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CHAPTER 3

READING THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS

SECTION 1. KUHN’S PROJECT AND ITS CENTRAL TERMS

Section 1 of SSR sets the stage by outlining the target of Kuhn’s crit-

ical focus, his project, the context of his work and some aspects of the

new image of science he hopes will result. Kuhn introduces some of the

key terms in this new image, notably ‘normal science’ and ‘scientific revolutions’, but explains them only in a preliminary way.

‘History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could provide a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed’ (p. 1). The ringing start of the first section of Kuhn’s book announces both his project and his target.

The existing image of science Kuhn has in mind seems to have been derived from his own scientific training, from finished scientific achievements such as science textbooks, and from his acquaintance with certain writings on the history and philosophy of science. Although he takes little trouble to specify this target in SSR, he did later say a little more about where he got the image of science he was reacting against. During his war service he read books by, among others, the physicists and philosophers of science Percy Bridgman and Arthur Eddington. By 1945 he had read some of Bertrand Russell’s philosophical works, and he later encountered the work of the logical positivists Philipp Frank, Richard von Mises and Rudolf Carnap.1

These works, which he ‘took to be philosophy of science’, together with a number of other ‘quasi-popular, quasi-philosophical works’ (RSS, p. 305) set his target. It was, as he put it, the ‘everyday image

Preston, John. Kuhn's 'the Structure of Scientific Revolutions' : A Reader's Guide, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/indwes/detail.action?docID=1644308. Created from indwes on 2021-03-09 12:56:14.

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of logical positivism’ he was reacting against (ibid., p. 306, emphasis added). His acquaintance with the philosophy of science was thus rather superficial and, as he later admitted, if he had known the philosophical literature in depth, SSR would probably never have been written.

Kuhn’s target, then, even in SSR, was not any particular devel- oped philosophical view of science (he seems to have been unac- quainted, at that time, with the developed views of either of the two main contemporary approaches to the philosophy of science, logical empiricism and Popper’s ‘critical rationalism’ (see RSS, p. 227)). Nevertheless, he quite plausibly considered this an image by which people were generally possessed, being ‘part of the ideology of sci- entists’ (RSS, p. 282), and the kind of image that filters through to the general public.

Kuhn’s complaint was principally that this image of science simply didn’t stand up to historical scrutiny. This is for several reasons. Scientific texts, Kuhn himself argues, are necessarily unhis- torical, since what a student needs is to become skilled at using the current methods, not the old ones. The questions prompted by science textbooks are unhistorical, and make it impossible to under- stand the development of science. The sort of history that emerges from science textbooks is ‘not quite history’ (RSS, p. 282). Science never forgets its heroes, but it does forget how they, and the scientific communities of which they were members, came to achieve what they did. Instead of looking at science as a set of products, as most scientists and philosophers, and even many historians had done, Kuhn follows the newer historians and looks at science as a process, a process which includes all sorts of phenomena that never make it into the finished (published) products of science.

A second reason why the existing image didn’t fit the history of science, though, was that the philosophers of science involved conceived their own discipline as a normative activity. The logical positivists, for example, at least in their better-known phase, weren’t even trying to give a historically accurate image of science.2 Their project was the rather different one of giving a ‘rational reconstruc- tion’ of the logic of science, the relations between different kinds of scientific statements.

Popper and his critical rationalists (at that time including Kuhn’s Berkeley colleague and friend Paul Feyerabend) tried harder to make contact with the history of science, and were more sympathetic

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to the works of the new historians of science Kuhn admired, but they still conceived of their project in strongly normative terms. For them, methodological rules are rules laid down for scientists by philosophers (see Chapter II of Popper 1959). They aimed to say what science is at its best, rather than giving an accurate picture of how science really and typically is. Indeed, they insisted that any account of the history of science will be informed by a selection of material which is based on certain values, and that different values would result in different (but still historically accurate) accounts of the history of science.

Kuhn had a different conception of the philosophy of science. He insisted that the evaluation of activities can only follow their accu- rate description. We would have to have an accurate picture of science before we could say whether any given activity counts as scientific or not, and before we could evaluate such activities. He therefore proposed, on broadly empiricist lines, to take a closer look at science, assuming that doing so would narrow down the range of views one might take of its history. He thought of himself as giving ‘a more realistic appraisal of scientific theories’.3 Kuhn’s book was one of the first attempts to describe, in a general way, what most of those employed as scientists spend most of their professional time doing, and thus to make more sense than had been made before of more of the activity which we all pre-theoretically recognize as science. There is a worry, though, that making such sense amounts to ‘legitimating’ science as a whole, the activities of typical scientists. Critical rationalists resist this. For them, it may or may not be that typical scientists proceed correctly. Whether they do so depends on whether or not they meet an external, universally applicable stan- dard (derived from philosophy). Science may have taken a wrong turn, losing sight of its own nature.

SSR did improve on current views in presenting science as a set of skilled activities or practises, not just a system of statements. (The logical positivists had explicitly committed to such a view, the criti- cal rationalists’ focus on deduction led them in the same direction, and even Koyré’s approach had a similar effect, being thoroughly ‘intellectualist’.) Kuhn thereby also distanced himself from any formalist view of science.

