The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Author: Thomas S. Kuhn
Publisher: Dong-A Publishing Co., Ltd.
Contents
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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
:: About the Author ::
Translator’s Preface
Preface
I. Introduction: The Role of History
II. The Route to Normal Science
III. The Nature of Normal Science
IV. Normal Science as Puzzle-Solving
V. The Priority of Paradigms
VI. Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries
VII. Crisis, and the Emergence of Scientific Theories
VIII. The Response to Crisis
IX. The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions
X. Revolutions as Changes of World View
XI. The Invisibility of Revolutions
XII. The Resolution of Revolutions
XIII. Progress through Revolutions
XIV. Postscript—1969
Translator’s Commentary
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Author: Thomas S. Kuhn
Translator: Kim Myeong-ja
Publisher: Dong-A Publishing Co., Ltd.
:: About the Author ::
Thomas S. Kuhn—Born in 1922, Thomas Kuhn majored in physics at Harvard University and graduated from the same university summa cum laude in 1943. Thereafter he served as assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley, then as professor of history of science and philosophy of science at Princeton University, and later as professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. Apart from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his books include The Essential Tension, The Copernican Revolution, and only a few coauthored works, yet reviews and articles on his writings number in the hundreds, and numerous academic meetings have been formed around the theme of his achievements; he is one of the scholars who exerted the greatest influence on the history of modern thought in the latter half of the twentieth century. Thomas Kuhn passed away in June 1996.
Translator’s Preface
It was in 1980 that I first translated The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In the more than twenty years of my scholarly life since completing my degree program, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has truly held a special meaning for me.
That is because it became the occasion that gradually brought me closer to the field of the history of science, in which, before that translation, I had been little more than a beginner. Yet the fact that, without deep knowledge accumulated over many years in that field, I had translated a controversial work that marked a milestone in the history of twentieth-century thought was always lodged in one corner of my mind, and I could not help but admit that, for that reason, there were in fact many shortcomings.
This is not to say that my own studies have now matured to a level different from those days; nor is my regret at lacking a philosophical background much different from what it was then. It is only that, if in the eleven years since the first translation something in my area of specialization has deepened a little, I have brought out this new translation edition in the hope that it may appear as a better fruit. And, in my own way, I devoted much care to this work over several months. In addition, with the intention of aiding readers’ understanding, I have included at the end of this book a translator’s commentary on the “Kuhn revolution.” I hope that through it the core outline of Kuhn’s theory and the impact of the Kuhn revolution may be broadly organized.
Thomas S. Kuhn, as a historian of science and philosopher of science, is counted among the scholars who exerted the greatest influence on modern thought in the latter half of the twentieth century. This book is a translation of the enlarged edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970 Enlarged Edition), whose first edition Kuhn published in 1962. Since its first edition, Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has stirred up an enthusiastic worldwide “Kuhn boom.”
In Seoul as well, as one of these movements, for example, in the autumn of 1980 a symposium was held on the theme “Kuhn’s Historiography of Science and Related Sciences.” The gathering took place under the sponsorship of the Industry-Academia Cooperation Foundation in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Korean Society for the History of Science. Its specific themes were “The Background and Development of the Kuhn Revolution,” “A Philosophical Critique of Scientific Revolution,” “Kuhn’s Theory and the Reality of Sociology,” “The Paradigmatic Status of Theories of Political Psychology,” and “Kuhn’s Thought and Linguistic Theory.” It was a symposium whose significance stood out especially in that it provided, after a long interval, a forum for interdisciplinary conversation among natural scientists and social scientists.
If we look at the history of science, we see that throughout history the transmission of science between different cultural spheres has been a very important occasion for the development of science, and that each time the role of translation was decisive. For example, in the sixth century B.C., when Greek natural philosophy, which had opened the beginning of rational science, was received into Rome along with the decline of Greece, the Roman intellectual class knew Greek and therefore felt no need for translation; accordingly, with the fall of Rome, one can also find the aspect that Greek natural philosophy was not directly transmitted to Latin civilization. Meanwhile, around the eighth century, the Arab world was developing its own science beginning with the work of translating Greek philosophy into Arabic, and the reimportation of Greek science into Latin Europe through the Arabs, called the “12th Century Renaissance,” likewise proceeded by means of retranslating Greek classics that had been translated into Arabic and other languages, or by translating the Greek originals, thereby earning even the nickname “Age of Translation.” Even now, in the various exchanges among cultural spheres with different languages, we keenly feel that the activity of translating all kinds of writings is extremely important.
