The historian as an ethnographer: Kuhn’s last philosophy of science
Adam Tamas
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SpringerLink
In a popular review, published a decade ago, it was stated that Kuhn’s magnum opus, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (published in 1962, second edition 1970), sold more than 1.4 million copies (Smith 2012). One could hardly imagine a more influential book than Structure that (re)introduced and domesticated such notions as “paradigm,” “normal science,” “revolution,” “crisis,” “puzzle solving,” and “incommensurability.”

Despite Kuhn’s immediate fame, not many people have followed his “road since Structure” and given equal or even sufficient attention to his work on matrices, possible worlds, and other concepts, which had less influence outside Kuhn scholarship. But legends are made by promises and secrets, and it was known by some and told to many more that Kuhn did not stop working on the ideas developed in Structure, even in the 1980s and 1990s, and during the time when he was publishing a selection of his works and a bigger book on the early history of quantum mechanics, he had been preparing another major book about his initial topic, namely the history and nature of science. After being on the wish-list of many historians and philosophers of science for decades, The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn are finally available and open to discussion for interested readers.

The book contains three major texts and two abstracts. The first, “Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product,” was a short lecture completed and revised many times between 1981 and 1984, published eventually only in Japanese in 1986. The two other major texts in the volume are Kuhn’s 1987 Shearman Memorial Lecture, “The Presence of Past Science,” with its extended abstract, and his long-awaited last book manuscript, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, from the early and mid-1990s, also with an extended abstract. The first lecture sets the tone of the book and raises all the issues and problems that will be developed and scrutinized in the major texts later in the book. Unfortunately, there are countless, somewhat distracting repetitions and overlaps.

From the history of philosophy of science point of view, one of the most interesting features of the volume is when Kuhn points out how misleading his occasional treatment of the history of science in his and others’ work was. He argues that history is not simply giving a bunch of examples and facts, but rather a “perspective” on the nature and development of science. The perspective comes down to a method and approach, namely ethnography and anthropology: an anthropologist approaches an unknown tribe, society, or even part of local society that is unknown to others with the aim of understanding their behavior, customs, habits, and values, by making known and coherent what was previously unknown, nonsensical, or even absurd. The anthropologist domesticates the other through finding similarities and joints in their shared experiences, seeking some kind of universals across societies, often in their structure, instantiated differently in the various cultures. The historian of science starts from the fact that “intelligent people” of the past have accepted strange, outdated, and obviously false theories as fundamental truths about the world, which raises the question of why and how. We should not assume, though we often do from our ethnocentric viewpoint, that past scientists were plainly wrong and their strange and unacceptable beliefs come from ignorance. The historian as anthropologist has to approach the subject as the ethnographer does during fieldwork; “historians are like ethnographers,” says Kuhn, “striving to understand and describe the apparently incongruous behavior of the members of an alien culture” (29), trying to show and “account for the coherence and plausibility” (47) of the ideas that were accepted in the past.

In that process, one of the most important questions is not the logical force behind the arguments that are often reconstructed as motors behind progress, but “how and why the status of those beliefs changed” (7). While traditional philosophers of science viewed this change of belief as a progressive development from falseness and ignorance to truth and knowledge, the historian as anthropologist has to understand “the transition from one body of knowledge claims to a different, though overlapping, set” (7). Kuhn’s anthropologist is compared to Quine’s field linguist on page 182. Kuhn argues that Quine’s field linguist is more absolutist in aims and methods.

This is a recurring theme in all three texts, with the same three historical examples published before but analyzed in much more detail here: Aristotle on motion, Volta on the battery, and Planck on the black-body problem. Much of the work is devoted to the historical and even philological work on understanding the complex set of beliefs that Aristotle and others had in promoting their ideas, making what seems to us weird coherent for them. Although all these examples have their roots in the so-called Aristotelian experience of 1947, what is new here is how Kuhn tackles the word-world relation on which understanding can be built. He emphasizes now explicitly that there is a problem (not a paradox yet, but something troubling enough): how to fix and iron out the relation between a developmental-historical approach to science and the intuitive correspondence theory of truth.

Kuhn clings to observation, based on evolutionary requirements. In the other texts, especially the book manuscript, he devotes a number of chapters to discussing the back-then contemporary best psychological and neurological theories about how infants see and experience the world, especially moving objects. He argues that certain basic kinds, similar to natural kinds, constitute the fundamental categories of observation during a child’s development, and they can be used as reference magnets, as well to keep track of the development of science, by providing clues for understanding across temporal periods.

