Parrini, Wesley C. Salmon, and Merrilee H. Salmon, 325–46. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. James, William. “The Will to Believe.” 1896. In Essays in Pragmatism, edited and introduced by Alburey Castell, 88–109. New York: Hafner, 1957. Kincaid, Harold. Individualism and the Unity of Science. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. Kindi, Vasso. “The Relation of History of Science to Philosophy of Science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Kuhn’s Later Philosophical Work.” Perspectives on Science 13, no. 4 (2005): 495–530. Kitcher, Philip. The Advancement of Science: Science Without Legend, Objectivity Without Illusions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ——. “Unification as a Regulative Ideal.” Perspectives on Science 7 (1999): 337–48. Koyré, Alexandre. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1957. Lakatos, Imre. “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes.” In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, 91–196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. ——. “History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions.” In PSA 1970: In Memory of Rudolf Carnap, edited by Roger C. Buck and Robert S. Cohen, 91–136. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 8. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971. Lakatos, Imre, and Alan Musgrave, eds. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Larvor, Brendan. “Why Did Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Cause a Fuss?” Studies in the History and the Philosophy of Science 34 (2003): 369–90. Latour, Bruno. “One More Turn After the Social Turn: Easing Science Studies Into the Non-modern World.” In The Social Dimension of Science, edited by Ernan McMullin, 272–94. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992. ——. Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Laudan, Larry. Beyond Positivism and Relativism: Theory, Method, and Evidence. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. ——. Progress and Its Problems. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977. Lloyd, Elisabeth A. The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Longino, Helen. The Fate of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. ——. “In Search of Feminist Epistemology.” Monist 77 (1994): 472–485. ——. Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

224BIBLIO GRAP H Y

Lovejoy, Arthur O. “The Thirteen Pragmatisms.” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 5, no. 1 (1908): 1–12. Mayr, Ernst, and William B. Provine, eds. The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification in Biology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980. McMahon, Christopher. Collective Rationality and Collective Reasoning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Misak, Cheryl. The American Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ——, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Peirce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ——. Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircian Account of Truth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. ——. Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation. London: Routledge, 2000. Morrison, Margaret. Unifying Scientific Theories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Musgrave, Alan. “Kuhn’s Second Thoughts.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 22 (1971): 287–97. Newton-Smith, W. H. The Rationality of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Nickles, Thomas. “Kuhn, Historical Philosophy of Science, and Case-Based Reasoning.” Configurations 6 (1998): 51–85. ——, ed. Thomas Kuhn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Nielsen, Joyce, ed. Feminist Research Methods. Boulder: Westview Press, 1990. Parrini, Paolo, Wesley C. Salmon, and Merrilee H. Salmon, eds. Logical Empiricism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. Peirce, Charles Sanders. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. 8 vols. Edited by Charles Hartshore and Paul Weiss (vols. 1–6) and Arthur W. Burks (vols. 7–8). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958. Pettit, Philip. The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pickering, Andrew. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy. 1958. Reprint. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Popper, Karl. “Normal Science and Its Dangers.” In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, 51–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ——. Words and Life. Edited by James Conant. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Putnam, Ruth Anna, ed. The Cambridge Companion to James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Quine, W. V. O. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In From a Logical Point of View, 20–46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Richardson, Alan W. “Engineering Philosophy of Science: American Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism in the 1930s.” Philosophy of Science 69 (2002): S36–S47.

