By presenting Owen as a person corrupted by power and self-interest, and by portraying the reclusive Darwin as the epitome of the pure and detached researcher, Huxley helped to shape the identity of the scientific practitioner as autonomous from society. But Huxley and the new generation of researchers he helped to train were in fact much more like Owen, employed in government institutions or on state-sponsored projects, embedded in institutional politics, implementing imperial policies. Perhaps even more than Owen, Huxley embraced the public role of science and sought to advance it. In addition to his duties at the School of Mines and Geological Survey, his teacher-training courses, and his public lectures, Huxley worked as a Science and Art Department examiner and as an inspector of fisheries; he eventually served on seven royal commissions, reporting to the state on matters of education reform, the fishing industry, and vivisection. In these posts, he employed his particular expertise in marine zoology and as a teacher of science. But he also developed for the man of science a broader agenda as cultural critic and commentator, competent to intervene in matters of general public interest or concern. Secured by scientific methods and procedures – acquired and honed in the laboratory – against any corrupting social interests or influences, the man of science, Huxley claimed, was the best of public servants.

PREAMBLE

Any attempt to evaluate the contribution of Thomas Kuhn's work to the history and sociology of science has to take care not to undermine the significance of the work itself; for the more respect we have for it, the less we will be inclined to attribute decisive significance to it as an individual contribution to these fields. Kuhn helped to undermine the view that cultural traditions like those of the sciences could be analysed into so many discrete individual contributions. Indeed, the part he played in correcting the excessive individualism that once characterised studies of the natural sciences stands as an important part of his achievement, acknowledged even today, when individualism is once more rampant in the academic world.

It is worth recalling that, at the outset of Kuhn's career, the ‘problem’ of the nature of the ‘discoveries’ made by individual scientists still figured prominently in the thought of historians of science. In an early paper, Kuhn (1962) cited extensive evidence, and in particular the many documented cases of ‘multiple’ and ‘simultaneous’ discovery, in support of the view that discovery was actually a process wherein the members of the relevant scientific community reoriented themselves cognitively, over an extended period of time, to the states of affairs their research addressed.

There is very little to be said about direct influences of twentieth-century French or German philosophers on Kuhn's work (or vice versa, for that matter). He did strongly appreciate Émile Meyerson's approach to the history of science but expressed distaste for Meyerson's idealism; and, as we will see, he had a brief but unproductive encounter with Gaston Bachelard. Beyond this, Kuhn seems to have had very little direct contact with European philosophy.

It is, of course, possible to plot various parallels between Kuhn's philosophy of science and the general trend of European thought from Heidegger through Derrida. Post-Kuhnianism and postmodernism oppose a similar range of Cartesian theses and pose the standard skeptical threats of a radically historicized reason. But beyond the broadest generalizations, there is little substantial overlap between Kuhn's philosophical interests and inclinations and those of, say, Heidegger and Derrida.

The one movement in twentieth-century European thought that has substantive affinities with Kuhn's work is the French tradition of philosophy of science. This begins with the classic writings of Poincaré, Duhem, and Meyerson but takes on its distinctive character (and its strongest similarities to Kuhn) in the work of Léon Brunschvicg, Gaston Bachelard, and Georges Canguilhem. Kuhn himself, unfortunately, had only a glancing contact with this tradition and no serious understanding of it. The main contact came through Koyré, who had urged him to meet Bachelard and provided a letter of introduction.

INTRODUCTION

The research project outlined in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions seems intrinsically historical, philosophical, and psychological (Kuhn 1970). However, by and large, Kuhn never utilized research in the cognitive sciences that would have furthered his own paradigm in ways I think he would have found agreeable. Until his very last writings, psychology dropped out of Kuhn's post-Structure published articulations of his views just at the time that the cognitive revolution was beginning to provide accounts of representation, problem solving, and learning that I believe are pertinent to his intuitive insights. With hindsight one can construct significant parallels between the views of knowledge, perception, and learning developed in each. In what follows I will discuss in what ways some of Kuhn's insights might be furthered today in light of cognitive science research. Seen through a cognitive lens, Kuhn's little book seems all the more remarkable and insightful. Many of the issues with which he grappled have been the subject of entire areas of research in cognitive science, especially cognitive psychology. In the course of this essay I can only give brief indications of how Kuhn's thinking and research in areas of cognitive science have been running along parallel lines and of how one might, through cognitive-historical analysis, create some intersecting lines.

In his Presidential Address to the Philosophy of Science Association, Kuhn expressed his abiding interest as being in “incommensurability and the nature of the conceptual divide between the developmental stages separated by … ‘scientific revolutions’” (Conant and Haugeland 2000, p. 228).

Kuhn's influence on feminist science studies and feminist theory of knowledge might well be understood as an example of the principle of unintended consequences. Kuhn's notions of theory-laden meaning and observation and of revolutionary science were embraced by feminist thinkers, who applied them in ways that seem their natural and logical extensions. Judging from remarks in later essays such as “The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science,” Kuhn would have had serious reservations about these applications, as he had about many of those in science studies who took his views as a mandate to inquire into the social nature of scientific inquiry. Nevertheless, the power of his challenge to logical empiricist philosophy of science provided a philosophical basis for a wide range of critical approaches to the sciences.

