THOMAS S. KUHN

The Road since Structure

Edited by James Conant and John Haugeland

Chicago: Chicago U. Press, 2000,

ISBN: 0-226-45798-2 (cloth), 0-226-45799-0 (paper)

Rupert Read

Head of Philosophy

School of Economic and Social Studies

University of East Anglia, Norwich

Kuhn arguably exercises a growing influence on the philosophy of the sciences--from beyond the grave. This, his last collection of essays, published posthumously, is now available in paperback, and so should (now) be an easy--and essential--addition to the library of all those interested in or affected by Kuhn’s work.

For this collection includes nearly all of Kuhn’s key later philosophical writing. We see here Kuhn re-articulating and re-phrasing his understanding of the central concepts of ‘scientific revolution’ and ‘incommensurability’ (including by means of his highly-intriguing account of scientific revolutions as involving substantial changes of taxonomies of ‘natural kinds’); we see him making clear the very real (though not ‘Realist’) sense in which he firmly believes in scientific progress; and we see him articulating in detail the Darwinian metaphor for scientific change first put forward in Structure.

The short Introduction by Conant and Haugeland is truly a model of clarity, and very concisely lays out the key elements of Kuhn’s later work. A good alternative to reading a book review of The Road since Structure in fact is simply reading the book’s Introduction, in which the Editors detail in a sympathetic but fairly non-controversial fashion the philosophical content of the papers Kuhn wrote from 1970 on, the most important of which (and some of the rarest) are collected here--for instance, “The trouble with the historical philosophy of science”, Kuhn’s long-awaited (though superficially very gentle) repudiation of many of his ‘followers’ in the fields especially of history and sociology of science.

(The only change I might have made would have been to have included in the collection Kuhn’s fascinating and powerful 1990 piece, “Dubbing and redubbing: the vulnerability of rigid designation”, Kuhn’s most direct and ‘technical’ response to the serious challenge that Kripkean ‘essentialism’ and Putnamian thoughts about natural kinds apparently pose to his views. I suppose that the Editors decided not to include it because it overlaps not inconsiderably with the longer (and superb) 1989 paper, “Possible worlds in history of science”, which they understandably have included.)

These essays render as crystal the experience as of gestalt-switch which is virtually necessary for the philosophical historian of science (though not necessarily for any individual scientist) to understand some defunct paradigmatic scientific theory. Kuhn’s accounts of his own experience of coming to understand Aristotelian physics serve as a model here.

Clearly visible in this book too is Kuhn’s post-Structure desire (perhaps a desire too strong for his own good) to find a way of making his own weltanschauung intelligible to ‘Analytic’ philosophers; the overarching notion that he came up with which seemed to him to best facilitate doing this is that of being a Kantian but with the categories no longer fixed, but (rather) mobile. Some say that that sounds very like Wittgenstein (think for instance of the latter’s remarks on the ‘evolution’ of the concept of ‘number’; or on the fluctuation between criteria and symptoms--and between the riverbed and the river; or on different tribes with allegedly different concepts; and so on). And indeed the affinities between Kuhn and Wittgenstein are evident in this book, especially perhaps in the autobiographical interview. Or take for instance the closing paragraph of “Reflections on my critics” (p.174):

‘What each participant in a communication breakdown has...found is...a way to translate the other’s theory into his own language and simultaneously to describe the world in which that theory or language applies. Without at least preliminary steps in that direction, there would be no process that one were even tempted to describe as theory choice. Arbitrary conversion (except that I doubt the existence of such a thing in any aspect of life) would be all that was involved. Note, however, that the possibility of translation does not make the term ‘conversion’ inappropriate. In the absence of a neutral language, the choice of a new theory is a decision to adopt a different native language and to deploy it in a correspondingly different world. That sort of transition is, however, not one which the terms ‘choice’ and ‘decision’ quite fit, though the reasons for wanting to apply them after the event are clear. Exploring an alternative theory..., one is likely to find that one is already using it (as one suddenly notes that one is thinking in, not translating out of, a foreign language). At no point was one aware of having reached a decision, made a choice. That sort of change is, however, conversion, and the techniques which induce it may well be described as therapeutic, if only because, when they succeed, one learns one had been sick before. No wonder the techniques are resisted and the nature of the change disguised in later reports.’

