Kuhn, Thomas | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

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Thomas Samuel Kuhn Summary

Kuhn, Thomas

Historian and philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996), who was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on July 18, was perhaps the most influential theorist of science in the second half of the twentieth century. Kuhn received all his degrees (in physics) and his first job at Harvard University, though he failed to be awarded tenure there in 1956, shortly after the departure of his mentor, Harvard President James Bryant Conant. Kuhn was finally tenured at Princeton University in 1964, on the basis of what remains his best known book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). In 1979 Kuhn moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he eventually retired as Laurence Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics. Essays from Kuhn's Harvard and Princeton years appear in The Essential Tension (1977). Essays from his MIT years are collected in The Road Since Structure (2000). At the time of his death, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on June 17, Kuhn had been long working on an update of the perspective first developed in Structure.

Kuhn's influence rests mainly on Structure, his second book, which departs from the then prominent logical empiricist efforts to understand science through its rational reconstruction in favor of a more historically based appreciation of its internal dynamics. Kuhn presents a theory of scientific change as a cycle of relatively clearly defined phases, centered on the creation, development, and destruction of a paradigm, a word that has entered the general vocabulary in the early twenty-first century. For Kuhn, the distinctiveness of science lies in the ability of its practitioners to take hold of the means of knowledge production by agreeing on a theoretical framework, methods, and suitable problems to pursue. Kuhn's protean use of paradigm to cover every aspect of this process has led to much confusion. Nevertheless the overall thrust of his account is clear. Normal science, the rather routine pursuit of paradigmatic puzzles, is the heart of the scientific enterprise, and the source of whatever progress science displays. Kuhn's picture was very much at odds with the more heroic Galilean image of scientists as bold destroyers of tradition. On the contrary, for Kuhn, scientists themselves worked within strict traditions of practice that were typically passed down through apprenticeship with master practitioners.

Kuhn's image of science is profoundly conservative, a point overlooked by most of his supporters. To be sure, revolution figures in the title of Kuhn's first two books—the first being The Copernican Revolution (1957)—and is the basis on which many readers have imagined him to be a radical thinker. Nevertheless Kuhn draws on a conception of revolution received from the conservative political tradition, whereby a revolution eventuates in a restoration of natural order. Thus, for Kuhn, revolutions in science happen only as a last resort, when the paradigm can no longer solve the problems it has set for itself. In that case a crisis ensues, the result of which is a new paradigm that then provides the basis for a new kind of normal science. Philosophically inspired criticism of fundamental assumptions in science is licensed only once a paradigm is in crisis. Under normal circumstances, scientists take a more heads-down approach to their work.

The widespread misunderstanding of Kuhn's theory has been an ironic source of its influence. Although Kuhn himself was careful to restrict the evidence base of his theory to roughly three centuries of the history of the physical sciences (1620–1920), he was quickly read as referring to a pattern of change that could be found in all sciences—even the humanities—across all periods. This misreading is partly due to the fact that Kuhn does not distinguish science by reference to its technological applications or material impact on the world. On the contrary, for Kuhn, a field becomes scientific by becoming autonomous from such external concerns. Thus physics is a science not because it produces real-world effects but because physicists are in full control of the physics research agenda. Many of Kuhn's hopeful readers outside of physics drew the conclusion that their own fields could similarly acquire the status of science by generating their own paradigms. Thus in the early 2000s virtually every discipline outside physics has at least one theorist or methodologist whose reputation is based on the claim of having founded a paradigm of some sort.

In first two decades after it was written, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was subject to much philosophical criticism, especially from Karl Popper and his followers. They questioned the normative backdrop to Kuhn's history of science: Was Kuhn effectively valorizing the most conformist elements of scientific practice? The answer appeared to be yes, but that did not prevent the book from entering the philosophical canon after 1980. Eventually most philosophers took for granted Kuhn's overall account of scientific change, especially his methodological assumption that science needs to be understood from the inside, so to speak. A mark of Kuhn's influence on contemporary discussions in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science is the preoccupation with demonstrating one's mastery of the inner workings of a science. In his later years, Kuhn grew closer to the standard philosophical understanding of these matters, while openly dissociating himself from relativist and constructivist sociologists who claimed to have been inspired by his work.

In taking the measure of Kuhn's legacy, it is puzzling how a physicist with an amateur understanding of the history, philosophy, and sociology of science could have had such a profound impact on these fields, which already enjoyed a relatively high degree of sophistication. In effect, Kuhn's Structure offered a historian's sense of philosophy, a philosopher's sense of sociology, and a sociologist's sense of history. That this particular book should have such an enduring impact cannot be explained simply by its content, because many of its supposedly distinctive theses could also be found in the work of contemporaries such as Norwood Russell Hanson, Paul Feyerabend, and Stephen Toulmin. However, unlike them, Kuhn singularly benefited from the patronage of Conant, to whom Structure is dedicated. Structure was written while Kuhn taught in a general education program that Conant had created to instill faith in science as an autonomous enterprise in a time—the Cold War—when it would be increasingly subject to public scrutiny. This helps explain Kuhn's peculiar inclusions and omissions. As conceptual horizons become detached from Kuhn's Cold War moorings, his work will probably lose its hold on the meta-scientific imagination.