The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Steve Fuller
Thomas Kuhn: A
Philosophical History of Our Times
VIII Conclusions
Content
1. The Canonization of
2. A Career of Lucky Accidents and Studied Avoidance
3. Getting over Kuhn: The Secularization of Paradigms as Movements
4. High and Low Church Secularizations of Science
5. Reinventing the University by Rediscovering the Contexts of Discovery and
Justification
1. The Canonization of
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions was one of the most influential academic books of
the second half of the twentieth century, and arguably the one that has done
the most to shape both academic and public perceptions of science.
However, Structure was the
product of a particular context and its influence has been of a particular
kind. The context may be roughly
divided into personal and situational factors.
The key personal factor was Kuhn’s
membership in a generation trained in physics who came of age at the dawn of
World War II. During that time, the
discipline that had attracted Kuhn and others as the continuation of natural
philosophy by experimental means was rapidly transformed into the paradigm
case of the sociotechnical behemoth, “Big Science.”
Like others of that generation, Kuhn
found this transformation profoundly disillusioning.
The key situational factor that enabled Kuhn to channel his disillusionment productively was the General Education in Science curriculum, designed by Harvard president and
Kuhn and Conant were clearly using the General
Education curriculum for somewhat different, yet overlapping, ends.
Kuhn was given the opportunity to
articulate the ideal of scientific inquiry that had originally
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motivated him to pursue a career in physics,
while Conant had found a reliable medium for normalizing science’s role in
contemporary society. What they shared
was an interest in promoting a normatively desirable understanding of science
that was grounded, in some sense, in its history.
However, this story is complicated by the exact
way Kuhn attempted to ground his normative ideal, namely in three hundred
years of the history of European physical sciences, while at the same time
refusing to comment on the failure of those very sciences (not to mention the
biological and social sciences) to conform to his ideal for most of the
twentieth century. Kuhn’s response to
the chord that his book struck - his silence and increasing withdrawal from
the communities that embraced him - is at least partly explained by his
awareness of a double-truth doctrine in the writing of history of science,
which he himself called “Orwellian”: on the one hand, a heroic history to
motivate scientists in their daily activities; on the other, a messy,
dispiriting, yet more down-to-earth history that the professional historian
uncovers mainly for consumption by other historians.
Ironically, what Kuhn presented as the
“real” history of science in Structure itself turned out to be a myth,
not only because its own empirical basis was suspect, but more importantly its
narrative was used uncritically by social scientists and other inquirers to
legitimate their activities as paradigms on the same footing as those of the
physical sciences.
The overall effect has been that Structure
diverted emerging tendencies in the 1960s to question the role of Big
Science in the academy and society at large, while reinforcing the ongoing
fragmentation and professionalization of academic disciplines.
Both developments marked a decisive
turn away from the ideal of a unified science that probably motivated Kuhn’s
original interest in physics as the continuation of natural philosophy by more
exact means. The net social
conservatism of Structure’s impact could well have pleased Conant, but
not its support for an intensified division of academic labor.
However, the latter explains the
book’s appropriation by a broad church ranging from “normal scientists” to
self-avowed “postmodernists.” The
point of my book has been to explore the background social, philosophical, and
historical conditions that have allowed this strange turn of events, in the
hope that we may still be in a position to remedy whatever damage has been
caused by an unreflective acceptance of the account of science given in
Structure.
Although I have been chiefly concerned with the
career of a book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the contexts
in which I have embedded the book’s origins and impacts, and especially the
normatively charged language I have occasionally used to explain these
developments, suggest that I wish to pass judgment on its author, Thomas Kuhn.
To be sure, it is
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difficult not to do so.
Historical figures so close to our own
time invite consideration of their suitability as role models, and the more I
learned the less I approved. I admit
to favoring figures who display an awareness of the sociohistorical setting in
which they stake their claims to knowledge. In
this respect, James Bryant Conant and Alexandre Koyre, in rather different but
equally reflexive ways, appear more exemplary figures than their protége,
Thomas Kuhn. Indeed, reading
Structure in light of his two mentors easily leaves the impression that
their value choices constitute taken-for-granted premisses for Kuhn’s account
of scientific change.
Nevertheless, I have neither the interest nor
the evidence to deliver a verdict on Kuhn’s life, let alone indict the man of
crimes of the intellect. As far as
intellectual personalities are concerned, my main interest is in evaluating
“Kuhn” as an ideal type of how academics respond to their social environment -
indeed, the sense in which Kuhn was “there,” as raised in the article that
originally motivated my inquiries, as recounted in the preface to this book.
It will become clear in what follows
that Kuhn’s mode of response to his environment marks a profound transition in
the nature of academic life. In short,
what did it mean to be someone in Kuhn’s position?
In the anglophone outposts of French social theory, it is nowadays fashionable to speak of habitus, the set of attitudes and expectations one acquires through the successive forms of discipline that constitute one’s upbringing, which are subsequently reinforced by others over the course of a lifetime
. [1] In this book, there have been occasional glimpses into Kuhn’s habitus, especially his lengthy incubation period at Harvard, which encompassed undergraduate and graduate training, as well as his induction into the newly created Society of Fellows and ultimately his first regular teaching post. In his last major interview, Kuhn left little doubt that his years at Harvard were the most formative in his life. His father and uncles had attended Harvard. Harvard was where Kuhn first found a circle of friends and felt he fitted in. Failure to achieve tenure at Harvard also nearly caused Kuhn to have a nervous breakdown. Last but not least, Kuhn met Conant, whom Kuhn regarded as the brightest person he had ever known - a judgment that forced him to shift his father, a clever and energetic engineer-turned-businessman, down to the second position. [21. The concept of habitus is developed in Bourdieu 1977, 72-95.
