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

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 often 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 neither 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. Eventually such anomalies force scientists to construct a new representational space, redrawing the boundaries of the possible (chap. 7). In this way, Hung captures the Kuhnian cycles of normal- and revolutionary science. What of the specters of scientiªc progress and ontological relativism? Scientiªc progress may occur over a span of historical time punctuated by true Kuhnian revolutions. It is articulated in terms of the relations between successive representational spaces, such that a mere empirical gen- eralization of one representational space can be understood, within another representational space, as a physical necessity. But such progress does not re- quire intertheoretic reduction. Here I am reminded of structuralism, though not that of Sneed or Stegmüller, but rather the mathematical structuralism of Michael Resnik (1997), on which mathematical objects deªned as positions or nodes in relational structures remain always incom- plete, their potentialities progressively reªned as they enter into new relations. Whatever the merits of Hung’s account of scientiªc growth, either as an account of scientiªc progress in its own right or as a rational recon- Perspectives on Science 373 struction of Kuhn, a good portion of his readers will surely be digging in their heels when it comes to the second trenchant problem, the charge of ontological relativism. As Peter Lipton admits, Kuhn’s realist opponents [will not] be entirely content. Hung wants an account that makes science objective and in various ways cumulative, yet his representational spaces and their incommensurability seem at ªrst to support the Kuhnian picture of world changes which the realist disdains. This is not quite where Hung Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/18/3/369/1789639/posc_r_00012.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 ends up, however, since rather than say that the world and hence the truth changes, Hung invokes an austere concept of truth, not in terms of a match between the esoteric internal ontology of theory and the world, but only between the predictions of the theory and the observable phenomena [as circumscribed by the representational space]. Yet this will not satisfy the realist either, since it smacks of instrumentalism. (xi) To dust off a classic of post-Kuhnian American philosophy, what is at issue here is the very idea of a conceptual scheme. To the committed realist about shoes and shirts, Donald Davidson’s claim is self-evident: “We cannot attach a clear meaning to the notion of organizing a single object (the world, nature, etc.) unless that object is understood to consist in other objects. Someone who sets out to organize a closet arranges the things in it. If you are told not to organize the shoes and shirts, but the closet itself, you would be bewildered” (Davidson 1984, 192). To anyone else, it smacks of an almost Moorean obtuseness. Hung and his fellow-travelers are unlikely to be sympathetic to an account of scientiªc knowledge that sets out from realism; those who demand such accounts are unlikely to be sympathetic to Hung. Nor should they expect to ªnd much in the way of polemical response to Davidson or others among Kuhn’s famous critics. Hung’s mentions Davidson, and his “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” only once, in passing, to acknowledge, “that our thesis here is in direct opposition to the view of Donald Davidson” (42). Those who believe, with this reviewer, that metaphysics can be, and perhaps ought to be driven by an account of the nature, extent, and justiªcation of scientiªc knowledge, need not be troubled by antirealist implications, when they come as a consequence of signiªcant explanatory gains. The question is, what are those gains? I was deeply impressed by the care and rigor with which Hung’s reconstruction and extension of Kuhn were implemented. But Kuhn surely meant the theory of scientiªc change articulated in Structure as a testable explanatory hypothesis, for which the relevant data, pro or con, were to be garnered from the history of science. Hung’s historical erudition is evident on every page of his text. Be- 374 Thomas Kuhn’s Cottage yond Kuhn is steeped in history. But it does not contain, nor does it claim to contain any novel historiography of science. And it seems likely that there is not a single historical case study cited in support of the Kuhnian account of scientiªc change whose Kuhnian interpretation has not been challenged, if not demolished, by reputable historians of science. Where, then, are the new data? Where, ªve decades after Structure, is the Kuhnian historiography of science? If there is no such historiography of science, one

of the reasons might be, at least in principle, that the historical data don’t Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/18/3/369/1789639/posc_r_00012.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 sustain it. Which brings us to our third book, whose authors acknowledge from the outset, “there is no Kuhnian school of history” (Andersen, Barker, and Chen 2006, 1). As its title implies The Cognitive Structure of Scientiªc Revo- lutions is not meant to initiate such a school, though the authors would surely welcome the attempt to do so. Their goal is rather to defend and ex- tend the Kuhnian project of understanding the genesis and transformation of scientiªc knowledge by recourse to its cognitive content. In doing so they wish to distinguish Kuhn’s approach to the history of science from the externalist approaches with which it is sometimes carelessly lumped, and most especially from social determinism. These latter approaches bracket the book, which begins with an epigraph from Latour and Woolgar 1986, calling for a “ten year moratorium on cognitive explanations of science” (vi) and ends with the conclusion that, in opposition to David Bloor and the Strong Programme in the sociology of science, “Scientists cannot so- cially construct what they do not understand, and to explain what they do and do not understand, and how a radical change in scientiªc understanding comes about, requires that we admit a cognitive component in historical explanations” (180). Andersen, Barker, and Chen endorse a common diagnosis of the pre- vailing negative response of philosophers to the ªrst edition of Structure: in 1962, the classical account of concepts as sets of individually necessary and jointly sufªcient conditions remained deeply entrenched in Anglophone philosophy, and this account was incompatible with Kuhn’s understanding of scientiªc knowledge and its historical transformations. In the wake of this reaction, “Between 1969 and 1994, Kuhn elaborated an account of scientiªc change in which the theory of concepts holds a central place.” The theory of concepts proposed by Kuhn “extended Wittgenstein’s account of family resemblance concepts,” which was philosophically unfash- ionable at the time. But happily for Kuhn’s account of scientiªc change, “At about the same time, a successful revolution in psychology and allied ªelds—the Roschian revolution—replaced the classical theory of concepts with a range of new accounts that were remarkably similar to the theory Kuhn had developed” (5). Eleanor Rosch’s own challenges to the classical Perspectives on Science 375

theory of concepts would give rise to the prototype theory and its allies, a productive family of hypotheses of great importance to cognitive science for the past four decades and often congenial to Kuhn’s view of scientiªc change. Before considering the marriage of Kuhnian philosophy of science to Roschian cognitive science, I feel obliged to draw attention to one lacuna in this study that may put off many readers. The Cognitive Structure of