When The Structure of Scientific Revolutions burst upon the academic scene in the early 1960s, the second wave of feminism was in its earliest stages: identifying the forms of legal discrimination against women, challenging the cultural expectations of femininity, agitating for access to contraception and abortion, and rebelling against the second-class status accorded to women in the civil rights and antiwar movements. By the early 1970s, feminists in the academy had expanded the reach of feminism to analysis and critique of the research and scholarship that supported the discriminatory legal and social treatment of women. They argued that the traditional academic disciplines were guilty not only of professional discrimination in university admissions, hiring, and promotion, but also of scholarly discrimination.

Conventional wisdom concerning twentieth-century philosophical approaches to scientific knowledge has held that Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions is diametrically opposed to the philosophical movement known as “logical positivism” or “logical empiricism.” Logical positivism has been portrayed as a naive version of empiricist foundationalism, according to which all knowledge is to be reduced to an epistemically certain basis in observational reports. And it follows, on this view, that there can be no genuine scientific revolutions in the Kuhnian sense: scientific progress must rather follow the “development-by-accumulation” model (in this case, development by accumulation of observable facts) that Kuhn explicitly rejects at the outset. If we accept Kuhn's theory, by contrast, it follows that the progress of science is marked by radical discontinuities quite incompatible with such naive empiricism. So it is no wonder that Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions is standardly taken as a major factor in the demise of logical empiricism.

Over the past twenty-five years, however, a growing body of active research has been devoted to detailed study of the rise and decline of the logical empiricist movement. And this research has shown, not surprisingly, that the accepted conventional wisdom concerning the relationship between Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions and logical empiricist philosophy of science is seriously oversimplified and fundamentally misleading. Perhaps the most striking results of this research appear in an article by George Reisch (1991) entitled “Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?

Every essay in this book has been written especially for this volume. While the book is aimed at a general educated audience, each author aspires to say something sufficiently substantial about one or more dimensions of Kuhn's work to interest experts. Moreover, this is more than a retrospective on Kuhn's work. It is forward-looking as well, with an eye on ongoing developments in philosophy of science, epistemology, social studies of science, and especially the cognitive sciences. Given our space limitations, we focus on Kuhn the philosopher of science rather than Kuhn the historian, and we devote more attention to Kuhn's relation to cognitive science than to social studies of science.

I owe the idea for the project to Terry Moore, Publishing Director for Humanities at Cambridge University Press, New York. Terry conceived the timely new series Contemporary Philosophy in Focus, with this book being one of the first offerings. I appreciate his guidance as to what sort of book it should be. Thanks to production editor Louise Calabro and to copyeditor Helen Greenberg, who gave the volume its final form. Thanks also to my wife, Dr. Gaye McCollum-Nickles, for helpful comments on my own contributions to the volume.

The decision of which authors to include in such a volume is always difficult and somewhat arbitrary. Several outstanding expositors and/or critics of Kuhn had to be passed over in order to keep the volume to a manageable size and to achieve a wider diversity of perspectives on Kuhn's work.

INTRODUCTION

The central distinction of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is that between normal science and revolutionary science. He offered suggestive and provocative but sketchy accounts of both. Most historians and sociologists who have discussed Kuhn's work have maintained that his account of normal science is the more important, while philosophers and culture theorists – and Kuhn himself – have tended to regard his claims about revolutionary discontinuities and incommensurability as his truly original contribution. In my judgment, the problems that Kuhn engaged in his account of normal science are more heuristically promising for understanding scientific inquiry and human inquiry more generally. Subsequent developments in cognitive psychology have vindicated Kuhn's departures from standard theories of cognition. It may even be the case that what is worth saving in Kuhn's treatment of revolutions depends on the account of cognition that he developed for normal science. After all, Kuhn's own most informative characterization of revolutionary science is that it is extraordinary – nonnormal. Accordingly, I shall examine Kuhn's account of normal scientific cognition as puzzle-solving practices guided by the exemplary problem solutions that he called “exemplars,” together with what he termed “an acquired similarity relation.” I shall center my discussion on that most basic problem concerning the very possibility of inquiry – the Meno paradox – and indicate how Kuhn's account of scientific inquiry attempts to solve it. Here I must limit myself to the “early” Kuhn of Structure and the related essays written in the 1960s and 1970s.

Whether one is pro-Kuhn, anti-Kuhn, or neutral, no one can deny that the work of Thomas Kuhn has been a lightning rod for debates about science, culture, and policy across many academic fields – and even in the political arena and the business world. This is especially true of Kuhn's best-known work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, originally published in 1962 and expanded in 1970. By now the book has sold over a million copies in two dozen languages – numbers almost unheard of for an academic book about abstract philosophical topics. The wide reception of his work, which greatly surprised Kuhn himself, has elevated the terms “paradigm,” “paradigm change,” and “paradigm shift” to household phrases and the stuff of advertising slogans, corporate boardrooms, and Washington bureaucratese. Although diverse individuals and groups have read and used (or misused!) it very differently, each according to their own abilities and needs, Kuhn's work has the merit, in these fragmented times, of serving as a common reference point and of generating cross-disciplinary discussion.

