He had wonderful phrases like "according to Kuhn, science is just mob psychology. But I think that his picture of what he called a research program to which he gave a substantial structure is one of quite a few valuable ways of approaching development of a science. Can you explain what a research program is and how it might pertain to the life sciences? Lakatos's notion of a research program is that all theories have lots of and lots of little anomalies. They wallow in a "sea of anomalies"—he was very good at making up these little aphorisms.
However, a research program has a hard core of beliefs which are never challenged, and then there's a whole bunch of auxiliary beliefs which can be modified. What distinguishes what he called a progressive research program from a degenerative research program—two highly loaded expressions with a lot of Hegel and Marx behind them—is the way in which they deal with anomalies.
Lakatos thought the progressive ones explain the anomalies and enable one to broaden the scope of research whereas a degenerating research program develops a kind of protective belt in order to exclude anomalies in an ad hoc way. I think one can say that the whole history of molecular biology since , when the first ream of Nobel Prizes came out, has been in Lakatos's terms an extraordinarily progressive research program.
So, for example, epigenetics, changes in gene activation without altering DNA, might be an example of an anomaly that modifies the overall picture while leaving the hard-core "research program" intact.
It makes the overall picture more complex…. Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas. Indeed, the very expression often used of the "central dogma" of recombinant DNA is a good example of a hard core of a research program. Fifty years on, there have been distortions, misappropriations and distractions related to Kuhn's work. Can you speak to that? I don't know why the notion of a paradigm took off, why a totally obscure word became common usage within a few years—and not only in English: If you do a Google n-gram on "paradigm" in German or French or Italian, you find the same leap into common usage, which wasn't there before.
Some people have been upset about Kuhn's idea that science, like Darwinian natural selection, has no overarching goal. Many people find it very disturbing. I don't. Of course many people have always found it very disturbing that Darwinian evolution seems to have no goal. Remember that Kuhn wasn't against progress; he just thought that progress wasn't "to" something. It was progress away from what didn't work very well, but that there isn't any kind of permanent goal. What about the association of his ideas with scientific relativism?
The thought-provoking thesis is argued with earnestness and clarity, not weighed down with jargon or lumbering footnotes. The more controversial claims are often advanced in a suggestive rather than declarative mode.
Perhaps most important, the book is short: it can be read comfortably in a single sitting. For the 50th-anniversary edition, the University of Chicago Press has included an introductory essay by renowned Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking. Like Kuhn, Hacking has a gift for clear exposition. His introduction provides a helpful guide to some of the thornier philosophical issues, and gives hints as to how historians and philosophers of science have parted with Kuhn.
The field of science studies has changed markedly since Few philosophers still subscribe to radical incommensurability; many historians focus on sociological or cultural features that received no play in Kuhn's work; and topics in the life sciences now dominate, whereas Kuhn focused closely on physics.
Nevertheless, we may still admire Kuhn's dexterity in broaching challenging ideas with a fascinating mix of examples from psychology, history, philosophy and beyond. We need hardly agree with each of Kuhn's propositions to enjoy — and benefit from — this classic book. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar.
Correspondence to David Kaiser. Reprints and Permissions. Kaiser, D. In retrospect: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Nature , — Download citation. Published : 11 April Issue Date : 12 April Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.
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Please contact our Customer Service Team if you have any questions. Most revolutions, he tells us, are not major discontinuities in which a successor theory overturns and replaces its predecessor. Rather, they are like allopatric biological speciation, in which a group of organisms becomes reproductively isolated from the main population. The biological parallel to revolutionary change is not mutation, as I thought for many years, but speciation.
And the problems presented by speciation e. Though I greet the thought with mixed feelings, I am increasingly persuaded that the limited range of possible partners for fruitful intercourse is the essential precondition for what is known as progress in both biological development and the development of knowledge.
When I suggested earlier that incommensurability, properly understood, could reveal the source of the cognitive bite and authority of the sciences, its role as an isolating mechanism was prerequisite to the topic I had principally in mind. In short, specialization is speciation, a scientific progress heightens communication breakdown. The group splits off and forms a distinct specialty with its own professional journals, conferences, etc. The incommensurability is now a local, community-licensed, taxonomic one that creates something of a barrier to communication with neighboring specialties.
