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Home , Ascension (Wercollier), Thomas Kuhn

Thomas Kuhn, the Image of and the Image of Art: The First Manuscript of Structure

J. C. Pinto de Oliveira State University of Campinas

The firstmanuscriptofThe Structure of ScientificRevolutions,prob- ably written in late 1958, is available in the Kuhn Archive at MIT ( Institute of Technology)1.Itisthefirst version of Chapter 1, which is the introduction to the book, and is completely different from the ver- sion that was published. In this article, I turn to the manuscript to show that at that time Kuhn considered the comparison between the image of science and the image of art as the most appropriate way to announce his project: to change the image of science by bringing it closer to the image of art. As I try to dem- onstrate, this appeal to the history of art is not merely occasional. And it allows us to understand Kuhn’s intriguing retrospective statement, according to which Structure was a belated product of his discovery of the parallels between science and art. Some passages from Kuhn’s unpublished manuscript are transcribed in the article.

1. Introduction Thomas Kuhn’s , which he developed by focusing on (and chemistry), was later applied by other authors to virtually all areas or disciplines of culture. What interests me here, however, is

I thank MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections for the permission to quote from Kuhn’s manuscripts. I am very grateful to Amelia Oliveira for her research at MIT, de- veloped under my supervision, for her doctoral work. I would also like to thank Paul Hoyningen-Huene and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this paper, as well as Baruana Calado for translations and revisions.

1. Kuhn Papers. MIT MC 240, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Librar- ies, Cambridge, MA. (Kuhn M1: box 4, folder 3, SSR – Chapter 1 – What are Scientific Revolutions? – Kuhn M2: box 4, folder 3, SSR – Chapter 1 – Discoveries as Revolutionary). Hereafter Kuhn papers.

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the movement in the opposite direction: the role that one of these dis- ciplines, history of art, played in the conception of Kuhn’stheoryof science. In a 1969 article, his only published text concerning science and art, Kuhn makes a brief and intriguing about The Structure of ScientificRevolutions. He says the book was a belated product of his dis- covery of the parallels between science and art (Kuhn 1969, p. 340). This is a retrospective assertion about Structure,aswellasthatofthe “Postscript – 1969,” inwhichhesaysthathisideasonthedevelopment of science have been borrowed from other areas, including history of art (Kuhn 1970, p. 208). In the text of Structure itself, there are only a few and minor references to art.2 What justifies the article is the that in the early manuscripts of Structure, available in the Kuhn Archive at MIT (to which I recently had access), the relationship between science and art is effectively taken by Kuhn as a fundamental aspect of the book. He considers the comparison between the image of science and the image of art, strongly contrasted, the most appropriate way to announce his project. In these terms, one can say that his purpose was to change the image of science by bringing it closer to the image of art. That is the first point I would like to highlight in this article and I do it in the following section by using the first manuscript of Structure.In Section 3, I try to show that the image of science outlined in this manuscript is actually present in the traditional conception. I take as a reference, in particular, an author like George Sarton, the main representative of the “old” historiography of science, which Kuhn criticizes. Not only does Sarton cultivate the traditional image of science, but also the traditional image of art, and the contrast between them, used by Kuhn. Finally, exploring the consequences of the rapprochement between science and art, I will suggest an explanation for the important impact Kuhn’s book had on other disciplines besides philosophy of science, extending its influence to virtually all areas of culture.

2. Science and Art in the First Manuscript of Structure Here I take into account what is probably the first manuscript of Structure, which I name M1.3 In it there is no indication of date, but the Archive index describes it as the first version of chapter 1 (Chapter 1, First draft,

2. See below the end of Section 3. 3. Kuhn Papers, box 4, folder 3, SSR—Chapter 1—What are Scientific Revolutions?

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1958–60), the introduction to the book. Moreover, in the preface to The Essential Tension, Kuhn writes: I spent the year 1958/59 as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral at Stanford, California, intending to write a draft of the book on revolutions during my fellowship. Soon after arriving, I produced the first version of a chapter on revolutionary change (…). (Kuhn 1977, p. xviii) I believe that these allow us to state that it is effectively the first manuscript of the first chapter of Structure. It would have been written by Kuhn “soon after arriving” at Stanford in the fall of 1958 (Preston 2008, p. 7; Hufbauer 2012, pp. 443, 451, and 453–54; Marcum 2015, p. 15). Certainly still trying to stick to the limited space assigned to it in the positivist Encyclopedia, Kuhn reckoned the monograph would have only five chapters (and about eighty pages, according to the editors’ suggestion).4 In the manuscript, Kuhn already refers to the book by its full name and entitles chapter 1 “What are Scientific Revolutions?”.5 The first section of the chapter, which I discuss below, is entitled “Cumulativeness and Rev- olutions in Science.” Because of the restrictions involving copyright of unpublished texts, I am not publishing in full Kuhn’s text from this sec- tion, but I transcribe some passages from it (and from other parts of the manuscript), duly authorized.6 Kuhn starts the first section of the first manuscript of Structure by out- lining the traditional image of the development of science. According to it, scientific is like an ever-growing edifice: Though we may recognize it as metaphor, we must all see the appropriateness of describing science as an ever-growing edifice to which each strives to add a few stones or a bit of mortar. Science appears to advance by accretion. (Kuhn M1, p. 2)

