Abstract
The 50 years that have passed since the publication of Kuhn’s (1962) Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) seem less oppressive when I consider that I first read the copy that now sits before me (a pink second edition) nearly 35 years ago (Kuhn, 1970). At that time, it was de rigueur to read it in concert with Lakatos and Musgrave’s (1970) Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Its quasi-disciplinary home was History and Philosophy of Science, and its disciplinary antithesis was the philosophy of science, a well-established specialty within philosophy. This created some tension, for which Criticism became a canonical locus. Philosophers’ objections focused on the issues of incommensurability and relativism (Shapere, 1964 is characteristic). Kuhn’s disciplinary self-identification at the beginning of SSR, however, was not with philosophy: ‘History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed’ (Kuhn, 1970: 1). Historians of science (of the right sort) are the heroes, as they ‘have begun to ask new sorts of questions and to trace different, and often less than cumulative, developmental lines for the sciences’ (p. 3).
It seems odd, in retrospect, to realize that one of Kuhn’s ‘new’ historians was Alexandre Koyré, most famous for his Études galiléennes (Koyré, 1940). The oddness stems from what Steven Shapin later dubbed ‘post-Koyréan intellectualism’ (Shapin, 1980a: 110): Koyré soon became a watchword for an intellectualist history of scientific ideas that seemed the antithesis of the sociological vistas opened up by SSR. In this sense, however, Kuhn’s own sensibilities were perhaps precisely those of most historians of science in the 1960s and 1970s: ideas with a bit of social contextualization. Science studies, as it emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, made of Kuhn a quite different figure. In the vanguard of science studies, one of the most forthright uses of SSR was Barry Barnes’ T.S. Kuhn and Social Science (Barnes, 1982). Tellingly, this book was not only largely ignored by historians of science, but also by Kuhn himself: it receives no notice in Kuhn’s well-known 1991 Rothschild Lecture at Harvard (Kuhn, 2000), even as part of that essay’s generalized condemnation of Edinburgh Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK). By that time it was too late; historians of science had been dragged into confrontation with SSK as a post-Kuhnian historical enterprise thanks to the slightly delayed notoriety of Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Shapin and Schaffer, 2011 [1985]). 1
The most obvious ‘application’ of SSR in historical studies, one flagged by Kuhn himself in the ‘Postscript’ to the second edition of SSR (Kuhn, 1970: 176), might be thought to be the identification and investigation of scientific communities. These are, after all, the social embodiments of a ‘paradigm’ in either of Kuhn’s clarified senses of ‘disciplinary matrix’ or ‘exemplar’ (getting down to cases confuses that mapping, of course). But surprisingly little work of this kind has actually been done by historians of science, and certainly not in an explicitly Kuhnian idiom. Instead, accounts of the sorts of things that Kuhn evidently saw as paradigm-communities in the broader sense – professional communities trained from the same textbooks – continued to be rather taken for granted by historians, even when they acknowledged their in-principle significance; if one 19th-century physicist had been trained in a different regime than that of another with whom he interacted, those different formations would typically be recognized through systematic differences in doctrine rather than by sociologically enunciated markers (bibliometrically, for example). Those many historians deserve to be let off the hook, though; Kuhn had provided them with little guidance. Even his distinction between the two kinds of paradigm provided little real sense of how big or small a paradigm community might be, or when the disciplinary matrix might have shrunk to little more than a few internalized exemplars. In 1979 Kuhn showed his cards by leaving Princeton to become a philosopher at MIT. I think that historians of science had long, by then, tended to conceive of Kuhn’s significance in the terms that the philosophers (and Kuhn himself) had established as central: incommensurability and relativism. He was never really a guide to historical research except by association.
There are always exceptions, of course. Shapin’s (1980b) review in Isis of Gerald Geison’s Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology (Geison, 1978) skewered its author for never having mentioned Kuhn, despite the book’s focus on a research group, its structure and its commitments. (‘That’s because you’ve absorbed me so thoroughly’, Kuhn was said by Geison to have commented wryly. 2 ) Geison’s subsequent interest in related issues focused on ‘research schools’ rather than ‘paradigm communities’ (Geison, 1981; Geison and Holmes, 1993), and had little to say about Kuhn’s work itself. Studies that focused on what might otherwise be described as the intellectual content of a Kuhnian paradigm necessarily differed little from Koyréan historiography, one of Kuhn’s principal models.