He also presented an image which runs counter to the logical positivist/logical empiricist idea of the unity of science. The posi- tivists undoubtedly conceived of this unity in different ways. Carnap,

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for example, initially conceived of it as unity by virtue of reduction, the concepts of ‘higher-level’ sciences being statable in terms of the concepts of ‘lower-level’ sciences such as physics. Otto Neurath, however, merely thought the sciences share a common (‘physicalis- tic’) language. Kuhn’s image is opposed to all such conceptions, though, since he insists not only that there is a succession of different conceptual frameworks in any given scientific field, but also that these successive frameworks need not even address the same problems.

Kuhn’s image also opposed the positivist and empiricist tendency to separate science from metaphysics. Kuhn followed Koyré’s deter- minedly philosophical approach to the history of science in recog- nizing the constitutive role of metaphysics in the history of science. Following the idea that philosophic trends have an essential influence on scientific theories (Koyré 1954), one cannot help con- cluding that metaphysics is somehow inseparable from science. Popper, too, had already recognized this. But logical positivists, logical empiricists and inductivists of other kinds are united in opposing the idea. (Followers of Wittgenstein also have trouble with it.) The positivist idea that one might once and for all declare a proposition meaningless is incompatible with Kuhn’s idea that scientific progress is punctuated by crises in which meanings are renegotiated.

Kuhn identified the main feature of the received image of science as cumulativism, the view that science advances by piecemeal accu- mulation. The resulting task of the historian of science is to chron- icle the advances (discoveries) and obstacles to this cumulative progress. But the continental historians of science whose work he knew well found it more and more difficult to work in this way.

Kuhn, then, undoubtedly perceived himself as opposing the logical positivist/logical empiricist view, which he thought of as cumulativist, formalist and ahistorical (if not antihistorical). But although this perception contains some truth, it must be heavily qualified.

For one thing, the earliest logical positivists (Neurath, Frank and Hans Hahn), influenced by the French conventionalists, had taken a substantial interest in the history of science, and were not commit- ted to either formalism or cumulativism.4 One is tempted not to blame Kuhn for not knowing much about this phase of positivism, which has been studied only recently. But Frank, some of whose

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work Kuhn says he knew, and who was at Harvard at the same time as Kuhn, was involved in this early phase, published an account of it in 1949, and also edited a volume (Frank 1954), one section of which is devoted to ‘Science as a Social and Historical Phenomenon’, and which includes an essay by Koyré which Kuhn would almost certainly have known.

For another thing, some central features of Kuhn’s view had been anticipated, albeit in a different key, as it were, by Carnap himself. The image of Kuhn as radically opposed to logical empiricism needs to be tempered with the realization that Carnap had already high- lighted some of the ‘practical’ aspects of scientific reasoning (see Reisch 1991, p. 276). Kuhn, who admitted to not knowing Carnap’s more recent work at the time SSR was published, and who didn’t take Carnap’s friendly editorial encouragement as evidence of any serious consonance between their views, seems eventually to have been persuaded of this consonance (RSS, pp. 227, 305–6). But he continued to insist that for Carnap the importance of language change was ‘merely pragmatic’, and not cognitive (ibid., p. 227).

On the horizon, Kuhn saw the possibility of a new image or ‘concept’ (p. 1) of science, derived from the work of the historians he admired. These were the people, led by Koyré, then involved in the ‘historiographic revolution’, a change in the way the history of science is written. These historians, Kuhn argued, found it increas- ingly difficult to answer the sorts of questions that the usual image of science prompts them to consider. (Later he will suggest that such questions are not merely intractably difficult, but that, having no answer, they’re confused or ill-formed.) When investigating intel - lectual products very different from our contemporary scientific theories, instead of having initially clear demarcations of science from error and superstition confirmed as their work went into more and more depth, these same historians became more and more confident that the products they were investigating were in no way less scientific than today’s theories.

These problems should make us reconsider the usual image’s idea that science advances by the accumulation of piecemeal results. If, as the historian is forced to say, science does include ‘bodies of belief quite incompatible with the ones we hold today’ (p. 2), cumulativism must be wrong. It has to be said that this might well seem to be news only to those deriving their views of science from science textbooks or the popular press, not to any historian or philosopher of science!

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Few twentieth-century historians of science thought of themselves as chroniclers of piecemeal accumulation. And most philosophers of science in the first half of the twentieth century were familiar with the idea that the change from the Newtonian world-view to that of Einstein’s theory of relativity, a transition they themselves had lived through, constituted a revolution in physics. This confirms that Kuhn’s target was a very naive cumulativism. As we shall see in section 5, though, cumulativist approaches to the history of science can and do still have important defenders.

The historiographic revolution prompted new sorts of questions about science, and resulted in a very different image of the development of science. This new image was driven by a historiogra- phy which, ‘[r]ather than seeking the permanent contributions of an older science to our present vantage, attempt[s] to display the histor- ical integrity of that science in its own time’ (p. 3). The historian must now try to present older views as being as internally coherent as the sources allow. This historically sensitive approach (related to the kind of ‘interpretative’ social science familiar from the post-Kantian philosophical tradition) would enable us to see that scientific methodology doesn’t dictate a single answer to all important scientific questions; that observation and experience don’t narrow the field down to a single body of belief; and that effective scientific research can’t begin before the scientific community has decided on answers to questions about explanation, observation and ontology (pp. 4–5).