4. See M1, pp. 37–9, where Kuhn outlines the structure of the book at that time and a letter from Charles Morris to Kuhn in March 1960 (Kuhn Papers, box 25, folder 53). For a discussion on the publication of Structure in positivist Encyclopedia, see Pinto de Oliveira 2007 and 2015, and Uebel 2011. 5. There are 41 typewritten pages in the manuscript, about 10,000 words. It should not be confused with later manuscripts, such as those that Hoyningen-Huene (2015, p. 188n4) calls Proto-Structure and (with Matteo Collodel) Proto-Proto-Structure, which are already full versions of the book. In the manuscript’s cover page, Kuhn writes that it is “a preliminary draft of a fragment of a projected book” (of its first chapter). The chapter title was used by Kuhn much later (1987) in a text with other content (see Kuhn 2000, p. 130). 6. I also quote here from the text that can be considered the second manuscript of Structure, which I call M2 (Kuhn Papers, box 4, folder 3, SSR—Chapter 1—Discoveries as Revolutionary). It was not dated by Kuhn either, but the Archive identifies it as Chapter 1, Second draft, 1958–60.

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And Kuhn soon reaches the point that particularly interests me here, the relationship between the development of science and the development of art. He initially compares the two disciplines to mark the difference between them, according to the traditional view, highlighting the specific cumulative of science: The most persuasive case for the concept of cumulativeness is made by the familiar contrast between the development of science and that of art. Both disciplines display continuity of historical development – neither could have reached its present state without its – yet the relation of present to past in these two fields is clearly distinct. Einstein or Heisenberg could, we feel sure, have persuaded Newton that twentieth-century science has surpassed the science of the seventeenth century, but we anticipate no remotely similar conclusion from a debate between, say, Rembrandt and Picasso. In the arts successive developmental stages are autonomous and self-complete: no obvious external standard is available for comparisons between them. (Kuhn M1, pp. 2–3)7 Kuhn introduces the concept of incommensurability in the first manu- script. He first applies it, significantly, to art:8 The creative idiom of a Rembrandt, Bach, or Shakespeare resolves all its aesthetic problems and prohibits the consideration of others. Fundamentally new modes of aesthetic expression emerge only in intimate conjunction with a new perception of the aesthetic problem that the new modes must aim to resolve. Except in the realm of technique, the transition between one stage of artistic development and the next is a transition between incommensurables. In science, on the other hand, problems seem to be set by nature and in advance, without reference to the idiom or taste of the scientific community. Apparently, therefore, successive stages of scientific development can be evaluated as successively better approximations to a full solution. That is why the present state of science always seems to embrace its past stages as parts, which is what the concept of cumulativeness means. Guided by that concept, we see in the development of science no equivalents for the total shift of artistic vision – the shift from one integrated set of problems, images, techniques, and tastes to another. (Kuhn M1, p. 3)

7. A mention of Rembrandt and Picasso remains in Kuhn 1969, p. 345. 8. It is important to notice that Kuhn first uses the notion of incommensurability in the context of art. This reinforces the idea that he starts from more intuitive notions of “incom- mensurability” and “,” such as found in history of art and other disciplines (see below Section 4).

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Kuhn then avails himself of the very contrast between science and art, in the traditional view, to propose a change in the image of science: Yet, at least in the climate of contemporary historiography, even the briefest immersion in the original works that constitute past science, suggests that the indubitable differences between science and art cannot be accounted for in this manner. (…) If cumulativeness is to distinguish the developmental pattern of science and art, that cannot be because art is never cumulative but because science is always so. There can be in the sciences no episodes that parallel the transition from one autonomous aesthetic perspective to another. I believe that there are many such episodes, and that they call for a fundamental revision in our image of science. It is to isolate them that I introduce the term “scientific revolution.” (Kuhn M1, pp. 3–4) Further, Kuhn points out that once the revolutionary change in science takes place, scientific activity takes on a new look and a new meaning to . The transformation, he says, is very similar to what occurs in artistic work, which at the same time acquires new goals and new ways to reach them after a fundamental change in aesthetic perspective. And the non-cumulative change, so familiar in the history of art, can be taken as a criterion of scientific revolution. Just as artists and their audience resist new styles and patterns, scientists have shown resistance to new scientific discoveries and theories. Although they may not be universal, Kuhn believes that demonstrations of resistance are typical in science. He says, as he will also do in the published version of the work, that often only death solves these conflicts. And he adds in the manuscript that, in fact, we cannot even be certain that Einstein could convince Newton (Kuhn M1, p. 7). According to Kuhn, the traditional cumulative image of the development of science reduces the dispute to an individual disability of the scientist, fallible like every human being, to follow here and there the standards of scientific activity. He suggests, however, another interpretation. He stresses that perhaps scientists, like artists, need a commitment to a particular way of seeing the world.9 And new findings and theories may pose a threat to the

