Kuhn: A
Wittgenstein of the sciences?
Is
the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to be found, ‘in disguise’, in Kuhn’s
philosophy of the sciences?
Kuhn’s
primary reputation is: as the great
leveller, reducing natural science to the level of all other disciplines. And,
in other words: as the great relativist, holding that whatever view of the
world works for a given discipline at a given time is the truth.
Kuhn
has certainly gone down in circles sociologistic and post-modernistic -- in
fact, in most of the culture, for his would-be opponents in (the popularization
of) the natural sciences themselves have much the same image of him -- in
roughly this way.[1] And so, very often, has Wittgenstein; such that
it might well seem that Kuhn is indeed a Wittgenstein of the sciences.
My
argument in this paper is that there is at least some good reason to hold --
and I shall explore some of that reason -- that my title justly describes Kuhn
... but NOT for the reason so far sketched.
I
think that Kuhn is a very different figure from the almost-cartoon-character
that his ‘foes’ and ‘fans’ depict.[2] I have
argued this in detail in my book, Kuhn.[3] That book seeks to be a sympathetic account of Kuhn, and one written with distinctively
Wittgensteinian sensibilities. I try to stay away from the attribution to Kuhn
of the kind of revisionist and pretty extreme philosophical views mentioned
above -- or, indeed, of any views whatsoever.
In
my understanding, Kuhn’s fundamental task was simply to understand -- or
rather, to find a mode of presentation that would ultimately avoid
misunderstanding -- the nature of science, including of course of scientific
change, both minor and major. He wanted, if you like, to return us to science,
leaving science as it is.[4] (Though science as we are returned to it is
probably not science as we ever succeeded in seeing it, before reading Kuhn.)
The
main thing I wish to accomplish in the present paper is to address what to many
readers has appeared to be the biggest problem
with the attribution to Kuhn of a modest, properly ‘Wittgensteinian’,
approach, of a leaving of science ‘as it is’, of a refraining from substantive
metaphysical or even epistemological committments. That big problem is the
moment in The Structure[5] when Kuhn has appeared most strongly to violate
such a counsel of modesty: namely, in his discussion of ‘world changes’. To
many of his readers, in talking of the world changing when science changes --
in ‘scientific revolution’ -- Kuhn has fallen into some kind of metaphysical
relativism, or pluralistic idealism.
Most
of what I am going to do in the below is in fact very elementary. I am simply
going to read some of the most troubling passages in Section X of The Structure, “Revolutions as changes
of world view” (The reader may find it helpful to have the book open in front
of them, at the relevant page(s).), and see if they can’t be understood in the
modest way I have suggested, and not as committing Kuhn to some form of
metaphysical relativism or such like.
Let
us begin with pp.110-111 of The Structure.
This is where Kuhn first starts to say things that have sounded very strange to
many:
“I have so far argued only that
paradigms are constitutive of science. Now I wish to display a sense in which they are constitutive of nature as well.”
(Emphasis added)
Note what Kuhn does not say here. He does not say,
for instance, “Now I wish to explain that paradigms constitute nature, as
well.” He says he wishes to get at a
sense in which paradigms may be said to constitute nature. And he wishes
not to set that sense in stone, but to display
it to his readers, so that it does not get missed.
I
think that if we fail to attend to the niceties of Kuhn’s linguistic
expression, then that will be in the end only to our own disadvantage. When
read carefully, Kuhn’s aim here already sounds more modest than has usually
been allowed.
Kuhn
goes on:
“Examining the record of past
research from the vantage of contemporary historiography, the historian of
science may be tempted to exclaim
that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.” (Emphasis
added)
When a temptation comes along -- for instance,
when one is offered illegal drugs -- one doesn’t necessarily immediately give
right in. (And even if one does, one may come to regret doing so before too
long!) In other words: Kuhn is NOT
simply urging us here to exclaim that the world changes, when paradigms change.
Again, he does not simply write, “When paradigms change, the world changes with
them.” [6] That is what I want to make crystal clear, here:
That Kuhn is not himself in the business of saying, “Scientific revolution:
therefore world change!”
(Indeed,
let us note the title of this (in-)famous Section of this (in-)famous book:
‘Revolutions as changes of world view’ (emphases added). This title
speaks only of world view change, not
yet of world change. Moreover, Kuhn
urges one to consider revolutions as changes
of world view. He suggests, that is that there will be profit in doing so; he
doesn’t suggest that one must see
revolutions under this aspect, that that is the
truth about them, or anything of that kind.)
Further
down the opening paragraph of this Section, we find the following passage. And
see for yourself how different it sounds, with the emphases falling where I
have indicated, from the way Kuhn is usually heard, or assumed to be:
“It is...as if the professional community had suddenly been transported to
another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are
joined by unfamiliar ones as well. Of
course, nothing of quite that sort does occur: there is no geographical
transplantation; outside the laboratory
everyday affairs usually continue as before.”