The idea that there is such as thing as ‘the scientific community’, seems to have been introduced by the Hungarian philosopher- scientist Michael Polanyi, as early as 1942.5 But, as with the concept of scientific revolutions, Kuhn’s innovation was to talk not just about ‘the scientific community’ (e.g. p. 4), but also about particular scientific communities (ibid., also pp. 11, 49, 177). As we shall see, the communities he has in mind can be small, ‘consisting perhaps of fewer than twenty-five people’ (p. 181). However, Kuhn wasn’t always careful about which characteristics are those of individual scientists, and which are those of the scientific community (or of a specific scientific community) (ET, p. 227 note).

Kuhn’s project, then, was to summarize, popularize and develop the historiographic revolution, and to indicate how it (together with apparently related developments) might transform both the philosophy of science and our general image or concept of science. It

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was, as he put it, ‘primarily a work of synthesis’.6 He didn’t think of himself as working on his own, or as breaking entirely new ground, but as drawing out, making explicit, the implications of a new kind of history of science, and a new kind of philosophy of science, which were already under development (p. 3). While most of Kuhn’s historical influences (Koyré, Meyerson, Metzger) pre-date even the conception of SSR, the works in the philosophy of science Kuhn was drawing from appeared during SSR’s gestation, not before it was conceived.

Kuhn developed a general sketch partly because the work of the new historians hadn’t yet lent itself to any such overview, and partly because only such a thing could displace the existing ‘image’ of science. SSR was intended as an outline of the new image of science, a salvo against a narrower conception present in the best- known phase of logical positivism which chimed with certain every- day assumptions about science, and an attempt to dislodge a philosophical picture initiated by the scientific revolution of the sev- enteenth century. In the Postscript to SSR, Kuhn took pains to point out that the book’s developmental portrayal of science borrows its themes from the work of historians. Applying concepts such as structure and revolution, already familiar from the field of history, to science, is one of only two respects in which he very modestly deemed SSR original (p. 208).

Kuhn also, in SSR’s first section, flags some of the conclusions he will come to. We shall note these as and when they occur in the rest of his text. But here it’s worth singling out a question he raises about his own investigation, whether historical study can possibly effect the change he envisages, which he calls a conceptual transformation (p. 8). Dichotomies routinely deployed within the philosophy of science, such as those between the descriptive and the normative, the empirical and the logical, and the contexts of discovery and of justification, suggest not. But, these dichotomies, Kuhn feels, are themselves parts of the philosophical picture that will need to be overcome in the course of his investigations. As he suggests, the history of science couldn’t fail to be ‘a source of phenomena to which theories about knowledge may legitimately be asked to apply’ (p. 9).

Kuhn’s central idea is that the career of most sciences has a typical pattern which can be divided into historical phases or stages. Before he can describe the first such phase, he has to start by introducing

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three new and related concepts which characterize later phases of this pattern: normal science, scientific revolutions and paradigms.

Normal science is what almost all scientists spend almost all of their professional time doing. It is what is enshrined in the scientific textbooks of the time, for it is what must be taught to each new gen- eration of scientific initiates. And it is based on what Kuhn calls ‘par- adigms’ (the subject of our next section). But normal science is disrupted and transformed by occasional episodes which Kuhn calls scientific revolutions. The crucial thought here is that ‘[t]he successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature science’ (p. 12).

Study questions 1. Did Kuhn choose too easy or broad a target for his critique? Was

he attacking an image only the general public would (in the early 1960s) have endorsed? Or are there historians and philosophers of science who fit his characterization of the old image of science? How much does his characterization fit the views of the logical pos- itivists, the logical empiricists, or Popper’s ‘critical rationalism’?

2. Was Kuhn being too naively empiricist in assuming that there can be such a thing as a more accurate description of actual scientific practice?

SECTION 2. THE PRE-PARADIGM PERIOD

Section II of SSR introduces another key term in Kuhn’s image of

science, ‘paradigm’. Initial characterizations of paradigms, their cre-

ation, and their roles are given, as are some examples of paradigms.

These are in the service of contrasting normal science, which consists

of research under a paradigm, with the earlier, pre-paradigm period,

whose nature and demise are then described.

Normal science consists, Kuhn says, in ‘research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supply- ing the foundation for its further practice’ (p. 10). The concrete achievements in question, which Kuhn calls ‘paradigms’, have to be unprecedented enough to attract an enduring group of followers, but at the same time open-ended enough to leave those followers the right kind of work to do.

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Such achievements are what one studies when being educated to enter a scientific community. (They need not be singular: Benjamin Franklin’s work, for example, provided those researching into the nature of electricity with a paradigm by explaining many of the effects other theorists could (separately) explain.) Researchers who share such a ‘paradigm’, Kuhn tells us, also share certain rules and standards for scientific practice. As a result, there’s a kind of con- sensus about fundamentals which is necessary for normal science. But what underlie (and are prior to) the other aspects of paradigms (concepts, laws, theories, etc.) are the achievements in question.