9. Kuhn uses the term “paradigm” in its more global sense (Cf. Kuhn 1970, p. 175) in the first manuscript of Chapter II (Kuhn Papers, box 4, folder 4, The Normal Practice of Mature Science, undated, pp. 53 and 54). In M1 and M2, he speaks of “scientific ideology” (p. 40), but already uses the term “paradigm” in the sense of exemplar (See Kuhn M1, p. 31, and Kuhn M2, p. 34. The passages correspond to Kuhn 1970, p. 138). The term appeared for the first time in print in the paper “The Essential Tension” (1959), reprinted in Kuhn 1977. For a discussion, see Wray 2011, Chapter 3.

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validity of the scientists’ view as a professional group, in the same way that new styles and preferences do to groups of artists (Kuhn M1, p. 7).10 Thus we can say in order to complete this brief presentation, that in the first manuscript of Structure (as well as in the second), Kuhn essentially contrasts the development of science with the development of art. He does it according to the traditional notion of the two disciplines, whereby the development of science would be cumulative, while the development of art would include breaks from previous norms, characterized by the succession of different styles. The contrast is important for Kuhn because it allows not only better understanding of cumulativeness and the idea of revolution, but it also immediately points out the content of its proposal to change the image of science: we will have a more appropriate image of science if its develop- ment is rightly understood from the traditional image of the development of art. This is the central idea that Kuhn announces from the start in his man- uscript and, with the necessary qualifications and deepening, intends at that moment to develop throughout the future book.

3. Metaphors and the Image of Science The traditional images of science and art that Kuhn refers to in both of his manuscripts are in fact quite common. James B. Conant, for instance, writes in On Understanding Science, published in 1947 (almost at the same time Kuhn begins, through Conant, his experience with the ): I have suggested on another occasion that one may group together under the heading “accumulative knowledge” subjects as diverse as mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, philology, and archeology. One can state with assurance that great advances have been made in these subjects in the last three centuries. A similar statement cannot be made about philosophy, poetry, and the fine arts. If you are inclined to doubt this and raise the question of how even in academic matters can be defined, I would respond by asking you to perform an imaginary operation. Bring back to life the great figures of the past who were identified with the subjects in question. Ask them to view the present scene and answer whether or not in their opinion there has been an advance. No one can doubt how Galileo, Newton, Harvey, or the pioneers in anthropology and archeology would respond. It is far otherwise with Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Dante, Milton, or Keats. It would be otherwise with

10. In M2, Kuhn writes that controversies and resistance to change in science mean more than mere human limitation. They indicate in fact the need of a new image of science—an image, he says, closer to our image of art (p. 6).

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Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, Locke or Kant. We might argue all day whether or not the particular artist or poet or philosopher would feel the present state of art or poetry or philosophy to be an advance or a retrogression from the days when he himself was a creative spirit. There would be no unanimity among us; and more significant still, no agreement between the majority view which might prevail and that which would have prevailed fifty years ago. (Conant 1957, p. 34)11 George Sarton—a prominent representative of the “old” historiography of science, to which Kuhn opposes his “new historiography”—also estab- lishes this contrast.12 In addition to a text published in 1941 on the his- tory of medicine and the history of art (which relates more to the history of music), Sarton refers to the history of art in at least two other texts. In the first, “The History of Science,” published in 1916 and republished in 1948, he writes in Section 4 (“Science and Art”): The artist admires the work of his forerunners, but the scientist does more than admire, he makes actual use of it. The artist may find an in it, but the scientist tries to incorporate it entirely in his own work. It is very difficult to conceive progress in art. Does Rodin carve better than Verrocchio or Polycletus? The pictures by Carriere, by Watts, or by Segantini: are they finer than those by Fra Angelico, by Van Eyck or by Moro? Have these questions even any sense? (Sarton 1948, p. 39) And then he compares this situation with what, according to him, would happen in science: In the domain of science the matter is quite different. Undoubtedly it would be foolish to discuss whether Archimedes was more or less intelligent than Newton or Gauss; but we can in all security assert that Gauss knew more than Newton, and that Newton knew more than Archimedes. The making of knowledge, unlike that of beauty, is essentially a cumulative process. By the way, this is the reason why the history of science should be the leading thread in the history of civilization. Nothing that has been done or invented gets lost. Every contribution, great or small, is appreciated and classified. This cumulative process is so obvious that even very young men may be better

11. See also Conant 1951, pp. 37–8. In other passages, however, Conant seems to antic- ipate some of Kuhn’s ideas (see Conant 1957, pp. 90, 94, 100–01; 1951, pp. 44–5). For a discussion of Conant’sinfluence on Kuhn, see Wray 2016. 12. On Kuhn, Sarton, and the “old” historiography of science, see Pinto de Oliveira and Oliveira forthcoming 2018. On Kuhn, Koyré, and the “new historiography,” see Pinto de Oliveira 2012.