No necessity of any world change at all to actually occur, then. Kuhn is speaking
almost exclusively of something relevant to scientists, to small professional
communities:
“[P]aradigm-changes do cause scientists to see the world of their research-engagement
differently. In so far as their only recourse to that world is through what
they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a
different world.”
Scientists. Not (the rest of) us.
And, most crucially of all, the formulation,
“...we may want to say...”. This, at the end of this influential opening
paragraph of Section X, echoes the opening of the paragraph, which we looked at
above: “...the historian of science may to tempted to exclaim...”.That we may
want to say something does not entail that we should say it. And it strongly
suggests that we should be wary about the consequences of saying it, if we
choose to do so.
In
other words, Kuhn is warning us -- by his carefully chosen terminology, by his
repeated indications that there is something potentially dangerous in these
‘temptations’ and ‘wants’ that we are subject to -- that it is easy for
philosophers to find themselves speaking nonsense. And wouldn’t it certainly
seem like nonsense, to speak (e.g.) of paradigms as constitutive of nature?
One
is reminded of Wittgenstein’s remark, “Don’t
for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay
attention to your nonsense.” [7] Some have thought Wittgenstein
pathologically anxious to avoid speaking nonsense himself, and all too keen to
dole out the critical epithet, “Nonsense!” to others. This is mistaken; ‘nonsense’
is indeed a very important term of criticism, for Wittgenstein,[8] but the point is not to pathologically avoid
speaking any, but to be aware of when anyone (including oneself) is apparently
speaking nonsense, and of why they want to.
Kuhn,
like Wittgenstein, when the philosophical stakes are highest, engages our temptation to mire ourselves
in nonsense. He doesn’t shy away from it.[9] Kuhn wants one not to be afraid even of speaking
nonsense, for the sake of better understanding the nature of science; but he
urges that one had better be aware of just what one is doing at every stage.
One can see that right-minded urge throughout
his writing.
Let
us go further in exploring this parallel with Wittgenstein, who felt that, to
reach clarity, to cure ourselves, to take part in an effective philosophical
therapy, it was necessary to go -- absolutely self-awarely, as Kuhn does --
through the crucible, the test, of investigating one’s own variegated
inclinations to speak nonsense (e.g. to feel that there is something right in
metaphysical Realism, and/or in Kantianism, and/or in Idealism, etc.).
Wittgenstein pursued this strategy in radically different ways -- his tactics in the Tractatus
bear little resemblance to those employed in Philosophical Investigations -- but the overall strategy, the
overarching aim, was the same
throughout.[10] Namely, to get the reader to overcome their own
metaphysical predilections by means of getting oneself to see just what those
predilections are (and how radically unclear they are).
I
think that Kuhn, in terrain where it is very hard to say anything useful -- in
the vicinity of fundamental conceptual change in science -- is doing what
Wittgenstein did in similarly difficult terrain -- in the philosophy of
psychology, of maths, etc. -- namely, helping us to have a clearer view by
taking a necessary journey through
nonsense.
We
may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a
different world. If we do say that, we will be saying something very strange
indeed. But understanding why we want to say it, and what the consequences of
saying it are, may at least give us some insight into what is going on in (say)
the Chemical Revolution (or at least in
the historiography etc. of the Chemical Revolution [11] ).
Let
us move on to another moment where the ‘world changes’ idea rears its head, and
see if the same considerations can apply. On p.118, we find the following:
“[A]s a result of discovering
oxygen, Lavoisier saw nature differently. And in the absence of some recourse
to that hypothetical fixed nature that he ‘saw differently’, the principle of
economy will urge us to say that
after discovering oxygen Lavoisier worked
in a different world.” (Emphases added)
Once again, what we feel an urge to say is not simply something we should say, as though it
were unproblematic, and true. Kuhn is drawing attention to the potentially
nonsensical nature of his own urgings, just as much as he is drawing attention
to the uselessness (if one wants to avoid misunderstanding how science actually
works) of metaphysical realist desires to speak of the fixed nature that is
there throughout all of scientific work.
And
so, to the most famous and tricky passages of them all. On p.120, Kuhn asks,
“Is there any legitimate sense in
which we can say that [Galileo and Aristotle, Lavoisier and Priestley] pursued
their research in different worlds?” (Emphasis added) Hardly a ringing claim; this question’s
phrasing signals explicit awareness that saying so would be odd indeed.
In
other words, Kuhn is agreeing with us that to think that we should resist using
the expression, ‘different worlds’, is quite reasonable. He goes on, however,
to argue that such resistance has led us into a dead end in the philosophy of
science, and indeed in a number of related fields (he mentions (on p.121) also
“psychology [the gestalt school], linguistics [Whorf], and even art history
[Gombrich]”. We may have to risk using apparently extreme phrases, nonsensical
sentences, if we are to avoid the aridity and irrelevance of most existing
thought about science. In order to accomplish the modest task of putting
ourselves in a better position to see the natural sciences as they are and
were, we may have (self-awarely) to say some immodest-sounding things.