Though Kuhn mentions that many concepts and parts of the literature were keeping him busy and engaged since the early 1960s, for example, Quine’s Word and Object (see, e.g., 183), the texts collected in the volume were written mainly in the 1980s and 1990s. Timing is crucial as by that time many of the Kuhn-inspired new movements, and even disciplines, became well-established, especially the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (David Bloor and Barry Barnes from Edinburgh), the relativist program of Harry Collins, Trevor Pinch and others (originally from Bath, later at Cardiff), constructivist historians (like Jan Golinski), and anthropologies of science, including laboratory studies (by Bruno Latour, Sharon Traweek, and others). Thus, one would hope to find how Kuhn’s thinking developed from the inevitable exchange between him and his environment that was defined very much by his earlier work.

Reading the text from that angle turns out to be highly expedient for the history of philosophy of science. Kuhn indeed cites, quotes, refers to, and engages with many of his contemporaries up to the mid-1990s, though the most often recurring name is Quine’s, and not those figures who are usually put in the Kuhnian camp—though occasionally a reference pops up, for example, to Ian Hacking or Paul Hoyningen-Huene. Certain trends of twentieth century philosophical and sociological thought are missing due to Kuhn’s repeated efforts to distance himself from them as in the case of sociology of scientific knowledge (about that relation and its complex history see Wray 2015). Nonetheless, the book provides ample examples and references from which we can infer how Kuhn conceived himself on the scene, especially in contrast to others. By quoting others repeatedly, and by pointing at their (now often classic) works, Kuhn has shown a great deal of intellectual honesty and integrity. He has also revised, updated, and challenged even some of his earlier commitments against the background of new scholarship.

Kuhn made a few concessions and compromises. He now accepts explicitly a milder form of framework-relativism, claiming that the lexicons of the community can vary in significant degree but not truth itself. He rejects a strong form of alethic relativity, namely that a sentence that is true in one language could be false after being translated and expressed in a different language (53). To solve the puzzle of how a sentence can seemingly be true in a past theory and not now, Kuhn introduces the idea that a certain truth-apt sentence in a language, which is either true or false in that language, will simply not be truth-apt, will not be a candidate for being true or being false in a different language (cf. 166).

There are also very interesting side remarks about historiography and science education. After discussing all the nitty–gritty issues of the historians’ tasks and responsibilities in understanding the development of science, Kuhn returns to an old issue of textbook science and the scientists’ understanding of science. He argues that in the classroom, practicing scientists will not learn science historically, and in fact, they do not need history of science: to professionalize, they “should learn their tools directly.” Furthermore, the history of science “might even undermine the student’s grasp of and faith in the tools required for current practice” (88). These remarks are basically consistent with how Kuhn dealt with normal science in Structure, where philosophy, history, and social sciences do not play a role, only paradigm and puzzle-driven learning of the basics. For that, says Kuhn, Whig-historiography is perfect. It serves “an indispensable human function,” namely that it gives to the members of the community a domesticated past that can be grasped, used, and “serve as a platform from which to move ahead” (87–88). It is still somewhat undervalued or not even recognized by philosophers and social scientists that according to Kuhn normal or paradigmatic science does not need the humanities, which is a blow to the many unreflective followers of Kuhn who envision a significant role for the human and social sciences in the everyday work of the natural sciences, thus securing a legitimate place for themselves. It is even more puzzling how science education embraced Kuhn’s ideas wholeheartedly in the last few decades (against that see Matthews 2022) and brings an interesting lens to recent debates about the place of teaching history and philosophy of science to students and adults in the fight against alternative truths, fake news, and pseudoscience.

The volume opens with a lengthy editorial introduction by Bojana Mladenović. The introduction describes the history of Kuhn’s manuscripts, comparing it to other works and contextualizes the main ideas of Kuhn, but also offers the reader a helpful guide in approaching Kuhn’s new terminology and sets of problems. The editor obviously did detailed and hard work on the manuscripts, some of which were left unfinished and required substantial engagement with the pieces, notes, and a significant knowledge of Kuhn’s person, intention, and works. The editorial work is also reflected in the additional notes at the end of the volume—explaining some of Kuhn’s mysterious remarks, mistakes, or unfinished sections—and a short index.

In closing, encountering the term “paradigm” in the book at only a few non-substantial places could be puzzling to those who do not know much about the trajectory of Kuhn’s work after the 1970s. But much of the volume is still understandable without paradigms and also very often reflects the shades of paradigms under disguise. Be that as it may, leaving plenty of space for further discussion and comparisons, one remains in a state of puzzlement when asked whether The Last Writings belongs to philosophy, sociology, or history of science, or perhaps to the even newer trends of history and philosophy of science. The sciences, including psychology, neurology, comparative anthropology, and cognitive enterprises, are marching forward, providing sufficient material for philosophers to engage with: one should check and evaluate Kuhn’s ideas from the 1980s and 1990s against the latest scientific developments. Do they stand the test of time? Intellectual historians could and should analyze the relation between Kuhn’s ideas of the 1980s and 1990s and the (scientific) worldviews or milieu of the times from which they emerged. Finally, one should try to understand the development of his thoughts, based on the many sidenotes and remarks in the plurality of Kuhnian worlds.