Evidence from absence for SSR’s role in the history of science at this time may be represented by the decline of biography as a leading historiographical mode. ‘To understand why science develops as it does, one need not unravel the details of biography and personality that lead each individual to a particular choice, though that topic has vast fascination’, Kuhn carefully wrote in his Postscript (Kuhn, 1970: 200). It certainly seems that in the 1970s and 1980s the stock of scholarly biography in the history of science had declined severely. Although books continued to appear that focused on aspects of individual figures, prefaces routinely took care to note that ‘this is not meant to be a biography’(see Geison, 1978: xiii). By contrast, the past 20 years have seen a resurgence in the respectability of biographical treatments in the history of science (among the very best examples of new historiographical departures being Porter [2004]). Nowadays, even scientific objects have biographies (Daston, 2000).
And what of SSR’s celebration of ‘the insulation of the scientific community from society’ (p. 164)? Kuhn saw this as a good thing, giving scientific enterprises their character and enabling their peculiar success. The implication that there is no society inside science, as well as the curious Cold War, Polanyi-esque ideal of isolated, privileged groups being shoveled massive funding from behind a curtain, surely created potential conflict between Kuhn and the concerns of emergent science studies (see, inter alia, Dear and Jasanoff, 2010). Only Kuhn, in his assaults on SSK, seems to have cared very much about this discord; most citations of his work in science studies long ignored it (cf. Fuller, 2000). What became dubbed, in the 1970s, the ‘social history of science’, especially associated at the time with the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, had very little interest in the detailed content of scientific knowledge, and in effect set itself at odds with Kuhn’s own central concerns (for example, Kohler, 1982).
In short, it is easy to downplay the importance of SSR for the history of science. The rarity of references to SSR in the historiography of science (as compared nowadays with those to Leviathan and the Air-Pump) make that apparent insignificance all the more plausible. Certainly, any historian who sits down to reread SSR will be struck by its almost archaic historiographical sensibilities: it really is based on Koyréan intellectual history, tricked out with a clever and beguiling structural model of science. The latter is clearly based on a dominant US Cold-War era ideology of science as a free and democratic social institution, and elaborated with elements drawn from cognitive psychology and the later Wittgenstein. It is a product of the 1950s, and became enormously popular as part of the counter-cultural 1960s: Tolkien for physics students (see also Kaiser, 2011).
It remains alive today for a variety of reasons: in science studies, it holds a mythic status (witness this special section of the journal) as the intervention that brought down the dominance of logical empiricism in the philosophy of science and Mertonian functionalism in the sociology of science, thereby clearing the way for the revolution of the 1980s, with SSK, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour. More actively, however, SSR, and Kuhn’s work in general, has gained a surprising legitimacy in professional philosophy of science: books and articles on Kuhn by philosophers have appeared unremittingly during the past 20 years, and show no signs of dwindling: Kuhn is a part of the philosopher of science’s canon (dating between Hoyningen-Huene [1993] and Wray [2011]).
But if the history of science as a distinct discipline has only a questionable relationship to SSR, as an inquiry forming part of a broader science studies it surely owes SSR a great deal (I hold questions of historical causation temporarily in abeyance). The book made certain kinds of approaches in studying science permissible: if Kuhn could get away with something that looked in practice rather like relativism, then so might others. That revolution in the 1980s, involving both SSK and the US style of cultural studies, is hard to imagine without SSR’s being embedded within it; furthermore, Kuhn overtly represented the book as one whose arguments and evidence were those of the historian.
Consequently, Bruno Latour’s (1987) Science in Action appeared originally in English for good reason: the anglophone science studies community, which had responded positively (especially in Britain) to Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar, 1979), must by then have seemed the right environment for its epistemically irregular antics. The book appeared almost as if prepackaged to be a blockbuster of SSR dimensions, and historians of science knew to pick it up immediately (my copy is of the first hardcover issue, with its excessive typographical errors). A common response among historians was to interpret it as a realist backsliding from the constructivist Laboratory Life, due to the entry of Science in Action’s non-human actants and a justifiable overlooking of their less-than-evident semiotic grounding. Networks, albeit not true Actor Networks, also spurred some notice among historians, but on the whole Latour’s overturning of the epistemology/ontology distinction, if it was noticed, drummed up little interest.
Neither of these two prominent items in the canon of science studies is easy to evaluate for its long-term influence on the practice or findings of the historically oriented scholar – nor should it be, given that ‘influence’ explanations have been suspect among historians at least since Quentin Skinner’s work (Skinner, 1966). Anniversaries are occasions for celebration or remembrance. These books are certainly worth remembering; in practice, they’ve been celebrated for a long time.