One thinks, for example, of the way different biological specialties employ the species concept itself, and the concept of gene. This linguistic sensitivity as a group identifier permits the kind of fullness of communication, both linguistic and practical, within the group that Kuhn had stressed already in Structure and thus permits the group to progress more rapidly.
Two recent books that directly engage these issues are Andersen et al. See also Nersessian , and Kuukkanen His conception of a science is therefore less monolithic.
A vibrant field such as evolutionary biology can tolerate several distinct species concepts at the same time, a fact that contributes rather than detracts from its vibrancy. The overall result is a less tightly integrated, less dogmatic conception of normal science under an overarching paradigm, a view that has implications also for the necessity and size of future revolutions.
For no longer need an esoteric discrepancy get the leverage to trigger a crisis that eventuates in the replacement of an entire, tightly integrated system. Given that progress in biological evolution is better regarded as the remarkable proliferation of intricate, useful design rather than movement toward a goal, the explicit parallels that Kuhn draws to biological evolution suggest that he is moving toward the same conception of scientific progress as some see in biological evolution—as the proliferation of adaptive design.
We may know more about his final position once more of the book manuscript, left incomplete at his death, is published. Other thinkers have gone even further than Kuhn, by positing the existence of cognitive formations that are both broader and deeper than his. One prominent line of thought here is the neo-Kantian one up through Reichenbach and Carnap, discussed and further developed by Michael Friedman , Another, not entirely distinct, idea is that of a thought style or discursive formation found variously in such writers as Ludwik Fleck , Alistair Crombie , Michel Foucault , and Ian Hacking , , Once they become canonical, they seem to be such obvious frameworks for making true or false claims that the corresponding categories of thought and action appear to be given as part of the nature of things, as written in the language of nature, so to speak, when they are in fact a product of the cultural conditioning of our socio-cognitive systems.
In the limit we project our deeply ingrained cultural categories not only onto our world as we encounter it but also onto all historically conceivable worlds. The historical change in question, once called to our attention, seems revolutionary—in a manner that is both broader and deeper than the transition to a new paradigm within a particular scientific specialty.
Once again, the magnitude of the change is practically invisible to all but the most sensitive archeologist of knowledge. Feyerabend was alive to this perspective in his work on Galileo.
Nor is it obvious that the emergence of a new thought style must overturn a distinct predecessor. The claim is that our constructions today are no different. For critical discussion of Hacking on styles of reasoning, see Kusch and Scortino For more on Hacking, see section 5. Given the historical approach of Structure , other commentators have likened Kuhn to Hegel instead of Kant. Kuhn disliked being compared to Hegel, whose work he found obscure and characterized by a non-naturalistic philosophy of history, but it is worth commenting further on the partial resemblance.
Kant argued that we need transcendental structures such as a system of processing rules in order to organize sensory input into something coherent and intelligible, e. In this regard Kant can be regarded as a forerunner of cognitive psychology. They are not inborn, permanent, and universal; on the contrary, they are socio-historically acquired or lost and hence differ from one historical epoch to another. People living in different epochs cognize the world differently.
It is tempting to read the Kuhn of Structure as further relativizing and localizing Hegel to specific scientific domains and their paradigms. Thus it is tempting to regard Kuhnian revolutions as Hegelian revolutions writ small. Nonetheless, in terms of historical genealogy, Kuhn is better aligned with the Kantian tradition, especially the neo-Kantian relativization of Kant.
Interestingly, some logical empiricists especially Reichenbach were influenced by the neo-Kantianism of the German Marburg School of philosophy to develop a historically relativized but constitutive a priori see below and Friedman The neo-Kantian label applies even to prominent logical positivists of the Vienna Circle and logical empiricists of the Berlin Circle, who have too often been caricatured as simple, cumulative empiricists.
As Friedman and others have shown, several founders of twentieth-century academic philosophy of science extended the neo-Kantian attack on simple empiricism. The German Marburg School of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer was especially important in the emergence of modern philosophy of science in the form of the logical positivism and logical empiricism.