The saying that translation is a second creation may sound trite. Yet, in dealing with the same work, I experienced this time that even the same translator may produce quite different products depending on the period. In a broad sense, this is probably due to the depth of thought; in a narrower sense, it may be called, in a word, the dilemma between whether something should be well expressed in Korean or whether it should remain faithful to the original even if it reads somewhat difficultly.
In this translation, I have rather come to follow the latter tendency. If I were to add an explanation as to “why,” I would say that it was probably because I felt that this work, which will perhaps become one of the most influential intellectual legacies of the latter half of the twentieth century, ought to have the atmosphere it originally possesses conveyed as it is. Although it may be somewhat unreasonable for me to say this when I am neither a scholar of English literature nor a stylist, nevertheless I chose the path of rendering it into Korean as faithfully as possible, almost as it stands in the original. Having said this, I feel embarrassed, as though I were making excuses after having translated it in a way that is harder to read than the original.
In fact, I know well that, were this book to be translated into Korean, there are several teachers who could produce the finest translation. And so I resolved to impose on them by taking up their precious time. Though I well knew what it meant to read through and correct a manuscript written by someone else, I thought there might not be another opportunity to revise it, and so I decided to rely further on the guidance they have always so generously given me. Thus Professor Kim Yeong-sik, who had been Kuhn’s student at Princeton University (professor in the Department of History and chair of the Interdisciplinary Program in Philosophy of Science at Seoul National University), read the first draft, and Professor Song Sang-yong, president of the Korean Society for the History of Science (professor at Hallym University), set aside his valuable time. As the translator, I offer inexpressible thanks for their reading a manuscript that had many deficiencies. If the contents of this book have become more substantial, it is entirely thanks to the help of those teachers who gave such advice. Finally, I offer my thanks to President Kim Hyeon-sik of Dong-A Publishing and to everyone in the editorial department, who devoted themselves to the publication of this book.
May 1992
In my study on Cheongpa Hill
Kim Myeong-ja
Preface
Preface
The essay printed here is the first complete report on a project originally conceived almost fifteen years ago.
At that time I was a graduate student in theoretical physics, nearly finished with my doctoral dissertation.
The good fortune of participating in an experimental undergraduate course that taught the physical sciences to students outside the natural sciences provided me, for the first time, with an opportunity to encounter the history of science. To my genuine surprise, contact with the outmoded theories and practices of science shook some of the basic notions I had held about the nature of science and the reasons for its special success.
Some of those notions were ones I had already acquired from scientific training itself, and others were obtained from a long-standing, almost avocational interest in the philosophy of science. In any case, whatever their educational utility and abstract plausibility, such notions did not at all fit the reality of science revealed by historical examination. Nevertheless, since such notions have formed the basis of many discussions of science, both in the past and today, the fact that they did not appear to be true seemed to me well worth thorough investigation. Through these circumstances, the plan of my life took a sharp turn in direction: from physics to the history of science, and then gradually from the comparatively straightforward problems of the history of science back to the more philosophical concerns that had first drawn me into history. Except for a few writings, this book is the first of my published works in which these early interests appear prominently. It is an attempt to explain from what point I turned aside into that history.
The first opportunity to delve deeply into the views I am about to state came during the three years I spent as a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.
Without such a period of freedom, the move into a new field of research would have been extremely difficult, and perhaps entirely impossible. I continued to devote part of that period to orthodox history of science. In particular, I continued to study the writings of Alexandre Koyré, and for the first time encountered the research achievements of Emile Meyerson, Hélène Metzger, and Annelies Maier.1) Far more clearly than most other recent scholars, this group showed what it meant to think scientifically in an era when the norms of scientific thought differed greatly from those of today. Though I increasingly came to question some of their particular historical interpretations of science, their work, together with A. O. Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being, had a greater influence than anything except primary sources in forming my conception of what the history of scientific thought is.
During that same period, however, I spent a great deal of time exploring fields that, on the surface, seemed to have little connection with the history of science, though now that research reveals the same problems that first began to interest me in history. By chance, while looking at a footnote, I was drawn to Jean Piaget’s experiments, which had illuminated both the various worlds of the growing child and the process of transition from one world to another.2) One friend advised me to read the psychology of perception, especially the papers of the Gestalt psychologists. Another friend introduced me to B. L. Whorf’s speculations on the influence of language upon worldview. W. V. O. Quine explained to me the philosophical difficulties of the analytic-synthetic distinction.3) These were precisely the subjects that the Society of Fellows allowed me to study freely, and only thanks to that did I come to feel, with the aid of Ludwik Fleck’s writings and the advice of Francis X. Sutton, a fellow Junior Fellow like myself, that such concepts might be necessary in the sociology of the scientific community. Readers of this book will notice that I scarcely cite those writings or conversations afterward, but I am indebted to them in far more ways than I can now reconstruct or evaluate.