BIBLIO GRAP H Y225

Rouse, Joseph. Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. ——. “Kuhn’s Philosophy of Scientific Practice.” In Thomas Kuhn, edited by Thomas Nickles, 101–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Russell, Bertrand. “Transatlantic Truth.” Albany Review 2, no. 10 (1908): 393–410. Reprinted as “William James’ Conception of Truth,” in Philosophical Essays, 127–49. London: Longman, Green, 1910. Sarton, George. The Study of the History of Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936. Schaffner, Kenneth. Discovery and Explanation in Biology and Medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Scheffler, Israel. Science and Subjectivity. 1967. Reprint. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1982. Shapere, Dudley. “Meaning and Scientific Change.” In Mind and Cosmos: Essays in Contemporary Science and Philosophy, edited by Robert G. Colodny, 41–85. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966. ——. “The Paradigm Concept.” Science 172 (1971): 706–9. ——. “Review: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Philosophical Review 73 (1964): 383–94. Sharrock, Wes, and Rupert Read. “Does Thomas Kuhn Have a ‘Model’ of Science?” Social Epistemology 17, nos. 2–3 (2003): 125–31. ——. Kuhn, Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. Siegal, Harvey. “Rationality and Anemia (Response to Baigrie).” Philosophy of Science 55 (1988): 442–47. Sigurdsson, Skúli. “The Nature of Scientific Knowledge: An Interview with Thomas S. Kuhn.” In Shifting Paradigms: Thomas S. Kuhn and the History of Science, edited by Alexander Blum, Kostas Gavrouglu, and Jürgen Renn, 17–30. Berlin: Edition Open Access, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2016. Sluga, Hans. Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Smocovitis, Vassiliki B. “Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology.” Journal of the History of Biology 25 (1992): 1–65. Solomon, Miriam. Social Empiricism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Stroud, Barry. Hume. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977. Suppe, Frederic. The Structure of Scientific Theories. 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Suppes, Patrick. “The Plurality of Science.” In PSA 1978: Proceedings of the 1978 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, vol. 2, edited by Peter D. Asquith and Ian Hacking, 3–16. East Lansing, MI: PSA, 1981. Tuana, Nancy, ed. Feminism and Science. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Von Dietze, Erich. Paradigms Explained: Rethinking Thomas Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001. Weber, Max. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Translated and edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch. New York: Free Press, 1949.

226 BIBLIO GRAP H Y

Wiggins, David. “Reflections on Inquiry and Truth Arising from Peirce’s Method for the Fixation of Belief.” In The Cambridge Companion to Peirce, edited by Cheryl Misak, 87–126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Wilson, Margaret Dauler. Descartes. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Williams, Bernard. Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. 1978. Rev. ed. New York: Routledge, 2005. Williams, Michael. Problems of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Williams, Pearce. “Normal Science, Scientific Revolutions, and the History of Science.” In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, 49–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Wolters, Gereon. “Carl Gustav Hempel: Pragmatic Empiricist.” In Logical Empiricism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Paolo Parrini, Wesley C. Salmon, and Merrilee H. Salmon, 109–22. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. Wray, K. Brad. Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Wylie, Allison. “Rethinking Unity as a Working Hypothesis: How Archaeologists Exploit the Disunities of Science.” Perspectives on Science 7 (1999): 293–317.

INDEX

accuracy, consensus and, 133 analytic philosophy, logical empiricism and, 186 Andersen, Hanne, 56 anomalies: disagreements and, 143; normal science and, 14, 130; paradigms and, 122; puzzle solving and, 198n10 applied science, 213n32; pure science and, 160–62 Ayer, A. J., 186 belief, 215n27; doubt and, 172–73; inquiry and, 174; knowledge and, 171–72; paradigms and, 172; Peirce and, 173–75, 179; scientific method and, 175–76; as social, 175; truth and, 171. See also method of belief; rational beliefs; religious belief; scientific belief Bird, Alexander, 35–40, 49, 51, 59–60, 205n42, 213n1; on first principles, 55–56; metaphilosophy and, 60–61 BonJour, Laurence, 182 Brandom, Robert, 173 Brown, Harold, 86, 129; on rationality, 96–102; on scientific rationality, 100, 102–4

bureaucracy, Weber on, 45, 147 Burtt, E. A., 202n30 Carnap, Rudolf, 3, 128, 185, 216n42 Carr, E. H., 38 Cassirer, Ernst, 44 Cavell, Stanley, 168 cognitive authority of science, 63, 86, 89 coherentism: epistemology and, 181–82; justification and, 181; Quine and, 217n50 collective rationality, 134; community size and, 115; consensus and, 115, 210n15; cooperation and, 115–16; criticism and, 131–33; cumulative growth and, 142; goal of science and, 139; historical possibility and, 132–33; justification and, 114–15, 120, 131–32; persuasion and, 114–15, 122; scientific method and, 176; scientific rationality and, 6, 106, 114–16, 122–23, 209n11; scientific revolutions and, 122–23 communicative isolation: specialization and, 149–50; speciation and, 155 communities: epistemology and, 178; rationality and, 99–100, 103–4. See also scientific communities