Before Kuhn got hold of the term ‘paradigm’ and, by his own admission, ruined it (RSS, p. 298), it had an established ordinary meaning, as well as both a technical and at least one philosophical use. Its ordinary meaning, deriving ultimately from Greek, is a pattern or example. In the teaching of grammar, it was a technical term used to mean a standard and basic example of a word’s inflexion (the conju- gation of a verb, or declension of a noun). In philosophy of science, the term has a long history that goes back to the eighteenth-century German scientist and philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.7 He applied the term to science and scientific change, but (unlike Kuhn) explicitly took on board its technical grammatical use, applying it to scientific achievements which function analogously to grammatical standards, as models for the solution of problems which obviate the need for explicit rules. Wittgenstein, who was influenced by Lichtenberg’s work, used the German term ‘Paradigma’ in his lectures for something like a model or stereotype. He also used it in his Philosophical Investigations, which Kuhn had read in 1959, for ‘some- thing with which comparison is made’ (Wittgenstein 1958, §50, see also §§51, 55, 57, 215, 300), but it’s not clear that Wittgenstein’s usage departs from the ordinary use in the direction of Lichtenberg’s semi- technical one.8 Logical positivists such as Neurath and Moritz Schlick, as well as philosophers of science influenced by Wittgenstein, such as W. H. Watson, Norwood Russell Hanson, and Stephen Toulmin, were using the term from the 1930s onwards, albeit in a way indistinguishable from its ordinary meaning. Kuhn himself used the term in this informal way in CR, too.

In philosophy more generally, again under the influence of Wittgenstein and the Oxford linguistic philosophers, some were per- suaded that the use of standard examples from which one catches on to the meaning of a word licensed what was known as ‘paradigm-case

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arguments’. In such arguments, there being a paradigm for our use of a word is supposed to establish the existence of whatever the word supposedly refers to. Such arguments are no longer in good odour, and the concept of a paradigm may not solve philosophical prob- lems. Nevertheless, the idea of a standard example from which one catches on, to pick out features of science, need not be impugned.

However, critics were quick to notice that Kuhn used the term ‘par- adigm’ very widely and in rather different ways. Kuhn himself later conceded that within SSR he had used the concept in two main senses, which he distinguished in his Postscript (and in ET, p. xix–xx). It is important to distinguish the different things Kuhn means by ‘para- digm’, since some of the things he says about paradigms make no sense when applied to the wrong kind of paradigm. (Likewise, as we shall see, it’s important to distinguish small from large scientific revolutions.)

The first sense of ‘paradigm’ is the one we have already met, in which it means a concrete achievement or model from which initiates are taught. For this sense of ‘paradigm’ Kuhn came to use the term ‘exemplar’ (short for ‘exemplary achievement’). He took this to be the more fundamental sense, and developing it was the one other respect in which he deemed SSR original (p. 208).

But it’s notable that a second sense of the term (if not something even more fuzzy) is the only one that really came to public con- sciousness. This is what Kuhn later called a ‘disciplinary matrix’, meaning a larger, more encompassing cognitive structure, ‘the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on shared by the members of a given [scientific] community’ (p. 175).9 Kuhn later took himself to task for using the term ‘paradigm’ in this way, for ‘a hell of a lot of other things that weren’t models’. This, he said, ‘made it very easy to miss what I thought of as my point entirely, and to simply make it the whole bloody tradition, which is the main way it has been used since’ (RSS, p. 299).

In introducing the concept of a paradigm, Kuhn said he wanted to suggest that ‘some accepted examples of actual scientific practice . . . provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research’ (p. 10, emphasis added). However, it isn’t always possible to tell from the context which kind of example of scientific practice, and thus which sense of ‘paradigm’, Kuhn had in mind. (It’s already somewhat ambiguous, for example, within the first two pages of its introduction, as between an achievement itself, and the complex of this achievement plus laws, theories, etc.)

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Some commentators, having noted this, persist in using ‘paradigm’ indiscriminately (sometimes on the ground that, having given birth to the term’s new use, Kuhn was no longer in control of it). But this can be confusing, and prevents detailed evaluation of SSR’s claims. Instead, where one can work out that Kuhn had one rather than another sense of the term in mind, one should try to follow his later suggestion of distinguishing them.

Some take Kuhn to be using the terms ‘paradigm’ and ‘scientific revolution’ only for large-scale scientific phenomena. This is wrong, since, not just within but also before SSR, he clearly applies both expressions to small aspects of science, as well as to large ones. (He explicitly discusses small scientific revolutions such as the discovery of X-rays, as well as large ones such as the Copernican revolution.)

In fact, most of the examples of paradigms from SSR’s first edition fall into the category of exemplars.10 He talks, for example, of ‘the Franklinian paradigm’ (p. 18), by which he means Franklin’s successful explanation of the Leyden jar, which ‘made his theory a paradigm’ (p. 17). (Both a theory and an explanation can be an achievement.) A synthesis successful in attracting the next genera- tion of practitioners is also said to count as a paradigm (p. 18), the kind of thing that transforms pre-paradigm research into a science. And later on, Aristotle’s analysis of motion, Ptolemy’s computa- tions of planetary position, Lavoisier’s application of the balance, and Maxwell’s mathematization of the electromagnetic field are all achievements explicitly said to be paradigms (p. 23). Paradigms are said to be qualitative rather than quantitative (p. 29).

