"Notes"
1) What first led me to prepare this postscript was the suggestion of Dr. Nakayama Shigeru of the University of Tokyo, once my student and long my friend, that a postscript be added to the Japanese translation of this book. I am grateful for his idea, for his patience in awaiting its fruition, and also for allowing this postscript to be included in the English edition.
2) In this revised edition I have not attempted a systematic rewriting, and, apart from correcting a few misprints, have confined myself to revising only two passages in which I could identify errors. One of these is the section on pp.
50-58 explaining the role of Newton’s Principia in the development of eighteenth-century mechanics. The other is the discussion of responses to crisis on pp. 129__130.
3) Further evidence will appear in two essays I have recently written: “Reflection on My Critics,” in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge, 1970); “Second Thoughts on Paradigms,” in Frederick Suppe (ed.), The Structure of Scientific Theories (Urbana, Ill., 1970 or 1971). Hereafter, the first of the above essays will be abbreviated as “Reflections,” and the book in which it appears as Growth of Knowledge. The second essay will be referred to as “Second Thoughts.”
4) For especially persuasive criticisms of my original proposal of paradigms, see Margaret Masterman, “The Nature of a Paradigm,” in Growth of Knowledge; Dudley Shapere, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Philosophical Review, LXXIII (1964), 383-94.
5) W. O. Hagstrom, The Scientific Community (New York, 1965), chaps. iv and v; D. J. Price and D. de B. Beaver, “Collaboration in an Invisible College,” American Psychologist, XXI (1996), 1011-18; Diana Crane, “Social Structure in a Group of Scientists: A Test of the ‘Invisible College’ Hypothesis,” American Sociological Review, XXXIV (1969), 335-52; N. N. Mullins, Social Networks among Biological Scientists (Ph. D. diss., Harvard University, 1966), and “The Micro-Structure of an Invisible College: The Phage Group” (a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association held in Boston in 1968).
6) Eugene Garfield, The Use of Citation Data in Writing the History of Science (Philadelphia: Institute of Scientific Information, 1964); M. M. Kessler, “Comparison of the Results of Bibliographic Coupling and Analytic Subject Indexing,” American Documentation, XVI (1965), 510-15.
7) Masterman, op. cit.
8) For important parts of this episode, see T. M. Brown, “The Electric Current in Early Nineteenth-Century French Physics,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, I (1969), 61-103, and Morton Schagrin, “Resistance to Ohm’s Law,” American Journal of Physics, XXI (1963), 536-47.
9) See especially Dudley Shapere, “Meaning and Scientific Change,” in Mind and Cosmos: Essays in Contemporary Science and Philosophy, The University of Pittsburgh Series in the Philosophy of Science, III (Pittsburgh, 1966), 41-85; Israel Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity (New York, 1967); the essays of Sir Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos in Growth of Knowledge.
10) See the discussion at the beginning of Section XII.
11) For this example, see Rene Dugas, A History of Mechanics, trans.
J. R. Maddox (Neuchatel, 1955), pp. 135-36, 186-93, and Daniel Bernoulli, Hydrodynamica, sive de viribus et motibus fluidorum, commentarii opus academicum (Strasbourg, 1738), Sec. iii. On the extent to which mechanics developed throughout the eighteenth century by modeling problem-solutions on others, see Clifford Truesdell, “Reactions of Late Baroque Mechanics to Success, Conjecture, Error, and Failure in Newton’s Principia,” Texas Quarterly, X (1967), 238-58.
12) Material on this subject is contained in “Second Thoughts.”
13) If all laws were like Newton’s laws and all rules like the Ten Commandments, there would be no need to make this point clear. In that case, the phrase “breaking a law” would be nonsense, and the rejection of rules would not seem to imply a process not governed by laws. Unfortunately, traffic laws and many similar laws can be broken, so this issue easily gives rise to confusion.
14) For readers of “Second Thoughts,” the following background story may be helpful.
The possibility of immediately recognizing the components of natural kinds depends on whether, behind the process of neural processing, there exists an empty perceptual space between the kinds one is trying to distinguish. If, for example, there is a perceived continuum among waterfowl ranging from geese to swans, we would have to introduce special criteria in order to distinguish them. If a similar point holds for unobservable entities as well, then, according to the case, this may be so even without a set of rules based on a few criteria that vary considerably. Such a point presents what may be an inevitable consequence of a still more important probability. Theoretical entities can be eliminated from the ontology of a theory by substitution. But without such rules, these entities cannot be eliminated. At the next stage, the theory requires the existence of such entities.