228 IND E X

community size, collective rationality and, 115 comparative evaluation: justification and, 118–21; paradigms and, 92–93; scientific knowledge and, 117–18; scientific progress and, 139, 145–46; scientific rationality and, 132–33 Conant, James Bryant, 167 consensus, 134, 177; accuracy and, 133; collective rationality and, 115, 210n15; Hoyningen-Huene on, 110–11; justification and, 133; normal science and, 13; reasons and, 110–11; scientific communities and, 116; scientific schools and, 11; scientific values and, 110–11. See also political consensus constructivism, world changes and, 22–24 contingency: scientific progress and, 157–58; scientific rationality and, 158 cooperation: collective rationality and, 115–16; scientific knowledge and, 115–16 crisis, 14; scientific change and, 37; scientific revolutions and, 36–37 criticism, 134; collective rationality and, 131–33; historiography, presentist and, 132 cumulative growth: collective rationality and, 142; normal science and, 140–42; painting and, 141; philosophy and, 141; scientific progress and, 136–44; scientific revolutions and, 142–44 cumulativism: incommensurability and, 139; Peirce and, 179; scientific change and, 138; scientific failures and, 138; scientific progress and, 137–40, 144 current science, philosophy of science and, 77–78 Dalton, John, 30 Darden, Lindley, 155–56 Darwin, Charles, 145 decision making, group reasoning and, 111–14

default-and-challenge structure, pragmatism and, 173 Descartes, René, 76–77, 124, 126, 172–73 Dewey, John, 6, 168, 187, 192–93, 213n32; dualisms and, 183–84; epistemology and, 170, 182; inquiry and, 170, 173–75, 182; pragmatism and, 169–70, 185; scientific inquiry and, 184 disagreements, 134, 209n6; anomalies and, 143; justification and, 120–21; revolutionary science and, 120; scientific communities and, 116, 209n8; scientific progress and, 142–43 discovery, 60; received view and, 32 disunity of science. See unity of science dogmatism: irrationality and, 208n34; scientific communities and, 126 domains, incommensurability and, 15 doubt: belief and, 172–73; inquiry and, 173–74; normal science and, 173–74; Peirce and, 172–74; revolutionary science and, 174. See also method of doubt Douglas, Heather, 213n32 Duesberg, Peter, 103 Elgin, Catherine Z., 217n54 empiricism, world changes and, 23. See also logical empiricism epistemology, 70; coherentism and, 181–82; communities and, 178; Dewey and, 170, 182; first principles and, 73; foundationalism and, 181–82; history and, 194; metaphilosophy and, 193–95; negative description of, 193; Peirce and, 169, 175, 178; Popper and, 215n28; positive description of, 193; practice and, 194; pragmatism and, 2, 4, 6–7, 135, 168–84; science and, 194; scientific inquiry and, 172, 177; skepticism and, 171–72; traditional, 134, 171, 178, 181–82 epistemology from below, 7, 193–95

IND EX 229

evolutionary niche, 200n33 exemplary solutions, incommensurability and, 15 explanatory success, paradigms and, 92 explanatory theories, ideal-type concepts and, 45–46 external pressures, scientific communities and, 130–32 extraordinary science. See revolutionary science fallibilism, 170; inquiry and, 178–79; philosophy of science and, 195; science and, 179–80 falsificationism, 3, 167 feminism, philosophy of science and, 80 Feyerabend, Paul, 35, 44, 59, 89, 177, 202n29; on atomism, 199n16; history of science and, 79; on science, 49–50, 202–3nn41–42; scientific progress and, 211n1; scientific rationality and, 88 Fiegl, Herbert, 185 Fine, Arthur, 95 first principles, 5; Bird on, 55–56; epistemology and, 73; historiography, cognitive internal and, 70; Kindi on, 56–61; metaphilosophy and, 55, 70–81; as philosophical reconceptualizations, 69–70; philosophy of science and, 55; Read on, 56; relativism and, 61; Sharrock on, 56 Fleck, Ludwig, 167 foundationalism, 96, 135; epistemology and, 181–82; justification and, 116–17, 181; rationalism and, 97 Frank, Philipp, 186 Frankfurt, Harry, 76 fruitfulness, specialization and, 148 Fuller, Steve, 201n10 Galileo, 79 Galison, Peter, 198n9 Gallie, W. B., 186