However, Kuhn refers also to ‘the corpuscular paradigm’ (p. 105), by which he seems to mean the ‘mechanico-corpuscular world view’. This would be ‘paradigm’ in its ‘disciplinary matrix’ sense.

An important aspect of Kuhn’s scheme that isn’t always picked up on, is that commitment to a given paradigm represents a particular way of doing science. Kuhn thus recognizes that scientists’ commit- ment always includes ‘an important element of the historically acci- dental, the temporarily local, and, thus, of the arbitrary’ (Kuhn in Crombie 1963, p. 393). However impressive any particular paradigm seems, there are always other possible ways of doing science.

Two philosophers who certainly have picked up on this are Stanley Cavell and Ian Hacking. Cavell recognizes Kuhn’s focus on the ‘tacit’, or ‘subliminal’ aspects of science, and he connects scientific revolutions with changes in what Wittgenstein called

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‘natural reactions’: ‘Perhaps the idea of a new historical period is an idea of a generation whose natural reactions – not merely whose ideas or mores – diverge from the old; it is an idea of a new (human) nature’ (Cavell 1969, p. 121). It is tempting to contrast this idea of different groups of scientists having different natures with Popper’s idea that we humans are creatures that let our theories die in our stead. Cavell doesn’t deny that one scientist can have more than one set of ‘natural reactions’, but he might insist that this is the excep- tion, rather than the rule, when it comes to scientific paradigms.

Ian Hacking, for his part, has pursued Kuhn’s ideas by focusing on the idea that different groups of scientists deploy different styles of scientific thinking, styles which themselves determine the sense of scientific propositions (see, for example, Hacking 1985).

The first phase in the typical pattern of the history of a science, which forms most of the subject matter of Kuhn’s section II, is the pre-paradigm or pre-consensus period. Such periods are marked by a certain kind of thorough-going diversity or fragmentation. There are multiple views of the phenomena in question, amounting to different concepts of those phenomena. There are no agreed canons of explanation, no fixed methodology, no acknowledged scientific authorities. Instead there’s a plurality of competing ‘schools’ of doc- trine, each of them deriving strength ‘from its relation to some par- ticular metaphysic’ (p. 12), but none having the upper hand. The activity of the researchers involved allows for unlimited disagree- ment and the criticism of each and every assumption. But this debate over fundamentals is directed against other researchers, not towards nature. Even when there is a single theory of the domain, there’s no single interpretation of that theory, no agreement on its achievements, methods, problems, or hopeful lines of solution. Instead there is what Kuhn comes to call a proliferation of versions of the theory. Observations which conflict with the theory are dealt with in an ad hoc way, or are simply ignored.

The consensus that paradigms involve is attained only with great difficulty, Kuhn suggests. This is because before a field has a para- digm all the facts its study might involve may well seem equally rel- evant. Research in these periods approximates most closely the kind of random ‘fact-gathering’ that naive empiricists like Francis Bacon are supposed to have held to constitute science. Although this can be essential to the origins of a science, it produces not a systematic body of knowledge, but what Kuhn calls a morass. The data collected are

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usually those that lie closest to hand, on the surface, and they are often collected by amateur observers, since there’s no motivation for experiments in which nature is asked detailed questions. Much effort is expended over natural histories which ‘classify’ specimens and data, where in a later period these kinds of classifications would be pre-determined by the paradigm itself. In the absence of a paradigm, researchers have no system to tell them what details are relevant and irrelevant, thus the facts collected remain in a heap, as it were, rather than a structure. Each writer has to reconstruct the field from its foundations, since no body of belief can be taken for granted. Such writers describe and interpret the same facts, but their descriptions and interpretations are different.

Kuhn seems somewhat unclear on whether science before para- digms is possible, and on whether each science, properly so-called, is constituted upon a single paradigm. On the one hand he says that there can be a kind of scientific research without paradigms (exem- plars), and that exemplars are a sign of the maturity of a scientific field (p. 11). His examples of pre-consensus periods are: the study of optics before Newton, the study of motion before Aristotle, the study of statics before Archimedes, the study of heat before Joseph Black, chemistry before Robert Boyle and Herman Boerhaave, and the study of geology before James Hutton, and he grants that such research involves scientists.

On the other hand, Kuhn observes that although the greatest figures in these periods are scientists, the net result of their activity is ‘something less than science’ (p. 13), and he counts the period before Newton as a pre-consensus phase of optics because there was no single generally accepted view of light at the time.11 This is to take the paradigm as what constitutes a science. (Kuhn later changed his mind about this, as we shall see. But in any case his vacillation may simply reflect the fact that the concept of science and its cognates don’t have sharp boundaries.)

The pre-consensus period usually ends in a fairly sudden and deci- sive way, when one school becomes dominant. Given the disarray Kuhn thinks characterizes such periods, of course, one might well wonder how such dominance is attained. Kuhn doesn’t say much about this, but it’s clear he thinks one pre-consensus school triumphs by emphasizing only some of the morass of collected facts.