How
then does Kuhn answer his own question? On p.121, he writes:
“I am...acutely aware of the difficulties created by saying that when
Aristotle and Galileo looked at swinging stones, the first saw constrained
fall, the second a pendulum. The same
difficulties are presented in an even
more fundamental form by the opening sentences of this [S]ection: though
the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward
works in a different world. Nevertheless, I am convinced that we must learn to make sense of statements that
at least resemble these.” (Emphases
added)
Kuhn is utterly aware of the trouble one can
court, the absurdities of idealism for instance, when one talks this way.
Nevertheless, he urges one to take the risk. Specifically, he suggests that we
ought to find a sense for these words, or at least words somewhat like them. We
ought to learn how to make sense of these words, words that as they stand do not make sense.
What
could be clearer? Kuhn is deliberately speaking nonsense here, when he makes
paradoxical statements such as that the scientist works in a different world
after a paradigm-shift, even though the world has (of course) not changed. He cannot be accused of lapsing into nonsense. He quite
deliberately speaks it.[12]
One
way of getting Kuhn out of this ‘predicament’ that he has voluntarily entered into would be favoured, perhaps by
Hoyningen-Huene, and others who read Kuhn (as he himself perhaps became
increasingly inclined to do) through Kantian spectacles: namely, to find a way
of apparently making sense of Kuhn’s strangest statements without having to
alter in any significant way our traditional (‘received’) image of science. For
example, we might read the crucial sentence above as follows: ‘Though the noumenal world does not change with a
change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different phenomenal world.’ This quasi-Kantian
‘disambiguation’ of “world” perhaps cleans things up somewhat.[13]
This
move is helpful, to a degree. But we have already seen indications that Kuhn
wasn’t keen to speak of ‘the noumenal world’ at all, for good post-Kantian
philosophical reasons: primarily, that speaking of ‘the noumenal’ makes it
sound like we are not in nonsense, not in paradox, any more; yet surely we still are. How, for instance, can
there be any such thing as speaking of the unspeakable?
Kuhn
doesn’t use the quasi-Kantian formulation that I have suggested a ‘sympathetic’
reader like Hoyningen-Huene would perhaps urge on us. Kuhn puts down a bald,
seemingly-absurd sentence. He then
urges that, if we want to find an alternative to the epistemological views
which have come to a crisis In Logical Empiricism, in Falsificationism, etc.)
we should attempt over time to make some sense out of that sentence (or to put
some sense into it, even?).
Wittgenstein’s
methods, his tactics, hereabouts would of course look rather different. He
would highlight what we can learn from the way in which what we want or even
‘need’ to say herabouts dissolves on us. Kuhn looks to find, over time, a less
paradoxical way of saying what he wants to say; Wittgenstein would tend to make
it more paradoxical, more patently
nonsensical.
But
this difference in style and ‘method’, while not unimportant, does not
necessarily connote a signal difference in overall strategy, or philosophical
aim.[14] Like Wittgenstein, Kuhn wants to teach us
differences. Especially, the (deep) difference between a puzzle-solving move
and the full gravity of a major conceptual change, a difference which he thinks
science education and the theoreticians of and popularizers of science more or
less sytematically efface.
So
again, I think we can see Kuhn
hereabouts as a kind of therapeutic
thinker, a kind of Wittgenstein of
the sciences. (In any case, will now seek to explicate and justify this thought
somewhat further.)
I
hope that the above is already enough to show that even Kuhn’s apparently most
troubling writing is actually extraordinarily careful and selfaware, and does
not support outrageous theories or theses (which his ‘foes’ and ‘fans’ alike
have tended to attribute to him), and is at least reasonably compatible with
how a Wittgenstein might approach the philosophy of the sciences. Much as Winch
traffics in nonsense in some of what he says about the Azande, and Wittgenstein
traffics in nonsense in some of what he says about ‘the woodsellers’,[15] so Kuhn traffics in nonsense in what he says
about Aristotle & co. He ought to be praised for this, not buried for it.
The way to greater philosophical enlightenment lies in understanding what we
are saying and why, even when it feels uncomfortable, not in banning us from
saying certain things. Kuhn’s world changes discussion, in my view, is not an
unfortunate aberration, a ‘descent’ into unclarity or absurdity, but a mark of Kuhn’s true depth and greatness.
