selling philosophy – Physics World
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Thomas Kuhn is famous for writing the surprise best-seller The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Who would have thought that a book published in 1962 on the history of science would turn out to be what Steve Fuller claims is the best-known academic book of the second half of the 20th century? So well known is […]
Physics World
Thomas Kuhn is famous for writing the surprise best-seller The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Who would have thought that a book published in 1962 on the history of science would turn out to be what Steve Fuller claims is the best-known academic book of the second half of the 20th century? So well known is this book, indeed, that Physics World asked a sociologist (me) to write a review of a philosopher’s analysis of the book because, as they told me, Kuhn is someone whom even physicists know about.

Let me say straight away that Fuller’s book is not really for physicists. It is a book aimed at people who have taken inspiration from Kuhn’s book for their own analyses of science. The sociologists (such as myself) and the cultural-studies types who say that “science is a social construct” – and who thus make themselves easy targets for “science warriors” such as Alan Sokal or Lewis Wolpert – mostly started out with Kuhn. That is not to say that Kuhn, who trained as a physicist, provided much in the way of real ideas that we could use; these ideas came either from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (for the sociologists) or from various French radicals (for the cultural-studies people).

It is not even to say that Kuhn was all that original. In the 1930s a Jewish medical doctor called Ludwik Fleck published a book called Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, in which he re-described his own research on syphilis in a way that today would merit attack from any red-blooded science warrior. Fleck, by the way, was forced by the Nazis to make a typhus vaccine for the German army and managed to make it impotent – his superb book has been available in an English translation since 1979, with a foreword by Kuhn himself (University of Chicago Press).

But Kuhn’s book appeared at the right time – at the start of the 1960s, which was the first affluent post-war decade when everything cultural, political, sexual and conscious-altering suddenly loosened up. Kuhn essentially said that science progresses not by orderly accumulation of knowledge, but by sudden shifts of fashion after which the whole scientific world, including data, suddenly takes on a new meaning. He talked of “scientific paradigms”, which provided the framework for the way we design experiments and interpret their results. He also spoke of scientific revolutions, in which existing paradigms are overthrown and replaced. Notoriously, he said that, say, Newtonians and Einsteinians “live in different worlds”. What Kuhn did with his paradigms and scientific revolutions was to loosen up science – to turn it, as many of his critics claimed, into mob psychology.

In 460 or so pages of hyperactive prose, Fuller embarks on taking the wind out of the sails of the science-analyst radicals by telling us that Kuhn was not a radical at all but a Cold War conservative. Fuller has plenty of evidence regarding Kuhn himself. First we can look at his published output. Kuhn’s second “great work” – which seems to be the book that he set out to be remembered by – was a thick treatise on black-body radiation entitled Black-body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity:1894-1912 (1978 Oxford University Press).

As astonished and disappointed Kuhn groupies noted at the time, the index of this massive and scholarly work contained no references to either “paradigm” or “scientific revolution”. This was just the climax to a post-1962 academic lifetime throughout which Kuhn continually condemned and distanced himself from his radical interpreters – telling us, as Fuller points out, that he preferred his critics to his followers. Furthermore, Kuhn was influenced by the Harvard Society of Fellows, which was in part set up, according to Fuller, to make popularized science an antidote to communism.

One has to admire Fuller for taking one of our best-ever radicals and telling us that Kuhn – and by implication we ourselves – are Cold War puppets. And there is a grain of truth in it. The politics of consciousness of the 1960s were a diversion from big political questions, and so was the analysis of culture. After all, if you were busy altering your mind or relativizing science, you were not blowing things up or writing big books in the name of communism.

Furthermore, if you look at the way “science studies” has evolved, you do find that it is struggling to tell everyone what a timid and unfrightening little thing it is. “Wimps,” says Fuller. “Let’s get back to some real radicalism. Why? Let’s reopen those big questions about whether science is the right way to spend the resources of nations and ask about the effect of the kind of science we do on the world-wide distribution of wealth and power.”

The other interesting thing about Fuller’s book is that it tries to switch the debate about Kuhn from what he said to the social context that caused him to say it. That is to say, Fuller does a sociology-of-knowledge job on the kind of knowledge that the sociologists of knowledge rely on. This is salutary for people like me because it helps us understand what the scientists we analyse have to put up with.

When I look at, say, the debate about whether gravitational waves have been detected, I discuss the social pressures that impinge on the scientists involved, not the scientific content of their arguments. Now Fuller is also concentrating on the forces that led Kuhn to say what he said and on its social meaning – rather than on its content – and I feel about as frustrated as the gravitational-wave scientists must feel about my conclusions. (To appreciate what I mean, read Kuhn’s brilliant 1961 paper “The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science” (ISIS 52 162) and remind yourself that in Fuller’s analysis we must ignore the content and concentrate on the context.)

Fuller gives the impression of writing at high speed – the Hunter Davies of science studies – but with immense scholarly breadth. Unfortunately, this approach carries the risk of carelessness. For example, in scything through some of the modern debates in science studies, he neglects to mention that many of his positions and insights – such as the call for science studies to be used in science education, or the way French philosophical radicalism turns full circle into common sense (something that Alan Sokal does not seem to have noticed) – are already there in the work of those he is analysing. This is important because the scythe gets blunted when one knows what the protagonists actually said.

It is also a shame that Fuller claims that social studies of science have concentrated wholly on big science in an attempt to gain respectability. This is exactly opposite to the notorious claim by Lewis Wolpert that science studiers never look at any serious science at all. Neither claim is true.