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informed and more learned than their most illustrious forerunners. As a matter of fact, they are standing on the shoulders of their predecessors, and so they have a chance to see further. (Sarton 1948, pp. 39–40) In the second text, chapter 1 of The History of Science and the New Humanism (1931), Sarton extends these considerations. He writes: Indeed the scientific activity is the only one which is obviously and undoubtedly cumulative and progressive. (…) If Aeschylus and Sophocles could attend our modern plays what would they think of them? What would they say of our art exhibitions? I imagine that their most charitable attitude would be to treat much of our effort not as a genuine performance but as a joke, – a huge and nonsensical joke. The fact is there cannot be any continuous progress in art or in literature. (Sarton 1937, pp. 10–11) And Sarton once again compares the development of science with the development of art. The path of science, according to him, is very different from the path of art: When one reads the history of science one has the exhilarating feeling of climbing a big mountain. The history of art gives one an altogether different impression. It is not at all like the ascension of a mountain, always upward whichever the direction of one’s path; it is rather like a leisurely journey across a hilly country. One climbs up to the top of this hill or that, then down into another valley, perhaps a deeper one than any other, then up the next hill, and so forth and so on. An erratic succession of climaxes and anticlimaxes the amplitude of which cannot be predicted. This history makes one think of a rhythmic motion, or rather of many rhythms capriciously interwoven. For example, our artistic sensibility passes periodically from romanticism to classicism, or else from to idealism. There is no reason to change the direction of the movement except that the pendulum has gone as far up this way as it could and must come down again and up the other way. People get tired of romanticism, or idealism, or intense colors, or short skirts, or what not, and they want a change; sooner or later a point is reached where no change is possible except by reversing the movement. Under such circumstances there are only ups and downs; one cannot speak of progress, nor even conceive it. (Sarton 1937, pp. 11–2)13

13. Gombrich (1995, pp. 9, 617) also understands that art does not present “continuous progress” or “progress as such.” See Pinto de Oliveira 2011, pp. 223–25, and 2014.

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And he completes the comparison further: Now as opposed to beauty, knowledge is cumulative and progressive. Looking at works of art will hardly help us to create better ones, but we can assimilate the store of knowledge amassed by the people who came before us, repeating in a few years the evolution of centuries, and start our own investigations where they left off. It is in that sense that one must understand the saying ascribed to one of the most lovable scholars of the twelfth century, Bernard of Chartres, “In comparison with the ancients we are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants.”14 Indeed, from the point of view of science mankind might be compared to a single man, to a single giant whose knowledge and experience are steadily increasing. (Sarton 1937, pp. 15–6) As one can see, the traditional images of art and science, and even the “” (that brings to the present scientists and artists of the past), to which Kuhn refers in the manuscripts of Structure,are already present in Sarton and Conant.15 And one can say, because of the contact he had with these contemporary authors in his long period at Harvard, they are the direct sources of the views that Kuhn criticizes. Never- theless, according to him, the traditional image of science goes back to much earlier authors.16 This traditional image of the development of science manifests itself in many converging metaphors, all pointing towards cumulativeness. In addition to the metaphors presented above—the mountain, the dwarves on the shoulders of giants, and the giant growing indefinitely—Sarton himself still speaks of an “ever-living tree,” a ladder or a ramp (Sarton 1937, pp. 21–2, 1948, p. 40).

14. In the manuscripts, Kuhn refers to the use of this metaphor by Newton (Kuhn M1 and M2, p. 2). 15. And also in Charles Gillispie. He writes in 1960 in a book critically cited in Struc- ture: “…the most dynamic, distinctive, and influential creation of the western mind is a progressive science of nature. Only there in the technical realm, indeed, does the favorite western idea of progress hold any demonstrable meaning. No one understands political power better than Machiavelli did. Picasso cannot conclusively be held a better or worse artist than Leonardo was. But every college freshman knows more physics than Galileo knew, whose claim is higher than any other’s to the honor of having founded modern sci- ence, and more too than Newton did, whose mind was the most powerful ever to have addressed itself to nature” (Gillispie 1960, p. 8; see Kuhn 1970, p. 108n11). 16. When Kuhn includes Condorcet (eighteenth century) into the broad spectrum of “old” historiography of science, which, he says, goes from “Condorcet and Comte to Dampier and Sarton,” he already indicates a much more remote origin of that image (Kuhn 1977, p. 148). And he goes even further in the second manuscript, also referring to (Kuhn M2, p. 2).

