THE PLACE OF KUHN'S WORK IN STUDIES OF SCIENCE

Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions became one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, although its author suffered the fate of many prophets: he was ignored by the people he most hoped to influence. His technical terms became so widely known that a popular cartoonist could depict a newly hatched chick greeting the world with the cry “Oh! Wow! Paradigm shift!” (Taves 1998) and a best-selling guide to success in life and business would tell its readers, “[W]e need to understand our own ‘paradigms’ and how to make a ‘paradigm shift’” (Covey 1990: 26). But there is no Kuhnian school of history, and many philosophers of science remain skeptical about his ideas. At the close of the twentieth century philosophers generally rejected paradigm shifts and normal science as useful categories for understanding scientific change and were still arguing about another key idea, incommensurability (Curd and Cover 1998; Hoyningen-Huene and Sankey 2001). Meanwhile Kuhn's emphasis on the historical variability of scientific standards and the role of research communities in scientific change was embraced by a new generation of sociologists of scientific knowledge. The new sociologists of science adopted Kuhn as a founding father, if not an intellectual guide: Kuhn's emphasis on the cognitive content of science was marginalized.

THE CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE OF PTOLEMAIC ASTRONOMY

In astronomy before Kepler the path of a planet was not its orbit but the pattern of its motion seen by an observer on a stationary earth against the hypothetical sphere of the heavens. It was recognized in antiquity that this pattern was not a real motion, but a complex outcome of the observer's viewpoint and a variety of circular motions that acted together. The task of astronomy was to define this pattern – to specify the path of the planet in this original sense. The real motion of the planet – its track in what we would now call three-dimensional space – was unknown, and possibly irrelevant. All other considerations – the causes of celestial motion, the actual dimensions of the heavens – were the business of a separate science, cosmology. It was well known that the goal of astronomy could be achieved, that is, the path of a celestial object could be predicted, without making specific assumptions about its distance from the earth, once appropriate rates of rotation were introduced (Evans 1998; Pedersen 1993).

The basic data of astronomy from antiquity to the sixteenth century – the explananda or, if you prefer, the ‘phenomena’ that needed to be ‘saved’ – were recorded observations of planetary positions. Sixteenth-century astronomy texts devoted most of their attention to motion in longitude.

After the appearance of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 Kuhn attempted to develop a Wittgensteinian account of family resemblance concepts for a domain that other philosophers had found most unlikely: scientific concepts. In the 1970 postscript to Structure Kuhn even suggested that the variants of Newton's second law that applied to different physical systems showed family resemblance, but no single defining properties. If this proved to be the general case, the most important examples of scientific concepts might turn out to be family resemblance concepts rather than the well-behaved concepts, analyzable by necessary and sufficient conditions, expected by earlier philosophers of science. Kuhn returned to these themes again and again in his later philosophical writings.

Kuhn's theory of concepts focused on a restricted class of terms, namely, kind terms. As Kuhn defined kind terms they are “primarily the count nouns together with the mass nouns, words which combine with count nouns in phrases that take the indefinite article. Some terms require still further tests hinging, for example, on permissible suffices” (Kuhn 1991: 92). Thus, kind terms include natural kinds, artifactual kinds, and social kinds.

EXEMPLARS

An important source for Kuhn's theory of concepts was his early reflection upon science teaching. He made the observations that, first, science education is based entirely on prepared teaching materials, and, second, this teaching confers the ability to recognize resemblances between novel problems and problems that have been solved before.

A frame is a hierarchy of nodes (Figure 10). The origin of this notation may be traced to the British psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett, who introduced the notion of a schema in his famous study of memory (Bartlett 1932). During the 1970s researchers in artificial intelligence developed and applied frames for a variety of purposes, including computer-based representations of everyday human activities (Schank 1975; Schank and Abelson 1977) and vision (Minsky 1975; Brewer 2000). During the 1980s, the American cognitive psychologist Lawrence W. Barsalou introduced frames in his studies of ad hoc categories (Barsalou 1982, 1991), autobiographical memories (Barsalou 1988), and contextual variability in concept representations (Barsalou 1987, 1989; Barsalou and Billmann 1989). He extended and refined previous presentations of the frame notation to represent concepts (Barsalou 1992b; Barsalou and Hale 1993), calling his new approach ‘dynamic frames’. The present authors adopted his techniques in the 1990s and began to apply them to conceptual change in science and the implications of Kuhn's mature work (Andersen, Barker, and Chen 1996; Chen, Andersen, and Barker 1998; Barker, Chen, and Andersen 2003).

