richard rorty - kuhn

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KuhnR I CHARD RORTY

Thomas S. Kuhn, historian and philosopher of science, was born on 18 July 192 2 inCincinnati, Ohio, and died 1 7 June 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He enteredHarvard in 1939 and remained there until 19 56, receiving a Ph.D. in physics in1949. For three years he was a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and thenbegan teaching in James Bryant Conant's recently established General EducationProgram. Conant used a historical approach to communicate the nature of science toundergraduates; working with Conant helped shift Kuhn's interests from physics tothe history of science. After leaving Harvard, Kuhn taught at Berkeley for 9 years, atPrinceton for 15 , and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 12. He retiredfrom teaching in 1991.

After publishing two articles in the Physical Review and one in the Quarterly ofApplied Mathematics, in 1951 Kuhn began publishing in Isis, the journal of the historyof science edited by George Sarton. In 1957 his first book, The Copernican Revolution,appeared. Following up on the work of Alexandre Koyre and others, this book spelledout in detail the gradual breakdown of attempts to reconcile Aristotelian ways ofdescribing physical processes, and Aristotelian ways of thinking about the methodsand function of scientific inquiry, with Copernican astronomy and Galilean mechanics.(See GAI~ILEO.)t made clear that the traditional account of the New Science as avictory of "reason" over prejudice and superstition was much too simple, and showedwhy a revolutionary mechanics and a revolutionary astronomy both required theother and a revolution in the philosophers' account of the nature of science, beforeeither could be fully accepted.

In his second book, The Struc ture of Scient$c Revolutions (1962).Kuhn made explicitthe philosophical moral of this historical story. The late 1950s and early 1960s were atime of ferment in philosophy of science, for writers such as Michael Polanyi, ImreLakatos, Stephen 'I'oulmin, Paul Feyerabend, and Norwood Russell Hanson had begunto challenge the picture of scientific inquiry which had been sketched by RudolphCarnap, Karl Popper, Carl Hempel, and others associated with logical positivism (seeLAKATOS; FEYERABEND; POPPER; LOGICAL EMPIR IC ISM; and I ,OCICAL POSITIVISM).hispicture had taken for granted the idea of a n observation language, neutral betweenalternative scientific theories, in which the explananda of all such theories might beformulated. The logical positivists had tended to assume that there must be a quasi-algorithimic logic of justification, producing rational choices among alternative theo-ries on the basis of such neutrally formulated data - a logic which could be studiedwithout reference to the history of science. Although Hempel, Goodman, and others


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K I C H A K D KOK'TYhad pointed out various difficulties faced by attempts to construct such a logic, mostphilosophers of science in the 1950s still took the idea of such a logic for granted.Its radical and thoroughgoing repudiation of the idea of such a logic, and of thatof a neutral observation language, made The Structure of Scientific Revolutions themost widely read, and most influential, work of philosophy written in English since theSecond World War. Dozens of books have been written in response to it. Constantlyassigned in undergraduate as well as graduate courses, in almost every academicdepartment, it has altered the self-image of many disciplines, from philosophy throughthe social sciences to the so-called hard natural sciences. For more than two centuries,up through the heyday of logical positivism, practitioners of many disciplines hadwondered if they were being "sufficiently scientific"- a term which they used almostinterchangeably with "sufficiently rational" and "sufficiently objective." The "hard"sciences -physics in particular -were viewed as models which other disciplines shouldimitate. Kuhn's book suggested that decisions between physical theories are no morealgorithmically made than are decisions between alternative political policies. Thissuggestion was greeted with sighs of relief by some, who felt relieved of their previousmethodological worries, and with consternation (and even anger) by others, whointerpreted Kuhn as denying science's claim to objective knowledge. (See P R AGM ATICFACTOKS IN THEOR Y ACCEPTANCE; J I J DGM ENT, ROLE I N SCIENCE; SCIENTIFIC CHANGE).

A host of critics gathered to defend science's rationality and objectivity against Kuhn.As defenses of Kuhn against these critics proliferated, new battle lines were drawnwhich gradually transformed the philosophy of science, and which brought history ofscience into ever more fruitful interaction with philosophy of science. (See HISTOKY,ROLE IN THE PHII~OSOPHYOF SCIENCE.) The resulting controversies interlocked with broaderphilosophical controversies about the nature of rationality itself, and in particularwith the debate between the atomistic accounts of language and thought familiarfrom the tradition of British Empiricism and more holistic accounts offered by Quine(see Q U I N E ) , the later Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, and Putnam. Kuhn's work thusbecame central to the development of post-positivistic analytic philosophy. Reactionsto his book produced an enormous increase in the amount and sophistication of philo-sophical discussion of meaning change, and of the distinction (if any) between observa-tional and theoretical terms. (See OB S ERVATI ON AN D THEORY and THEOR ETI C AL TERMS).Much discussion of Kuhn's work has focused on the question of whether eithertables or electrons can be said to exist independently of human thought. Even thoughKuhn for many years explicitly characterized himself as a realist, he was often accusedof lacking a sufficiently robust sense of mind-independent reality, and of lending aidand comfort to anti-realism: the view that there is no fact of the matter about which oftwo scientific theories is true (see UNDERDETEKMINATION).e also insisted that he hadno intention of breaking down the distinction between science and nonscience, butmerely wished to demythologize scientific practice by setting aside a simplistic pictureof scientific practice as the patient accumulation of "hard facts." He clarified his posi-tion considerably in a postscript to the second edition of Structure and also in variousfurther explanations and replies to criticisms (collected in Kuhn 1977).Kuhn turned away from philosophy to history for a time, while preparing a historyof the origins of quantum mechanics (Kuhn 1978). But since the publication of thatbook the bulk of his work consisted in detailed defenses of the claim that there is no