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But the metaphor Kuhn elects to account for the traditional image of science in the manuscripts of Structure is the scientificedifice, which is cumulatively built over time with the addition of new bricks (see Kuhn M1, p.1; Kuhn M2, p. 7).17 Sarton also refers to the science edifice when he writes in 1916: Critical and sincere biographies make excellent contributions to the history of mankind. Would not the students work with a better heart and more enthusiasm, would they not have a deeper respect for science, if they knew a little more about the heroes who have built it up, stone by stone, at the expense of so much suffering, struggle and perseverance? (Sarton 1948, pp. 50–1) And Carnap writes more explicitly in the Aufbau (1928): If we allot to the individual in philosophical work as in the special sciences only a partial task, then we can look with more confidence into the future: in slow careful construction insight after insight will be won. Each collaborator contributes only what he can endorse and justify before the whole body of his co-workers. Thus, stone will be carefully added to stone and a safe building will be erected at which each following generation can continue to work. (Carnap 1967, p. xvii)18 The metaphor of the edifice, as pointed out above in Sarton’stextin 1916 and in Carnap’s text in 1928, is still present in the 1940s. Zilsel, for example, writes that “the modern scientist looks upon science as a great building erected stone by stone through the work of his predecessors and his contemporary fellow-scientists” (Zilsel 1945, p. 325). And, as late as 1972, Popper says in Objective Knowledge that “all work in science is work directed towards the growth of objective knowledge. We are workers who are adding to growth of objective knowledge as masons work in a cathe- dral” (Popper 1972, p. 121). Kuhn uses the metaphor of the edifice to stand against the image of science associated with it. In a passage of the second manuscript, he makes it clear that we should think of the building-like process of

17. He also refers to the metaphor in the published version of Structure (Chapter XI, p. 140) and in Kuhn 1984, p. 369. 18. I believe “knowledge” is a better translation than “insight” for the word “Erkenntnis,” originally used by Carnap in German. In Pinto de Oliveira 2015, I establish a theoretical and historical link between Sarton and logical . Curiously enough, Sarton was invited before Kuhn to write the monograph on history of science for the positivist Encyclopedia (which ultimately became Structure).

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science in other terms, consistent with the breaks observed in the history of art:

If we are to preserve any part of the metaphor which makes inventions and discoveries new bricks for the scientific edifice, and if we are simultaneously to give resistance and controversy an essential place in the development of science, then we may have to recognize that the addition of new bricks demands at least partial demolition of the existing structure, and that the new edifice erected to include the new brick is not just the old one plus, but a new building. We may, that is, be forced to recognize that new discoveries and new theories do not simply add to the stock of pre-existing scientific knowledge. They change it. (Kuhn M2, p. 7)19 And this new image of science is close to the image of art, as Kuhn writes in Section 3 of the first manuscript. He already states that the science that comes after a scientific revolution is incompatible and in- commensurable with the preexisting one:20 Often a decision to embrace a new theory turns out to involve an implicit redefinition of the corresponding science. Old problems may be relegated to another science or may be declared entirely “unscientific.” Problems that, on the old theory, were non-existent or trivial may, with a new theory, become the very archetypes of significant scientific achievement. And, as the problems change, so, often, does the standard that distinguishes a real scientific solution from a mere metaphysical speculation, word game, or mathematical play. It follows that, to a significant extent, the science that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible, but often actually incommensurable, with that which has gone before. Only as this is realized, can we grasp the full sense in which scientific revolutions are like those in the arts. (Kuhn M1, pp. 17–8) But if he thought so, why did Kuhn not preserve the comparison of science with art in the final version of Structure? Kuhn avails himself of some ideas from the manuscripts of Structure in a 1969 article, republished in The Essential Tension (Kuhn 1977,

19. In “Plans for Research” (1954), a manuscript published in Hufbauer 2012, Kuhn already writes (p. 459): “Science, then, does not progress by adding stones to an initially incomplete structure, but by tearing down one habitable structure and rebuilding to a new plan with the old materials and, perhaps, new ones besides.” 20. Without the mention of the arts, the passage essentially corresponds to Kuhn 1970, p. 103 (see the end of the second paragraph).