CONSTITUENTS OF DYNAMIC FRAMES

In the explanations that follow we will draw increasingly complex diagrams to represent frames, and we distinguish the concepts appearing in frames by capital letters when we mention them in the text. To represent a concept by a frame, one layer of nodes is selected to represent attributes of the concept.

In this final chapter we attempt to do three things. First, we review the results we have presented. Next we consider the implications of our position for one of the major controversies within philosophy and sociology of science, the realism debate. Finally, we consider the significance of our results for wider debates in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science.

RESULTS

Our goal throughout this book has been to recover and extend Kuhn's account of scientific change by showing that its most important features are consequences of the nature of concepts, as currently understood in cognitive psychology and cognitive science. An important subsidiary point is that Kuhn's own theory of concepts has been shown to be independently supported by work in cognitive psychology and cognitive science.

We have shown that there is a defensible distinction between normal science and revolutionary science, but that the difference between them is not a question of the historical rarity of one process versus the other. Viewed as conceptual changes both processes may occur at any time. In the case of revolutionary change, whether the result is a big revolution or small one depends on other factors – the status of the conceptual structure that changes (for example, whether or not the changes affect a fundamental item in the ontology of the field), as well as the speed and completeness with which the changes are adopted.

In Chapter 2 we gave an account of concepts and conceptual structures based on family resemblance. We showed that on this account possession of a conceptual structure implies knowledge of ontology, as objects not belonging to any of the known similarity classes are assumed not to exist. Likewise, we showed that through the relations of similarity and dissimilarity, possession of a conceptual structure implies knowledge of regularities, that is, expectations of the different situations that nature does and does not present.

In Chapter 3 we have seen how conceptual structures of the kind introduced by Kuhn may be represented by dynamic frames, a form of representation developed in cognitive psychology and independently supported by empirical research. Frames not only accommodate the most important features of Kuhn's account, such as family resemblance, but may also be used to represent graded structure, the most important empirical phenomenon documented by studies of categorization supporting the reality of family-resemblance categories. The frame account allows us to display details of conceptual structures that are otherwise difficult to examine, such as the patterns of attribute-value sets that characterize concepts, and it allows us to locate constraints between elements of the structure that correspond to knowledge of ontology and knowledge of regularities.

We have already suggested a developmental perspective: a particular conceptual structure is always given by the preceding generation, which passes it on to the next.

Those of us who grew up during the 1950s and early 1960s can still vividly recall the seemingly unbridled enthusiasm that society displayed toward science and technology. Sunday supplements, radio, television, and newspaper advertisements, television and radio shows, world's fairs, comic books, popular science magazines, newsreels, and, indeed, virtually all of popular culture heralded the vision of a golden age to come through science. One popular Sunday evening program sponsored by Dupont featured Ronald Reagan promising – with absolutely no irony – “better things for better living through chemistry,” a slogan that evoked much hilarity during the drug-soaked 1960s.

In an age where TV dinners were symbols of modern convenience, rather than unpleasant reminders of cramped airplane trips, nothing seemed beyond the power of science. The depictions of science-based utopia – perhaps best epitomized in the Jetsons cartoons – fueled unlimited optimism that we would eventually all enjoy personal fliers, robotic servants, the conquest of disease. Expanding population? No problem – scientists would tow icebergs and desalinize water to make deserts bloom. The Green Revolution and industrialized agriculture and hydroponics would supply our nutritional needs at ever-decreasing costs. Computer gurus such as Norbert Wiener promised that cybertechnology would usher in “the human use of human beings.” We would colonize the asteroids; extract gold from the sea; supply our energy needs with “clean, cheap” nuclear power; wear disposable clothing; educate our children according to sound “science-based” principles; conquer disease and repair nature's deficiencies and mistakes.