This passage is exemplary of the concentrated brilliance of Kuhn’s writing, and of the depth of his own quite distinctive contributions to the philosophy of science (e.g. the explanation of why the history of science tends to read as if there have not been scientific revolutions). It also evidences a wish to be comprehensible (on their own terms) to the ‘Analytic’ philosophers by whom Kuhn was most harshly criticised (e.g. Davidson). But it also makes visible a whole series of inheritances from or parallels to Wittgenstein. The emphasis on the real possibility of communication breakdown, but further the possibility that some such breakdowns are productive of a new understanding; the open willingness to entertain or utter words (phrases, sentences) that are provocative or even paradoxical, together with the repudiation of unmodest, dogmatic readings of those words; the repudation of objectivist fantasies and the permission of conceptual difference, without the commission of relativist theorizing; great care over the words we do use, and over the words we want to use--and over their limits; the prioritisation of practice, even when what is being practiced is a theory; and lastly, and most strikingly of all, a metaphor of illness, an emphasis on the variety of methods by which one may try to cure oneself (or others), and an explicitly therapeutic conception of such cure.

We should pause a moment, however, before proceeding to identify Kuhn and Wittgenstein too closely, and perhaps even calling Kuhn a Wittgenstein of the sciences. For while Wittgenstein more or less identifies himself as a midwife of change in philosophy (in oneself), as a therapist (albeit one who (like Freud did) has to cure himself as well as (or perhaps before) curing others), the analogous or parallel figure in the quotation just examined is not Kuhn, but rather the scientist at the point of crisis and transition. It is the scientist at a moment of extraordinary or revolutionary (conceptual) change that may describe his earlier self or his old paradigm as having been sick, monstrous, or an unhealthy or unholy mess.

This of course should not actually surprise us: Kuhn always made it clear that, if science ever resembled philosophy, it resembled it somewhat at the moments of crisis (Whereas Popper wanted science always to be like philosophy, in the sense of always starting from ground-zero, always being revolutionary). What we can add, however, is that the essays in this collection bring out how, to an unrecognisedly large extent, the philosophy which extraordinary science sometimes resembles can be Wittgensteinian in its nature. Not, of course, through and through; it is hardly as if scientists are ever going to be satisfied merely with pulling down houses of cards, or ‘houses of air’! (Though, even here, we might recall Hertz’s wonderful words about how a central task of the creative physicist is simply to remove the ‘painful contradictions’ that accumulate around central terms of the discipline (his example was ‘force’), and not to set up anything new in the place of those confusions.) But to a perhaps-surprisingly large extent; Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy--his practice--is a model not only for Kuhn himself, but also at times even a model for how scientists act, at those (rare) moments when their practice comes closer to philosophy.

I don’t know if Kuhn himself would have gone along with the sketchy suggestions I have just given. One can be sure that any public disagreements he had with them would have been put generously. But it is for this reason among others that the long interview with Kuhn included in this book is useful--in it, Kuhn is rather more candid in his opinions about some of his apparent allies and critics than was normally the case.

Kuhn hoped to live to write a monograph which would bring the central ideas of these essays together, and that would have made yet clearer to his own and his readers’ satisfaction what his project had really been about. Sadly, he did not live to do so, and we should not expect that his nachlass will deliver that unwritten book. One of the great merits of these essays--as opposed perhaps to whatever riches the nachlass may offer us, and however those riches might be packaged for us by Kuhn’s ‘foes’ or ‘fans’--is that they do not give the illusion of being an absolutely worked-out system. Rather, they are fertile inter-linked treatments of and developments of the key themes of Kuhn’s philosophical lifework. It is to be hoped that Kuhn’s compelling metaphors of speciation, ecological niches, untranslatability, natural kind taxonomies, hermeneutical understanding of a practice, and so forth, are worked on for years to come by philosophers of science keen to escape the Idealism or philosophical unsophistication of some of Kuhn’s alleged inheritors in Science Studies, and the dogmatic ‘Realism’ or technical overkill of some of his alleged opponents or superseders in Anglo-American philosophy of science.

The bibliography of Kuhn’s work with which The Road since Structure closes is pretty complete and extremely useful. The absence of an index for the book is virtually my only quibble with it. In sum, Conant and Haugeland have made an excellent set of editorial decisions for this very fine collection of Kuhn’s work.

R.Read@uea.ac.uk