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pp. 340–51). It is his only specific text on science and art (“Comment on the Relations of Science and Art”), but in it he mostly points out the differences (Kuhn 2000, p. 137n15).21 Therehesaysheknows“too little of art as activity” and gives us a clear clue about the reason the rap- prochement between science and art is abandoned in the introduction to Structure (Kuhn 1969, p. 345). In this regard, in a schematic outline of Structure in MIT’s Archive of his papers, Kuhn remarks that he is not an art historian and will not bring the science-art parallel much further, although he considers it important as a starting point.22 Thus, I believe one can say that Kuhn eliminates his references to art or restricts his discussion to science in Structure for a strategic reason. He had certainly predicted the range of specific issues that could be added to his controversial book because of a foray into the history of art. It would open a “new front” which he reckoned himself without competence or disposition to face at that time. In his correspondence with Kuhn, seems to have understood very well what was at stake. After reading Kuhn’s book at his request, Gombrich writes (in August 1963) that he thought Kuhn to be right about restricting his discussion to science (although some of the more sociological aspects described in the book could be studied more broadly and effectively in the ).23 In support of this explanation, it can be added that Kuhn has the same cau- tious attitude in Structure itself. He writes in the preface, regarding biology: Far more historical is available than I have had space to exploit below. Furthermore, that evidence comes from the history of biological as well as of physical science. My decision to deal here exclusively with the latter was made partly to increase this essay’s coherence and partly on grounds of present competence. (Kuhn 1970, pp. vii–viii)

21. One must consider that the issue here is no longer the supposed differences between science and art, such as, according to Kuhn, the objective-subjective, inductive-intuitive, -values poles traditionally associated with them (Kuhn 1969, p. 340). He refuses these differences and raises the question of what still, and significantly, differentiates science and art. Kuhn thinks that the actual differences are as important as the similarities. 22. Kuhn Papers, box 4, folder 2, New Outline—Chapter 1, p. 1, undated. 23. Kuhn Papers, box 4, folder 9. A copy of Structure was sent to Gombrich by Rosalie ColieatKuhn’s request (see Kuhn Papers, box 4, folder 8). Kuhn wrote that he would love to know Gombrich’s opinion on the book and learn from him about the relationship of artists to their community or school, an issue that interested him very much. The letter confirms Kuhn’s interest in the relationship between science and art and in Gombrich’s opinion about it, even after having excluded the subject from the final version of Structure. In Kuhn 1969 (pp. 340–41), he says that “Gombrich’swork(…) has been a source of great encouragement to me.” On Kuhn and Gombrich, see Pinto de Oliveira 2011 and 2014.

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The explanation suggested here is fully compatible with the fact that Kuhn continued to consider the parallels between science and art impor- tant. In the 1969 article, despite its emphasis on differences, he writes that “those parallels still need to be both underlined and developed. We have only begun to discover the benefits of seeing science and art as one” (Kuhn 1969, p. 343). This and other pertinent passages (Kuhn 1970, p. 208, cited below; Kuhn 2000, pp. 136–38, 157), as well as the content of note 23 above, show that the appeal to the history of art in the first manuscript is not merely occasional. On the other hand, the manuscript organizes and inte- grates the references on the subject that are dispersed in these texts.24 It allows us to understand well Kuhn’s intriguing retrospective statement, cited above, according to which Structure was a “belated product” of his “discovery of the close and persistent parallels” between science and art, disciplines that he had once seen as polar opposites (Kuhn 1969, p. 340). The manuscript also allows to integrate and better understand the refer- ences to art that survived in the final version of Structure (1962). There is no mention in the Introduction (Chapter I) and only three non-trivial refer- ences to art are found throughout the text. One of them concerns the dif- ferences between science and art, in the same spirit as the 1969 article, and I quote it in this context in note 29 (cf. Kuhn 1970, p. 160; see also pp. 165, 167). Below I reproduce the other two passages that highlight, as in the manuscripts considered here, the parallelism between the two disciplines. In the first, Kuhn refers to what he calls the “philosophical paradigm” or “traditional epistemological paradigm” and the way it conceives sensory experience or visual perception. And he affirms that the overcoming of this paradigm—in favor of a very different conception, still in development at that moment—could already be observed both in the history of science and in other disciplines, “even art history.” The text is linked to the first man- uscript (Kuhn M1, p. 7), which I cite above in connection with notes 9 and 10. Kuhn writes in Structure: Many readers will surely want to say that what changes with a paradigm is only the scientist’s interpretation of observations that themselves are fixed once and for all by the nature of the environment and of the perceptual apparatus. On this view, Priestley and Lavoisier

24. The three texts were written in 1969 (Kuhn 1977, p. xx, n8), at a time in which Kuhn reacts to criticism of Structure. This is the context in which he resumes the relation- ship between science and art, perhaps in search of clarity. There is a reference to the science- art connection also in a text published before Structure. It is the 1959 paper in which the term “paradigm,” in Kuhn’s sense, appeared for the first time. See Kuhn 1977, p. 231.