Let
us look now for comparitive purposes at a key (and particularly salient, for our present purposes) moment in
Wittgenstein of his looking at what is happening when one tries to get
enlightenment about one’s concepts, or
about those of others, who may be separated from us by a conceptual gulf (e.g.
by a scientific revolution?). For, although I have urged that Kuhn is not the
metaphysical relativist he is often take for, it remains the case that Kuhn can
and does intelligibly hold onto something modest and necessary and even
meaningful which one could perhaps (if one wished to) call conceptual
relativism, or (better) conceptual relativity. ‘Conceptual relativity’, first
off, in the sense of bringing out the deep difference (though not of course an absolute gulf, of
incommunicability) between (say) phlogistic and modern chemistry. We can see
better, I think, how this can be present (and correct) in Kuhn’s philosophy
when we see it in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, in the conceivability (and actuality)
of a sense of ‘concepts’ in which it is intelligible to speak of different
concepts -- and thus of ‘partial communication’ -- without falling into
semantic nonsense and/or self-refutation. The most crucial passage of all on
this in Wittgenstein himself, runs, in Philosophical
Investigations, as follows:[16]
“I am not saying: if such-and-such
facts of nature were different people would have different concepts (in the
sense of a hypothesis). But: if anyone believes that certain concepts are
absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not
realizing something that we realize -- then let him imagine certain very
general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the
formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to
him.
Compare
a concept with a style of painting. For is even our style of painting
arbitrary? Can we choose one at pleasure? (The Egyptian, for instance.)” (PI,
Part II, p.230; emphasis added)
‘Our’ style of painting -- or of writing, for
example of writing poetry, with the distinctive kinds of effects and ‘aspects’
that that has and yields -- is not arbitrary
-- and no more is our style of science, our
scientific sensibility. Kuhn can be seen, I am suggesting, as intelligibly
pointing to how different aspects have been seen and acted upon and realized at
different points in history in different fields. He is concerned that we will
do bad history and philosophy of science
if we take our concepts to be absolutely the correct ones.[17] (Or, indeed, even if we more ‘modestly’ take the
concepts of a future ‘finished science’ to be “absolutely the correct ones”.
Kuhn is contesting the very idea of some set of concepts being absolutely the
correct ones, whether or not we ourselves claim to be currently in possession
of them.)
In
a nutshell, Kuhn is interested in real
cases where the formation of concepts different from our’s has happened, has
been the case.
If
the connection I have drawn here is right, then Kuhn is for sure among other
things enriching Wittgenstein’s diet of examples, by discussing in detail real
examples, from the sciences, of what Wittgenstein has already indicated an
interest in, by means mostly of the (mostly) fictional examples which play such
an important role in his later work.
We
might even compare here Kuhn’s important paper on “A function for thought
experiments”. As I read that paper, Kuhn is trying to get rid of the prejudice
-- existing when we refuse to look, but only think -- that thought experiments cannot
possibly be part of science, and work, unless they are real (physical, etc.) experiments, not thought experiments. Thought experiments involve working upon one’s
assumptions, etc. . In this respect, there
is a parallel (though one I cannot investigate further in the present paper[18] ) to be drawn with Wittgenstein’s
‘thought-experiments’.
Like
my book, but even more so, this paper has been an experiment in reading Kuhn.
An attempt to see how far one can push out the boat of looking at Kuhn as a
genuinely Wittgensteinian writer, writing about an area where Wittgenstein
himself said little. My primary interest in this paper has been to go into some
of these affinities by means of trying to think Kuhn’s philosophical methods
and indeed style at some difficult
and crucial points in his work as alike to Wittgenstein’s own. The reader will
have to judge how far the experiment has been a success. But can I suggest that
that experiment is best pursued further, if one is so minded, by continuing to
look at (other moments in) Kuhn’s work, to see if it works there too. Insofar
as it does, insofar as one can find Kuhn to be writing in a philosophically
sophisticated and self-aware fashion, aware of the dangerousness, importance
and near-inevitability of writing nonsense when one thinks the philosophical
history of science in a way which is not tedious, timid or Whiggish, then I
think one must tend to concur with my own judgement: that Kuhn was the greatest
philosopher of science we have yet known, and one who was, if anyone has yet
been, something like a Wittgenstein of the sciences.[19]
Appendix:
Does Kuhn have a (new)
paradigm?
I think it is worth attaching a further
discussion, concerning Kuhn’s thinking applied to Kuhn’s own book. Because a
striking feature of The Structure,
and perhaps especially of some of the key discussions in its Section X, is its
interest in understanding itself as exemplifying his own theses. Kuhn is
interested, in other words, in the kind of change discussed above -- a learning
to make sense of certain items of nonsense, for instance -- as something like a
paradigm-shift.