In my final year as a Junior Fellow, an invitation to lecture at the Lowell Institute in Boston gave me my first opportunity to present my slowly forming thoughts about science. Thus, in March 1951, I delivered eight public lectures under the title “The Quest for Physical Theory.” The following year, I began teaching orthodox history of science, and for almost ten years, having to lecture in a field I had never studied systematically left me almost no time to clarify the concepts that had originally driven me into it. Fortunately, however, those concepts became an implicit source of orientation and of several problem formulations in my more advanced lectures.
For that reason, I am grateful to my students for valuable lessons both about the viability of my views and about techniques suitable for communicating them effectively. Those same problems and orientations also run through the various papers, mostly historical in character, that I published after the end of my fellowship in those years. Some of those writings deal with the indispensable role played by one or another metaphysical element in creative scientific research. Other studies examine how the experimental basis of a new theory was accumulated and assimilated by those who clung to an older theory that contradicted it. In the process, those studies describe the form of scientific development that I now call the “emergence” or discovery of a new theory in this book. Many other such connections may also be made.
The final stage of this essay began with the invitation from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, where I spent 1958–59. There I was once again able to focus my attention entirely on the problems I am about to discuss. More important, by living in a community composed chiefly of social scientists, I encountered unexpected problems concerning the differences between such a society and the society of natural scientists in which I had long been trained.
In particular, I was struck by the extent of the open disagreements among social scientists about the nature of legitimate scientific problems and methods. Both the history of science and that awareness led me to doubt that practitioners of the natural sciences possessed firmer and more enduring answers to such questions than their colleagues in the social sciences. Yet in any case, scientific activity in astronomy, physics, chemistry, or biology does not ordinarily provoke debates over the fundamental issues that seem to confront psychologists or sociologists today. The attempt to discover the source of this difference led me to recognize the role in scientific inquiry of what I have since called a “paradigm.” I regard these paradigms as universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide a community of specialists with model problems and solutions. Once this piece of my puzzle fell into place, the outline of this essay immediately became clear.
There is no need to recount here the subsequent history of that draft, but I must say a few words about the form it has retained through many revisions. Until the first version was completed and substantially revised, I expected the manuscript to be published only as a volume of the Encyclopaedia of Unified Science. The editors of this epoch-making enterprise originally invited me to do so, I accepted their wish, and in the end they patiently waited until I completed it. I am deeply grateful to them all, and especially to Charles Morris, for the unstinting encouragement and advice they gave me until the manuscript was finished. Because of the space limitations of the encyclopedia, however, my views could only be expressed in an extremely condensed, schematic form. Various circumstances considerably eased those restrictions, and eventually the work was even published simultaneously as a separate volume, but it nevertheless remained an essay rather than the full-scale work that my subject ultimately demands.
Since my most fundamental purpose is to urge a change in the perception and evaluation of already known data, the schematic character of this first presentation is not necessarily a weakness. Rather, readers whose own research has prepared them for the kind of reorientation argued here may find this reflective form more suggestive and easier to digest. Yet it also has weaknesses, and so it may justify my indicating at the outset the extensions of breadth and depth that I ultimately hope to include in an expanded edition. Far more extensive historical material is available than I present in this book. Moreover, such evidence arises not only from the physical sciences but also from the history of the biological sciences. I have chosen here to deal exclusively with the history of the physical sciences partly in order to preserve the coherence of this essay and partly because of my present competence. In addition, the view of science to be developed here suggests the potential usefulness of several new kinds of historical and social-scientific research. For example, just as the emergence of a crisis caused by repeated failures to make anomalous phenomena conform must be examined more closely, the manner in which anomalies, or failures of expectation, intensify the attention of the scientific community requires detailed study.
Or, if I am truly right in thinking that every scientific revolution changes the historical perspective of the society that undergoes it, then such a change in perspective will affect the structure of post-revolutionary textbooks and research papers. One such effect—the changed distribution of the technical literature cited in the footnotes of research reports—ought to be studied as an indicator of the occurrence of a revolution.
The extreme compression of this work has forced me to omit discussion of several major issues. For example, my distinction between the pre-paradigm and post-paradigm periods in the development of a science has become overly schematic. Each of the schools whose competition characterizes the early period takes as its guide something very much like a paradigm. In the later period, though I believe it to be very rare, there are also cases in which two paradigms coexist peacefully. The mere possession of a paradigm is not in itself a sufficient condition for the developmental transition discussed in Section 2. More importantly, except for occasional brief remarks, I have said nothing at all about the role played in scientific development by technological progress or by external social, economic, and intellectual conditions. Yet the mere example of Copernicus and the problem of the calendar quickly shows that external conditions can transform a simple anomaly into the source of an acute crisis. This very example will also explain how extra-scientific conditions influence the range of alternatives available to a scientist who seeks to evade crisis by presenting one or another revolutionary form.4) In my view, an explicit consideration of influences of this type would not alter the theme developed in this essay, but it would plainly add an analytical dimension of the first importance for understanding the progress of science.
