Thomas Kuhn
Nick Nielsen jnnielsen.medium.com
Today is the 101st anniversary of the birth of Thomas Kuhn (18 July 1922–17 June 1996), who was born in Cincinnati on this date in 1922. Kuhn is not remembered as a philosopher of history, but as a…
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Today is the 101st anniversary of the birth of Thomas Kuhn (18 July 1922–17 June 1996), who was born in Cincinnati on this date in 1922.

Kuhn is not remembered as a philosopher of history, but as a philosopher and an historian of science, yet the influential work he produced has had profound implications for how we understand history, and in particular for how we understanding the history of science. You could call Kuhn’s work, if you liked, a philosophy of the history of science. And given the outsize role that science plays in the history of industrialized civilization, a philosophy of the history of science is a large part of a philosophy of the history of industrialized civilization. That is no small contribution.

A reductionist account of Kuhn’s philosophy is that scientific progress is not cumulative, but proceeds in fits and starts, with many losses along the way. There is an ongoing debate among Kuhn’s heirs as to whether theory change in science is ultimately a rational process, even if non-linear, or if it is ultimately an irrational process, essentially arbitrary, and without deeper meaning. If this is reflected upward to the history of industrialized civilization, which is predicated upon science, and the technology that science makes possible, then the ongoing debate is about whether the history of our civilization is ultimately rational, even if it jumps around in the short term, or whether it is ultimately irrational and arbitrary.

That’s just the disputed portion of Kuhn’s interpretation, about which one can be hopeful or despairing. The undisputed portion of Kuhn’s interpretation, again, reflected upward, is that a civilization based on science and technology is not cumulative, but more like Gould and Eldridge’s punctuated equilibrium: institutions that have been stable for a long period of time, perhaps over the longue durée, can suddenly be upended in the paradigm shift when old principles are abandoned, and new principles eventually take their place. Come to think of it, this is pretty much how modern industrialized civilization came into being: the nearly static medieval world endured for about a millennium, but then when things started to change, they changed rapidly and drastically. Old certainties that seem to have stood the test of time were abandoned forthwith, and new uncertainties had to take their place.

Of course, Kuhn doesn’t say what I have written above; generally speaking, he doesn’t project from his history of science to the history of civilization, but he does touch briefly upon civilization in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

“Inevitably those remarks will suggest that the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character of Orwell’s 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the powers that be. Furthermore, that suggestion is not altogether inappropriate. There are losses as well as gains in scientific revolutions, and scientists tend to be peculiarly blind to the former. On the other hand, no explanation of progress through revolutions may stop at this point. To do so would be to imply that in the sciences might makes right, a formulation which would again not be entirely wrong if it did not suppress the nature of the process and of the authority by which the choice between paradigms is made. If authority alone, and particularly if non-professional authority, were the arbiter of paradigm debates, the outcome of those debates might still be revolution, but it would not be scientific revolution. The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community. Just how special that community must be if science is to survive and grow may be indicated by the very tenuousness of humanity’s hold on the scientific enterprise. Every civilization of which we have records has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws, and so on. In many cases those facets of civilization have been as developed as our own. But only the civilizations that descend from Hellenic Greece have possessed more than the most rudimentary science. The bulk of scientific knowledge is a product of Europe in the last four centuries. No other place and time has supported the very special communities from which scientific productivity comes.”

Kuhn explicitly addresses philosophy of history in one of the essays in The Essential Tension, more or less to disavow that he has any philosophy of history:

“During my days as a philosophically inclined physicist, my view of history resembled that of the covering law theorists, and the philosophers in my seminars usually begin by viewing it in a similar way. What changed my mind and often changes their’s is the experience of putting together a historical narrative. That experience is vital, for the difference between learning history and doing it is far larger than that in most other creative fields, philosophy certainly included. From it I conclude, among other things, that an ability to predict the future is no part of the historian’s arsenal. He is neither a social scientist nor a seer. It is no mere accident that he knows the end of his narrative as well as the start before he begins to write. History cannot be written without that information. Though I have no alternate philosophy of history or of historical explanation to offer here, I can at least outline a better image of the historian’s task and suggest why its performance might produce a sort of understanding.”

While Kuhn had no explicitly formulated philosophy of history, there is much in the understanding of history that is implicit in Kuhn, for example, in the above passage, there is the distinction between learning history and doing history. What exactly is doing history? Presumably this could be writing history, or teaching history… it could even mean studying history, though the latter would certainly also count as learning history. In the above, for Kuhn doing history is “putting together a historical narrative.” He also suggests that doing history may produce a sort of understanding. Is this the sort of understanding that we derive (or hope to derive) from a philosophy of history? Is a philosophical understanding of history best to be had from putting together an historical narrative?