And
we can add that the history of both the production and the reception of Kuhn’s
book does go some significant way toward
exemplifying his theses.[20]
We
might go so far as to say, as Arthur Danto has done, that the special feature
of Kuhn’s book is that it can account for its own production and effects,
including the resistance to it, in a manner that no previous philosophical
picture of science could do. All Popper
can say concerning the resistance to his own theory is that many philosophers
and others are too scared to be bold thinkers etc. -- but this is essentially an external fact to Popper’s
picture, a psychological happenstance. Whereas it is internal to Kuhn’s account
that there will be a great effort to maintain the prior paradigm in the face of
a revolutionary incursion. This effort will frequently in fact extend to the
revolutionaries themselves. Thus Kuhn emphasizes not only their frequent
reluctance to face the broader and ultimate consequences of their own
innovations, but even to recognise that their’s truly were major innovations,
and even to make those innovations in the first place. Thus Kuhn finds Planck,
for instance, to have been a much more reluctant revolutionary than has
traditionally been thought. According to Kuhn, Planck resisted strongly the
idea that he had discovered the quantum, especially around the crucial period
of 1906, and not only around and after 1912, when it became more generally
recognized among his peers that he was reluctant to come with them down the
revolutionary road he had begun the
construction of. And Kuhn famously quotes with apparent approval Planck’s own
telling remark that scientists relatively rarely manage to be converted to a
new paradigm: “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its
opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” [21]
The
difference is even starker when we shift from Popper to the Logical Positivists
-- when, that is, we compare Kuhn to the Vienna Circle on science; in
particular to Carl Hempel. Hempel’s attempt at producing a Confirmational logic
for science led to the desperate anomalies of his and Goodman’s paradoxes [22] -- but his own account of science has nothing to
say about why any of this should have happened. Whereas Kuhn can point to the
state of crisis that philosophers of science were gradually, reluctantly realizing
their ‘discipline’ was in; and to the revolution that ‘reluctantly’ ensued when
he displaced (NOT refuted/falsified!) the orthodox wisdom on the relevance of
hisory of science for philosophy of science, on the dubious utility of the
context of justification vs. context
of discovery principle, and so on.
There
is an obvious analogy with Freud here. Freud famously predicted that his views
would spawn various kinds of critical responses among his own followers and
enemies, responses of exactly the kind that his views would naturally predict
-- i.e. that his followers would have Oedipal reactions against him, that his
opponents would be working up (as well as through) their own resistances
because of wanting to repress the threatening aspects of Freudian thought, etc. . Again: Freud could account for
the emergence of his own views and (more importantly) of the forms of
opposition to them (and him) on the basis
of his own views, and this was in his time arguably an unprecedented
phenomenon in intellectual history. One can go so far as to say this: if
Freud’s views had not been fiercely resisted, this would have counted significantly against their validity. If Freud had not generated resistance, if his
views (and he) had not been repeatedly and variously rejected, then we would
have been well-placed and well-advised, according to his own lights, to reject
those views...
Of
course, this does not impress Popperians much -- they see in this mostly an
effort to explain away, psychologize, and ad-hominem-ize the legitimate
complaints they think can be made against Freud for his unfalsifiability; and
they see also one particular fake way of finding ‘confirming’ evidence for the
Freudian (or similarly, Jungian, or Adlerian etc.) theory -- for given the
extreme unlikelihood of the whole scientific community rolling over and
accepting Freud lock-stock-and-barrel, it is hardly a very dramatic and risky
prediction -- hardly a bold conjecture -- that one’s new paradigm will generate
resistance; and, one might add, it is hardly good ‘corroboration’ of one’s
theory when it does.
Kuhn
by contrast would of course not necessarily castigate a theory, or a paradigm,
merely for working to find evidence that will support it, or for resorting to ‘ad hoc’ hypotheses, etc. . But, more importantly in the
present context, Kuhn can explain his own emergence -- and the resistance to
his views (including even on his own
part...!) in a manner roughly after that of Freud. A ‘revolution’ in the
philosophy of science should be expected only at a time when there is some
perception emerging of anomaly or ‘monstrosity’; one should expect its fomentor
to have his/her feet very much in the old tradition, and not even to realize at
first the revolutionary effects of his/her own views;[23] there should be communication difficulties of a
major sort between the newly emergent paradigm and defenders of the old
verities... and so on. On this last point, of course, Kuhn made capital from
the problems which he -- on the one hand -- and the Falsificationists (and
those influenced by the Logical Empiricists) -- on the other -- had in debating
each other -- a point that must have infuriated his rationalist audience in the
discussions recorded in Lakatos and Musgrave’s ‘Criticism and the growth of
knowledge’, for example.[24] For Kuhn endeavoured to present the
“cross-purposes” which he discerned between himself and his critics as
‘confirming evidence’ for his picture, as itself a very interesting example of
the phenomenon of “partial communication”, “the talking-through-each-other that
regularly characterizes discourse between participants in incommensurable
points of view”.[25]
The
above, then, is an interpretation of / extension of Danto’s thought that there
is something splendid about a philosophy of science that can understand itself.[26] Kuhn’s view of scientific development can be reflexively applied -- we can productively see the philosophy of science as
experiencing something like a paradigm shift. In Martin Hollis’s words,
“[Kuhn’s] thesis is, in short, revolutionary.” [27]
But
let us turn now to consider certain ways in which Kuhn does not self-apply. For
there are also key respects in which ‘the Kuhnian revolution’ does not support Kuhn’s own picture. This
ought perhaps not to surprise us overly -- for whoever said that philosophy was
a science, a science which has for some time been at a normal science stage of
development? Well, of course, many philosophers have in fact tried to say that;
but their grounds for doing so are, I would claim, thin in the extreme.