Rudolf Carnap had been influenced by Ernst Cassirer, among others. But the very fact that we still needed organizing structures that are constitutive or definitive of the cognitive enterprise in question meant that Kant was still basically correct. In the USA, meanwhile, C.
Starting from the problem of the existence of abstract entities, Carnap distinguished internal questions, that is, questions that can arise and be answered within a particular logico-linguistic framework, from external questions, that is, meta-level questions about which framework to prefer. External questions cannot be answered in the same, disciplined manner as internal, for choice of framework is ultimately a pragmatic decision based on the expected fertility of using one framework rather than another.
Although both defended two-tiered conceptions of inquiry, there are important differences between Kuhn and Carnap as Friedman, , , , among others, observes. For Carnap, as for Reichenbach, the choice of framework or coordinating definitions was conventional, a matter of convenience or heuristic fertility, whereas for committed Kuhnian normal scientists the foundational tenets of their paradigm are deep truths about the world, principles not subject to empirical test.
However, in a crisis situation, fertility becomes a key element in theory and paradigm choice. Meanwhile, Friedman himself has extensively developed the idea of historically contingent but constitutive a prioris e. From the old point of view, there is disruptive and incommensurability, but defenders of the new viewpoint manages to establish a kind of continuity.
Friedman goes well beyond Kuhn in stressing the role of philosophical ideas in establishing this continuity. As models, these constructions must be concretized to some degree before they can be applied to the real world. While the idealizationists tend to reject Kuhnian revolutions as too discontinuous and irrational, they do see a resemblance to their internalistic, dialectical conception of scientific development. Hence there can be a significant change of world-conception.
However, the structuralists were and are interested in intertheory relations, and models are central to their non-sentential conception of theories.
These are models in the formal sense, but Kuhn found insightful connections to his own use of models in the form of exemplars. For both Kuhn and the structuralists it is the collection of exemplars or models, not an abstract statement of a theory, that carries the weight in scientific inquiry.
Already the early Kuhn, especially in the postscript to the second edition of Structure , largely abandoned the traditional conception of theories as deductive systems, even in physics, and substituted informal collections of models of various, exemplary kinds, along with a toolbox of expert practices for constructing and applying them Cartwright , Giere , Teller Meanwhile, important French thinkers had already taken a historical approach, one that explicitly characterizes science as a series of breaks or coupures.
However, the French and Germanic traditions have some roots in common. For him the mind is not a passive wax tablet; rather, it actively forges internal links among ideas, yet it is also often surprised by the resistant exteriority of the natural world. Against traditional metaphysics, philosophy of science should limit itself to what the science of the time allows—but not dogmatically so.
Bachelard, French physicist and philosopher-historian of science, also believed that only by studying history of science can we gain an adequate understanding of human reason. In Le Nouvel Esprit Scientifique , Bachelard argued that the worldview of classical physics, valuable in its own time, eventually became an obstacle to future progress in physics.
Hence a break was needed. Here, then, we already find the idea that a successful theory can lose its luster by being considered exhausted of its resources and thus lacking in fertility. Like Brunschvicg, Bachelard held that a defensible, realist philosophy had to be based on the science of its day. Hence, scientific revolutions have and ought to have brought about epistemological revolutions. Future mental activity as well as future empirical findings are likely to require another rupture.
Bachelard was willing to speak of progress toward the truth. He made much of the fact that successor frameworks, such as non-Euclidean geometry or quantum physics, retain key predecessor results as special cases and, in effect, contextualize them. Canguilhem was more interested in the biological and health sciences than Bachelard and gave great attention to the distinction between the normal and the pathological, a distinction that does not arise in physical science.
For this and other reasons, in his view, we can expect no reduction of biology to physics. Canguilhem provided a more nuanced conception of obstacles and ruptures, noting, for example, that an approach such as vitalism that constitutes an obstacle in one domain of research can simultaneously play a positive role elsewhere, as in helping biological scientists to resist reductive thinking.
Here we find context sensitivities and heuristic resources difficult to capture in terms of a context- and content-neutral logic of science such as the logical empiricists espoused. Bachelard and Canguilhem also had less disruptive conceptions of scientific objectivity and scientific closure than Kuhn. Both Frenchmen emphasized the importance of norms and denied that disciplinary agreement was as weak as Kuhnian consensus.