15) For the accompanying main point, see Sections v and vi of “Reflections.”
16) Note 9) and Stephen Toulmin’s essay in Growth of Knowledge.
17) Most of the aspects related to translation are contained in what has already become a classic source, W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., and New York, 1960), chapters i and ii. Quine, however, seems to assume that two people who receive the same stimulus must have the same sensation. Thus he has little to say about the extent to which the translator must be able to describe the world to which the language he is translating applies. See E. A. Nida, “Linguistics and Ethnology in Translation Problems,” in Del Hymes (ed.), Language and Culture in Society (New York, 1964), pp.
790-97.
18) Shapere, “Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” and Popper in Growth of Knowledge.
19) Among various examples is P. K. Feyerabend’s paper in Growth of Knowledge.
20) Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (N.Y., 1969), chap. i.
21) On this point, as well as for a more extended discussion of what is so special about science, see T. S. Kuhn, “Comment (On the Relation of Science and Art),” Comparative Studies in Philosophy and History, XI (1969), 403-12.
Translator’s Commentary
I
Among the currents of modern thought in the twentieth century, it is no exaggeration to say that Thomas S. Kuhn’s (1922-) view of science is one of the ideas exerting the most profound influence across almost every field. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which contains his thesis on paradigms, became the object of both enthusiastic praise and criticism upon the publication of its first edition in 1962, thereby setting off a “Kuhn revolution” across a wide range of domains. His theory of scientific change and development provoked especially serious debate in the philosophy of science, and its influence extended beyond the natural sciences to have an even more profound impact on the social sciences.
What was the background against which Kuhn’s theory came to acquire its basic framework?
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1922, Kuhn graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1943 with a major in physics. After working for two years at the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), he returned to the physics department of his alma mater’s graduate school and pursued his degree with the support of a fellowship (NRC). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
As he recounts autobiographically in the preface, he began to take a deep interest in the historical aspects of science while assisting with an introductory natural science course for non-science students, established by James Conant, the president of his alma mater, who was both a chemist and deeply versed in the history of science. Kuhn’s interest in the history of science led, through his time as a Harvard University junior fellow in 1948 and then as an instructor and assistant professor in Harvard’s general education program and in the history of science in 1951, to a profound understanding of revolutionary changes in scientific thought. Thus, over the course of more than ten years of wide-ranging reading and discussion in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and sociology, his theory of scientific revolutions gradually took shape.
Kuhn, whose scholarly abilities came to be widely recognized through the achievement of The Copernican Revolution, moved to the University of Berkeley in 1956 and took the lead in establishing a program in the history of science.
Two years later, while living among social scientists at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Kuhn came to devise the concept of the paradigm. At that time, he was struck by the frequent open disputes among social scientists over the nature of the subjects and methods of their field, and he came to recognize the difference between this and the relative scarcity of such disputes over fundamental issues in the scientific activities of natural scientists as the role of paradigms in scientific research.
A paradigm is a word meaning “exemplar,” as used in language learning.
In one respect, the introduction of this term into the theory of the development of scientific knowledge shows the influence of linguistics. According to Kuhn’s view, what students acquire in scientific education is not so much definitions of scientific concepts, which commonly give rise to controversy, as standard methods for solving examples in which the terms are used. By focusing on the actual character of science, in which professional scientific research is carried out on this basis, scientific activity came to be compared to the process by which students learning a language derive various transformations from standard forms; this gave rise to “the emergence of Kuhn’s paradigm.” The concept of the paradigm that occurred to him in this way became an indispensable basic element in his writing of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and his ideas could accordingly be set down in an essay.
II
Kuhn’s view of science, by placing its central emphasis on the revolutionary character of the change and development of scientific knowledge, shook to its roots the conventional inductivist view of science, which held that scientific progress proceeds cumulatively. According to his model of development, a scientific revolution refers to non-cumulative episodes of change in which one paradigm is wholly or partially replaced.