2. On these Harvard-related details, see Kuhn et
al. 1997, 46-48, 163, 170. Conant’s
displacement of Kuhn’s father invites further psychoanalytic exploration.
In the interview, Kuhn contrasts his
father, a quick-witted man of action, and his mother, a socially inept
intellectual. Kuhn identifies with the
latter but admires the former.
However, Kuhn also observes that his father failed to fulfill his potential,
in part because his efforts came to be dispersed after World War I, where his
talents had been concentrated in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
[Generally speaking, the need
for achievement figures prominently in Kuhn’s interview.
In fact, he associates his discovery of the power of normal science
puzzle solving with a watershed moment in his education, namely when he
realized that the unstructured setting of his “progressive” primary school
days had prepared him poorly for solving physics problems in high school,
thereby undermining his “straight A” average.
See Kuhn et al. 1997, 148.
Those interested in pursuing the psychoanalytic
dimension of Kuhn’s thought should find two features of the interview of note.
First, as a young man, Kuhn underwent psychoanalysis for his difficulty
in relating to women, though his description of the relationship to his father
and Conant may well strike the psychoanalytically inclined as “feminized.”
My thanks to Stephanie Lawler for talking me through this
psychoanalytic possibility.
Second, he claims that his interest in “climbing into people’s heads” was
triggered by this experience in psychoanalysis.
See Kuhn et al. 1997, 163.
The latter point bears an intriguing relationship to Jacques Lacan’s
admission that his own distinctive approach to psychoanalysis was triggered by
Koyré’s interpretation of Galileo. See chapter 1, note 65.]
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Conant’s style of recruitment politics reflected
an aristocratic orientation to the social order, one to which Kuhn acquiesced,
albeit without ever having engaged in its active promotion. [3]
Kuhn’s passive acceptance was
probably facilitated by the different values that Conant and Kuhn assigned to
Conant’s actions toward Kuhn. For
example, Kuhn reports being very impressed that Conant wanted him to do a case
history on mechanics for Natural Sciences 4, given the significance of
mechanics for the history of science. [4] No
doubt, for his part, Conant appreciated the efficiency of having the case
history done by someone with the relevant knowledge at his fingertips.
Moreover, Harvard’s willingness to deny Kuhn
tenure shortly after Conant’s departure from the presidency testifies to a
general impression that Kuhn was beholden, however passively, to Conant’s
patronage and the vision of the world with which it was associated.
This vision assigned to elite American
universities the unique role of consolidating and protecting the heritage of
Western civilization, especially as it underwent the twin twentieth-century
threats of Nazism and Communism. More
specifically, like C. P. Snow’s depiction of the “two cultures” divide in
3. On “recruitment politics,” see the
underrated Cook 1991,65-66.
4. Kuhn et al. 1997, 159.
5. Although Kuhn studiously refrained from
acknowledging any specifically intellectual debts to Conant, he nevertheless
admitted that he found it hard to cope when Conant’s various administrative
duties forced him to turn over the lecturing of Natural Sciences 4 to Kuhn,
which suggests how much he had relied on Conant’s intellectual (and other)
leadership in the [course. Kuhn
wrote out all his lectures, a compensatory reaction that, by his own account,
inhibited his subsequent efforts at writing.
See Kuhn et al. 1997, 166.
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Conant’s sense of science’s world-historic
mission did not especially endear him to Harvard’s doyens, most of whom still
operated with a liberal arts college model of the university in which the
humanities reigned supreme and even the natural sciences were viewed more as
teaching than research subjects. Indeed,
resentment periodically surfaced in the minutes of the General Education
meetings at how the liberal arts were becoming subordinated to the needs of
Big Science research, be it the special deals that researchers negotiated on
teaching loads or the way in which Conant himself generally saw teaching as a
conduit for promoting the aims and products of research.
The formative experiences in Kuhn’s
professional life occurred in the midst of this particular culture war.
This point comes out very clearly in
the protracted debate over his tenure, which centered on Kuhn’s drift from the
sciences to the humanities without having made a clear mark in any field.
In Whiggish hindsight, we maybe tempted to conclude that the doyens were unduly harsh or downright obtuse in their judgment of The Copernican Revolution as a good teaching text but not much more
. [6] However, without a clearly established history of science profession in the
6. Remarks by Edwin Kemble and Leonard Nash, in
Minutes,
7. In the lengthy deliberations over Kuhn’s
tenure, this point was explicitly raised by Harry Levin, who eventually became
the Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard.
Levin said he sat on many university
committees over the years in which Kuhn’s lack of performance was repeatedly
justified by extenuating circumstances. See
Minutes,
In these self-professed democratic times it is
awkward to invoke an aristocratic ethic that revolves around the exchange of
privilege and obligation. Indeed,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary, when the expression
noblesse oblige was coined in 1837, it was already meant ironically.
Nevertheless, the injection of an
elitist dimension into normative discourse suggests that some people, in
virtue of their social position, deserve to be held accountable to
[a somewhat different standard from that
of the run of humanity. Modern
moralists are uncomfortable with this idea because it presupposes that we
cannot all be judged by a common standard, be it deontological or utilitarian,
that marks us as children of the same God or ape.