The
attempt to render (for example) Analytic philosophy into something like a
paradigm, where there would be ongoing technical work on long-lasting problems,
was an influential feature of twentieth-century philosophy, but it suffered not
only from a pervasive failure to be actualized, but also along the way from
massive internal dispute about how (as well as whether) it could conceivably be
actualized.
For
example, no consensus has ever been achieved within Anglo-American philosophy
about whether philosophy should itself be a science-in/for-itself, or whether
it should instead simply be continuous with empirical science. ‘Classical’
Analytical philosophy sometimes advocated the first; those philosophers
sceptical of the Analytic vs. Synthetic
distinction have tended toward the second.[28] There is an intrinsic conflict, not a minor
dispute, between the two. (Arguably, the attempt to settle such disputes and to
generate a ‘paradigm’ out of Anglo-American philosophy has only resulted in the proliferation of schools of thought here;[29] and if there has ever been anything resembling a
paradigm as a consequence of the successes (say) of Oxford philosophy, it has come to have more versions the
more people have tried to specify it and achieve agreement upon it...)
The
Russellian Philosophy of Logical Atomism was perhaps the first Recent attempt
to achieve a paradigm in Anglo-American Philosophy. But Logical Positivism is
more famous in this capacity -- and the ambiguity just sketched was present
already within it. For while the
Positivists wished to pursue an agenda of unifed science -- Kuhn’s being one of
the very last (not surprisingly...) in the series entitled The Encyclopedia of Unified Science (Foundations of the Unity of
Science) -- they also had hopes of contributing to it primarily from their
armchairs. Their programme would eventually come publicly undone under the
assaults of (first) Quine’s questioning of the
Analytic vs. Synthetic
distinction, and Goodman’s questioning of the very possibility of developing a
Logic of Confirmation, and (second) Kuhn’s cogent undermining of their vision
of the nature of Positive Science.[30]
The
respects in which Kuhn’s picture does not effectively apply to its own
production and reception are respects which are quite comprehensible, once we
take fully into account that philosophy is surely most effectively understood
as to a very large extent not
intelligibly regarded as a science, but rather as being ‘pre-paradigmatic’ (to
use Kuhn’s potentially-misleading term.[31] ). Kuhn’s subject matter is essentially disciplines with (single) paradigms. And
philosophy (even of science) is not such a discipline. As I explain in detail
in my book, Kuhn, one needs to keep
in mind the (very limited) extent to which Kuhn’s views and observations ought
to be applied to the disciplines for which they were not specifically modelled
and on which they were not specifically based -- namely, the social sciences,
philosophy itself, and so on.[32] And again, for the limits of the extent to which
Kuhn’s position is or attempts to be a systematic constructive ‘theory of
science’.
This
is where I think Kuhn goes wrong. Unlike Wittgenstein, he hopes -- and these
hopes if anything grow with the years, with for instance his increasing
attraction to a ‘Darwinian’ picture of the growth of science -- to be able to
read his own work of part of a quasi-scientific change. He hopes to understand
in Kuhnian terms the need for his own ‘paradigm-shift’ in the philosophy of
science.
It
is actually this, not his
deliberately nonsensicalish talk of ‘world changes’, which should alarm us on
p.121 of The Structure. No-one
worries much about Kuhn’s talk there of ‘the traditional epistemological
paradigm’; but it is that talk, and not the talk of different worlds, which
is actually, in my view, the Achilles Heel of Section X of The Structure, and in a way thereby of Kuhn’s philosophy as a
whole.[33]
Very
many people want Philosophy of Science to involve a metaphysics, or think it
must. They hope to go one better than Science -- imagining Philospohy of
Science as a kind of Queens of the Sciences. They hope to be able then to tell
scientists how to behave, how to do science properly. This is a fantasy of a
normative Philosophy of Science -- an epistemological fantasy loosely based on
a metaphysical fantasy. Kuhn doesn’t buy into the metaphysical fantasy -- to
show how this can be truly said was a large part of the point of the body of
this paper. But Kuhn he has not escaped the epistemological fantasy. He does
not have a picture of how the Universe really is that he hopes to get to fall
out from his philosophical reflections on science (from his discussion of
‘world changes’, etc.); but, regrettably, he does hold onto some over-ambitious
expectations for the philosophy of science. Wrapped up in the cleverness of how
his philosophy can be read not as self-refuting but as self-supporting, he does
not break with the fantasy that what he is doing is itself something like science.