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both saw oxygen, but they interpreted their observations differently (…). Let me say at once that this very usual view of what occurs when scientists change their minds about fundamental matters can be neither all wrong nor a mere mistake. Rather it is an essential part of a philosophical paradigm initiated by Descartes and developed at the same time as Newtonian dynamics. That paradigm has served both science and philosophy well. (…) Today research in parts of philosophy, , , and even art history, all converge to suggest that the traditional paradigm is somehow askew. That failure to fit is also made increasingly apparent by the historical study of science to which most of our attention is necessarily directed here. (Kuhn 1970, pp. 120–21; see also Kuhn 1970, pp. 77–9, 85)25 The second reference to art may be directly associated with a passage from the first manuscript, quoted above in section 2 (Kuhn M1, pp. 3–4), in which Kuhn says that “if cumulativeness is to distinguish the developmental pat- tern of science and art, that cannot be because art is never cumulative but because science is always so.” He calls attention to the fact that art is also cumulative and that in some periods—such as the —art and science were barely distinguished from each other: For many centuries, both in antiquity and again in early modern Europe, painting was regarded as the cumulative discipline. During those years the artist’s goal was assumed to be representation. Critics and historians, like Pliny and Vasari, then recorded with veneration the series of inventions from foreshortening through chiaroscuro that had made possible successively more perfect representations of nature. But those are also the years, particularly during the Renaissance, when little cleavage was felt between the sciences and the arts. Leonardo was only one of many men who passed freely back and forth between fields that only later became categorically distinct. Furthermore, even after that steady exchange had ceased, the term “art” continued to apply as much to technology and the crafts, which

25. Kuhn refers in particular to the philosopher N. R. Hanson, to Gestalt psychology, and to the linguist Benjamin L. Whorf (Kuhn 1970, pp. vi, 113). With respect to the history of art, the reference is certainly Gombrich 1960. Both Kuhn and Gombrich (and also Hanson) resort to Gestalt psychology and its famous figures, such as the duck-rabbit (bird-antelope), to show that the differences between two or two styles are not restricted to the interpretation of what is seen but reach the perception itself (Kuhn 1970, Chapter X. In Gombrich 1960, see, for example, “Introduction” and “Retrospect”). It is also worth mentioning that, in view of the manuscripts, perhaps it is no longer surprising that Kuhn used in this passage the term “paradigm” out of the context of science. See Hoyningen-Huene 1993, pp. 4–5n3, and Preston 2008, p. 114n21.

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were also seen as progressive, as to painting and sculpture. Only when the latter unequivocally renounced representation as their goal and began to learn again from primitive models did the cleavage we now take for granted assume anything like its present depth. (Kuhn 1970, p. 161; see also p.162)26 In this passage, Kuhn cites Gombrich 1960 and Santillana 1959, works published after the first manuscript of Structure was written. But it must be remembered that Santillana’s text was presented at a congress held in 1957, in which Kuhn also took part (see Clagett 1959). In any case, I be- lieve that the greatest influence on Kuhn’sreflection on art came from Gombrich and, at least initially, from the developmental pattern present in The Story of Art (1950). On this see my first, more exploratory, approach to the subject of this article before I had access to Kuhn’s manuscripts (Pinto de Oliveira 2014, unpublished but available as preprint).

4. Final Comments Another aspect that becomes clearer through what has been presented here is the very notion of “image of science.” By using this expression, Kuhn is often accused of being vague or confusing. Alan Richardson, for instance, writes that “Kuhn’s opponent in Structure is a bit shadowy—it is an image of science, an image Kuhn does not carefully locate” (Richardson 2007, p. 359). It should be noted that Kuhn’s commitment in the introduction to the book is briefly reproducing the image of science “by which we are now pos- sessed” and not to refining it. That is why he uses the expression “image” and refers to it also as a stereotype or an implicit point of view.27 He does not bother to present in a detailed fashion the traditional image of science, which, after all, according to his own proposal, should be replaced. And therefore, he has no commitment to judiciously identifying the source for this vague image or stereotype of science. But I believe that the abandon- ment of the original idea, the suppression of the reference to the history

26. The traditional image of art referred to by Kuhn in the first manuscript of Structure certainly takes shape from that moment when painting and sculpture “unequivocally re- nounced representation as their goal” and there is the cleavage between science and art “we now take for granted.” In Kuhn 1969 (p. 341), he writes that “science and art are very different enterprises or at least have become so during the last century and a half.” See also Kuhn 1970, p. 186. 27. About the image as stereotype, see notes of a manuscript mentioned above (Kuhn Papers, Box 4, folder 2, New Outline—Chapter 1, p. 2). See also Kuhn M1, p. 29; Kuhn M2, p. 5; Kuhn 1970, p. 1. Kuhn writes in a 1951 manuscript that there is an implicit point of view in all that it is commonly said about scientific knowledge (Kuhn Papers, box 3, folder 11, Lowell Lectures, 1951, p. 1).