In other words, to accept “privilege” and “obligation” as reciprocal
terms of moral appraisal is to acknowledge the failure, or at least the
shortfall, of the democratic project whereby people are judged entirely on the
basis of their own intentions and actions, without factoring the cultural
burden they have inherited and acquired.
However much we may wish academia to be
constituted as a democracy in the sense presupposed by modern ethical theory,
it is not now and it certainly was not in Kuhn’s lifetime.
By pretending otherwise, we may salvage the honor of those who have
occupied Kuhn’s position, but we do our nonelite colleagues a severe injustice
in the process. If someone
groomed to rule fails to provide the expected form of leadership, then that is
prima facie grounds for believing that such a person has morally failed.
The most articulate and systematic challenge to modern ethical
individualism is still Bradley 1927. Bradley’s
conception of one’s “station and its duties” should be read as the
philosophical counterpart to Bourdieu’s sociology of habitus.
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would later publish a book, Structure,
that accomplished much of what the committee had wanted - indeed, with the
help of the cultural investment that constituted Kuhn’s habitus (specifically
his stint as a General Education instructor), but without Kuhn’s deliberate
involvement.
We face a subtle interpretive problem here, one that reflects the historical transition from an aristocratic to a capitalistic field of play in academia. Perhaps most indicative of this problem is what Robert Merton (b. 1910) has called “the principle of cumulative advantage,” which we first encountered in chapter 1, note 1, under its nickname the “Matthew effect.” According to this principle, the more benefits one receives, the more one will continue to receive. In what sense does this characterize Kuhn’s rise to prominence? Merton, himself a Harvard man somewhat older and less privileged than Kuhn, recognized Conant’s style of recruitment politics for what it was. [8] However, Merton tends to give the principle a much stronger capitalist spin than would seem appropriate in Kuhn’s case, which leaves the principle’s general normative implications radically unclear. Kuhn, the product of an aristocratic culture, provides Merton’s most elaborate illustration of the Matthew effect at work, yet Merton’s principle is usually associated with a capitalized scientific environment, where one’s academic credentials clearly prove to be a good predictor of the quantity and quality of both one’s own and one’s students’ long-term research productivity. [9]
In this context, the principle is normally read
as marking an invisible-
8. Perhaps the reader will not be surprised to
learn that Merton’s own professional progress did not exhibit Kuhn’s
streamlined trajectory. Though himself
a Harvard graduate, upon completing his Ph.D. in 1936, a tight job market
forced Merton to the backwater of
9. The contrast in Merton’s presentation of the
principle of cumulative advantage may be seen in the Kuhn-oriented Merton
1977, 71-108 and Merton 1973, esp. 439-59, which focuses on the natural
sciences.
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hand process, the uncanny ability of the
scientific community to pick its winners without explicit criteria or external
supervision. However, those generally
skeptical of invisible-hand arguments immediately pounce on the word
“uncanny.” They question whether the
predictions are sufficiently independent of the outcomes at successive stages
of the process - who gets into graduate school, who gets a job, who gets an
article published, who gets tenured and promoted, etc. - to constitute a
series of fair tests. In an ideal
capitalist environment of perfect competition, they would.
The people making the predictions
(admissions officers, personnel committees, editorial boards) would literally
place bets (in the form of scholarships, grants, salaries, and journal space)
on particular players. But these
bettors do not control the outcomes of the game.
The outcomes emerge from interaction
of the players themselves, depending on who turns out to make the most
brilliant advances, as seen through the eyes of their peers.
What sort of evidence would one seek to
demonstrate that the principle of cumulative advantage is, indeed, the result
of the capitalist process just described? Two
facts stand out as very relevant to the natural sciences (and increasingly
relevant to the other academic disciplines). The
first is that, in the game outlined above, the vast majority of players -
including those with prestigious pedigrees - lose in the long run.
That the winners are most likely to
come from prestigious backgrounds is certainly compatible with the fact that
most of those with prestigious backgrounds drop out of the game after a
certain point: they fail to complete their degrees, they fail to get and keep
good jobs, they fail to publish, or finally, if they publish, they fail to be
recognized for having published. In
short, the amount of waste in individual human talent tolerated by the science
game speaks to a process that is not subject to the designs of any human
agency.
The second relevant fact is that the players
must demonstrate their skill as soon as they enter the field of play,
endlessly showing that they can provide return on investment, so as to
continue to enjoy the affections of future investors.
The combination of these two facts can
leave the impression that the science game is not rigged.
Promise must be quickly backed by
product. It is tough to win simply
because of the scarcity of prizes relative to the pool of contestants.
Such an understanding of the
environment invites the ascription of credit and blame to the skills and
efforts of individuals, both on the field and in the betting parlors, so to
speak. Scientists can only blame
themselves for not making the most of their cultural capital, and similarly
university officials can only blame themselves for having invested their
institution’s cultural capital on the wrong scientists.
Such is the individualized moral
universe of the capitalist field.
In contrast, someone in Kuhn’s position is most
naturally understood as
385
having operated in an aristocratic field of
play, one in which cumulative advantage incurs cumulative obligations.
The normative presuppositions here are
markedly different from the capitalist ones just enumerated.
(However, determining that Harvard and other elite American
universities from the early 1940s to the late 1950s operated in an
aristocratic, rather than a capitalist, field of play would require
demonstrating that they could have reliably placed their recruits in
influential academic - not to mention non-academic - posts.