Garber, Daniel, 76 gestalt switches, 112–13, 210n12 goal of science: collective rationality and, 139; Hoyningen-Huene and, 91–93, 95–96; minigoals and, 95; Popper and, 211n2; puzzle solving as, 94–95, 138; scientific progress and, 137–39, 144; scientific rationality and, 87–88, 96, 207n7; scientific values and, 93 Gödel, Kurt, 185 Godfrey-Smith, Peter, 207n3 Goodman, Nelson, 192, 198n2; justification and, 189–90; world changes and, 191; worlds and, 190–91 Grelling, Kurt, 186 group reasoning, decision making and, 111–14 groups, individuals and, 111–13 Haack, Susan, 182 Hacking, Ian, 198n9 Hempel, Carl Gustav “Peter,” 92, 186, 188 historical facts, 38–39, 75 historical narratives, 75–76; philosophy and, 52–53; scientific communities and, 34 historical perspective: philosophy of science and, 72–73; received view and, 73 historical phenomena, ideal-type concepts and, 46–47 historical possibility, collective rationality and, 132–33 historiography, cognitive internal, 183–84, 201n16; first principles and, 70; philosophy of science and, 64–65, 72; theory of evolution and, 152–53 historiography, hermeneutic: justification and, 35; philosophy of science and, 33–35; received view and, 52; scientific rationality and, 34–35; sociological school and, 73–74; strong program and, 64–65; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and, 34–35

23 0 IND EX

historiography, presentist, 200n10, 208n19; criticism and, 132; genius and, 32; philosophy of science and, 30–33; received view and, 28–33; scientific education and, 30, 77; scientists and, 30 history: epistemology and, 194; philosophy and, 42; Weber and, 44–45. See also sociopolitical history history of philosophy, 76–77 history of science, 198n14, 200n3, 200n4; external, 31–32; Feyerabend and, 79; incommensurability and, 21; internal, 31–32; mathematical knowledge and, 29–30; philosophy of science and, 4–5, 9, 27–44, 51–61, 67, 71–81, 198n3, 205n42; received view and, 57, 75, 78; sociopolitical history and, 79–80; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and, 40, 47–48 Hitler, Adolf, 185 HIV/AIDS, 103 Hookway, Christopher, 175 Hoyningen-Huene, Paul, 52, 55, 70, 86; on consensus, 110–11; goal of science and, 91–93, 95–96; justification and, 91–92; scientific rationality and, 91–93; scientific values and, 91–92 Hume, David, 172–73, 215n13 Hurley, S. L., 209n6 Huxley, Julian, 155 ideal-type concepts: diachronic entities and, 47; explanatory theories and, 45–46; historical phenomena and, 46–47; normal science and, 49; philosophy and, 51–52; scientific change and, 43–44, 48, 51, 203n43; scientific revolutions as, 48; significance and, 46; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and, 47–48, 51; Weber on, 44–47, 49 incommensurability, 10, 19, 22; conceptual frameworks and, 15; cumulativism and, 139; domains and, 15; exemplary solutions and, 15; history of science and, 21;

incomparability and, 20–21; Peirce and, 179–80; practical progress and, 159; as a priori, 57; scientific facts and, 16; scientific observation and, 16; scientific revolutions and, 48, 121, 142; scientific values and, 15–16; sociological school and, 66; specialization and, 148–52. See also local incommensurability individuals: groups and, 111–13; rationality and, 99–100, 103; scientific communities and, 114; scientific rationality and, 107–9 inquiry, 183; belief and, 174; Dewey and, 170, 173–75, 182; doubt and, 173–74; fallibilism and, 178–79; Peirce and, 174–75, 179–80; problems and, 174–75, 182; puzzle solving and, 170; scientific education and, 175. See also scientific inquiry; suspension of inquiry interdisciplinary research: specialization and, 150–51, 154–57; as unification, 155 interfield theories, unification and, 156. See also intrafield theories internal realism: scientific inquiry and, 191–92; world changes and, 191 interpretation, historical facts and, 38–39 intrafield theories, 156. See also interfield theories irrationality, 124, 208n30; dogmatism and, 208n34; rationality and, 101–2; science and, 89–90, 103–4; scientific communities and, 129–33, 134; scientific rationality and, 106 Irzik, Gurol, 207n3 James, William, 6, 125–26, 168, 187, 192, 214n6; error and, 178; pragmatism and, 169–70; on religious belief, 169; on truth, 169 justification, 60, 96; coherentism and, 181; collective rationality and, 114–15, 120, 131–32; comparative evaluation and, 118–21; consensus and, 133; disagreements and, 120–21; foundationalism and, 116–17, 181; Goodman and, 189–90; historiography, hermeneutic and, 35;