Here Kuhn begins to develop the concept of a paradigm in a subtle but unacknowledged way. His mentioning that a theory can

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be accepted as a paradigm (p. 17), together with his later talk (pp. 26–8, 53, 61) of ‘the paradigm theory’ introduce the possibility that a theory might (sometimes) be a paradigm. Although he doesn’t explain this, presumably it just means that the exemplary achieve- ment in question can be (although it need not be) a theory. The exemplar is a successful theory, a theory which constitutes an achievement because it successfully explains some range of phenom- ena. When such a theory seems markedly better than its competitors, by virtue of being generally accepted as having explained more phe- nomena than they do, it becomes a paradigm or comes to be used as a paradigm. (This doesn’t mean that one can generally identify par- adigms with theories, though. As we shall see, there are good reasons to resist that identification.)

The onset of a paradigm has several effects, although all of them fall under the rough heading of specialization. Intellectually, it gives researchers in the field confidence to direct their investigations; this increases the effectiveness of their research. Socially, it affects the structure of the research field, partly by converting new members to the cause of the exemplar, and partly by ensuring that those uncon- verted are no longer considered as belonging to the profession, their work being ignored. It can even help to transform a field into a pro- fession, bringing with it learned societies, journals and a place in the teaching curriculum. As a result, although the research is now focused on nature, rather than on other schools, the communications of these researchers come to be directed more and more to each other, rather than to a public audience, or to the unconverted. The textbooks and journals marking the discipline are directed to its own professionals. Finally, the field in question comes to be conceived more narrowly and rigidly by its researchers. This means they can take its paradigm for granted, no longer feeling the need to build the field anew from its foundations.

This specialization, and the increasing autonomy which separates professionals in a given scientific field from their colleagues, as well as from the public, are often deplored, of course.12 Kuhn, however, suggests they are essential preconditions of the progress of science. (We shall consider his suggestion later, when we come to his discus- sion of scientific progress.)

Kuhn closes this section by taking the onset of a paradigm as the sign that a field has become a science: ‘Except with the advantage of hindsight, it is hard to find another criterion that so clearly

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proclaims a field a science’ (p. 22). We make more sense of this, I think, if we take it as saying that an exemplary achievement (rather than a disciplinary matrix) is what constitutes a science. Kuhn con- siders the kind of achievement in question to be pretty much unique to science (whereas disciplinary matrices certainly seem to be the kind of thing one also finds in other fields). But his qualification about the advantage of hindsight is important, too. It means Kuhn thinks of himself only as trying to say how one might recognize a science at the time in question, rather than as trying to give a once- and-for-all criterion that would ‘demarcate’ science from pre-science (let alone from error, superstition, metaphysics, non-science, pseudo- science or nonsense, as some philosophers have tried to do).

In his Preface Kuhn conceded that his distinction between pre- consensus and post-paradigm periods is ‘much too schematic’ (p. ix). In fact, in his 1969 Postscript he admitted to wanting to revise SSR in this respect. The transition from the pre-science period to normal science, he concedes there, ‘need not be associated with the first acquisition of a paradigm’ (p. 179). Pre-scientific researchers already share paradigms, but the nature of those paradigms is such that normal-scientific research isn’t yet possible. The paradigms in question aren’t yet mature enough to provide the sort of guidance that paradigms give to normal scientists. Despite this concession, though, Kuhn always resisted blurring the distinction between normal and revolutionary periods.

Study questions 1. Why should we think there is a typical pattern in the history of a

science? Can such a pattern form part of our concept of science, or would it be merely a contingent feature of science?

2. Which aspects of science count as parts of ‘paradigms’, and which don’t? What are the possible relations between theories and paradigms? Is the existence of a paradigm a criterion of a field’s scientific status?

3. Is science before paradigms possible? Why should detailed scientific investigation prove possible only under a paradigm?

SECTION 3: PARADIGMS AND NORMAL SCIENCE

Sections III–V of SSR characterize paradigms and normal science

further. Kuhn asks: what do scientists do when engaged in ‘normal

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science’, and why? Paradigms turn out to be largely promissory notes,

and normal science their redemption. Kuhn then characterizes the

problems that normal science consists in. Section III describes three

‘foci’ for the investigation of problems surrounding normal scientific facts, and three kinds of theoretical problems of normal science.

Section IV goes on to characterize normal science in terms of the rules

which govern what Kuhn calls its puzzle-solving activity. Section V

investigates the relations between paradigms, rules and normal science.

Kuhn argues that the rules philosophers of science usually focus on,

which should be fully articulable, are in fact secondary to something

that, although not fully articulable, can more easily be identified: a ground consisting of paradigms.

The second phase in the historical development of a science is embodied in what we have already seen Kuhn calls, perhaps some- what provocatively, normal science. If a paradigm really is an achievement (an exemplar), and thus something that has been done ‘once and for all’ (p. 23), what is there left for scientists to do when engaged, as they almost always are, in ‘normal science’?