Certainly, Conant and Harvard’s
humanist doyens acted as if they could.) The
basic scheme is that each generation of academic leaders is actively recruited
by those in a realistic position to select them.
Thus, while the aristocrat and the
capitalist concur on the highly stratified nature of academic success, they
explain it in radically different terms: the former by design, the latter by
effect.
Aristocratic recruitment typically involves a period of incubation during which recruits are not expected to produce any independent work, but rather are to become imbued with the doctrine that they will spend the rest of their lives extending and defending. But there come moments of truth, when recruits must do something that reveals their induced capacity to lead. For example, they may spontaneously rally to a defense of the realm when it comes under attack, even when the realm is the notional one of “academia” or “science.”
[10] For better or worse, Kuhn never actively engaged in this strategy. Lest we forget, Kuhn was ultimately judged a failure by those who managed the aristocratic recruitment process, and it is only once more strictly capitalistic criteria are introduced that the overall impact of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions can be explained, namely, in terms of what I described in section 7 of the introduction as the book’s “servant narrative” status, which attracted a wide range of intellectual consumers.
However, the question remains why such a success
of the marketplace, which depends entirely on the use that others make of a
work, should then serve to confer attributions of profundity on its author.
Here Kuhn’s habitus
10. The ideal type for this sense of
aristocratism is provided by the Japanese samurai, who successfully translated
the unconditional loyalty and discipline demanded of their warrior ethic from
feudal administration to research management in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. See Fuller 1997d,
123-29. However, similar
precedents can be found among some European aristocrats, especially during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See
Bauman 1987, 25-34. Closer to
Kuhn is the career of his rival, Gerald Holton (b. 1922), who has
mitigated the tensions between science and its social environment for the
better part of a half-century. Holton’s
guardianship of scientific virtue extends at least to 1958, when he was asked
to turn the Proceedings of the
386
plays a crucial role: it was much easier to take
Kuhn out of Harvard than Harvard out of Kuhn.
I mean this in two senses. The
first relies on a very perceptive attempt to understand the aristocratic
mentality as an ideal type of political action.
In the case of fallen aristocrats,
saintliness is often the interpretation that nonaristocrats have projected
onto the chosen one’s alternative lifestyle. The
second sense in which Harvard could not be taken out of Kuhn, which will be
discussed in the next section, concerns Kuhn’s propensity to find himself at
the right place at the right time to be led in directions that turn out to be
fruitful, or at least suggestive, for his research.
Terrence Cook has analyzed not only those who adhered to their elite calling but also those who, in one way or another, strayed from the appointed path
. [11] Among the many ways in which saints reveal their aristocratic bearing is their ability to endure, evade, and exit from disagreeable social situations without their own status becoming diminished in the process. Saints typically ignore criticism and stoically suffer injustice because they believe that a more active response would compound damage that has been already done. Only those with considerable control over their own fate who also believe in the larger significance of their actions are entitled to think in such terms. Lesser mortals have no choice but to respond, regardless of the consequences for either themselves or others. This point can be illustrated with Kuhn’s response to the perversion of normal science that accompanied the atomic age. As we saw in chapter 4, section 6, the uncritical pursuit of highly technical work that enables paradigmatic puzzle solving to proceed apace has also enabled scientists to be easily co-opted into projects where their prowess is subserved to often dubious military-industrial ends. Yet, instead of reflecting critically on the ends of their inquiries, Kuhn would seem to have scientists either stick to their work or, as Kuhn himself did, withdraw from it entirely.Saints are perceived as leaders in direct proportion to their rejection of the obligations imposed by their aristocratic habitus. Usually this rejection is deliberate but it can also be unselfconscious, which then leads saints to spurn their followers. Often this serves only to encourage the followers to apply and develop the saint’s ideas, as if to prove their own worthiness. [12
11. Cook 1991, esp. chaps. 4-5.
12. At the risk of courting charges of cynicism,
I have observed that attributions of saintliness are most easily made by those
who have never experienced the aristocratic lifestyle and hence have only
witnessed the freedom - but not the constraints - that such a lifestyle
entails. In other words, the sense
that a saint’s followers have of their own imagined inability to resist the
temptations of aristocracy contributes significantly to the aura of holiness
that surrounds the fallen aristocrat. Because
this sense is based more on ignorance than knowledge of the aristocrat’s
actual situation, very personal forms of resistance that, were they made by
someone in a less exalted setting, would be regarded as simple expressions of
irritation, inconvenience, and avoidance can be easily interpreted as bold
political gestures, if the person experiencing [these feelings has an
aristocratic background. In
recent public consciousness, the career of Lady Diana Spencer, the late
princess of
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Whether the followers are justified in this
course of action depends on the hold that the aristocratic imperative has on
the rest of society. One
indicator is a widespread belief that good can arise only from pure motives.
Thus, if change is unlikely to occur
without an initiative from a disaffected aristocrat, then it is not surprising
that saintliness is attributed to that person.
With the decline of hereditary monarchies in politics, academia may be
the only globally pervasive institution that still has pockets of aristocracy
in this sense. In that case, the
aristocrat’s purity of motives applies to inquiry.
Given Kuhn’s personal disdain for
ideological extensions of his views, it is not far-fetched to interpret Kuhn’s
actions as those of a saint, albeit a rather unselfconscious and secular one.
At least, I shall assume this
diagnosis in what follows.