Once again we meet a two-level account. Writes Hacking:. Hacking, too, historicizes the Kantian conception. Yet they are at the same time conditioned and formed in history, and can be uprooted by later, radical, historical transformations. They have become part of our standards for what it is, to find out the truth. They establish criteria of truthfulness. The styles are how we reason in the sciences. To repeat: No foundation.
The style does not answer to some external canon of truth independent of itself. Thus he feels free to employ telling bits of popular culture in laying out his claims, and he admits to being whiggish in starting from the present and working backward to find out how we got here.
Yet people living before and after the historical crystallization of a style would find each other mutually unintelligible. Hacking recognizes that Kuhnian problems of relativism rather than subjectivism lurk in such positions.
This sort of unintelligibility runs deeper than a Kuhnian translation failure. It is not a question of determining which old style statements match presumed new style truths; rather, it is a question of the conditions for an utterance to make a claim that is either true or false at all.
Writes Hacking,. By contrast, Kuhnian paradigms include a set of positive assertions about the world. To what extent was Kuhn indebted to these thinkers?
As noted above, he took Kant but not Hegel very seriously. He was largely self-taught in philosophy of science. Among his contemporaries, he was familiar with Popper but not in any detail with the various strains of logical positivism and logical empiricism, in particular the positions of Carnap and Reichenbach.
Apparently, he was only slightly acquainted with the work of Bachelard while writing Structure , and they never engaged in a fruitful interchange Baltas et al. Kuhn more than anyone in the Anglo-American world pointed out the need for larger-sized units than individual theories in making sense of modern science. If we think of authors such as the Annales historian Fernand Braudel, with his distinct time-scales, we recognize that the attribution of transformative change clearly depends heavily on the choice of time-scale and on how fine- or course-grained is our approach.
Hacking , 76 makes this point with reference to the French context:. Foucault does not speak of revolution. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Early Kuhn did seem to believe that there is a single, underlying pattern to the development of mature sciences that is key to their success, and late Kuhn a different pattern.
Has either early or late Kuhn found such a pattern, or has he imposed his own philosophical structure on the vagaries and vicissitudes of history?
For a recent selection see Soler et al. Still others accept that some revolutions are Kuhnian but deny that all of them are. One common criticism is that not all revolutionary advances are preceded by an acute crisis, that is, by major failures of preceding research.
Kuhn himself allowed for exceptions already in Structure. Yet another is that there need be little logical or linguistic discontinuity. A rapid, seemingly transformative change in research practices may involve simply a marked gain in data accessibility or accuracy or computational processing ability via new instrumentation or experimental design.
Only a few examples can be considered here. Do revolutions consist, according to Kuhn, of major new materials experimental facts, theories, models, instruments, techniques entering a scientific domain or, instead, of a major restructuring or rearrangement of materials, practices, and community affiliations already present? Kuhn states that the relativity revolution might serve as. The reader may find this claim confusing, however, because in the just-preceding paragraphs Kuhn had emphasized the ontological and conceptual changes of precisely this revolution, e.
They are newly introduced entities; hence, we may infer, new content. Yet Kuhn surely does have a point worth saving, in that relativity theory still deals with most of the same kinds of phenomena and problems as classical mechanics and employs immediate successors to the classical concepts. But, if so, then reorganization of familiar materials implies a disciplinary continuity through revolution that Kuhn minimized.
But he also emphasized that revolution involves social reorganization of the field not merely the cognitive reorganization of an individual , from one form of scientific life to another, incompatible with it.
By implication, his structural or formal conception of revolution excluded the alternative idea of revolution as extraordinary bursts in substantive content. He distinguishes two kinds of reclassification, in terms of the language of tree structures used in computer science: branch jumping and tree switching. Branch jumping reclassifies or relocates something to another branch of the same tree, e. New branches can appear and old branches can be eliminated.
Meanwhile, tree switching replaces an entire classification tree by a different tree structure based on different principles of classification, as when Darwin replaced the static classification tree of Linnaeus by one based on evolutionary genealogy and when Mendeleev replaced alternative classification systems of the chemical elements by his own table.
