Thomas Kuhn's Cottage

Thomas Kuhn’s Cottage Alex Levine University of South Florida Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/18/3/369/1789639/posc_r_00012.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Books reviewed in this essay: Fred d’Agostino, Naturalizing Epistemology: Thomas Kuhn and the Es- sential Tension (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) Edwin H.-C. Hung, Beyond Kuhn: Scientiªc Explanation, Theory Struc- ture, Incommensurability and Physical Necessity (Hants: Ashgate, 2006) Hanne Andersen, Peter Barker, and Xiang Chen, The Cognitive Structure of Scientiªc Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Forty-eight years after the publication of The Structure of Scientiªc Revolu- tions, fourteen since the death of its author, Thomas S. Kuhn, and ten since the publication of the posthumous Road Since Structure (2000), the Kuhn cottage industry continues to produce. In preparing this essay review I read eight monographs published in the last ªve years, all explicitly about or inspired by Kuhn’s history and philosophy of science, before settling on three I found representative of the dominant themes: the sociality of the scientiªc enterprise; the structure of scientiªc theories; and the cognitive content of scientiªc knowledge. No one familiar with recent trends in this cottage industry will be surprised to hear that there was not a single historical monograph in the bunch. It is interesting that this is so unsurpris- ing, a fact to which I shall return later. Fred d’Agostino’s Naturalizing Epistemology: Thomas Kuhn and the ‘Essen- tial Tension’ is the latest of several books in which this philosopher extends what he calls the “practical turn” (2) in contemporary epistemology—or more speciªcally, in Steve-Fuller-style social epistemology. It is included in this review because of the importance the author ascribes to Kuhn as a Perspectives on Science 2010, vol. 18, no. 3 ©2010 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology 369 370 Thomas Kuhn’s Cottage pioneering ªgure in social epistemology, a status he traces back to the 1959 paper, “The Essential Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Scientiªc Research” (Kuhn 1977) and cemented by Structure and the road since. Kuhn’s original “essential tension” was strung between two conºicting yet complementary impulses in scientiªc enquiry: the traditional, conser- vative impulse to stick with time-tested solutions to familiar problems, and the innovative, risk-taking impulse to devote resources to new, un- tried solutions to unfamiliar problems. Whereas in the body of his 1959 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/18/3/369/1789639/posc_r_00012.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 essay Kuhn seems to have imagined this tension as instantiated within the mind of the individual scientist, who “must simultaneously display the characteristics of the traditionalist and the iconoclast,” in a footnote he added, “strictly speaking, it is the professional group rather than the individual scientists that must display both these characteristics simultaneously...Within the group some individuals may be more traditionalistic, others more iconoclastic, and their contributions may dif- fer accordingly” (Kuhn 1977, 227–228; d’Agostino 2010, 12). Successful science thus requires the distribution of risk-taking strategies through the community, what d’Agostino calls risk-spreading, further articulated in the Postscript to the second edition of Structure. Risk-spreading, in turn, requires both tradition and its iconoclasts. In d’Agostino’s view, “Kuhn’s collectivist approach to this tension has...brilliantly pointed the way toward a self-consciously social approach to epistemology.” But the real subject of d’Agostino’s book is a second essential tension, a tension between the potential epistemic beneªts of collective enquiry, as recognized by Kuhn, and the actual tendency of many sorts of group organization to foster conformity, stiºing most kinds of beneªcial risk-taking entirely. The potential beneªts provide incentives toward the organization of collective efforts; but in practice, as empirical studies have shown, the resulting group structures frequently inhibit the very beneªts (the “assembly bonus”) they were meant to attain. That science has nonetheless of- ten given rise to groups capable of realizing the assembly bonus is clear; how it does so is less clear. The later chapters of d’Agostino’s book suggest a range of possible answers, some of which may point the way toward the assembly bonus of collective scientiªc enquiry to be realized in other kinds of social practice. We can hope. While d’Agostino’s study is wholly devoted to the collective aspect of the scientiªc enterprise, this facet of the Kuhnian legacy all but disappears in Edwin H.