IND E X 231

Hoyningen-Huene and, 91–92; inferential practices and, 190; rationalism and, 87–88; reasons and, 111; received view and, 32; reflective equilibrium and, 190; scientific belief and, 117–18; scientific change and, 117–20; scientific communities and, 118–19; scientific values and, 121, 190; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and, 88 Kant, Immanuel, 167, 204n15 Kindi, Vasso, 79, 202n27, 203n11, 205n42; on first principles, 56–61; metaphilosophy and, 60–61; on scientific change, 58 kind terms, structured lexicons and, 149 knowledge: belief and, 171–72; paradigms and, 172; received view and, 67–69; scientific development and, 22; sociological school and, 67–69; truth and, 171. See also mathematical knowledge; scientific knowledge Kuhn, Thomas S. See specific topics

principles and, 55, 70–81; Kindi and, 60–61; monist, 74–75, 77; pluralist, 4–5, 74–77; pragmatism and, 81, 170–71, 194–95 metaphysics, 70, 73 Misak, Cheryl, 177, 215n27 Morris, Charles, 216n42 Musgrave, Alan, 85 naturalism, 202n26 Neurath, Otto, 186 Newton, Isaac, 10, 30 Nickles, Thomas, 126 normal science: anomalies and, 14, 130; consensus and, 13; cumulative growth and, 140–42; doubt and, 173–74; ideal-type concepts and, 49; institutional support and, 13; paradigms and, 11–14, 20; revolutionary science and, 9–10, 37, 130–31; scientific character and, 110, 175; scientific communities and, 13; scientific rationality and, 128 objectivity, pragmatism and, 177–78

Lakatos, Imre, 31–32, 74, 205n42 Laudan, Larry, 138–39 Lavoisier, Antoine, 11–12 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 30 Lewis, C. I., 216n42 local incommensurability, 150–52, 156 logical empiricism, 2–4, 167, 200n31, 213n1; analytic philosophy and, 186; Great Britain and, 185–86; pragmatism and, 185–87; United States and, 185–87. See also positivism Lovejoy, Arthur O., 214n7 Masterman, Margaret, 181 mathematical knowledge, history of science and, 29–30 Maull, Nancy, 155–56 medicine, 160–61 metaphilosophy, 32–33, 52; Bird and, 60–61; epistemology and, 193–95; first

paradigms, 199n22; anomalies and, 122; belief and, 172; comparative evaluation and, 92–93; explanatory success and, 92; knowledge and, 172; local incommensurability and, 156; normal science and, 11–14, 20; practice and, 13, 19–20; representation and, 23, 181; revolutionary science and, 14–17, 210n27; scientific facts and, 12, 16; scientific observation and, 12, 16; scientific practice and, 180–81; scientific progress and, 154; scientific revolutions and, 17–18, 121–22, 142–44; specialization and, 154–56; suspension of inquiry and, 124–27; theory and, 19–20; thick description and, 23–24; undetermination of, 126; world changes and, 22; worldviews and, 19–20. See also incommensurability

