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 re- conceived 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.