-C. Hung’s Beyond Kuhn. It is not that Hung denies the exis- tence or the importance of scientiªc communities, only that in reading the book it is possible to forget about such things. Hung’s project is con- cerned with the abstract representational structures that constitute scientiªc knowledge, and not with the constitution of the entities, indi- Perspectives on Science 371 vidual or collective, in which the corresponding representations are tokened. With this qualiªcation, Beyond Kuhn is militantly committed to continuing and extending a Kuhnian approach in the philosophy of science, perhaps more so than any book since Hoyningen-Huene’s Recon- structing Scientiªc Revolutions (1993). It bears a very unusual imprimatur in the form of laudatory forewords by two leading philosophers, Rom Harré and Peter Lipton. The scope of the book is ambitious—as Lipton notes, it “aims to provide a kind of successor text to Structure” (ix)—and the fore- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/18/3/369/1789639/posc_r_00012.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 words seem geared toward persuading the mildly skeptical reader to give it a try. As any self-consciously Kuhnian philosopher of science must, Hung takes seriously the central notions of Structure, paradigm shift and incommensurability. The problems with applying such notions to the historical interpretation of science are far too well known to warrant detailed re- hearsal here. They include the charge that paradigm shift, as a signiªcant mode of scientiªc change, undermines the rationality of the scientiªc enterprise and makes nonsense of the very idea of scientiªc progress. Another deep-seated concern is that Kuhn’s account of the incommensurability of the paradigms on either side of a revolutionary divide leads directly to one or another degree of relativism: in the worst case, taking literally Kuhn’s assertion that scientists facing one another across such a divide “work in different worlds” (Kuhn 1970, 150), an intractable ontological relativism. As Hung is well aware, any exposition and defense of the Kuhn of Structure must tackle such problems head-on. The keystone of Hung’s approach is the idea of a representational space, understood as “a mathematical structure whose elements are interpreted as theoretical possibilities for physical instantiation” (34). In other words, a representational space plays the role Tarski envisioned for the laws of logic: an expression of the (possible) laws of nature at their highest level of generality. Hung rejects the classical understanding of a scientiªc theory as a set of statements (or the logical closure of a set of statements), but nei- ther does he endorse either the semantic conception of theories articulated by van Fraassen (1980) and others, on which a theory is a family of models, or any standard structuralism. Scientiªc theories come in two varie- ties, generic and speciªc, with generic theories historically prior to speciªc theories in the emergence of a scientiªc discipline. “in theoretical science,” Hung asserts, “the scientist typically aims at the correct representation of (various aspects of) reality. The act of representation takes two steps: the construction of a representational space (a generic theory) and the model- ing of various aspects of reality by the construction of models (speciªc theories) within that representational space” (33–34). Kuhnian paradigms are representational spaces constructed by scientists, and Kuhnian normal sci- 372 Thomas Kuhn’s Cottage ence is the construction and testing of speciªc theories within such paradigms. Hung justiªes this identiªcation by restricting his use of ‘paradigm’ to what Kuhn, in the second edition Postscript, calls “disciplinary matrices.” Kuhn scholars may be a bit suspicious of this move, since the Postscript instead reserves the word ‘paradigm’ for exemplars (exemplary solutions to exemplary scientiªc problems), but it is defensible, at least as a reading of the ªrst edition of Structure. As Hung argues in chap. 5, as media for the construction of speciªc Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/18/3/369/1789639/posc_r_00012.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 theories and the statements associated with them, representational spaces are language-like. This point having been made, a mapping of all of the familiar elements of Kuhn’s theory of scientiªc change into Hung’s scheme falls neatly into place. For example, the mature Kuhnian view that “if two theories are incommensurable, they must be stated in mutually untranslatable languages” (Kuhn 1983, 669–670) may be cashed out in terms of the language-like features of representational spaces. Hung’s met- ric of the distance between representational spaces, “conceptual disparity” (chap. 6) can be used to characterize various degrees and kinds of transla- tion failure. Now consider Kuhn’s view of scientiªc revolutions. For Hung, new representational spaces are devised in the “empirical stage” of the development of a science, which is followed by the “theoretic stage,” in which scientists devise speciªc theories within the modal boundaries set by the representational space. When objects postulated by such speciªc theories fail to conform to these modal boundaries—when they exceed the constraints of physical possibility inherent in the representational space— an anomaly has occurred.

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