The statement “There are certain things humans were not meant to know (or do)” often conceals an enthymematic component “because such knowledge will lead to great harm.” This theme is orchestrated in the tales of the Tower of Babel, the Sorcerer's apprentice, the Rabbis who studied the Kabbalah and went mad or turned apostate, and of course the endless variations on the Frankenstein story we alluded to earlier.

The reason that disaster results in these stories, of course, is not so much that a given area of knowledge or its application is inexorably dangerous, it is rather that we (or scientists) tend to rush headlong into a field or activity with incomplete knowledge, where our ignorance inexorably leads to disaster. And we have seen abundant examples of this in twentieth-century science: the escape of “killer” bees, the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters; the various space shuttle tragedies. The thrill inherent in the pursuit of new knowledge or new power often eclipses scientists' concern about dangers – I have seen scientists engrossed in an experiment use their mouths to pipette drug-resistant tuberculosis!

There is in fact a tendency on the part of researchers to denigrate the need for any biosafety oversight; “I've always done it this way and no one has ever been hurt” is a familiar refrain. On one occasion, before it was mandatory for research institutions to have a biosafety officer, I was discussing these issues with the provost of a major research university.

Thus far, we have examined the relationship between scientific ideology and the neglect of major ethical dimensions of science, largely caused by the component of scientific ideology that declares science to be “value free” and “ethics free.” But while the explicit denial of values is certainly going to be the most obvious cause of ethical neglect, we cannot underestimate the more subtly corruptive influence of the second component of scientific ideology we have delineated, the denial of the reality or knowability of subjective experiences in people and animals.

Obviously, concern about how a person or animal feels – painful, fearful, threatened, stressed – looms large in the context of ethical deliberation. If such feelings and experiences are treated as scientifically unreal, or at least as scientifically unknowable, that will serve to eliminate what we may term a major call to ethical deliberation and ethical thought. Insofar as modern science tends to bracket subjectivity as outside its purview, the tendency to ignore ethics is potentiated. For example, in our discussion of animal research we have alluded to the absence of pain control in animal research until it was mandated by federal legislation.

While this is certainly a function of science's failure to recognize ethical questions in science, society in general, except for issues of overt cruelty, also historically neglected ethical questions about animals.

In the course of reflecting on the issues dealt with in this book, I was reminded of an incident that took place when I was in the fifth or sixth grade during my elementary education. One of my elementary school's graduates had gone on to Harvard to do a Ph.D. with David Riesman, the renowned sociologist. For his Ph.D., he was studying how various groups in society viewed scientists. Toward that end, he administered a questionnaire to all the students in my grade asking us a variety of questions, essentially aimed at detecting whether children viewed scientists as markedly different from other people. The only question I remember was the following: What is a scientist most likely to do while on vacation – study a new science, work on research, or do what other people do? I recall thinking, “Well, scientists are human, just like everyone else, so they do what all people do – spend time with family, travel, etc.” The graduate student called me out of class a week later, after processing the data, and informed me that I had the best understanding of how scientists behave and asked me to further elaborate on my answers. I remember explaining that people's humanness took precedence over their occupations – how could it not?

Years later, in reading Hume, I recalled my opinion, and had it buttressed when Hume said, in essence, that one can be a philosopher (or scientist) but one must be first a man.

Before exploring specific ethical issues that the scientific community has mishandled or failed to handle, we must first address a basic question: Why does the research community have such a bad track record in dealing with ethics? Why has it consistently missed the mark set by society for rational ethical discussion and explanation? And what should it be doing instead? In my view, the problem grows out of strongly and unquestioningly held beliefs in the scientific community about science and ethics, beliefs that are never questioned to the extent that they constitute a hardened and unshakeable ideology that I have called “scientific common sense” or “scientific ideology,” which stands in the same relationship to scientists' thinking that ordinary common sense does to the thinking of nonscientists. It is to this ideology we now turn.