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language-independent reality, no single "Way The World Is" (a claim first defended, inthose terms, by Nelson Goodman) (seeN A T ~ I K A L I N I ) ~ ) .He subsequently said: "1 aim todeny all meaning to claims that successive scientific beliefs become more and moreprobable or better and better approximations to the truth and simultaneously to suggestthat the subject of truth claims cannot be a relation between beliefs and a putativelymind-independent or 'external' world" (Kuhn 1993, p. 3 30).Kuhn then defended his much-discussed thesis that Aristotle lived in a different worldfrom Galileo (Kuhn 1962, ch. 10) by an analogy between the evolution of scientificideas and that of biological species: "1,ike a practice and its world, a species and itsniche are interdefined; neither component of either pair can be known without theother" (Kuhn 1993 , p. 337) . On this view, you can no more identify the world towhich a statement or a theory corresponds, or which it accurately represents, withouta knowledge of the language in which the statement or theory is framed, than you canidentify a biological niche without knowledge of the behavior of the species whichinhabits, or inhabited, tha t niche.

Kuhn's critics continued to press on the question of whether this line of thoughtcan be reconciled with his claim that science produces genuine knowledge of nature.These critics insist tha t, if we drop the notion of a language-neutral reality to be accu-rately represented, we endanger the distinction between increasing knowledge of natureand mere pragmatic adjustments in response to novel stimuli. Kuhn's response con-sisted in denying that the "objective of scientific research" is accuracy of representation.Rather, "whether or not individual practitioners are aware of it, they are trained toand rewarded for solving intricate puzzles - be they instrumental, theoretical, logicalor mathematical - at the interface between their phenomenal world and their com-munity's beliefs about it" (ibid., p. 338). The principal question raised, though not yetresolved, by Kuhn's work is: Can the link between representation and knowledge, alink still taken for granted by most post-empiricist analytic philosophers, be brokenwithout abandoning the distinction between rational and irrational human practices,;Kuhn clearly thought that it could. He ended a response to his critics with the sentence:"Those who proclaim that no interest-driven practice can properly be identified asthe rational pursuit of knowledge make a profound and consequential mistake" (ibid.p. 339).

References and further readingWorks by Kuhn1 9 5 7 : Th? Coprrnic'an Rrvolutior~:Planrtnry Astronom y ir ~ hc~Drv~~lo~prr~?i~tf Wv strr n Thought

(Cam bridge. MA: Harvar d [Jniversity Press).1 9 6 2 : U I P tr uc tu r~ f 'Sc irn t if ic Rr~oll l t ior ls Chic ago: llnive rsity of Chicago Pre ss). (A second.

enlarged edition published in 1 9 7 0 included a n important Postscript .)1 977 : Thp Essc~ntinl 'rnsion: Selrctrd Stud ips i n Scientific' Trad itior~ rld Change (Ch icago : IJniversity

of Chicago Press). (Co ntain s Ku hn 's much -discussed essay "Objectivity. valu e, judgm ent an dtheory choice.")

1 978 : Black-Bod!! Th~orlyrld thr Quanturt~Disc'ontir~uity.1894-1 9 12 (Oxford: Clarendon Press).199 3: Afterwords. In World Char~gc,~:hori~asKullr~ rid t h t~ aturr c ! f S ~ i c ~ r ~ c ~ ~ ,d. Paul Horwich

(Carxibridge. MA: MIT Press), 311-41. (This book contains important critical appraisals ofKuhn 's work , to whic h he responds in "A fterwords.")


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K I C H A K I ) K O K ' I ' Y

Work s by other authorsBarnes, B. 1982: T. S. Kulln arrd Social Scirnce (New York: Colum bia University Press).Goodman, N. 1 9 78: W a y s of' Worldrr~akirlgIndianapolis: Ha ckett) .Gutting, G. ( e d .) 1 9 8 0 : Applic7ations an d Appraisals of' Thornas Kuhrl's Ph ilosophy of'Scienccl (Notre

Dame, IN : IJniversity of Notre Dame Press).Hoyningen-Huen e, P . 19 9 3 : Ko,constructing Scientific Kr\~olutioils: Thornas S. Kuhn's PIlilosophy of'Scirrlr%e, ith a Foreword by Thomas S. Kuhn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). (Trans.

by Alexander T. Levine from Dir Wiss~nschaf'tsp/lilosopl~irhornas S. Ku hns: Rek onstruktio n andGrundlugrrlproblen~~Braun schw eig: Friedrich Vieweg, 1 98 9) .)

Stegmiiller, W. 197 3: Problprne und Rrsul tatr der W issrnsckgfts throrie und An nl yt is ch ~n llilosophiu,vol. 2: Thporie un Erf'ahrung. part 2: The ori ~ns ktr ukt ur rld Throriendynamik (Berlin: Sp ringer).

richard rorty - kuhn

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