When Kuhn began writing, philosophy of science, especially in England and the United States, was dominated by the logical positivists (Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Carl Hempel, and others) and by Karl Popper and his followers. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Structure hereafter), Kuhn gave us a very different picture of science. Kuhn contended that there are two types of mature physical science, “normal science” and “extraordinary” or “revolutionary science.

The opening sentence of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is often thought to be prophetic. Kuhn proclaimed that “history of science … could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed” (1970, p. 1). In the decade or so after the book was published in 1962, the dominant philosophical conception of science, logical empiricism, was indeed substantially transformed. Moreover, although Kuhn's book at the time was only one among a half dozen prominent challenges to logical empiricism, it has in retrospect become the symbol for its own revolution, marking a transition to a postempiricist era in the philosophy of science. Citations of Kuhn are now ubiquitous in various contrasts between the supposedly bad old days and some more enlightened present conception of science.

Proclamations of revolution are often succeeded by revisionist debunking. That fate may well befall Kuhn's book. In the past decade or so, a number of scholars have convincingly called attention to important continuities between Kuhn's book and the work of his logical empiricist predecessors. Others note that Kuhn and his most sympathetic readers have repudiated the most radical-sounding claims associated with the book. In a still different vein, one scholar has argued that Kuhn's book was reactionary rather than revolutionary: Fuller (1999) claims both that Kuhn aimed to insulate science from public scrutiny and democratic control, and that, contrary to its public image, the philosophical and social scientific work most influenced by Kuhn has had just that effect.

INTRODUCTION

In Kuhn's account of the history of science, the nature of concepts and conceptual change looms large. Kuhn found little to admire in contemporary philosophical accounts of science, and he also found himself at odds with the philosophical community on the theory of concepts. Consequently, in the course of developing his philosophical account of science, he was also obliged to articulate a theory of concepts. One of the central ideas of his account, incommensurability, originated as a thesis about concepts. As his account matured, Kuhn came to formulate incommensurability as a thesis about taxonomies. The issue of categorization therefore emerges immediately from his account, with his theory of concepts providing the basis for the conceptual structures that he calls “kind hierarchies.”

Kuhn's theory is not without precedent. It builds on the work of Wittgenstein and also reflects Kuhn's early and profound exposure to Kant. In a revealing interview near the end of his life Kuhn said simply, “I am a Kantian with movable categories” (Baltas, Gavroglu, and Kindi 2000, p. 264). Provided that the categories are understood as Wittgensteinean family resemblance concepts, this is a valuable summary. As his philosophy of science developed, Kuhn focused increasingly on the nature of scientific concepts, and his account of concepts gradually became the foundation from which he sought to vindicate his earlier claims on the development and change of scientific knowledge.

One sixties' summer, shortly before the ‘Summer of Love’, probably the two most widely influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century – Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn – met at a conference in ‘swinging London’ to compare and contrast their views on the nature of theory change in science.

The debate was recorded (and extended) in an influential book called Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge Although Kuhn was at pains to begin his paper (1970) by stressing similarities between his own views of scientific development and those of ‘Sir Karl’, and although Kuhn's official line was that the differences between Popper and himself were ‘comparatively secondary’, it soon became clear that those differences were in fact sharp and apparently rather deep. Kuhn claimed, for example, that ‘Sir Karl has characterized the entire scientific enterprise in terms that apply only to its occasional revolutionary parts’ (p. 6). And he suggested that to accept his own account of science was, in effect, ‘to turn Sir Karl's view on its head’ by accepting that ‘it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition to a science’ (ibid.). Popper responded by, amongst other things, admitting that Kuhn's ‘normal science’ is a real phenomenon and that he had indeed hitherto failed fully to recognise it – but he did so reluctantly in the way that a starstruck lover might be brought to admit that he had hitherto been blind to an imperfection in his inamorata.

Of all the controversial elements of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962/1970), the most controversial and problematic for the majority of readers are Kuhn's claims about the changes in the world that accompany scientific revolutions. Kuhn's own ambivalence about his doctrine is exemplified by the contrast between the title of Chapter X, “Revolutions as Changes of World View,” which places the changes in the minds and theories of the scientists, and the first sentence of that section, which shows the temptation to locate the change in the worlds themselves:

Kuhn describes himself as “acutely aware” of the difficulties posed by his locutions:

One example he discusses at some length (pun intended) is the pendulum. Heavy objects suspended by ropes or chains had existed for a long time, and certainly their occasional motions had been observed. However, for an Aristotelian this is an example of unnatural motion: The heavy body is moved by its nature toward the center of the Earth and the universe, but it is constrained by the suspension.