5 6 4 |
*Departments of Biology and History, University of Florida, Bartram Hall, Gainesville, FL ; bsmocovi@ufl.edu.
Acknowledgments I wish to thank Andrew Wilson for sharing his reminiscences of the Cornell graduate experience with me in preparation of this paper. I also wish to acknowledge the generous support and teachings of L. Pearce Williams and my other mentors at Cornell.
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 42, Number 5, pps. 564–569. ISSN 1939-1811, electronic ISSN 1939-182X. © 2012 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpress-journals.com/ reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2012.42.5.564.
Dr. Kuhn, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Started
Loving
The Structure
Winston Churchill once remarked that the only successful revolutions are those made by conservatives. L. Pearce Williams and Henry John Steffens1
Like many historians of science, my first encounter with Thomas Kuhn’s pro-vocative text, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, came in an introductory graduate seminar in the historiography of science. The course was taught by L. Pearce Williams, no great fan of Kuhn’s, or of some of the new approaches to the history of science in the s. Pearce was scary, at first. A famously disagreeable Cornell professor with strong conservative leanings (Ann Coulter was one of his more famous mentees), Pearce lectured in a stentorian voice, even if only four or five of us were present. Huddling around a small table and poring over our texts, we were exceptionally wary of what we said or how we said it, lest we trigger an outburst of verbal volley fire.
Virtually anything said about Kuhn and his work could engender that kind of reaction from Pearce, who viewed Kuhn’s book as a kind of virus that had infected the minds of vulnerable academics since . The book might appeal to people outside the field who knew little or nothing about it, he said, but seri-ous historians of science objected to the quality of the argument, the eviden-tiary base, and the crudeness with which Kuhn tried to understand the history of science. Besides all that, he pointed out that Kuhn was not entirely original,
. L. Pearce Williams and Henry John Steffens, The History of Science in Western Civilization,
having drawn on Ludwik Fleck’s insightful reflections in Genesis and the De-velopment of a Scientific Fact ().2 So, as good graduate students, we
scruti-nized each text trying to find parallels between Kuhn and Fleck. (Examining my annotated copies, about the only thing I can make out with certainty is that the words “vague” and “fuzzy” appear as marginalia with equal regularity in both.)
Pearce was a delightful performer, the child of a “show-biz” family accus-tomed to theatricality and fond of hyperbolic excess (either that, or he was obsessed with German Romanticism, what with all that Sturm und Drang). Pearce was also a great historian, with a deep knowledge of the field, who taught generations of students a love of history for its own sake, and what I still refer to as a view of history with a capital “H.” We began that seminar engaging R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of Nature and Idea of History, as Pearce extolled the virtues of interpretive history, the importance of narrative crafting, and stressed that history was a humanistic and literary exercise, replete with tropes of irony, tragedy, comedy, and the like. Using Collingwood, he conveyed to us the enormity of the empathetic demands placed on historians whose goal was to gain understanding or to give expression to something called “the human condition.” Collingwood was Pearce’s way of setting the stage for what was come, namely the triumvirate of Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos (whom he always evoked always in that order). Pearce had a deep respect for philosophy, but he didn’t care for philosophical fashion. He was a great admirer of Nor-wood Russell Hanson, whose assertion, a wordplay on Kant, that “history of science without philosophy is blind; philosophy of science without history is empty,” provided the intellectual foundation of the new program Pearce was building at Cornell.
This was why Kuhn had to be taken—and engaged—seriously. Whatever disciplinary label you wanted to put on Kuhn, his project delved profoundly into the history of thought. The view that scientific knowledge was grounded in history, opening the door to a historicist thinking, was an argument no seri-ous historian of Pearce’s generation could easily dismiss. As a physicist, further-more, Kuhn’s technical understanding could not be easily challenged, and physics was the disciplinary centerpiece of the history of science at that time. That mattered at a place like Cornell, where competence in the technical sub-ject area, especially physics, was considered de rigueur.
Whatever its strengths, the book nonetheless became a flash point, if not the
flash point, for critical discussion by scholars in both history and philosophy of science after . And however extreme he may have appeared in his criti-cism, Pearce Williams was hardly alone: a dizzying number of critiques had accumulated by that time, the most memorable of which was the hatchet job on Kuhn’s use of the “p” word (banished from my lexicon forevermore) by Margaret Masterman, whose linguistic unpacking showed a less than consistent use of the term.3 That was child’s play compared to Paul Feyerabend’s notorious
attack on Kuhn, expressing his frustration at all the shoddy scholarship Struc-ture had engendered. We read Feyerabend with a mixture of horror and delight more common to readers of tabloid journalism than scholarship, and left the room laughing but wary of the many “creeps and incompetents” in the field.4
There were other more forgettable challenges, and few of Kuhn’s responses were effective at assuaging the critics, especially on points of vagueness or language; Kuhn’s usual response was to claim his readers just didn’t understand.5 This was
so much the case that a part of me still thinks of Kuhn as the person who be-came very famous largely by being misunderstood.
I had additional concerns of my own. As someone more interested in biology than physics, I wondered to what extent Kuhn’s project applied to the history of the biological sciences. It didn’t seem to fit into what I knew of the history of molecular biology or genetics, and it certainly didn’t help with the other great “revolution” in science, the so-called Darwinian Revolution, which was finally getting serious attention. A number of intellectual historians like John Greene were asking similar questions, as were philosophers of biology like Michael Ruse, all pointing to serious problems with Kuhn’s thesis.6 I made the
. Margaret Masterman, “The Nature of a Paradigm,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowl-edge, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.