2. A Career of
Lucky Accidents and Studied Avoidance
It is clear from interviews conducted with him
over the years that Kuhn turned away from a career in theoretical physics
after becoming profoundly disaffected by the routine and destructive uses to
which science was put in World War II. Conant’s
curriculum seemed to provide a way of reinstating his original interest in
science. But as the years passed, Kuhn
distanced his concerns from those of the historians and sociologists of
science who had derived inspiration from his work, many of whom were overtly
concerned with understanding the changing contemporary scene, even when the
past was their nominal topic.
Thus, when asked explicitly whether the story presented in Structure
would need to be altered in light of the changing character of science in the
twentieth century, Kuhn had this to say:
I see no reason to suppose that the things I think I have learned about the nature of knowledge are going to be disturbed by the need to change the theory of science. I could be all wrong with respect both to science and to the nature of knowledge, but I would make this separation to explain why I’m less concerned about the question, “Is science changing?” than I might be if studying the nature of science weren’t in the first instance simply a way of looking at the picture of knowledge
. [13]
Interestingly, Kuhn did not treat the question
as a provocation either to modify his model (for failing to match the
contemporary scene) or to condemn the contemporary scene (for failing to live
up to his model). Instead, he
respecified his project at a level of abstraction that escaped having to
decide between the two. Moreover,
Kuhn’s retreat to the “nature of
13. Sigurdsson 1990, 24 (italics in the
original).
knowledge” invited scrutiny in just those
features of his work that philosophers have found most objectionable:
questions of meaning and reference, especially in relation to how scientists
come to acquire a specific orientation to the world.
But from the standpoint of the
anti-Whig historiographies discussed in the introduction to this book, Prig
and Tory, this strategy made perfect sense, as it effectively shifted the
salient epistemological difference from the forward-looking “true vs. false”
(i.e., how scientific claims are ultimately received) to the backward-looking
“understood vs. misunderstood” (i.e., how those claims were originally
intended). Thus, whereas philosophers
of science structured their arguments around alternative sets of criteria
(e.g., “realist vs. instrumentalist”) that can justify more or less the same
set of more or less progressively correct theory choices in the history of
science, Kuhn took exactly the reverse tack of showing how the same set of
criteria can justify quite different theory choices depending on how the
criteria are interpreted and applied at specific moments.
On that basis, incommensurability between paradigms appeared
inevitable. [14
No matter how much Kuhn recanted his more
radical rhetoric about scientists in different paradigms inhabiting different
worlds, his own research agenda always kept this possibility open - certainly
more so than the possibility that science may exhibit some normatively
desirable sense of “progress.” A
typically Kuhnian line of reasoning that attempted to put some distance
between himself and his radical admirers was to grant the plausibility of the
underdetermination of theory by data or the theory-ladenness of observation,
and then wonder why self-styled “Kuhnians” would want to conclude that the
validity of scientific claims is relative to the social conditions of their
production or that nature plays a negligible role in scientific theory choice.
[15] Kuhn was correct to
observe that these conclusions do not deductively follow from their premisses.
[16] Yet Kuhn’s own failure
to address exactly how nature makes itself felt in a socially conditioned
science hardly set a good example for his would-be disciples. [17
14. Credit for making this point explicit goes to
Doppelt 1978.
15. Sigurdsson 1990, 22-23; Kuhn 1992, 8-9.
16. After all, the validity of scientific claims
may be relative to the social conditions of their distribution, which
would require looking at the political-economic relations in which they
figure, such as the spread of capitalism, imperialism, democracy, etc.
This is the view I happen to hold.
Alternatively, there maybe limits to the human condition - be they
Kantian or Darwinian in nature - such that, presented with the same evidence
and background information, humans will respond within a relatively narrow
range of possibilities.
17. The most philosophically sophisticated
defense of bracketing considerations of an external reality from sociological
accounts of knowledge remains Barnes and Bloor 1982, which argues that
reality plays a negligible role in sociological explanations precisely
because it is presupposed by all such explanations, and hence it offers no
way of explaining the differences that arise in people’s beliefs.
The type of argument represents strategy B social epistemology, as I
called it in chapter 6, note 46.
389
Of course, Kuhn could not have foreseen all the
ways his readers would interpret what he did and did not say in Structure.
Nevertheless, on several occasions
after the book’s publication, he was invited to reflect on these matters.
But more than that, as I observed in
chapter 1i, section 5, Kuhn was actually afforded a clear opportunity to
anticipate the consequences of his book, namely in response to Paul
Feyerabend’s prescient remarks on the 1960-61 draft of Structure, which
led him to deem the manuscript “ideology covered up as history.” [18]
Kuhn characteristically failed to
understand how Feyerabend’s concerns bore on his own project.
As Kuhn saw it, “The
quasi-sociological elements of my approach were overwhelmed by [Feyerabend’s]
desires for society in the ideal.” [19]
Undeterred by Kuhn’s obtuseness,
Feyerabend once again raised this objection at Imre Lakatos’s famous 1965
conference where Feyerabend’s mentor, Karl Popper, formally confronted Kuhn in
debate. [20
That Kuhn had so rapidly risen to the rank of
Popper’s debating opponent on Popper’s home turf surprised British observers
at the time. [21
18. For the context and correspondence relating
to Feyerabend’s remarks, see HoyningenHuene 1995.
