Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times [Paperback]

Steve Fuller (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226268969 | ISBN-13: 978-0226268965 | Publication Date: December 1, 2001

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the best known and most influential books of the twentieth century. Whether they adore or revile him, critics and fans alike have tended to agree on one thing: Kuhn's ideas were revolutionary. But were they?

Steve Fuller argues that Kuhn actually held a profoundly conservative view of science and how one ought to study its history. Early on, Kuhn came under the influence of Harvard President James Bryant Conant (to whom Structure is dedicated), who had developed an educational program intended to help deflect Cold War unease over science's uncertain future by focusing on its illustrious past. Fuller argues that this rhetoric made its way into Structure, which Fuller sees as preserving and reinforcing the old view that science really is just a steady accumulation of truths about the world (once "paradigm shifts" are resolved).

Fuller suggests that Kuhn, deliberately or not, shared the tendency in Western culture to conceal possible negative effects of new knowledge from the general public. Because it insists on a difference between a history of science for scientists and one suited to historians, Fuller charges that Structure created the awkward divide that has led directly to the "Science Wars" and has stifled much innovative research. In conclusion, Fuller offers a way forward that rejects Kuhn's fixation on paradigms in favor of a conception of science as a social movement designed to empower society's traditionally disenfranchised elements.

Certain to be controversial, Thomas Kuhn must be read by anyone who has adopted, challenged, or otherwise engaged with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

"Structure will never look quite the same again after Fuller. In that sense, he has achieved one of the main aims of his ambitious and impressively executed project."—Jon Turney, Times Higher Education Supplement

"Philosophies like Kuhn's narrow the possible futures of inquiry by politically methodizing and taming them. More republican philosophies will leave the future open. Mr. Fuller has amply succeeded in his program of distinguishing the one from the other."—William R. Everdell, Washington Times

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Fuller (sociology, Univ. of Warwick) argues that the Kuhnian philosophy of the history of science, as presented in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions owes a lot to the ideas of James Bryant Conant (1893-1978), who was president of Harvard University. Fuller also maintains Kuhn's central idea of a "paradigm shift" in the sciences is actually a sociopolitically motivated view of conceptual revolutions in scientific history. Unfortunately, Fuller does not offer the reader a clear and succinct chapter on the life and thought of Kuhn (l922-96). Instead, the author discusses the complex emergence of Kuhn's viewpoints, with an emphasis on developments in modern physics. Even so, the relevance of empirical evidence is never stressed as being far more crucial to the success of scientific theories than the influences of social movements. This very scholarly but overly abstruse introduction to Kuhn's influence on society and education is suitable for large academic science collections only.DH. James Birx, Canisius Coll., Buffalo, NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Scientific American

Thomas Kuhn (1922-96) is known best, and almost exclusively, for a slim volume published in 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The book is widely acclaimed to be the most influential academic work of the second half of the 20th century. It has sold nearly a million copies and has been translated into 20 languages. With undiminished regularity, it is cited by scholars in fields as diverse as political science and art history. Al Gore has mentioned Structure as his favorite book.

I read Structure in 1964, in its first paper edition, and like many of my scientific cohort I was much taken by Kuhn's analysis of science. To be sure, the sources of Kuhn's thought were in the air at the time: Piaget's work on how children acquire knowledge, Whorf's studies of language and worldviews, Gestalt psychology, Koyré's groundbreaking interpretations of the history of science, and so on. It was a heady time to be thinking about the history and philosophy of science, and Kuhn plugged into the prevailing culture with uncanny precision.

According to Kuhn, the authority of science resides in the community of scientists practicing what he called "normal science." Normal science is defined by a "paradigm," a kind of shared worldview, or, as Kuhn described it, "universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners." Within normal science, anomalies are generally ignored. Eventually, however, difficulties within a paradigm become unsustainable, and a revolution occurs. A new paradigm is established, incorporating social and cultural influences of the time, and work goes on.

What Kuhn had going for him (or against him) was a dazzlingly simple schematic (with that magic word "paradigm") embedded in an inchoate epistemic stew. This made him easy to latch onto by almost anyone, regardless of philosophical or political predilections. Indeed, Kuhn has been taken to heart by scholars espousing almost directly opposite views about the nature of science. Combatants on both sides of the infamous "science wars" between scientists and sociologist critics of science regularly use Kuhn to buttress their respective positions or whack each other over the head.

Now along comes Steve Fuller to put Kuhn into a historic and philosophical context and to excoriate Structure for its presumed baleful influence on the authority and practice of science. Fuller is an American sociologist, currently professor at the University of Warwick, formerly of the University of Durham. His prolonged British residence is evidenced in the scrappy, iconoclastic, take-on-all-comers spirit of his work (one can find Fuller giving and taking his licks in the Internet lists). Nothing here of the sometimes wearisome pomposity of American academics who inhabit that obfuscated discipline called science studies.

Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times is a heavily footnoted and almost impenetrably dense insider's account of 20th-century sociology of knowledge. Fuller marshals an astonishingly detailed grasp of recent intellectual history to argue that science as we know it has outlived its usefulness. The paradigms of normal science are not the ideal form of science, he says, but rather "an arrested social movement in which the natural spread of knowledge is captured by a community that gains relative advantage by forcing other communities to rely on its expertise to get what they want."

Fuller is especially effective at reconstructing the debates between Ernst Mach and Max Planck about the nature of science at the beginning of the 20th century, which he takes as emblematic of all such debates since. In Fuller's dichotomous scheme, Mach championed an instrumentalist philosophy of science; Planck was a realist. Mach lodged science in everyday psychological experience; Planck reduced everyday experience to the ultimate constituents of physics. Mach exalted technology; Planck promoted abstract problem solving. Mach was the liberal democrat, intent on empowering "citizen scientists"; Planck was the state corporatist, who thought ordinary folks had no claim on "real" science.

Kuhn is squarely on the side of Planck, Fuller says. The paradigms of normal science, Fuller goes on to assert, confer a phony legitimacy and autonomy on scientific practice. Alternative versions of the "truth" are delegitimized, and establishment science (with its consumerist-military alliances) becomes the only game in town. Young scientists are acculturated within the paradigm and spend the rest of their careers tweaking theories. Dissent is frowned upon. The real problems of society are ignored in the pursuit of the next decimal place.

Fuller, of course, comes down on the side of Mach, espousing a vaguely defined "citizen science." His democratizing instincts are admirable, but as he storms the Bastille of normal science he will find himself in the teeming company of those who believe in creationism, alien abductions, parapsychology and other nonparadigmatic citizen sciences. He does not seem to cringe at the prospect of postestablishment intellectual anarchy.

Kuhn wrote: "The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community." Fuller has confidence in the intelligent good sense of ordinary folks and properly calls for "the right to be wrong." But do statements such as "the universe is light-years wide," "the earth is billions of years old," "all life is related by common descent," "organisms are composed of cells that contain double-helix DNA," and so on really have no greater claim on "reality" than the Genesis stories of creationists or the popular consolations of astrology? If the answer is no, as Fuller comes dangerously close to asserting, then most scientists would throw in the towel and get jobs flipping burgers.

Fuller underestimates the highly evolved "fitness" of the methodologies, sociologies and conceptual paradigms of normal science. The deprofessionalization of science and the establishment of a citizen marketplace of ideas are not likely to happen without the sociopolitical equivalent of an asteroid impact, and no such potential upheaval looms on our intellectual radar screens. Certainly, science studies lacks the weight to do it.

At the same time, it would behoove scientists to pay close attention to Steve Fuller's sprawling, brawling and gloriously provocative book. He is perhaps more friend than enemy, and by nipping at our heels he reminds us that science might in fact do a better job serving a socially and ecologically responsible agenda, empowering citizen science-kibitzers to live purposefully and with exalted spirit in the science-revealed world of galaxies and DNA.

CHET RAYMO teaches physics at Stonehill College in Massachusetts and is a science columnist for the Boston Globe. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 490 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (December 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226268969
• ISBN-13: 978-0226268965
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #230,031 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book..., March 18, 2004

By 

Benjamin B. Eshbach "Ben Eshbach" (Los Angeles, Ca) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (Paperback)

If you approach this book thinking that you are going to read a shrewd critique of paradigms, incommensurability, "normal science" and the like, you will be disappointed. Fuller does not approach Kuhn on this field, largely because Fuller is practically a Kuhnian. What Fuller attempts in this book is a critique of a certain overarching detrimental (and ancient) mindset which has been facilitated by, among many other things, the social impact of Kuhn's Structure. According to Fuller, the hasty acceptance of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by intellectuals in the sixties resulted in a general acceptance of specific strategies for studying science as a social and historical phenomenon: strategies which, by virtue of their wickedness, have furthered the distance between science and the public. What SSK and STS have done (thanks to built in Kuhn-isms) is continued a tradition which presents science conveniently distanced from any moral culpability to the public. This social division is being entrenched, not closed, by science studies who see their mission as value-free and judgment-prohibited.

Fuller is gifted at rhetoric. This and some of his other works are really challenging and illuminating. He draws his lines at odd angles to the ones we've been accustomed to by science-wars literature which make him hard to track. The perspectives veered back and forth between refreshing and annoying for me but usually stayed on the refreshing side. Fuller's identification of Richard Swinburne as both a capable natural epistemologist and natural theologian (refreshing). Fuller's chastisement of Philip Kitcher (refreshing). Fuller's dismissal of the institutional conflict thesis in the history of "science" and "religion" (refreshing). Fuller's dismissal of Erwin Panofsky and Alexander Koyre (disappointing.) I need at least a year with this book before I can clearly call Fuller a good guy or a bad guy.