23 2IND EX

Peirce, Charles Sanders, 6, 186–87, 192, 211n2, 214nn8–9; belief and, 173–75, 179; cumulativism and, 179; doubt and, 172–74; epistemology and, 169, 175, 178; incommensurability and, 179–80; inquiry and, 174–75, 179–80; pragmatism and, 168–70, 185; scientific change and, 179–80; scientific method and, 175–76; scientific revolutions and, 179–80 Pera, Marcello, 67 persuasion, collective rationality and, 114–15, 122 philosophy: cumulative growth and, 141; historical narratives and, 52–53; history and, 42 political communities, scientific communities and, 115–16 Popper, Karl, 205n42; epistemology and, 215n28; falsificationism and, 3; goal of science and, 211n2 positivism, 3 practical progress, 160–62; incommensurability and, 159; scientific progress and, 158–60 practical rationality, theoretical rationality and, 128–29 practice: epistemology and, 194; paradigms and, 13, 19–20; pragmatism and, 170. See also inferential practices; scientific practice pragmaticism, 214n8 pragmatism, 167, 184, 192–93, 214n7, 216n37; adjudication and, 182–83; complexity and, 181–83; default-and-challenge structure and, 173; Dewey and, 169–70, 185; epistemology and, 2, 4, 6–7, 135, 168–84; Great Britain and, 186; James and, 169–70; logical empiricism and, 185–87; metaphilosophy and, 81, 170–71, 194–95; as nonhierarchical, 171; objectivity and, 177–78; Peirce and, 168–70, 185; philosophy of science and, 192–93; practice and, 170; Putnam on, 170; Quine

and, 189; Read and, 210n22; relativism and, 177; Russell and, 216n43; scientific inquiry and, 193; Sharrock and, 210n22; skepticism and, 172, 174, 177; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and, 188–89, 210n22 presentism. See historiography, presentist Priestly, Joseph, 11–12 progress. See scientific progress pseudoscience, science and, 104, 198n1 pure science: applied science and, 160–62; scientific revolutions and, 160–61 Putnam, Hilary: internal realism and, 191–92; on pragmatism, 170 puzzle solving: anomalies and, 198n10; as goal of science, 94–95, 138; inquiry and, 170 Quine, W. V. O., 56; coherentism and, 217n50; pragmatism and, 189 rational agent, 99 rational beliefs, 99–100 rationalism, 135, 211n2; foundationalism and, 97; justification and, 87–88; scientific rationality and, 87–91 rationality: Brown on, 96–102; classical conception of, 96–97; communities and, 99–100, 103–4; descriptive component of, 98–99, 104; individuals and, 99–100, 103; irrationality and, 101–2; linguistic component of, 98–99, 102–4; paradigmatic application of, 100–101; science and, 89–90, 97–98, 100–102, 135; scientific belief and, 119; scientific change and, 98–99; scientific communities and, 104; scientific development and, 118; scientific revolutions and, 121–23; scientific values and, 121; specialization and, 153–54. See also practical rationality; scientific rationality; theoretical rationality Rawls, John, 217n54

IND EX 233

Read, Rupert, 23–24, 36, 39–43, 70, 79, 200n33; on first principles, 56; on naturalism, 202n26; pragmatism and, 210n22; relativism and, 207n3 reason responsiveness, scientific rationality and, 127 reasons: consensus and, 110–11; justification and, 111; scientific choice and, 111 received view, 3–4, 40–41, 197n3; discovery and, 32; historical perspective and, 73; historiography, hermeneutic and, 52; historiography, presentist and, 28–33; history of science and, 57, 75, 78; justification and, 32; knowledge and, 67–69; on scientific activity, 8–9; scientific change and, 58–59; scientific progress and, 137–44, 158; sociological school and, 67; specialization and, 154; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and, 42–43 reflective equilibrium, 190, 217n54 Reichenbach, Hans, 185, 188 relativism: first principles and, 61; philosophy of science and, 5–6; pragmatism and, 177; Read and, 207n3; scientific belief and, 62–63, 68–69; scientific method and, 176; scientific rationality and, 87–88, 134–35; Sharrock and, 207n3; sociological school and, 63, 67, 75, 85; sociology of science and, 5, 56, 61; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and, 85–86, 88, 113. See also strong program representation, paradigms and, 23, 181 representationalism, 170 revolutionary science: disagreements and, 120; doubt and, 174; normal science and, 9–10, 37, 130–31; paradigms and, 14–17, 210n27; political revolutions and, 16–17; scientific character and, 110; scientific rationality and, 128. See also scientific revolutions Richardson, Alan, 186 Rorty, Richard, 188–89 Rouse, Joseph, 180, 198n9