Nersessian herself , emphasizes model-based reasoning. These are no longer static cases or exemplars, for they possess an internal dynamic. Howard Margolis distinguishes two kinds of revolutions, depending on which kinds of problems they solve. Those revolutions that bridge gaps, he contends, differ from those that surmount or penetrate or somehow evade barriers.
More broadly, deeply ingrained cultural habits of mind can close off opportunities that, according to the perspective of later generations, were staring them in the face. No new gap-crossing developments were needed. He concludes that, rather than a gap to be bridged, the problem was a cognitive barrier that needed to be removed, a barrier that blocked expert mathematical astronomers from bringing together, as mutually relevant, what turned out to be the crucial premises, and then linking them in the tight way that Copernicus did.
Here one thinks of a model popular with mystery writers, where an everyday observation leads to a sudden change in perspective.
Davis Baird contends that there can be revolutions in practice that are not conceptual revolutions. He emphasizes the knowledge embodied in skills and in instruments themselves. His central example is analytic chemistry. Recently, Rogier De Langhe , a and b, has been developing a broadly Kuhnian, two-process account of science from an economics standpoint.
Instead of doing a series of historical cases, De Langhe and colleagues are developing algorithms to detect subtle patterns in the large citation databases now available. The account of the dynamics of science in Structure ill fit the rapid splitting and recombining of fields in the post-World War II era of Big Science, as Kuhn recognized. So he excluded from his account the division and recombination of already mature fields such as happened with the emergence of biochemistry.
This exclusion is troubling, given the universal thrust of his account. It is as if Kuhn admitted that his account applies only to a particular historical period that is now largely past; yet he also wrote as if the normal-revolutionary model would apply to mature disciplines into the long future.
However, he still gave little attention to the more-or-less reverse process of new fields coming into existence by combinations of previously distinct fields as well as to cross- and trans-disciplinary research, in which a variety of different specialists somehow succeed in working together Galison , Kellert , Andersen Molecular genetics quickly grew into the very general field of molecular biology.
Less than two decades after Watson and Crick, Gunther Stent could already write in his textbook:. There is something paradigmatic about molecular biology and also something revolutionary about its rapid progress and expansion.
It is not clear how to characterize this and similar developments. Was this a Kuhnian revolution? It did involve major social and intellectual reorganization, one that conflicted with the previous ones in some respects but without undermining the Darwinian paradigm.
Quite the contrary. Or is molecular biology more like a style of scientific practice than a paradigm? Instead, it seems better to regard it as a large toolkit of methods or techniques applicable to several specialty fields rather than as an integrative theory-framework within one field.
Should we then focus on practices rather than on integrative theories in our interpretation of Kuhnian paradigms? The trouble with this move is that practices can also change so rapidly that it is tempting to speak of revolutionary transformations of scientific work even though there is little change in the overarching theoretical framework see Part II of Soler et al.
Moreover, as Baird points out, the rapid replacement of old practices by new is often a product of efficiency rather than intellectual incompatibility. Why continue to do gene sequencing by hand when automated processing in now available? Replacement can also be a product of change in research style, given that, as Kuhn already recognized, scientific communities are cultural communities.
See also Brush and Porter This was an explosion of work within the classical mechanical paradigm rather than a slow, puzzle-by-puzzle articulation of precisely that paradigm in its own previous terms.
Or was it? For Kuhn himself recognized that modern mathematical physics only came into existence starting around and that Maxwellian electrodynamics was a major departure from the strictly Newtonian paradigm. In any case, there was much resistance among physicists to the new style of reasoning.
The kinetic theory of gases quickly grew into statistical mechanics, which leapt the boundaries of its initial specialty field. New genres as well as new styles of mathematical-physical thinking quickly replaced old—and displaced the old generation of practitioners.
Furthermore, the biological and chemical sciences do not readily invite a Kuhnian analysis, given the usual, theory-centered interpretation of Kuhn. For biological fields rarely produce lawful theories of the kind supposedly found in physics. Indeed, it is controversial whether there exist distinctly biological laws at all. What of the emerging field of evolutionary-developmental biology evo-devo?
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