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of art, made the traditional image of science less sharp in the final version of Structure. The contrast with art made the traditional image of science clearer and, at the same time allowed Kuhn to outline the new image of science, hav- ing the traditional image of art (with its breaks throughout history) as a model for representation. And Kuhn could go on from there, displaying the new historiography of science as a historiography sensitive to breaks, just like the historiography of art. To conclude: In the first lines of this article, I said that what interested me here was not the extension of Kuhn’s theory of science to other areas, but the role of one of these areas, the history of art, in the conception of Structure. Now that we have an answer to this question, we can say that it also helps us to understand the broad influence of Kuhn’s theory on other areas. When, in 1969, in his postscript to Structure, Kuhn commented on the fact that many considered that his main theses were applicable to other fields besides physics, he admitted that “to the extent that the book por- trays scientific development as a succession of -bound periods punctuated by non-cumulative breaks, its theses are undoubtedly of wide applicability.” And he added: But they should be, for they are borrowed from other fields. Historians of literature, of music, of the arts, of political development, and of many other human activities have long described their subjects in the same way. Periodization in terms of revolutionary breaks in style, taste, and institutional structure have been among their standard tools. If I have been original with respect to concepts like these, it has mainly been by applying them to the sciences, fields which had been widely thought to develop in a different way. (Kuhn 1970, p. 208, emphasis added; see also Kuhn 1969, p. 348) One might say that, in a feedback process, Kuhn starts from more intuitive notions of “paradigm” and “incommensurability,” just as found in history of art and other disciplines.28 He develops them within his phi- losophy of science and then, in a higher level of conceptualization, they will arouse the interest of the originating disciplines and of virtually all areas of culture. Kuhn gives back to the other disciplines, with “added value,” the idea of development with breaks.

28. In doing so, he focuses on history of art, as can be seen in the manuscripts. In the final version of Structure, Kuhn refers to politics (1970, pp. 92–4). In other texts, Kuhn also refers to other disciplines, such as philosophy and the social sciences (see, for example, Kuhn 2000, pp. 136–38, 216–17). But in Kuhn M2 (p. 3), Kuhn says that art is the prototype of the non-cumulative disciplines.

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In , and , seems aware of what was involved in Kuhn’s project when he writes: The fracas over Kuhn’s and Feyerabend’s claim that some scientific theories were incommensurable with predecessor theories was created by philosophers who were intent upon salvaging a nonpragmatic criterion for distinguishing science from nonscience. Most of Kuhn’s readers were prepared to admit that there were areas of culture—e.g., art and politics—in which vocabularies, discourses, Foucaultian epistémés replaced one another, and to grant that, in these areas, there was no overarching metavocabulary into which every such vocabulary might be translated. But the suggestion that this was true of the natural sciences as well was found offensive. Critics of Kuhn such as Scheffler and Newton-Smith thought of Kuhn as casting doubt on “the rationality of science.” They sympathized with Lakatos’ of Kuhn as having reduced science to “mob psychology.” (Rorty 1991, p. 47) The “added value” or the greatest elaboration of the concepts made by Kuhn in the case of science evidently stemmed from the very strong resis- tance to this transposition into science and it needed to be justified. If there were no problems admitting “paradigms” and “incommensurability” in the history of art, the extension of these concepts to science seemed a flagrant contradiction. After all, science, as opposed to art (and other dis- ciplines), was traditionally considered as the natural or proper place of objectivity, rationality and progress. Kuhn sought to change the image of science by justified (and selective) transposition of the image of art into the realm of science.29 Many authors have written about the relationship between science and art—some of which are even directly interested in Kuhn’s perspective on the matter (such as in Jones 2000 and Kindi 2010)—but I think it is par- ticularly worth noting here, in view of the content of the first manuscript of Structure, the case of . It is a very interesting fact that he, who is the other main name of the contemporary historically oriented phi- losophy of science, had written about the relations between science and art as well and, essentially, from a convergent point of view with Kuhn’s.

29. See note 21 above and Kuhn’s article to which it corresponds. See also the last chapter of Structure, in which Kuhn writes: “Why should the enterprise sketched above [science] move steadily ahead in ways that, say, art, political theory, or philosophy does not? Why is progress a perquisite reserved almost exclusively for the activities we call science? The most usual answers to that question have been denied in the body of this essay. We must conclude it by asking whether substitutes can be found” (Kuhn 1970, p. 160).

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Itistruethatheonlypublishedaspecific work on the subject in 1984 (and some other texts later).30 However, as suggested by Carlo Ginzburg, the theme may have arisen on Feyerabend’smindmuchear- lier (Ginzburg 1998, pp. 42–3; see also Jones 2000, p. 497). If this can be shown in his work, the role of the history of art in the conception of the so-called post-positivist philosophy of science would be broadened and strengthened. Against the traditional image of science, both Kuhn and Feyerabend would then oppose a new image, developed, or at least sketched, with the image of art as a model.31

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