And if science changes through revolutions, there must be stable periods of activity normally carried out by scientists between such revolutions; this he defines as normal science. Accordingly, a scientific revolution is a phenomenon that occurs when a given normal science collapses after encountering a crisis caused by the frequent appearance of serious anomalies, and its result is a new normal science. Normal science, as the typical form of scholarly activity in a scientific community, is characterized by its dependence on a paradigm.
Then, in Kuhn’s theory,
what is a paradigm? In fact, it is almost impossible to specify the essence of a paradigm clearly and define it perfectly. It can only be described in terms of its various components.
Concretely, the basic theories, laws, concepts, and knowledge of a given scientific field constitute its elements, and since students of science learn a paradigm from actual problem-solving examples, such examples also become its elements. The standard methods of applying fundamental laws, as well as the experimental techniques and apparatuses needed to relate laws to natural phenomena, are also included among the components of a paradigm. Moreover, metaphysical principles that indicate the direction of regular research also constitute basic elements of a paradigm, so that the values of the field—for example, its emphasis on the accuracy, simplicity, and systematicity of theories—as well as the shared concepts and customs of the scientific community are included in the paradigm.
Because a paradigm is thus a concept difficult to define,
students of science do not learn it from codified rules, but come to grasp it tacitly in the course of their education. In particular, in the educational process, they come to grasp it tacitly in the process of scientific research.
In particular, in the educational process, they also become aware of the values of the scientific community of that field in evaluating the results of scientific research. Therefore, in order to understand the nature of paradigms and normal science, an understanding of the scientific community is required, and in Kuhn’s theory of scientific knowledge, sociological consideration of the scientific community comes to play an important role. In normal science, critical questions about the paradigm itself—for example, discussions concerning whether the basic theory holds—are not raised. The emergence of normal science indicates that the field has reached a mature stage, while the absence of a paradigm indicates a pre-scientific stage. From this perspective, controversy arises over whether the various fields of modern social science have in fact attained the status of science.
According to Kuhn’s analysis, scientists
settle within a paradigm and engage, for the most part, in three types of research activity. First is the factual investigation, within the framework of the paradigm, of the nature of phenomena in the natural world; second is the work of comparing and explaining the results predicted from basic theories with facts directly observed; and third is the work of revising, supplementing, and clarifying the paradigm in a direction that increases the degree of agreement between prediction and fact.
Normal science is likened to puzzle-solving. What the two have in common is that those solving them know that a definite answer exists and have mastered the rules and guidelines necessary to obtain the solution. In regular research, when results are obtained that conflict with the basic theory of the paradigm, it is customary for the scientist’s competence, rather than the validity of the theory, to be called into question. A scientist who hastily judges that there is a problem with the paradigm becomes like a carpenter who “blames his tools.”
However, when anomalies that the scientific community can no longer explain,
and that contradict the basic theory, accumulate, normal science encounters a crisis, and the response changes the character of scientific research. As activities and judgments based on the existing paradigm are called into question, new theoretical systems eventually appear, and the scientific community ultimately comes to agree upon a new paradigm.
At this time, a large-scale
readjustment in research methods and in the perspective from which phenomena are perceived is involved, and the conceptual system also undergoes a process of reconstruction. Kuhn calls this a scientific revolution. Since the scientist views some aspect of the natural world through the paradigm of the field to which he belongs, a new paradigm means a conversion to a new worldview; thus, through a scientific revolution that rebuilds the field upon a new foundation, knowledge undergoes change. Paradigms in competition with one another possess incommensurability, meaning that they cannot be compared on the same standard by logical criteria. To accept a theoretical system means to believe in the entire paradigm, including its concepts, laws, and assumptions; therefore, one cannot separate them out for comparison or evaluate the old by means of the new system.
And because competing paradigms presuppose different criteria, it is difficult to expect arguments to be persuasive. In connection with this point, Kuhn likens scientific revolutions to political revolutions: just as the purpose of a political revolution is to reform political institutions by destroying existing institutions, making reliance on politics impossible, so in a scientific revolution the choice between competing paradigms is a choice between incompatible ways of life and is of a character that cannot be logically persuaded. Therefore, seeing that this choice may vary according to personal and subjective reasons—depending on which factors the scientist gives priority to, such as the simplicity of the theoretical system, social need, or problem-solving ability—Kuhn came to compare such a transition to a gestalt switch or to religious conversion.
