Kuhn on Revolutions
Political history and scientific history
The age of revolutions
• The scientific revolution runs, depending on
whose account you buy, from the mid-sixteenth
century (Copernicus) to the mid-nineteenth
century (Darwin).
• During that same period, there was a
fundamental re-thinking of political authority and
its grounds (think of Hobbes)
• There were also a few revolutions, including the
English revolution, the American Revolution and
the French revolution.
Political revolutions
• In a political revolution, social institutions go through a
dramatic transition. Some simply end, others are reconceived and ‘re-purposed’.
• Furthermore, the goals and values that these institutions
are justified in terms of are also reconceived.
• It’s rare for the defenders of the ancien regime to view the
result as progress. UE Loyalists left the United States after
the revolution; the French revolution indulged in the Terror,
beginning with persecution of those associated with the
most resented practices of the French state (e.g. tax
farmers) and winding up with the use of execution as a part
of the struggle for power in the new state; royalists and
Catholics fought Cromwell’s harsh Protestant state
(consider priest-holes & other signs of the underground).
A suspicion
• My suspicion is that this is the background model Kuhn
brought to his account of scientific revolutions.
• The implications are obvious enough– a revolution cannot
occur until there actually is state (=paradigm); a crisis of
political authority must arise before a revolution can occur;
it’s not clear that revolutions are progressive, because
central ideas about legitimate authority and the purpose of
the state are contested and changed by revolutions. The
language of political thought is transformed in the process.
Some problems may be solved along the way, but other
problems or values may be simply set aside.
• Mutatis mutandis, Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions
includes all these features.
A few Remarks
• This suspicion is reinforced by the
observations GS makes in 6.2, where he points
out that many episodes we think of as
‘revolutionary’ in science don’t show these
features. Copernicus was not responding to a
crisis, and neither, it seems, was Darwin. No
crisis seems to be involved in the emergence
of modern genetics around 1900 (De Vries,
Bateson et al.) either.
The details of Kuhn’s Account
• During normal science we have a strongly constrained,
progressive enterprise. Which problems count, what a
good solution to them should look like, even how to go
about seeking a solution are all widely agreed on.
• A crisis develops when problems that are seen as
important resist solution and (for various reasons,
sometimes very convincing ones) it begins to appear
that no solution is possible.
• A revolution occurs when a new paradigm emerges
that seems to solve (some of) the problems that
confronted the former paradigm, and then goes on to
replace the old paradigm altogether.
The Relativism Thing, 1
• Relativism is tempting here because of the strong emphasis
Kuhn puts on the shift of values involved in a revolution (in
Ch.X Kuhn even declares, in a flight of rhetorical excess,
that post-revolution scientists are working in a different
world than pre-revolution scientists.
• A revolution develops only when the old paradigm has
‘dead-ended’; only a kind of disorderly process can resolve
this kind of situation, since the constraints we’ve been
working under have to be set aside and it’s not possible in
advance to specify which constraints will ultimately go and
which may stay. It’s all up in the air.
• But Kuhn does say that there is continuity – that some
features of theories count in their favour before and after
the revolution: we’re still doing science, after all!
Incommensurability
• Barriers to translation
– This is a bit weak, since many scientists show a pretty
good capacity to become ‘bilingual’ and move back
and forth between competing accounts/ paradigms.
• Different standards of evidence and argument.
– Detailed standards are what vary here.
– The choice between paradigms is unclear except in
the light of standards that are in dispute.
– Examples: Mechanism vs. gravity, biometricians vs.
the mechanisms of Mendelian genetics.
Relativism 2
• Kuhn recognizes increasing ‘problem solving
power’, as an example (maybe the most
important one) of continuity in standards, relative
to which the course of science as a whole can be
seen as progressive.
• Kuhn’s explanation of progress has two sides:
– The relativistic side (of course it’s progress– it led up
to our present views, after all…).
– The objective side (efficiency and problem solving
power of later paradigms).
– Can we reconcile these? Reculer pour mieux sauter?
The problem of truth
• A popular, simplistic view of scientific progress involves the
accumulation of truths over time.
• This view is often abused by those who want to cast doubt on
science (e.g. by criticizing evolutionary theory because Darwin got
some things wrong).
• The idea of progress is easy when framed this way– but it’s also
clearly inapplicable to the history of science.
• If we think of physics as our model, and regard fundamental shifts
in theory (from classical to quantum, from ‘plum pudding’ to
nuclear atoms, from particles to strings) as completely shifting our
description of everything, then the notion that we are progressing
towards a true theory seems dubious– the pessimistic induction is
almost irresistible, since there’s no sign that we are really
converging towards a single basic view of what there is in physics.