At this point, Kuhn enters a bit further into the explication of his concept of a paradigm. One aspect of the established use of the term (according to which paradigms are accepted models or pat- terns used by being repeated in various ways within a training process) he regards as misleading. A paradigm (exemplar) in science, on Kuhn’s usage, ‘is an object for further articulation and specification under new or more stringent conditions’ (ibid.). This is because, when it first appears, the paradigm is restricted in both scope and precision. It gained its adherents because of its advantage in solving certain generally recognized and acute problems more successfully than its competitors. But this doesn’t mean that it is any- where near completely successful. The ‘success’ of a paradigm, says Kuhn,

is at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples. Normal science consists in the actu- alization of that promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as partic- ularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm’s predictions, and by further articu- lation of the paradigm itself. (pp. 23–4, emphases added)

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This means that most scientists, throughout their careers, are engaged in what Kuhn rather disparagingly calls ‘mop-up work’, attempts to fit nature into the ‘preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies’ (p. 24). What he will soon call ‘anomalies’, phenomena that don’t fit the paradigm’s conceptual categories, aren’t sought for, and often aren’t noticed. Neither the discovery of new sets of phenomena nor the invention of new theo- ries are parts of the aims of normal science, since that has a ‘drasti- cally restricted vision’ (ibid.). But this restriction, which might well appear to be a defect, is essential to scientific progress, since it forces scientists to investigate a limited range of phenomena in a depth and detail that would be impossible without it. Like the establishment of a paradigm in the first place, part of this kind of problem-solving work represents a permanent achievement.

This is one respect in which Kuhn’s image of science is simply intended to give a more realistic description of the professional activ- ities of those people employed as scientists than the images of scientific activity which emerge from philosophy. His comment to the effect that few who aren’t practitioners of a mature science realize how fascinating such ‘mop-up work’ can be might well be directed to philosophers of science, many of whom would construe such work as mere drudgery.

Normal science, according to Kuhn, has two principal compo- nents: experimental and observational ‘fact-gathering’, and theoret- ical activity. The former is focused upon three kinds of problems. First are those facts which the paradigm has shown to be ‘particu- larly revealing of the nature of things’ (p. 25). Since the paradigm has already employed them in solving problems, they are worth determining ‘both with more precision and in a larger variety of sit- uations’ (ibid.). Much normal science therefore consists of attempts to increase the accuracy and scope with which such facts (e.g. posi- tions, magnitudes and movements of astronomical objects, proper- ties of elements, materials and phenomena) are known. Usually, complex special apparatus is needed for the task. Plenty of famous scientists owe their reputations to work of this kind, work which Kuhn calls the ‘redetermination of a previously known sort of fact’ (p. 26).

Second, there are those facts which can be compared directly with the predictions of what Kuhn calls ‘the paradigm theory’. Even in the case of our best theories, there are usually few such facts. And

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even where there are such facts, theoretical and instrumental approx- imations often limit the agreement which can be expected. But ‘[i]mproving that agreement or finding new areas in which agreement can be demonstrated at all presents a constant challenge to the skill and imagination of the experimentalist and observer’ (p. 26). Again, complex and special equipment is usually needed, and reputations can be made. This kind of work is even more obviously paradigm- dependent than the first kind, since the problem to be solved is set only by the paradigm, and ‘often the paradigm theory is implicated directly in the design of apparatus able to solve the problem’ (p. 27, see also Kuhn in Crombie 1963, p. 389).

The third and final kind of fact-gathering activity involved in normal science, but the most important, is the empirical articulation of the paradigm theory, which resolves its ambiguities and permits the solution of ‘problems to which it had previously only drawn attention’ (p. 27). Depending on what science is in question, such work may involve the precise determination of physical constants; or of quantitative laws; or of new ways of applying the paradigm. Of the three kinds of fact-gathering activity, this is the least clearly empirical.

The theoretical work involved in normal science can also be sub- divided into much the same classes. Part of it consists of ‘the use of existing theory to predict factual information of intrinsic value’ (p. 30). But, Kuhn thinks, scientists generally regard this as ‘hack work to be relegated to engineers or technicians’ (ibid.).

A second class, which does appear in scientific journals, results from the difficulty of developing points of contact between the par- adigm theory and nature. It comprises ‘manipulations of theory undertaken, not because the predictions in which they result are intrinsically valuable, but because they can be confronted directly with experiment’ (ibid.). Such manipulations are intended to ‘display a new application of the paradigm or to increase the preci- sion of an application that has already been made’ (ibid.). In the more mathematical sciences, says Kuhn, most theoretical work is of this sort. Kuhn’s attention to this aspect of the complexity of science, which one wouldn’t have suspected from logical empiricism or Popper (or from contemporary ‘scientific realism’) is an impor- tant reminder on his part. Scientists do have to spend time clarifying and reformulating their theories, since it’s not always obvious how they apply to nature. Points of contact between a theory and nature

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can be very difficult for scientists to, as Kuhn puts it, ‘develop’ (p. 30).

Finally, the third kind of theoretical work implicated in normal science involves paradigm articulation. This includes attempts to clarify a paradigm by reformulating or reinterpreting it. It domi- nates during periods when scientific development is predominantly qualitative.