19. Kuhn et al. 1997 187.
20. Feyerabend 1970, esp. 202-3.
21. In personal communication, several
professional philosophers - who, as students, traveled from
The substance of Kuhn’s own views was seen from
Among Kuhn’s earliest British defenders was Mary
Hesse (b. 1924), who eventually held the first chair in history and philosophy
of science at
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390
Nevertheless, it reflected the Popperian perception that Kuhn had been anointed by Conant to provide a philosophical defense of the Big Science initiatives that increasingly characterized American research in the Cold War era. [22] Yet given Kuhn’s ostracism from Harvard in 1956 and the dismantling of Conant’s General Education curriculum shortly after the launch of Sputnik (see chapter 4, section 7), the view from London seemed to be nearly ten years out of date. In 1965, Kuhn probably did not warrant such exalted treatment. Nevertheless, the star billing helped convert the Popperian conjecture about Kuhn’s status into a self-fulfilling prophecy - a most ironic fate, considering Popper’s own heightened awareness of the havoc that publicly promoted predictions can wreak on the reliability of our knowledge of human beings. [23] The irony is only compounded by Kuhn’s failure to realize, until after Structure was already in press, that logical positivism had moved on from its extreme
A curious feature of Kuhn’s self-understanding
was the ease with which he acknowledged the accidental character of what
turned out to be decisive influences in his intellectual development.
In his last extended interview,
22. Interview with Jagdish Hattiangadi in
23. The locus classicus for this argument is
Popper 1957.
24. From his final interview, it is clear that,
while writing Structure, Kuhn was working with the conception of logical
positivism he received as a Harvard undergraduate in the early 1940s.
See Kuhn etal. 1997, 183-84.
Curiously, although Kuhn never hid
Quine’s influence on his own thought, he did not seem to recognize the role
that Quine’s long-term engagement with Rudolf Carnap played in modifying the
logical positivist position to one that would enable Carnap, by the early
1960s, to see Kuhn as a kindred spirit, as noted in chapter 6, section 4.
See Creath 1990.
391
Kuhn gave the impression that he was in endless
need of guidance to focus his thoughts. Yet,
he never seemed to appreciate the tension between having a continuous
epistemological project and its particular expression being determined by
chance events. More comprehensively
reflexive thinkers would have incorporated this tension, however abstractly or
symbolically, in the account of knowledge they produced.
For example, the account would
probably not portray the crises that occasion major epistemic change as
internally generated. However, Kuhn
tended to present these fortuitous episodes more as signs that he was already
on the right track, what in more religious times would have been associated
with signs from “above,” especially given that these “accidents” have been
largely responsible for defining Kuhn’s project in his interpreters’ minds.
Thus, in Kuhn’s last interview, we learn the following:
1. A footnote in Hans Reichenbach’s
Experience and Prediction led Kuhn to Ludwik Fleck’s The Genesis and
Development of a Scientific Fact;
2. A footnote in Robert Merton’s Harvard
Ph.D. thesis, “Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth Century
England,” led Kuhn to Jean Piaget’s The Child’s Conception of Movement and
Speed;
3. James Bryant Conant led Kuhn to
Britain, where he learned about history and philosophy of science as a field
of inquiry and met Mary Hesse, who would turn out to be his strongest British
champion;
4. I. B. Cohen led Kuhn to Alexandre Koyre’s
Galileo Studies and thereafter the man himself;
5. Alexandre Koyre led Kuhn to Gaston Bachelard;
6. Karl Popper led Kuhn to Emile
Meyerson’s Identity and Reality. [25
Of all these chance encounters, I believe that the last left the most indelible impression in Kuhn’s intellectual orientation. This claim calls for substantial comment, since it implies that the person normally seen as Kuhn’s most formidable antagonist - Karl Popper - actually provided him with the principal resource to bolster his position. To be sure, fifteen years separated the time that Kuhn first met Popper as William James lecturer at Harvard (1950), when Kuhn was told of Meyerson’s work, and then confronted Popper on his own turf in
Meyerson (1859-1933) was no less than
25. All of these fortuitous contacts are
mentioned in Kuhn eta!. 1997, 162-68.
392
inaugurated a role that was subsequently usurped
by Gaston Bachelard, discussed in chapter 7, section 4.
An industrial chemist by training and
a man of letters by disposition, Meyerson was the darling of antipositivists
across the European Continent. [26] Popper’s
recommendation of Meyerson to Kuhn was prescient in at least two respects.
First, it drew attention to the hidden
French roots of modern anglophone philosophy of science.
As I observed in chapters 1 (note 136)
and 6 (note 32), Popper’s conception of science as the open society and of
reality as an open-ended process were indebted to Henri Bergson, whom Meyerson
took to be his main academic rival. Here
we need to recall when Kuhn first met Popper, namely the latter’s invitation
to deliver a set of lectures in honor of a philosopher - William James - whose
compatibilist attitudes toward religion and science and popular touch made him
America’s answer to Bergson. As
Bergson and James had regarded thought in general, Popper located the essence
of scientific inquiry in an endless quest for self-transcendence.
In terms of this process, established
facts and theories are little more than way stations that potentially obscure
the course of inquiry if they are taken as final products in their own right.
Popper told Kuhn to read Meyerson
precisely because he had already detected in the young Kuhn disagreements on
this point.
Meyerson never hid his debts to Leibniz and
Kant, both of whom were inclined to treat established facts and theories as
direct evidence for the processes by which they were - indeed, had to be -
produced. Thus, according to Meyerson,
the best way to understand the nature of science is not to observe the actual
conduct of science, as social constructivists subsequently would, because that
could lead to so many dead ends and unscientific directions.