Finally, and perhaps most important of all, limitations of space have severely constrained my treatment of the philosophical implications of the historically oriented view of science presented in this essay. Clearly, such implications are present, and I have made an effort to point out and substantiate the principal ones. In doing so, however, I have largely refrained from discussing in detail the various positions taken by contemporary philosophers on the issues involved. Where I have expressed doubts, they are more often doubts about a philosophical posture than about any fully articulated view. Thus, those who work from more refined and developed positions may sometimes feel that I have misunderstood their views. I think they are wrong, but I do not intend to persuade them in this essay. To do so would have required a work far longer than this book, and different in form as well.
I have written the opening of this preface in an autobiographical tone in order to express my gratitude for the great debt I owe both to the scholarly works and to the research institutions that helped give shape to my thinking. I shall try to repay my remaining debts through the other citations scattered throughout this book. But to those whom I have not mentioned above and will not mention later, who supported and guided my intellectual development in various ways through suggestions and criticism, I offer my deep thanks. The concepts contained in this essay began to take shape a very long time ago. The list of those who, in turning the pages of this book, may feel that they have had some influence somewhere would be almost as long as the list of all my colleagues and friends. For now, however, I must confine myself to only a few of the most significant debts, which I cannot possibly pass over.
First of all, it was James B. Conant, then president of Harvard University, who first introduced me to the history of science and thereby provided the occasion for transforming my ideas about the nature of scientific development. Since that process began, he has continually given me his views, criticism, and time—including the time he devoted to reading the first draft of my manuscript and helping me revise important sections. Leonard K. Nash taught with me for five years the historically oriented course in science that Dr. Conant had begun, and at the time when my ideas were taking their first steps toward taking shape, he was an incomparable active collaborator; in the later stages of the work, I greatly missed his presence. Fortunately, after I left Cambridge, Nash’s place as more than a creative sounding board was filled at Berkeley by my colleague Stanley Cavell. That Cavell, a philosopher mainly concerned with ethics and aesthetics, had reached conclusions so closely consonant with mine was always a source of stimulation and encouragement to me. Moreover, he was also the one person to whom I could present my thoughts in unfinished sentences. That mode of communication proved that he understood me well enough to show me ways to break through, or go around, several major barriers I encountered while preparing the first manuscript.
After the first draft of the first edition had been prepared, several other friends helped me revise it. The others will forgive me, I hope, if I name here only the four whose roles were the most wholehearted and decisive: I am especially grateful to Paul K. Feyerabend of Berkeley, Ernest Nagel of Columbia, H. Pierre Noyes of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, and my student John L. Heilbron, who gave me much help in preparing the final version for publication. Their objections and suggestions were of great assistance, but I am not certain that they, or the others listed above, would fully agree with what is written in this book.
(I suspect that they would not agree entirely.)
Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to my parents, my wife, and my children, though in a sense different from that described above. In ways I never even realized, they too gave me something still more important. That is to say, they encouraged me to continue my work and, further, to devote myself to it. Anyone who has struggled with a project such as this research of mine will know how great a price one’s family must pay. I do not really know how to thank them.
February 1962
Berkeley, California
T.S.K.
“Notes”
1) Among those that had an especially great influence were Alexandre Koyré, Etudes Galileennes (3 vols., Paris, 1939); Emil Meyerson, Identity and Reality, trans. Kate Loewenberg (New York, 1930); Hélène Metzger, Les doctrines chimiques en France du debut du XVIII siecle (Paris, 1923), Newton, Stahl, Boerhaave et al doctrine chimique (Paris, 1930); and Annelies Maier, Kie Vorlaufer Galileis im 14.Jahrhundert (“Student zur Naturphilosophie der Spatscholastik”; Rome, 1949).
2) Since concepts and processes that also appear directly in the history of science were expressed here, two of Piaget’s studies were especially valuable: The Child`s Conception of Casuality, trans. Marjorie Gabin (London, 1930), and Les notions de mouvement et de vitesse chez l`enfant (Paris, 1946). 3) Whorf’s papers were subsequently collected by John B. Carroll in Language, Thought, and Reality—Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (New York, 1956). Quine set forth his views in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” printed in his From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 20__46.