There are two things about the book that I would inform a reader going in:
(1) The author nurses an uncomfortable hostility toward Thomas Kuhn. This hostility waxes and wanes throughout the work giving the impression that it was written over a long period of time as Fuller himself passed in and out of hostile episodes (inspired by newsgroup debates?) At first I found this hostility off-putting. He simply came off as a man whose underwear was a couple sizes too small. For the first half of the book I highlighted (in pencil) each of these disorienting jabs as I came on them -- turning an otherwise disruptive read into a game of I-Spy-With-My-Little-Eye. Eventually I came to believe that Fuller's meanness was a conciliatory performance for the benefit of irritated science fans who bought this book dreaming that Fuller was going to "go to bat" for them against "Kuhnheads."

(2) Fuller consistently and ungenerously reads Kuhn as prescriptive, not descriptive. This is by no means clear in Kuhn's writing,not even in all two or three Kuhn-quotes provided by Fuller. -- Just as Feyerabend was perplexed to declare near the opening of his contribution to Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, (Consolations for the Specialist.)

A flip-book reading might inspire a premature eulogy to Kuhn's ideas and a triumphant reaffirmation of the ("the" as in "one") Scientific Revolution. Kuhn's significance has been *decimated* only in the imaginations of those who have been praying for some relief from the beatings they've gotten when trying to endorse their vision of cumulative scientific progress (a vision Fuller does not share and in fact attributes partly to the fact that "the goals of science are continually rewritten so that the current state of inquiry always turns out to be a waystation that some suitably trans-generational 'we' have been always pursuing." (Science. Milton Keynes and Minneapolis.)) Now, armed with an academic conspiracy theory and clever neologisms like "Kuhnification", these valiant warriors can go another round -- unless of course their adversary has also read this book, in which case they're still screwed.

What "Kuhn" and "paradigm" have come to be are mere rhetorical trump-card ripostes, suitably amorphous to lend false dignity to any sentence they happen to find themselves in. This book could have been called 'Alexander Koyre' or even "James Conant" or even Duhem! The book is not really about Kuhn. It is about a beef which Fuller has with science studies. For Steven Fuller, "Thomas Kuhn" is nothing if not a fetching title, bound to move copy.

24 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Defense of Fuller, October 1, 2000

By 

"billyhill" (Knoxville, TN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (Hardcover)

Judged by the Reader from Nashville's idea of what goes on in academic culture and research grants, I wouldn't trust his reading of Fuller. In the first place, Fuller's book is very much in the "old style" of academic work -- including not only archival material, conceptual overviews of various fields, but even some moralizing. That is to say, Fuller's book harkens back to a period BEFORE the research grant culture arose. Nowadays, the grant culture supports loads of bite-sized articles with executive summaries and crisply presented reference lists. Whatever other business Fuller might be up to in this book, it is certainly not that! Also, it's nothing like a contemporary doctoral dissertation, since the dissertation director would have nipped in the bud the vast scope that Fuller's book has.

As an academic author, I have no problem with Fuller's method, especially because of the enormous -- and often enormously mindless -- significance accorded to Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. You can't uproot such an entrenched book without assaulting it from all sides, ranging from the immediate Harvard environment to the larger themes in Western culture with which Kuhn's book has unwittingly resonated. Anything less, it seems to me, would simply not be taken seriously by the people who ultimately have the power to dethrone it -- which, for better for worse, are academics and those who take us seriously.

42 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Paradigms are dead! Long live the permanent revolution in sc, May 9, 2000

By 

Courtney Pearson ([e-mail]) (Boston, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (Hardcover)

This book is much more than an intellectual biography of Kuhn himself (who does not seem to have been a very interesting person) and even more than an intellectual history of the times in which Kuhn lived -- though it is closer to the latter. Rather, it is a systematic indictment of the ways in which Western culture - "from Plato to NATO," as Fuller himself puts it -- has suppressed the critical function of scientific inquiry. Kuhn is a major player here because he was very explicit that criticism of a ruling paradigm should happen only after it has accumulated so many unsolvable problems that even defenders of the paradigm are forced to ask the big questions about why they were interested in their particular domain of reality in the first place. Fuller argues that all the radical implications drawn from Kuhn's work over the last two generations have been largely spurious. Fuller shows this over and over again in many fields of inquiry. Kuhn was bred by a Harvard elite that was interested in stabilizing a world repeatedly threatened by war. The person to whom Kuhn dedicated his seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was not only Harvard's president and the chief administrator of the US atomic bomb project in WWII, but he was also "the brightest person" Kuhn ever met (quoted from Kuhn's last interview). This book really leaves you wondering how it was possible for so many supposedly intelligent people were so fooled for so long - after all, according to Fuller, philosophers and sociologists of science remain under the Kuhnian spell. In short, if Hegel needed a present-day advocate of the "cunning of reason" in history, Fuller is his man. The book is incredibly documented - from both archives and esoteric texts - yet the writing remains lively throughout.