Rather, one should start with
unproblematic scientific achievements, because they provide the threshold for
what it is that competing scientific theories have historically tried to
achieve. [27] This point is
26. Meyerson was plugged into the major
scientific networks of his day, regularly corresponding with Einstein and de
Broglie. Nevertheless, he remains a
neglected figure, even in
27. A good example of Kuhn’s attachment to this
Meyersonian doctrine is his response to Shapin and Schaffer 1985, the most
influential social constructivist history of science.
Kuhn accuses them of not knowing, or
ignoring, the technical details of hydrostatics that “everybody now learns in
high school” in their explanation of why Boyle’s account of the air-pump was
preferred to Hobbes’s (Kuhn et al. 1997, 192).
Here Kuhn takes what is now a long-standing scientific finding as the
goal toward which both Boyle and Hobbes were aiming in their
seventeenth-century dispute, clearly abstracting what Kuhn presumes to be the
common goal of their scientific inquiry from whatever other personal and
political goals distinguished them in their day.
In contrast, a social constructivist
would refuse to grant any clear distinction between scientific, political, and
personal goals, until a canonical account of the episode is constructed,
whereby the various goals would be disentangled for purposes of vindicating
the dominant research trajectory. Thus,
from Shapin and Schaffer’s standpoint, it would not have [made sense to
mention matters currently settled in hydrostatics, since it was the resolution
of the Hobbes-Boyle dispute that helped to settle them.
In these terms, Popper may be seen as having
agreed with social constructivists about the actual nature of science; hence,
his insistence on interpreting the “basic observation statements” of the
logical positivists as revisable “conventions” for the conduct of inquiry, not
indubitable foundations of knowledge.
However, Popper differed from the social constructivists in his
insistence on an explicit normative standard, against which such ongoing
developments in science may be judged.
My own social epistemology agrees with Popper on both scores, though I
am more explicit than Popper about the political character of the means by
which this normative standard is determined.
See Fuller 1999b, but also chapter 6, section 1, above.]
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393
easily overlooked because, like today’s social
constructivists, Meyerson himself invoked the distinction between what
scientists say and do - but he meant what scientists do once it had been
done, not as they were doing it. Historically,
this mentality is closely associated with the argument from design in
theology. It capitalizes on the
psychological fact that after an event has occurred it is harder to imagine
equally probable alternatives than before it occurs.
This post facto perspective, in turn,
suggests that the event was caused for a reason; hence, the need for a
rational agent behind the scenes. [28
The argument from design is most persuasive when
the world is seen as both rational and complex, since taken together, these
two factors diminish the probability that sheer chance could explain why
things are as they are. Thus, whereas
Bergson read history back to front, so that at any point in the past the
future appeared indefinitely open, Meyerson read it front to back, so that the
present appears to be the logical culmination of the past.
Methodologically, Bergson shadowed the
stream of consciousness, while Meyerson diagnosed the textual trace.
That Kuhn stood with Meyerson on this
point is demonstrated by his own method of research (noted in chapter 4,
section 2), which privileged finished works in the public domain over draft
manuscripts in the archives. [29
Given Meyerson’s exclusive interest in proven
scientific achievements, it would be easy to conclude that he regarded his
theory of scientific change as normative rather than descriptive.
However, this would clearly mistake
the spirit of his enterprise, as Meyerson’s most heated polemics were directed
against the logical positivists and behaviorists, both of whom
28. Far from being anomalous, Meyerson’s
design-oriented approach to the history of scientific achievement finds good
company in the history of scientific reasoning, especially the Reverend Thomas
Bayes (1702-61), whose eponymous theorem aimed to formalize inductive
(or in Charles Sanders Peirce’s more precise terms, “retroductive” or “abductive”)
inference in order to show that the probability of a divine intelligence
increased as science revealed just how well-ordered nature is.
See Hacking 1975, esp. chap.
18. Whewell’s interest in putting the
“theos” back in scientific theorizing also fits in this tradition (see chapter
1, section 6, above).
29. See Lecourt 1975, 53, who wisely
places Kuhn closer to Meyerson than to Bachelard, despite superficial
resemblances.
394
he accused of normative heavy-handedness. Meyerson understood the expression “the nature of science” very literally to mean that science is an activity having intrinsic ends, no mere means for predicting, controlling, or even representing something outside itself, called “Nature.” Indeed, in response to Moritz Schlick of the
Meyerson- and Kuhn after him - perceived a much
harder boundary between science and Nature than his interlocutors.
For example, whereas a positivist,
behaviorist, or Popperian would equate the “self-correcting” character of
scientific inquiry with how it responds to phenomena in Nature, Meyerson saw
science’s self-correction more strictly as a purging of its own past, the
ongoing conversion of empirical findings into logical deductions, which placed
under continual erasure any evidence for science’s existence in a world
outside its own rationalizing tendencies. Philosophers
of science may see here an attempt to turn the distinction between the
contexts of discovery and justification into a two-stage developmental
process. Speaking more fashionably, we
might say that Meyerson had an “autopoietic” conception of scientific inquiry,
as did Kuhn. Meyerson himself invoked
the term “conservation” - as of number, matter, and energy - to identify the
principles that have historically functioned as the transcendental basis for
knowledge of the physical world: to wit, that whatever happens in this world
is the result of something else that happens in the same world.
For Meyerson, the one great
revolutionary moment in intellectual history came when the pre-Socratic
philosophers abandoned the appeal to supernatural agency and grounded their
inquiries in a generalized conservation principle. [31
Alexandre Koyré also shared this suspended view of science. Koyre was one of several Jewish émigrés from the Russian borderlands of
30. This debate is outlined in La Lumia 1966,
11-12.