III
Kuhn’s view of science caused the greatest stir in the field of philosophy. At the time his theory was published, attempts were already being made within the philosophy of science to solve problems that had been raised concerning logical positivism and analytical philosophy of science. Within such a movement, the view had emerged that, in the epistemological understanding of scientific theories, it was inevitable to move away from the conventional static and ahistorical consideration of the relationship between the content of a theory and phenomena and toward a dynamic and practical approach encompassing the discovery, transformation, and acceptance of theories. For this reason, philosophers of science could not help but take an enormous interest in Kuhn’s theory. Considering the heated criticism and the background of the theory, the main cause of these controversies, to borrow Kuhn’s terminology, seems to be that the two camps adhered to different paradigms.
Kuhn’s theory first presents an empirically and socially valid explanation of how scientific activity is carried out historically and in practice, and then draws normative conclusions. By contrast, the critical forces on the philosophical side, by positing not the development of science in reality but the development of science in a sense rationally reconstructed according to norms, strongly demanded a rigorous and explicit explanation from an analytical and logical-positivist perspective while disregarding empirical grounds. As long as the matter is viewed from these two contrasting perspectives, conflict seems inevitable.
Meanwhile, Kuhn’s theory aroused deep sympathy among historians of science, sociologists of science, and scientists.
This was because the characteristics they had experienced in ordinary scientific activity were concretely systematized by Kuhn, and Kuhn’s basic concepts became useful tools for historical understanding and explanation of science.
And it was because a starting point was provided for sociological research on the structure, norms, and institutions of scientific communities.
The response to Kuhn’s theory was even more enthusiastic in fields outside the natural sciences. The original idea in his theory concerning revolutionary discontinuity had been inspired by the histories of politics, culture, music, art, and the like; now Kuhn’s theory of development returned to those fields and came to function as a model for changes in knowledge. Kuhn himself, in connection with such applications, pointed out the fundamental difference that, unlike science, other fields rarely agree upon a single paradigm and carry out detailed puzzle-solving activities without criticism.
In addition to "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," Kuhn’s other works include "The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought" (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957) and "The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). His coedited works include T. S. Kuhn, J. L. Heilbron, P. Forman, eds., "Sources for the History of Quantum Physics" (Philadelphia, Pa.: American Philosophical Society, 1967), and T. S. Kuhn, Alan L. Porter, eds., "Science, Technology, and National Policy" (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), among others.
IV
Critics have pointed out that Kuhn’s theory is still in the process of evolution.
First of all, in response to the criticism that the meaning of paradigm was so ambiguous that, as analyzed by the linguist Margaret Masterman, it was used in no fewer than twenty-two different senses, Kuhn supplemented his theory in the postscript to the expanded 1970 edition by newly proposing the concept of a disciplinary matrix. Regardless of its definition, however, the term paradigm has become extremely familiar and widely used. In Kuhn’s theory, the incommensurability of different paradigms when compared by the same standards, as well as the explanation of how one chooses between them, have also been particularly frequent targets of attack. Kuhn—professor of the history and philosophy of science at Princeton University from 1964, and professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT from 1979—has, as befits one of the representative thinkers of the modern age, continued to present highly persuasive counterarguments, but in terms of the rigor of logical analysis, it still does not appear that complete agreement has been reached.
Nevertheless, such weaknesses cannot diminish the importance of Kuhn’s theory.
This is because of an essential ambiguity inherent in the nature of science and scientific activity: they themselves contain not only explicit elements but also tacit elements that do not conform to logic. We should note that if one takes the extreme position of excluding such elements from consideration simply because they cannot be rigorously analyzed, thereby slighting the historical and social aspects of scientific change, one is ultimately left with no choice but to abandon a true understanding of the nature of science.
In this context, perhaps one of the revolutionary conclusions presented by Kuhn’s "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is that science, too, changes in ways similar to other human activities, and that the objective, logical, empirical, and value-neutral characteristics ordinarily regarded as distinctive features of science, while indeed present to a greater degree than in other fields, are not essentially so very different—a truth he may be said to have demonstrated empirically.
In 1987, as he turns sixty-five, Kuhn is once again devoting himself to the writing of a new book.
Since, in the preface to "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," he stated that he had been constrained by limitations of space in developing his discussion of the development and transformation of scientific knowledge, his forthcoming new book is drawing anticipation, for it is expected both to show the evolution of his thought and to bring the Kuhnian revolution to completion.