. Feyerabend’s essay first appeared in in Radical Philosophy, pp. –, and has been re-printed extensively. See Paul Feyerabend, “How to Defend Science Against Society,” in Introduc-tory Readings in the Philosophy of Science, ed. E. D. Klemke, R. Hollinger, and A. D. Kline (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, ), –, on . See also the electronic version available in The Galilean Library: http://www.galileanlibrary.org/manuscript.php?postid= (last accessed on May ).
. See, for example, Thomas Kuhn, “Reflections on My Critics,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.
terrible mistake of mentioning this in a class on “Darwin and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy,” with Marjorie Grene, a formidable presence in the phi-losophy of biology. Her reaction at the mere mention of Kuhn scared the daylights out of me: she foamed at the mouth and shouted at me for even bringing it up.7 Something must clearly be wrong with the book, I surmised.
I put it on the mental back burner in a category of its own labeled “important for some reason, but I am not going there any more,” and moved on with a thesis on the historical event called the “evolutionary synthesis.” Neither Wil-liam B. Provine nor Ernst Mayr thought it relevant to the history of evolution-ary biology or to the synthesis, as they were articulating it at the time.8
Curiosity got the better of me, especially after I snuck into the series of lectures by Dominick LaCapra, from whom we had been sheltered as students. He was then in the throes of introducing literary criticism into intellectual history but was unsettling to traditionalists who preferred the history of ideas.9
He could not be easily ignored, however: cool and detached in personality, his lectures were delivered with razor-sharp precision in a funky New York City accent. Somewhere in between references to apocalyptic paradigms and themes of the carnivalesque, LaCapra contrasted Kuhn’s characterization of science as puzzle-solving activity with a problematic—the latter having the possibility of no real solution. It was the first time I’d heard anyone utter the name without criticism. My curiosity was additionally piqued by the arrival of Peter Dear, whose historiography syllabus drew on a new literature in the sociology of sci-ence that built on Kuhn, and I knew that Martin Rudwick’s The Great
the publication of The Darwinian Revolution: Nature Red in Tooth and Claw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), see Michael Ruse, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Jul , online edition at http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions/ (last accessed on Jul ).
. For background on Marjorie Grene and that class see Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, “Marjorie, Matriarchy, and ‘Wretched Reflection’: A Personal Remembrance of Marjorie Grene,” Biological Theory (): –.
. Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine, eds., The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). See also Ernst Mayr, “The Nature of the Darwinian Revolution,” Science (): –.
Devonian Controversy was also getting a huge amount of attention at the time.10
I read it in only a couple of sittings and realized how clever he had been to focus on a community and to devise such wonderfully novel techniques for historical analysis.
But the real shocker came after a summer immersion course in literary and composition theory as part of the writing-across-the-disciplines program I was teaching in that year. After dismissing most of the readings as incomprehensible gobbledy-gook, I underwent a kind of “conversion experience,” or so my in-structors said. A “gestalt-switch” had been tripped. Nothing looked the same after my last summer at Cornell: I saw science in terms of communities, recep-tion theories, problematics, rhetoric, and discursive formarecep-tions, instead of the history of disembodied ideas that followed an internal logic. It was confusing as heck, but illuminating too, especially when I turned those perspectives onto the evolutionary synthesis—lo and behold, there too was a community, a dis-cursive formation, negotiating a shared language, as they formed a new disci-pline called “evolutionary biology” and employed a kind of “disciplinary discourse.” I also began to appreciate Kuhn’s insightful notion of the disciplin-ary matrix and amended it to the disciplindisciplin-ary problematic.11
My mentors at Cornell thus may have had a legitimate set of concerns with Kuhn’s project, but they were too quick to dismiss it, or to appreciate how and where its impact would eventually be felt. Most shared commitments to an older view of the history of ideas that viewed science in terms of the establish-ment of grand, overarching explanatory theories, and to a history of science in terms of conventional internal vs. external determinants. One might even say that they themselves upheld a vision of the history of philosophy of science with more than faint traces of positivism: Marjorie Grene, for example, had been associated directly with Rudolf Carnap at the University of Chicago. Kuhn began a project of demonstrating how those ideas could be embedded in a community of thought, and in the process opened a conversation with the sociology of science, and more specifically with the sociology and anthropology
. Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
of knowledge. It wasn’t his intention at the outset, of course, but that is what eventually came out of the publication of his book, as it made its way to varied audiences and younger historians of science.
Let us remember that Kuhn was curious about what a serious engagement with history would do for understanding the “growth” of physics, using an approach common to the history and philosophy of science. But he knew little about the philosophy of history, and drew from Gestalt psychologists who were popular at the time. As a result he saw a structuralist trajectory of science that included ruptures or breaks between incommensurable worlds; and he used a language to describe what he saw that was less than meaningful—or perhaps too much so, if we follow Masterman. His monograph was imperfect, and it was crude, and it may have not been entirely original, but its publication nonetheless became the starting point for a long conversation that contributed to the view held by many historians of science today, that science is a histori-cally rooted and culturally embedded set of practices. That is why I have never seen Kuhn or his Structure as “revolutionary” in the conventional sense of the term, though it did eventually enable a kind of revolution in the way many historians now think about science and its history.12 It was possibly a
“revolu-tion-making text,” in much the same way he had articulated elsewhere.13
Ul-timately, however, it led to a recovery of some of that older view of history as a profoundly interpretive activity that makes empathetic demands of its prac-titioners; and in its emphasis on language and discourse, returns us to a view of history that recovers some of that originary historiography with a capital “H.” Insofar as it succeeded in returning us to that, it was a revolution to be sure, but a peculiarly conservative one at that.
. For a discussion of the varied meanings of the term “revolution” see Raymond Williams,
