Thomas Kuhn, 1922-1996

Paradigms as soft structures

Ted Benton

Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was, despite the modesty of its author, a revolutionary work. Like Darwin's Origin of Species (with which it shares many other likenesses), its wider cultural and political resonances far exceeded the intentions and expectations of its author - both in scope and in direction. Developed through painstaking scholarly work in the history of science, Kuhn's concepts of `paradigm', `normal science', `anomaly', `crisis', and `scientific revolution' itself, exploded their initial disciplinary confines. Throughout the humanities and social sciences, and even in some heretical margins of the natural sciences, the implications of Kuhn's arguments were intensely debated. And, beyond the classrooms and libraries, Kuhn's ideas became commonplaces in the intellectual and cultural ferment of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Why was this? The most obvious answer lies in the key words of Kuhn's title. `Structuralism' had already gained an exotic presence in Anglophone culture through the work of a Francophile intellectual vanguard. `Science' was an important site of cultural and political contestation, both because of the challenge to scientific authority mounted by the emerging counterculture, and because of the more circumscribed battle for scientific status going on in the social sciences. And the word `revolution'! Here the resonances are far more complex and mediated. The word had a place in the popular music and youth culture of the time, as the generation of the 1960s defined itself in opposition to military power, imperial domination and rampant consumerist `materialism'. Some among the generation of `peace and love' were also revolutionaries in a more self-consciously political sense, and it was perhaps in these circles more than elsewhere that Kuhn's ideas were taken up and debated. Increasingly, as revolutionary practice was seen to require revolutionary theory, the status of Marxism, in particular, became a central issue. With that, as the work of the French structural Marxists became better known among English-speaking radicals, the question became: `scientific' or `humanist' Marxism? The nexus of structure, revolution and science seemed inescapable.

Kuhn as trojan horse

Steve Fuller

From a distance, the legacy of Thomas Kuhn to academia appears to have been a radical one. After all, isn't he the person most responsible for overturning the positivist philosophical orthodoxy by defining science so that the social and natural sciences could both be seen as forms of organized enquiry or `paradigms'? And didn't his definition stress the social dimension of science to such an extent that he breathed new life into the sociology of science, starting with the Edinburgh School and eventuating in the professionalization of `science studies'? And hasn't the advent of science studies paved the way for a radical reconsideration of the place of science in society, leading to the `Science Wars' that have periodically erupted on both sides of the Atlantic over the last five years? The presuppositions informing each of these three questions are false, as Kuhn himself has been at pains to point out since the introduction to his collected essays, The Essential Tension, in 1977. Indeed, as I have stressed in a set of essays and a forthcoming book, Kuhn's influence has been a profoundly conservative one, but one in keeping with the setting in which The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was written.

The key to understanding the impact of Kuhn's work is the dedication of that classic work to Harvard President James Bryant Conant, an administrator of the US atomic bomb project, staunch cold warrior and Kuhn's early academic mentor. It was Conant who conceived of the courses, `General Education in Science', in which Kuhn developed his famous conception of science as iterated cycles of paradigms and revolutions, in the decade following World War II. The constituency for Conant's courses was the returning soldiers whose education was funded by the US government. They were expected to become managers who would be increasingly asked to decide on projects containing a strong scientific component. From Conant's standpoint, it was important that they remained friendly to science, despite public calls for greater regulation of scientific research in the wake of the US atomic bombing of Japan (which Conant strongly encouraged).

No turning back: Kuhn and feminist epistemology

Helen E.Longino

Feminist epistemology may owe more to Quine and Wittgenstein philosophically, but Thomas Kuhn's dramatic delineation of the differences that `paradigms' could make in the sciences gave content and material consequence to the philosophical ideas. This emboldened feminists to articulate the kinds of difference feminist inquiry might exhibit by comparison with the mainstream.

Kuhn's work was important to feminists in several respects. It was first invoked as a way of articulating convictions about the role of gender ideology in the content and practices of the sciences. I can recall taking Kuhn as my legitimating text in the first public lecture I ever gave (1973), on masculinist bias in biology and psychology. And Ruth Hubbard, in her classic essay `Have Only Men Evolved?', also cites Kuhn as offering a framework within which to place her critique of the representations of the roles of male and female organisms in evolutionary theory. What Kuhn's ideas offered were ways to make sense of the perpetuation of gender stereotypes in an arena allegedly governed by objective, empirical methods. The notions of the theory-ladenness of observation and of paradigm made it possible to see and say how careful scientists could nevertheless persist in treating certain kinds of human variation as falling into bivalent and exclusive categories of masculine and feminine, or even in seeing variation where there was none. But Kuhn's insistence that elements other than empirical evidence and logic were required for theory-choice facilitated even stronger views. As Evelyn Keller put it in the introduction to Reflections on Gender and Science, `the direct implication of such a claim is that not only different collections of facts, different focal points of scientific attention, but also different organizations of knowledge, different interpretations of the world, are both possible and consistent with what we call science' (p.5). So, interpretations of the world expressive of a feminist sensibility, or at least of a non-androcentric and non-masculinist sensibility, should also be possible and consistent with what we call - that is, should be recognizable as - science.

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