For
that reason, one cannot be as hard on his misreaders in the Sociology of
Scientific Knowledge (e.g. Barry Barnes) as one would like to be. And,
regrettably, the question-mark on the title of my paper must remain. Would that
Kuhn had followed Wittgenstein on the question of whether philosophy itself can
hope to be scientific (to have a paradigm), as much as he followed Wittgenstein
(whether by design or otherwise) on the questions of the nature of paradigms
(in natural science), and as I argued earlier, of the speaking of nonsense.
[1]
For detailed criticisms of the reading of Kuhn to be found among Kuhn’s
‘followers’ in the social sciences etc., consult my "On wanting to say:
"All we need is a paradigm"", in The Harvard Review of
Philosophy XI, Spring 2001.
[2]
I think the same of Wittgenstein. I think he is no Relativist, no Idealist (but
also no Realist), etc. See for instance
Investigations 402.
[3]
(Jointly written with Wes Sharrock), Oxford: Polity, 2002.
[4]
And my suggestion, therefore, is that Kuhn is practising ‘therapy’ by
presenting something to us in a way that engages our (including his own)
temptations to misunderstand it, and tries to work through them.
[5]
All references are to the Chicago English edition(s) of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
[6]
This has not stopped people claiming that just that is what Kuhn writes. An egregious example is to be found in Jerry
Gill’s book, Wittgenstein and metaphor (London: Humanities Press, 1996),
on p.136. Gill actually misquotes Kuhn so as to remove all his (Kuhn’s) care,
caution and qualification.
[7]
P.56, Culture and Value (ed. von Wright; Chicago: U. Chicago Pr., 1980).
[8]
My book, The New Wittgenstein (jointly edited with Alice Crary; London:
Routledge, 2000).
[9]
At least, this is true of Kuhn in The Structure (and not just in the examples I am writing on here. I think one
could run a similar argument, for instance, on Kuhn’s intriguing picture (see
especially Section II of The Structure) of pre-paradigmatic scientists
as undoubtedly scientists, even though the product of their labours was somehow
less than science...). Mostly regrettably, though understandably, Kuhn does
later become shier of speaking nonsense: having seen the horrendous
misunderstandings he was subject to at the hands of his ‘foes’ and ‘fans’
alike, and having in particular been calumnied by his philosophical ‘foes’ with
talking trash. Kuhn tried to avoid being so misunderstood and calumnied again,
and so backed away from some of the richest (and also, admittedly, riskiest)
moments in his oeuvre.
[10]
Detailed justification for this claim can be found in my (2000), especially in
the Introduction.
[11]
For here is an important point: Kuhn came later to doubt that the
‘gestalt-switch’ metaphor for scientific change applied very directly to the
scientists themselves, but he never gave up the thought that it applies to the
(good) historian of science. The
scales can fall from one’s eyes, almost literally, when one suddenly gets (e.g., Kuhn’s favourite e.g.) what strange kind of physicist Aristotle might
have been, if he was not a very bad or stupid physicist. Insofar as our
interest is in our own understanding of fundamental scientific change, this
reflexive understanding of how it is like seeing a different world remains of
great value, even if it risks
misleading us somewhat as to the actual experience the scientists of the time
had.
[12]
In this regard, Kuhn is like Heidegger as well as Wittgenstein. Carnap
notoriously criticises Heidegger for falling into metaphysical nonsense when he
(Heidegger)speaks of ‘the nothing itself noth-ing’. But Carnap’s criticism falls
flat in part just because it is hardly as if Heidegger does not know that this
(speaking nonsense) is precisely what he is -- deliberately -- doing. At the end of his life, a more
sophisticated Carnap was a great admirer of Kuhn’s book. Had he perhaps
rethought somewhat his own, troublesome attitude to the employment of nonsense
in philosophy?
[13]
Or perhaps it merely gets us deeper into nonsense, through appearing to provide the form of a straightforward solution to our
difficulties?
[14]
The reader who finds this remark implausible is directed to the close of Kuhn’s
“Reflections on my critics”, where his use of the idea of us being ill (when in
‘crisis’), and needing treatment (e.g. through ‘extraordinary science’ of the
kind practiced by Copernicus, Hertz, or Einstein), is strikingly similar to
Wittgenstein’s.
[15]
See for instance the discussions of Cerbone and Crary in my (2000).
[16]
In this paragraph and the one that follows, I draw on (and adapt) passages from
my “Understanding Kuhnian incommensurability: some analogies from
Wittgenstein”, forthcoming in Wittgenstein
Studies 2002.
[17]
Again, a danger should be borne in mind here: One should not start to think of
the ‘different concepts’ to which Wittgenstein refers as potentially forming an
ontology ‘wholly alien’ to our’s. To do so risks falling straight back into an
over-strong semantic relativism, justly criticised (though not justly found in
Kuhn) by (say) Davidson. (See David Cerbone’s work.)
[18]
A somewhat similar enterprise is undertaken by Juliet Floyd in her fascinating
paper, “Wittgenstein, mathematics, philosophy”, which draws maths and
philosophy closer together than might have been expected, after Wittgenstein.
