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Social Studies of Science Social Studies of Science http://sss.sagepub.com/ Comment on Kuhn Harry Collins Social Studies of Science 2012 42: 420 originally published online 3 April 2012 DOI: 10.1177/0306312712436571 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sss.sagepub.com/content/42/3/420 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Social Studies of Science can be found at: Email Alerts: http://sss.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://sss.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://sss.sagepub.com/content/42/3/420.refs.html >> Version of Record - Jun 6, 2012 OnlineFirst Version of Record - Apr 3, 2012 What is This? Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CONNECTICUT on June 19, 2014 SSS42310.1177/0306312712436571CollinsSocial Studies of Science 4365712012 Social Studies of Science 42(3) 420 –423 Comment on Kuhn © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0306312712436571 sss.sagepub.com Harry Collins Cardiff University School of Social Sciences, Cardiff, UK Keywords incommensurability, structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Kuhn What does one mean by ‘the impact’ of a book? Is it the importance of the ideas or is it the causal influence of a publishing event, in the sense that one might talk of the impact of the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand – which is said to have precipitated the First World War. While we tend to speak as though books have their effects in conse- quence of the ideas they contain, the sociologist should keep the Archduke model in mind. Moreover, the shot that killed the Archduke would not have started the War were it not the case that many other pieces were already in place, and the same goes for a lot of key books. In the case of books, the sociological question is, why has this one rather than that one been chosen to count as the trigger of some social/intellectual change. In the case of both Kuhn’s (1962) and Latour’s (1987) books, the ideas were largely in place already – we have Fleck (1935) and Wittgenstein (1953) on the one hand and Bloor (1973) and various others (for example, Collins, 1975) on the other. But Kuhn’s book is said to be the best selling academic book of the 20th century and I think I can just about see why. As for Science in Action (Latour, 1987), I hadn’t realized it ranked with Kuhn so I’ll read the other essays with interest.1 Context is one thing, but there is also the quality of the performance. Here there is a big difference between the sciences, on the one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other. In science, it is originality that leads to greatness – or supposedly so; in art, at least those arts that Goodman (1976) refers to as allographic, it is performance that is crucial. A performance of Hamlet is not diminished by the fact that the work has been performed thousands of times before. The social sciences are torn between science and art. Is Kuhn’s book great because it is a brilliant performance, in spite of the fact that it was not as Corresponding author: Harry Collins, Cardiff University School of Social Sciences, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WT, UK. Email: [email protected] Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CONNECTICUT on June 19, 2014 Collins 421 original as we all once thought? I would say that if you think as a scientist, then it is Fleck who deserves the larger part of the credit: Fleck did it first and, in a lot of ways did it best. After all, Fleck (1979 [1935]) did not just explain ‘thought collectives’, he showed how they operated through a reflexive case study of his own work. Kuhn was a ‘mere’ histo- rian and philosopher, not a participant. If you think as a social scientist, however, Kuhn created the social change by coming along at the right time and writing in English; Fleck wrote in German and there was no English translation until 1979. Thinking as an artist, you might give Kuhn credit for dreaming up the dramatic illustrations and the vocabulary. Kuhn’s scientific contribution is restricted to his more or less original ideas: ‘scientific revolution’ – though I am going to show that this too was anticipated – and ‘incommensurability’. And, of course, he was responsible for telling the history of sci- ence in a thought-collective kind of way. I think that the best I can do by way of adding something to this well-known story is describe its effect on me and my close circle.2 It must have been in 1968 or 1969 that I was looking along the shelves of the London School of Economics (LSE) bookshop when I saw a thin blue hardback with the title The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1962). I’d never heard of the book but the title was intriguing, so I bought it. Someone, somewhere, has that copy with my name and my annotations in it. Please send it back! As a result of certain biographical contingencies, I was, at that point in my life, immersed in Peter Winch’s (1958) Idea of a Social Science and, consequently, in Wittgenstein’s (1953) Philosophical Investigations, and slowly coming to understand them in an autodidactic way. After this, Kuhn was easy: it was simply the application of Winch and Wittgenstein to science; paradigms were forms-of-life in science. To me, the odd thing was that these sources weren’t acknowledged except for a passing mention of Wittgenstein. Some years later, I found myself in the audience at a meeting in America with Kuhn and I put up my hand and made the point that Structure was an application of Wittgenstein. Kuhn called me up to the front to make my point more formally, but when I explained that he had been anticipated by Winch he was not amused. But the fact was that in some important respects he had been anticipated and, in a manner of speaking, Winch understood him better than he understood himself: here’s the Winch passage pub- lished 4 years before Structure came out: To illustrate what is meant by saying that the social relations between men and ideas which men’s action embody are really the same thing considered from different points of view, I want now to consider the general nature of what happens when the ideas current in a society change: when new ideas come into the language and old ideas go out of it. In speaking of ‘new ideas’ I shall make a distinction. Imagine a biochemist making certain observations and experiments as a result of which he discovers a new germ which is responsible for a certain disease. In one sense we might say that the name he gives this new germ expresses a new idea, but I prefer to say in this context that he has made a discovery within the existing framework of ideas. I am assuming that the germ theory of disease is already well established in the scientific language he speaks. Now compare with this discovery the impact made by the first formulation of that theory, the first introduction of the concept of germ into the language of medicine. This was a much more radically new departure, involving not merely a new factual discovery within an existing way of looking at things, but a completely new way of looking at the whole problem Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CONNECTICUT on June 19, 2014 422 Social Studies of Science 42(3) of the causation of diseases, the adoption of new diagnostic techniques, the asking of new kinds of questions about illnesses, and so on. In short it involved the adoption of new ways of doing things by people involved, in one way or another, in medical practice. An account of the way in which social relations in the medical profession had been influenced by this new concept would conclude an account of what that concept was. Conversely, the concept itself is unintelligible apart from its relation to general medical practice. A doctor who (i) claimed to accept the germ theory of disease, (ii) claimed to aim at reducing the incidence of disease, and (iii) completely ignored the necessity of isolating infectious patients, would be behaving in a self-contradictory and unintelligible manner. (Winch, 1958: 121–122) So there, in Winch, is normal and revolutionary science and, if only Kuhn had read and understood that passage he would have saved himself backtracking on the notion of para- digm. There aren’t two ideas of paradigm – the practical and the conceptual – there is only one, because where collective life is concerned the practice is inseparable from the idea. Winch explains that clearly and convincingly in that one short passage.3 To read this as a linear progress is, however, to miss the point. I would never have noticed what Winch was saying if it weren’t for Kuhn. Kuhn’s book led me to see that Winch and Wittgenstein could be applied to science. Structure was one of the greatest books of the 20th century because it catalysed a change in the way we could see science. It licensed a new kind of thinking about science. It is a counterfactual speculation, but I’m guessing we wouldn’t have a science studies or an STS and, if I can put it this way, most of us would not have a Ludwik Fleck, were it not for Kuhn.
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