The overwhelming majority of the research problems undertaken by even the very best scientists, according to Kuhn, usually fall into one of these three categories. Such problems, as we have just seen, almost never aim at producing novelties of fact or theory. Normal science does add to the scope and precision with which the paradigm can be applied. But why are scientists so devoted and enthusiastic in tackling these research problems?

Kuhn’s answer is that normal science consists in puzzle-solving. Normal scientists often know what the outcomes of their experi- ments, calculations, etc. should be, but they still devote their energies to showing how those outcomes can be achieved:

Bringing a normal research problem to a conclusion is achieving the anticipated in a new way, and it requires the solution of all sorts of complex instrumental, conceptual, and mathematical puzzles. (p. 36)

A puzzle, Kuhn tells us, is a particular kind of problem that tests ingenuity or skill in its solution. Where problems may have no solu- tions, though, puzzles must have, although these need not be intrin- sically interesting or important, and there must be ‘rules’ which limit the nature of acceptable solutions and the ways in which they can be obtained. Paradigms provide criteria for choosing just such puzzles. These are, Kuhn says, to a great extent, ‘the only problems that the community will admit as scientific or encourage its members to undertake’ (p. 37). One powerful way in which paradigms restrict vision is by ensuring that other problems are rejected as metaphysi- cal, or as the concern of some other discipline, or as a waste of time:

A paradigm can . . . even insulate the community from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the puzzle form [e.g. finding a cure for cancer (p. 36)], because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools the

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paradigm supplies. [. . .] One of the reasons why normal science seems to progress so rapidly is that its practitioners concentrate on problems that only their own lack of ingenuity should keep them from solving. (p. 37)

This is supposed to explain the passion with which scientists attack puzzles during normal science. Once a scientist, one is challenged and spurred on mainly by the thought that one will succeed in solving a puzzle which no one has solved before, or solved as well. Those scientists who do succeed in this prove themselves to be expert puzzle-solvers.

Here occurs one of the strongest contrasts between Kuhn’s image of science and those associated with Popper and Feyerabend, who both portray scientists as far more than puzzle-solvers. Popper, for example, started from the thought that we can get a simplified picture of science from looking at the achievements of great scientists such as Galileo, Kepler and Newton. This starting-point obviously repre- sents something of an idealization, for in focusing on the work of great scientists, one might well be ignoring the work of most scien- tists. Popper admitted as much, explaining that he wanted to convey ‘a heroic and romantic idea of science and its workers: men who humbly devoted themselves to the search for truth, to the growth of our knowledge; men whose life consisted in an adventure of bold ideas’ (Popper 1974, p. 977). Feyerabend, too, tended to discuss indi- vidual scientific heroes. Kuhn, though, was trying to represent most scientific activity, not merely the occasional, heroic and potentially revolutionary aspects of science. His concern was with science as a profession, rather than science as a purely intellectual adventure. Popper and Feyerabend, by contrast, simply weren’t interested in sci- entists for whom science is nothing more than a profession.

Most scientific activity, then, for Kuhn, is puzzle-solving. Among the ‘rules’ (in an extended sense) which limit the nature of acceptable solutions to puzzles, and the ways in which they can be obtained, are the following:

(I) Explicit statements of scientific law and about scientific con- cepts and theories.

(II) Commitments to preferred types of instrumentation and to the ways in which accepted instruments can legitimately be employed.

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(III) Higher-level, quasi-metaphysical commitments displayed by historical study.

(IV) Methodological commitments, commitments ‘which have held for scientists at all times’ (p. 42), such as the commitment to understand the world.

As well as holding over different durations and across different subsets of the relatively disunified body of science, these rules are obviously at very different levels of generality, some concrete and practical, others theoretical. However,

Though there obviously are rules to which all the practitioners of a scientific speciality adhere at a given time, those rules may not by themselves specify all that the practice of those specialists has in common. Normal science is a highly determined activity, but it need not be entirely determined by rules. That is why . . . I intro- duced shared paradigms rather than shared rules, assumptions, and points of view as the source of coherence for normal research traditions. Rules, I suggest, derive from paradigms, but para- digms can guide research even in the absence of rules. (p. 42)

This brings us onto the theme of Kuhn’s next section, section V, the priority of paradigms over rules.

According to Kuhn, historians can identify the paradigms of a mature scientific community pretty easily, by finding a set of recur- rent and repeated illustrations of theories ‘in their conceptual, observational, and instrumental applications’ (p. 43). What they thus find are the tools which members of the scientific community in question use to learn their trade, normally embodied in ‘text- books, lectures, and laboratory exercises’ (ibid.).13 But to determine the paradigms of a mature scientific community isn’t yet to identify the shared rules which members of that community follow. The rules followed are abstracted from paradigms, and are to be found by com- paring the community’s paradigms with one another, and with its current research reports. This search for rules, says Kuhn, is ‘both more difficult and less satisfying than the search for paradigms’ (ibid.). It is frustrating because scientists can agree in their identification of a paradigm, without agreeing in their interpretation of it. Agreeing in the identification of a paradigm is merely a matter of the scientists in a given field acknowledging that one of their number ‘has produced an apparently permanent solution to a group

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