What Thomas Kuhn Really Thought about Scientific “Truth” [View all]

[Jim__]

John Horgan writes a somewhat meandering essay on Thomas Kuhn's thought as The Structure of Scientific Revolutions reaches 50 years of age. An excerpt from his article

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When we finally sat down together in his office, Kuhn expressed nominal discomfort at the notion of delving into the roots of his thought. “One is not one’s own historian, let alone one’s own psychoanalyst,” he warned me. He nonetheless traced his view of science to an epiphany he experienced in 1947, when he was working toward a doctorate in physics at Harvard. While reading Aristotle’s Physics, Kuhn had become astonished at how “wrong” it was. How could someone who wrote so brilliantly on so many topics be so misguided when it came to physics?

Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out his dormitory window (“I can still see the vines and the shade two thirds of the way down”), when suddenly Aristotle “made sense.” Kuhn realized that Aristotle invested basic concepts with different meanings than modern physicists did. Aristotle used the term “motion,” for example, to refer not just to change in position but to change in general—the reddening of the sun as well as its descent toward the horizon. Aristotle’s physics, understood on its own terms, was simply different from rather than inferior to Newtonian physics.

Kuhn left physics for philosophy, and he struggled for 15 years to transform his epiphany into the theory set forth in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The keystone of his model was the concept of a paradigm. Paradigm, pre-Kuhn, referred merely to an example that serves an educational purpose; amo, amas, amat, for instance, is a paradigm for teaching conjugations in Latin. Kuhn used the term to refer to a collection of procedures or ideas that instruct scientists, implicitly, what to believe and how to work. Most scientists never question the paradigm. They solve “puzzles,” problems whose solutions reinforce and extend the scope of the paradigm rather than challenging it. Kuhn called this “mopping up,” or “normal science.” There are always anomalies, phenomena that that the paradigm cannot account for or that even contradict it. Anomalies are often ignored, but if they accumulate they may trigger a revolution (also called a paradigm shift, although not originally by Kuhn), in which scientists abandon the old paradigm for a new one.

Denying the view of science as a continual building process, Kuhn held that a revolution is a destructive as well as a creative act. The proposer of a new paradigm stands on the shoulders of giants (to borrow Newton’s phrase) and then bashes them over the head. He or she is often young or new to the field, that is, not fully indoctrinated. Most scientists yield to a new paradigm reluctantly. They often do not understand it, and they have no objective rules by which to judge it. Different paradigms have no common standard for comparison; they are “incommensurable,” to use Kuhn’s term. Proponents of different paradigms can argue forever without resolving their basic differences because they invest basic terms—motion, particle, space, time—with different meanings. The conversion of scientists is thus both a subjective and political process. It may involve sudden, intuitive understanding—like that finally achieved by Kuhn as he pondered Aristotle. Yet scientists often adopt a paradigm simply because it is backed by others with strong reputations or by a majority of the community.

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