Russell, Bertrand, 172, 216n43 Ryle, Gilbert, 23–24 Schlick, Moritz, 185 science: cognitive authority of, 63, 86, 89; conditions of possibility of, 57; differentiation of other practices from, 93–94; epistemology and, 194; fallibilism and, 179–80; Feyerabend on, 49–50, 202–3nn41–42; irrationality and, 89–90, 103–4; nature and, 177–78; philosophy and, 42; pseudoscience and, 104, 198n1; rationality and, 89–90, 97–98, 100–102, 135; as social practice, 106–7; society and, 50–51, 63–64, 79–81; success and, 95. See also applied science; current science; goal of science; normal science; pure science; revolutionary science; unity of science scientific activity: process of, 9; products of, 8–9; received view on, 8–9 scientific belief: justification and, 117–18; rationality and, 119; relativism and, 62–63, 68–69; scientific communities and, 118–19 scientific bilingualism, local incommensurability and, 150 scientific change, 35, 40–41; crisis and, 37; cumulativism and, 138; general pattern of, 18; ideal-type concepts and, 43–44, 48, 51, 203n43; justification and, 117–20; Kindi on, 58; normative aspects of, 49; Peirce and, 179–80; perspective and, 162–63; rationality and, 98–99; received view and, 58–59; sociology of science and, 62–66. See also scientific development; scientific practice; scientific progress scientific character: normal science and, 110, 175; revolutionary science and, 110; scientific education and, 109–10 scientific choice: reasons and, 111; scientific rationality and, 110; strong program and, 65

23 4IND E X

scientific communities: consensus and, 116; disagreements and, 116, 209n8; dogmatism and, 126; external pressures and, 130–32; historical narratives and, 34; individuals and, 114; irrationality and, 129–33, 134; justification and, 118–19; normal science and, 13; political communities and, 115–16; rationality and, 104; scientific belief and, 118–19; scientific rationality and, 106–14; scientific values and, 94; scientists and, 114; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and, 111–12; theory choice and, 107, 126–27; world changes and, 24 scientific development: early stages of, 10; knowledge lost in, 22; rationality and, 118; scientific progress and, 139–40; scientific schools and, 10–11; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and, 9–10. See also crisis; normal science; revolutionary science; scientific change; scientific progress scientific education: historiography, presentist and, 30, 77; inquiry and, 175; scientific character and, 109–10 scientific facts: incommensurability and, 16; paradigms and, 12, 16 scientific inquiry: Dewey and, 184; epistemology and, 172, 177; internal realism and, 191–92; pragmatism and, 193 scientific knowledge: comparative evaluation and, 117–18; cooperation and, 115–16; as public, 113–14; socialization and, 113; specialization and, 113, 148 scientific method, 215n23; belief and, 175–76; collective rationality and, 176; Peirce and, 175–76; relativism and, 176 scientific observation, 66; incommensurability and, 16; paradigms and, 12, 16 scientific practice, 198n9; paradigms and, 180–81; scientific progress and, 158–60; scientific rationality and, 102, 129

scientific progress, 6; as backward-looking concept, 144–46; comparative evaluation and, 139, 145–46; as comparative progress, 146; contingency and, 157–58; cumulative growth and, 136–44; cumulativism and, 137–40, 144; disagreements and, 142–43; Feyerabend and, 211n1; goal of science and, 137–39, 144; paradigms and, 154; philosophy of science and, 136; as pluralistic, 157; practical progress and, 158–60; received view and, 137–44, 158; scientific development and, 139–40; scientific practice and, 158–60; scientific rationality and, 87–88; scientific revolutions and, 139, 142–44; specialization and, 147–57; speciation and, 6, 146–47; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and, 140–46; technological growth and, 159–61; theory of evolution and, 145–47, 152–53. See also scientific change; scientific development scientific rationality, 5, 86, 105, 207n3, 211n39; absolute requirements for, 123–29; Brown on, 100, 102–4; classical conception of, 87–88, 97; collective rationality and, 6, 106, 114–16, 122–23, 209n11; comparative evaluation and, 132–33; contingency and, 158; Feyerabend and, 88; goal of science and, 87–88, 96, 207n7; historiography, hermeneutic and, 34–35; HoyningenHuene and, 91–93; ideal epistemic agents and, 107; inconsistency and, 123–24; individuals and, 107–9; ineffectiveness and, 123–24; instrumental conception of, 91–96; irrationality and, 106; normal science and, 128; prescientific assumptions and, 131–32; rationalism and, 87–91; reason responsiveness and, 127; relativism and, 87–88, 134–35; revolutionary science and, 128; scientific choice and, 110; scientific communities and, 106–14; scientific practice and, 102, 129; scientific progress and, 87–88;