What is an ideology? In simple terms, an ideology is a set of fundamental beliefs, commitments, value judgments, and principles that determine the way someone embracing those beliefs looks at the world, understands the world, and is directed to behave toward others in the world. When we refer to a set of beliefs as an ideology, we usually mean that, for the person or group entertaining those beliefs, nothing counts as a good reason for revising those beliefs, and, correlatively, raising questions critical of those beliefs is excluded dogmatically by the belief system. (As David Braybrooke has stated it, “ideologies distort as much by omitting to question as by affirming answers.”)

Before we can explore the relationship between science and ethics, we must be clear about the general nature of ethics. This is particularly important in the age in which we live, since the rate of socio-ethical change has increased with great rapidity. As we shall see throughout our discussion, if professionals such as physicians, veterinarians, or researchers wish to keep their autonomy and steer their own ships, they must be closely attuned in an anticipatory way to changes and tendencies in social ethics and adjust their behavior to them, else they can be shackled by unnecessarily draconian restriction. And, as we saw in chapter 1 there have been numerous and bewildering ethical changes that professionals and others must adjust to throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There I catalogued some of the bewildering array of major socio-ethical changes that had developed in the second half of the twentieth century. As we shall see, failure of any subgroup in society to adjust to these ethical charges can result in major loss of freedom.

The first distinction that must be mastered is the difference between what I have called Ethics1 and Ethics2. Ethics1, or morality, is the set of beliefs that society, individuals, or subgroups of society hold about good and bad, right and wrong, justice and injustice, fairness and unfairness. Ethics2, on the other hand, is the logical examination, critique, and study of Ethics1. What we are doing in this chapter and indeed in this book is Ethics2.

In a sense, my whole career can be viewed as an attempt to articulate the legitimate role of ethics in science, on both a theoretical and a practical level. With my appointment to the Colorado State University College of Veterinary Medicine as the person charged with developing and teaching the field of veterinary medical ethics and, shortly thereafter, serving as an “ombudsman for animals” charged with achieving consensus on animal use issues in science came a unique opportunity for testing theory in practice and for almost daily interaction with scientists on ethical issues. This activity in turn meshed well with my working with colleagues in the 1970s to write legislation protecting laboratory animals, in a real way articulating the emerging social ethic for animal treatment in a manner that would benefit animals without harming research and, ideally, improving it by underscoring the control of hitherto ignored deforming variables resulting from uncontrolled pain and distress in animal subjects.

Ever since I was a biology student in the 1960s, I had also chafed under science teaching that ignored ethical and conceptual issues raised by biological science. Funding from the National Science Foundation in the mid-1970s allowed me, together with molecular botanist Murray Nabors, to develop a year-long, five-credit honors biology course in which ethics and philosophy were taught as part and parcel of biology.

If one imagines an extraterrestrial researcher looking at the history of science and ethics in the twentieth century, one can imagine such an observer not being surprised at, and even having some sympathy for, the failure of the scientific community to engage issues of animal research and toxicology testing, animal cloning, and genetic engineering of animals. After all, he or she might affirm, there has been relatively little thought devoted to ethics and animals – most of what there is has been a product of the last quarter of the twentieth century, and it takes time for such new ideas to be incorporated into social thought.

On the other hand, such a detached observer would almost certainly be shocked at the cavalier use of human beings in research during the same era, a use that in many cases was violative of absolutely fundamental social ethical commitments that have been thoroughly discussed for hundreds and even thousands of years. In an extraordinarily clear and perceptive statement made at the close of the trial of the infamous Nazi physicians who cavalierly used large number of prisoners, slave laborers, and concentration camp inmates in painful experiments, the chief prosecutor affirmed that “the most fundamental tenet of medical ethics and human decency [requires that] the subjects volunteer for the experiment after being informed of its nature and hazards.”

Notice that in addition to citing field-specific “medical ethics” the prosecutor also refers to fundamental human decency.