Customer Reviews

Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times

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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.

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.

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.

One learns to cruise the groves of academe discoursing gladly in Kuhn pidgin talk about paradigm shifts and gestalt switches and picking up this book seemed to forebode some fan club grok on the profundity of the 'paradigm' paradigm. Quite a high dosage of shock treatment then to face head on a virtual mastiff's attack against current Kuhnification. Taken aback, I recovered by midbook and thought, Ok you convinced me. In fact, this book, at any level of agreement or not, is an invaluable tour through many regions of science studies untravelled by most due to either the lack of time for specialized literature or more likely the outcast status of anything less than science worship. Comprehensive to almost arcane at points, the account succeeds through sheer overkill and in the process fills in the background to Kuhn's achievement, from the influence of Conant, to the legacy of Big Science served in a trick play on the normal science chloroform that is our daily bread. At the end one is cured of facile use of Kuhnian terminology, although I see no reason why one couldn't indulge a revised usage of the concept once it is clear that the implied mechanics of scientific change does not quite really follow Kuhn's model, and remains to be discovered. I read this next to the recent 'Doubts about Darwin' by T. Woodward with its depiction of the Intelligent Design folks closing on their foes with some Kuhn, clamoring for a paradigm shift in evolutionary biology. Not so simple, as Fuller's book makes clear.
Such a rich discourse requires a bit of study, but if you still plan to speak Kuhn pidgin,you might consider this inside track on the Kuhn paradigm. Quiet ferocity, but very much worth reading.

Fuller argues that Kuhn's *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, the ostensibly radical study of paradigm shifts in science, is a profoundly reactionary work: by interpreting historical disputes in terms of parties' commitments to incommensurable paradigms, Kuhn has unleashed a pernicious ahistorical relativism that closes off public debate about the moral, political, and cultural implications of contemporary science. Fuller, a sociologist, attributes Kuhn's conservatism to an over sensitivity to the social consequences of challenging received opinions and to cold war concerns about scientists' morale and about the public perception of science.

Fuller portrays Kuhn as a dangerous exemplar of the dark side of Western culture. Whereas, on his estimation, Socrates, Jesus, and Kuhn's rival Ernest Mach represent a salutary risk-seeking critical libertarianism, Plato, the Catholic Church, and Kuhn represent a tragic risk-adverse authoritarianism. Fuller's broader agenda is to combat the second tradition from the standpoint of the first. This makes for an exciting polemic and, to his credit, Fuller supports his partisan rhetoric with extensive documentation. Ultimately, however, Fuller is not simply a critic of Kuhn but is his implacable enemy. A destructive urge dominates, which leads Fuller to put forward numerous implausible analyses and causes him to overlook opportunities to engage in constructive reasoned dialogue with his interlocutor.

I tried to write a review while I was reading this book. It was not posted, and attempting to read that conglomeration of insights on the complexity of the arguments in this book now does not encourage me. Just a few strands in the book coincided with my normal states of perplexity, and the only sense that tied them together was a common triumph of humor over interest: we know different jokes, but the joke we know is not the best part of how we are able to evaluate new situations. There is a tremendous tension in this book between having a paradigm and being able to exercise mental control in a way that leads to intellectual servitude. The concern with science is the tip of the iceberg, like neology was the key for understanding Lenny Bruce for anyone who did not want to think any further than the words he could pile on once he got started.

When theology exercised control over education, it determined what was taught in a way that expanded its own importance. David Friedrich Strauss wrote his major work about myths included in Bible accounts of the life of Jesus in about 1835, showing how real thinkers were unimpressed by the form of miraculous persuasion it had attempted to impose. Steve Fuller, in this book, mentions David Friedrich Strauss as an example of a thinker who became too sarcastic to be included within the scholarly factions of his day. With a pension, David Friedrich Strauss was able to write instead of teach, becoming as popular as any serious theologian of his time and able to pursue the content of popular opinion.

Social science has become such a group activity that the greatest relief in this book is when Thomas Kuhn has an opportunity to address what social science is doing, but admits that he doesn't know enough to get started down that road, because he doesn't want to fake it. Experts of their own ideas have their own jokes, and the rivalries between departments at major universities push different points of view to the point where absurdity is not out of place in a book of this nature, which ought to be a warning to you, somehow.

I rate this book highly because it exceeds my standards for getting into the thick of things on an intellectual level that is sure to remain challenging for as long as the reader attempts to figure out what it is saying. Thomas Kuhn has become famous for having a philosophy of science that any intellectual can use to measure how successful the participants in the sociology of knowledge have been. Expecting the future to be different from the past, as happens occasionally, this book challenges how precariously such judgments maintain the egoes of modern thinkers. If the book seems a bit thick with names and ideas, that is not something that should stop serious readers and thinkers.

I read over the other reviews before writing mine, and one thing is clear for sure -- a lot of people's bubbles have been burst! However, the thing that struck me the most about Fuller's book is the simple fact that he is really the first person to come up with a comprehensive account of why Kuhn became such a big deal. Before this book, there was simply no explanation whatsoever, aside from some vacuous remarks about the stylistic qualities of the book. I always find this kind of judgment rich, especially when it comes from people who had no clear vision of science before reading Kuhn. To the "Kuhn-heads" out there, I say this: If you find Fuller's iconoclasm offensive, ask yourself whether you had any REALLY good reason to accept Kuhn in the first place. Weren't you just swept along on a wave, a bandwagon effect? Once you read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions critically, as Fuller has, you see that Kuhn's model just falls apart in your hands. It's bad history, philosophy, and sociology of science -- but it's probably better than what Kuhn's admirers originally had! If someone has a better account of why Kuhn's book had so much influence, then the gauntlet has been thrown down!

Professor Fuller's tome gives new meaning to the term "academic." [Correction, these existing meanings will suffice: 4 Scholarly to the point of being unaware of the outside world. 7 Theoretical or speculative without a practical purpose or intention.] This critique of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (my copy of which is 212 pages) spans 423 pages, much of it densely packed footnotes. It also includes 37 pages of bibliographical references, of which entirely two are devoted to Fuller's own works (which, I'll wager, reek of the same "research grant" odour). But what purpose does this unprecedented documentation serve? Is there a thesis (idea) within this thesis (dissertation)? My advice: check out a copy from the library; it's the dusty one in the New Books section.