There are times in science when it is close to philosophy too, when it involves
working on our ‘conceptual schemes’’ architecture. Kuhn shows this very well;
unlike many philosophers (e.g. Popper), he does not make the mistake of
thinking that most science is like this, though. Virtually all science is
‘normal science’. And in comparison, it is least misleading to say that there
is no ‘normal philosophy’.
[19]
Grateful acknowledgements to James Conant -- whose thinking on these matters
when I visited Chicago as a Visiting Fellow in 2001 has been crucial to my
understanding of them -- and to Wes Sharrock -- my erstwhile collaborator,
whose knowledge of Kuhn I find now virtually inextricable from my own. Thanks
also to audiences at Williams College, Massachussetts, and at the Institut
d'Histoire et Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques, University of Paris ,
where I first presented this paper, at 'Aprés la Structure: Kuhn et la philosophie des sciences aujourd'hui', an
international conference held on March 16 2002, especially to Sandra Laugier
and Ian Hacking. Thanks finally to Angus Ross, for a set of helpful comments on
an earlier draft of this paper.
[20]
See e.g. p.85 of Martin Hollis’s The Philosophy of Social Science
(Cambridge: C.U.P., 1994).
[21]
Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography, transl. F.Gaynor (New York, 1949),
pp.33-34; quoted on p.151 of The Structure.
[22]
For a full account, see my Ph.D thesis, Practices without Foundations?
(Rutgers Univ., 1995). (I note again here that recent research (see especially
recent work by Thomas Uebel) is indicating that Rudolf Carnap (and Carl Hempel
too), at least in their final years, were significantly less far from Kuhn than
was the general ‘classical’ Positivist line. However, this in my view is no
indication of any particular subtlety or reflexivity in Positivism or in (more
generally) Logical Empiricism; it is more a specific indication of the extent
to which Hempel’s and Carnap’s views moved,
even to the point of being actually somewhat influenced by Kuhn himself.)
[23]
Witness Kuhn’s surprise -- ironically, predictable on his own views -- at the
strong reactions to The Structure!
[24]
It is notable that Popper more recently conceded some ground to Kuhn here,
possibly in part to draw the sting from the way the failure in the debate between them was grist to Kuhn’s
mill. Thus on p.63 of The Myth of the Framework (London: Routledge,
1996), we find him admitting that, after Kuhn’s “Reflections on my critics” and
after the “Post-Script” to The Structure (2nd ed.), he realized that he
had been attacking only views attributed to Kuhn, not Kuhn’s own views, when he castigated “normal science” etc. . He nevertheless maintained that
the view he was attacking, including the “myth of the framework” itself, was an
“influential” view.
[25]
Lakatos and Musgrave, Criticism and the growth of knowledge (Cambridge: C.U.P,
1970), pp.231-2. See also Kuhn’s remark on p.233: “Inevitably, the term
‘cross-purposes’ better catches the nature of our discourse than
‘disagreement’.” (Is Kuhn entitled to these assertions? How does he
magisterially know the nature of this dispute that he is a part of? That’s the
problem: that Kuhn is a part of history
but claims to be able to see it too, to be able to reconstruct a part of it
that ex hypothesi he is alien to. I get to this crunch issue shortly.)
[26]
Though again, we need to bear in mind the kind
of danger that Popper was getting at -- that it is perhaps just too convenient,
too neat, to have a theory, a picture, that is arguably in a certain sense designed to legitimate itself; and that
can be smug over the difficulties in explaining itself to its opponents and vice versa?
[27]
Hollis, p.85.
[28]
On this massive dispute, see particularly John Preston’s very intriguing
discussion of Feyerabend’s wrestlings with the question of Scientific and(!)/or
Analytic Philosophy, in Chapter 1 of his Feyerabend (Oxford: Polity,
1997).
[29]
See pp.49-51 of Midgeley’s The Ethical Primate (London: Routledge,
1994).
[30]
That is, for those
who do not consider, as we ourselves would tend to, that their programme was
still-born as a result of its misinterpretation of Wittgenstein and its
concomitant disastrous philosophical errors and mythologies. Richard Rorty, of
course, has most powerfully disputed the possibility of Philosophy constituting
itself as a science -- indeed as a discipline, a fach, at all -- in his Philosophy
and the mirror of nature (Princeton: Princeton U. Pr.,
1979; especially Part 3.).
[31]
For Kuhn’s most careful reappraisal of “pre-paradigms”, and of how what he is
referring to here could be less
misleadingly conveyed, see p.272 of “Reflections...” in Lakatos and Musgrave.
[32]
It’s much easier to have ‘revolutions’ in the human sciences and philosophy
than in the natural sciences. Because the former are roughly in a state of
‘permanent revolution’, unlike the latter (perhaps to Popper’s chagrin). So we oughtn’t to be too
impressed if it seems reasonable to describe Kuhn’s effects as ‘revolutionary’.