INDEX235

scientific values and, 91–92, 110; sociological school and, 88, 207n9; suspension of inquiry and, 124–27 scientific revolutions, 10, 127; applied science and, 160–61; collective rationality and, 122–23; crisis and, 36–37; cumulative growth and, 142–44; as ideal-type concepts, 48; incommensurability and, 48, 121, 142; paradigms and, 17–18, 121–22, 142–44; Peirce and, 179–80; pure science and, 160–61; rationality and, 121–23; scientific progress and, 139, 142–44; specialization and, 147–48, 153–54, 162–63; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and, 122, 142, 162. See also revolutionary science scientific schools: consensus and, 11; philosophy and, 11; scientific development and, 10–11; social science and, 11 scientific tenets. See scientific belief scientific values, 210n24; consensus and, 110–11; goal of science and, 93; Hoyningen-Huene and, 91–92; incommensurability and, 15–16; justification and, 121, 190; rationality and, 121; scientific communities and, 94; scientific rationality and, 91–92, 110; specialization and, 156–57; unification and, 156–57 Sharrock, Wes, 23–24, 36, 39–43, 70, 79, 200n33; on first principles, 56; on naturalism, 202n26; pragmatism and, 210n22; relativism and, 207n3 skepticism, 126, 134; epistemology and, 171–72; pragmatism and, 172, 174, 177. See also antiskepticism social practice, science as, 106–7 social science, scientific schools and, 11 society, science and, 50–51, 63–64, 79–81 sociological school, 54, 80, 203n2, 209n5; historiography, hermeneutic and, 73–74; incommensurability and, 66; knowledge and, 67–69; received view and, 67;

relativism and, 63, 67, 75, 85; scientific rationality and, 88, 207n9; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and, 65. See also strong program sociology of science, 54, 204n17, 205n40; relativism and, 5, 56, 61; scientific change and, 62–66. See also strong program sociopolitical history, history of science and, 79–80 specialization: communicative isolation and, 149–50; fruitfulness and, 148; incommensurability and, 148–52; interdisciplinary research and, 150–51, 154–57; paradigms and, 154–56; rationality and, 153–54; received view and, 154; scientific knowledge and, 113, 148; scientific progress and, 147–57; scientific revolutions and, 147–48, 153–54, 162–63; scientific values and, 156–57; speciation and, 147; structured lexicons and, 149–50; unity of science and, 150–52, 154–57 speciation: communicative isolation and, 155; scientific progress and, 6, 146–47; specialization and, 147 strong program: historiography, hermeneutic and, 64–65; scientific choice and, 65; symmetry postulate and, 62–63. See also sociological school Strong Programme for the Sociology of Knowledge, 203n2 structured lexicons: kind terms and, 149; specialization and, 149–50 symmetry postulate, strong program and, 62–63 technological growth, scientific progress and, 159–61 theoretical rationality, practical rationality and, 128–29 theory, paradigms and, 19–20. See also correspondence theory of truth

23 6 IND EX

theory choice, scientific communities and, 107, 126–27 theory of evolution, 155, 199n20; historiography, cognitive internal and, 152–53; scientific progress and, 145–47, 152–53 truth: belief and, 171; correspondence theory of, 68–69, 204n31; James on, 169; knowledge and, 171 unification: interdisciplinary research as, 155; interfield theories and, 156; scientific values and, 156–57 unity of science, specialization and, 150–52, 154–57 virtue ethics, education and, 108–9

Waismann, Friedrich, 185 Weber, Max: on bureaucracy, 45, 147; history and, 44–45; on ideal-type concepts, 44–47, 49 Williams, Bernard, 76 Williams, Michael, 173 Williams, Pearce, 205n42 Wilson, Margaret Dauler, 76 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 40–41, 168 world changes: constructivism and, 22–24; empiricism and, 23; Goodman and, 191; internal realism and, 191; paradigms and, 22; scientific communities and, 24 worlds, Goodman and, 190–91 worldviews, paradigms and, 19–20