Scientiªc Revolutions is not a polemical work, nor should it be. The authors Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/18/3/369/1789639/posc_r_00012.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 do consider and reply to the occasional objection. But it is startling to ªnd absolutely no engagement with trenchant critiques of Roschian accounts of concepts by perhaps the most important living cognitive scientist, Jerry Fodor (see e.g. Fodor 1981, 1998). Fodor, it is worth recalling, is also a philosopher of science of some note. At any rate, the authors are not, of course, the ªrst to propose the marriage of Kuhnian philosophy of science to Roschian cognitive science. There have been many such efforts, as they acknowledge, though in this book their review of the relevant literature is unsystematic, passing over several studies that might help their case, as well as not a few that threaten to undermine it. In the ªeld of cognitive developmental psychology, for example, they cite Susan Carey’s (1985) and Frank Keil’s (1989) work on conceptual change in childhood, in which prototype concepts are har- nessed in identifying and explaining developmental analogues to Kuhnian paradigm shifts. But they miss the equally important contributions of Piagetian developmentalists Bärbel Inhelder (1992) and Annette Karmiloff-Smith (1995), not to mention those of Jean Piaget himself. This last oversight is particularly signiªcant, since Kuhn himself credits Piaget’s experimental illumination of “both the various worlds of the growing child and the process of transition from one to the next” as an in- spiration for Structure (Kuhn 1970, vi–vii). And though Kuhn may not have known it at the time, Piaget’s developmental psychology drew on his philosophical psychology—speciªcally, on an approach to conceptual change he called “genetic epistemology” (see e.g. Piaget 1950). In other words, Kuhn’s theory of scientiªc change is not only a potential spouse to cognitive science, it is also its erstwhile offspring and parent. This intimation of incest is potentially troubling, as I have argued else- where (Levine 2000). For purposes of this review, it is important to ask, what is Andersen, Barker, and Chen’s account about? More speciªcally, which data matter (or ought to matter) to our acceptance (or rejection) of the account? Are they the data of the history of science, as collected by Kuhn and his successors? Are they the data of cognitive psychology and related ªelds, as collected by Eleanor Rosch and her successors? Both? Neither? Happily this book is not a work of free-ºoating theorizing. It develops 376 Thomas Kuhn’s Cottage two historical case studies in detail, and uses them to illustrate the explanatory value of the authors’ Kuhnian/Roschian account of the cognitive structure and content of scientiªc knowledge and its changes. The ªrst case study is the familiar (dare I say, hackneyed?) Copernican Revolution, to which the authors contribute an analysis that differs somewhat from Kuhn’s in that it associates the revolutionary paradigm shift not with Co- pernicus, but with Kepler. The second and, to my mind, the more inter-

esting case is the revolution in physics brought about by the discovery of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/18/3/369/1789639/posc_r_00012.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 nuclear ªssion. Here, ªnally, we see a new piece of historical analysis of- fered in support of a Kuhnian account of scientiªc change. Whether such analyses will eventually give rise to the Kuhnian school of history remains to be seen. Has the Kuhnian cottage industry ªnally run its course? Like many philosophers of my generation and the one preceding it, I was ªrst at- tracted to the philosophy of science by The Structure of Scientiªc Revolutions. But like many of my peers, I found that once I started actually doing philosophy of science, I was far less of a Kuhnian than I had thought. I sus- pect that in various ways, each of the three books discussed above is less Kuhnian than it might appear at ªrst blush. If the cottage industry remains alive, it is because it has transformed into something else.

References Andersen, Hanne, Peter Barker and Xiang Chen. 2006. The Cognitive Structure of Scientiªc Revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carey, Susan. 1985. Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. D’Agostino, Fred. 2010. Naturalizing Epistemology: Thomas Kuhn and the Essential Tension. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Davidson, Donald. 1984. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Fodor, Jerry. 1981. Representations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1998. Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. Oxford: Ox- ford University Press. Hoyningen-Huene, Paul. 1993. Reconstructing Scientiªc Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science. Trans. Alex Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hung, Edwin H.-C. 2006. Beyond Kuhn: Scientiªc Explanation, Theory Struc- ture, Incommensurability and Physical Necessity. Hants: Ashgate. Inhelder, Bärbel. 1992. Le Cheminement des Découvertes de l’Enfant. Neuchâtel: Delachaux et Niestlé. Perspectives on Science 377

Karmiloff-Smith, Annette. 1995. Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Per- spective on Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Keil, Frank. 1989. Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. The Structure of Scientiªc Revolutions. Second edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1977. The Essential Tension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 1983. “Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability,” in Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/18/3/369/1789639/posc_r_00012.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Asquith and Nickles, eds., Proceedings of the 1982 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. East Lansing: Philosophy of Science As- sociation, 669–688. ———. 2000. The Road Since Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientiªc Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Levine, Alex. 2000. “Which Way is Up? Thomas S. Kuhn’s Analogy to Conceptual Development in Childhood.” In Science and Education 9: 107–122. Piaget, Jean. 1950. Introduction à l’Épistémologie Génétique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Resnik, Michael. 1997. Mathematics as a Science of Patterns. Oxford: Claren- don Van Fraassen, Bas. The Scientiªc Image. Oxford: Clarendon.