31. The point comes out most clearly in
Meyerson’s magnum opus, Identity and Reality (1908).
395
appreciate the Platonic hermeticist precedent of the perspective that Meyerson brought to bear in the salons he conducted from his home, which were the talk of
Take Koyré’s portrayal of Galileo, previously
raised in chapter 4, section 4. The
principal rupture occurred between the underlying structures of reality that
were available only to the intellectually adept and the realm of empirical
phenomena that made the art of experiment a suitable foil to the commonsense
forms of observation underwriting Aristotelian science.
In Galileo’s day, Scholastic
scientists, with one eye on spiritual governance, favored empirically based
forms of knowledge that smoothed over the epistemic differences between the
governors and the governed. In fact,
those harboring a more strictly Platonic concern for ensuring the integrity of
knowledge over time sought protection from such contamination through
practices that admit of esoteric interpretations.
The great breakthrough that
constituted Galileo’s approach to experimentation was that it met the Platonic
need, while at the same time enabling the conversion of those who are moved
only by their senses. The former is
illustrated by the potential access that experimental intervention allows to
the mechanisms that underwrite empirical regularities; the latter by the
import attached to an experimental observation that confirms a prediction.
Together these two aspects
systematically purge scientific thought from extrascientific contaminants.
In one sense, Kuhn helped update the psychology
that informed this perspective by introducing Piaget’s “genetic structuralist”
account of child development in his contribution to Koyré’s Festschrift.
[33] Piaget recognized the tension
between science’s overarching interest in what Piaget, following Meyerson,
called the “conservation” of knowledge over time with the periodic
reconfiguration of the terms under which that conservation occurred. [34]
According to Kuhn and Piaget,
the resistance that experience
32. See Collins 1998, 1024 n. 20.
33. Kuhn 1977a, 240-65 (originally 1964).
For more on Kuhn’s debt to Piaget and
its bearing on Koyré’s influence, see introduction, note 37, above.
34. Piaget routinely motivated his account
of cognitive development as a reaction to Meyerson.
See Piaget 1952, 13; Piaget 1970, 21,
39, 122. Koyré 1978, 2, cites Meyerson for the classic Piagetian
example of the modern notion of inertia appearing self-contradictory to
ancient and medieval physicists who had failed to abstract the principle from
its empirical realizations. For his
part, Meyerson was attracted to Hermann von Helmholtz’s project of
naturalizing the normative dimension of cognition by translating Kantianism
into experimental psychology.
[However, according to La Lumia 1966,
chap. 9, Meyerson never satisfactorily reconciled the transcendental and
empirical elements of his historical epistemology, a fate perhaps also
suffered by Kuhn. On Helmholtz’s
project, see Hatfield 1990b.]
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396
poses to our conceptual scheme is not simply an
instance of the irrational, as Meyerson thought, but rather marks of a reality
that exists beyond our concepts, to which we must somehow “accommodate,” in
Piagetian terms. However, as the word
“accommodate” suggests, this recognition of an external reality is not
entirely welcomed. Indeed, given his
own experience in psychoanalysis and its admitted influence on other aspects
of his work, Kuhn may have been moved by the Freudian concept of “trauma” when
trying to capture these unwanted contacts with a world beyond one’s reach,
which culminate in a paradigmatic crisis. [35]
Had Koyré not died the year his Festschrift
appeared, he probably would have responded to Kuhn’s piece by drawing
attention to the “straightness” of his interpretation of Piaget, which focused
exclusively on how his experiments induced in children the equivalent of
paradigmatic crises, without commenting on how the experiments occluded their
own manipulative character. Indeed, by
failing to account for the role of the Piagetian experimenter in the
constitution of directed epistemic change, Kuhn lost the political side of
Meyerson’s project, which Koyré had uncovered through his deep knowledge of
the history of Platonism. This may be
summed up as the ongoing construction of epistemic continuity and progress, a
process whose significance Kuhn downplayed by discussing only its products,
the histories recounted in postrevolutionary scientific textbooks.
Indeed, Kuhn so minimized the
significance of effort needed to maintain the distinction between the
scientist’s history of science and the historian’s that he made the two appear
to subsist in parallel universes. The
irony here is that shortly before the publication of Structure, Kuhn
had shown that the energy conservation principle, far from being a
transcendentally knowable feature of physical reality, began life as a set of
incommensurable interpretations of ongoing research and only gradually
acquired its current canonical form. [36
So far my account has attributed Kuhn’s
significance largely to things that other people thought and did.
As we have just seen, this extends
beyond the reception of Structure to its actual composition.
This pronounced state of uninvolvement
suggests that he did indeed suffer from a state of diminished cultural
responsibility that makes the sense of “being there”
I raised in the preface to this book
more than just a nasty dig. In any
case, we need a term for the incapacity to do what is expected of someone in a
given
35. See note 2.
36. Kuhn 1977a.
397
social position, a failure to acknowledge from
where one had come and to where one was supposed to go.
Let us call this condition
culturopathy. Culturopaths lack
reflexive engagement with what they say and do.
They go through life as if in a vacuum
or a bubble. Academic training
unwittingly renders its subjects susceptible to this disorder while preparing
a “universal class” of pure inquirers: the so-called Ivory Tower mentality.
The symptoms may range from the
crudely comic to the more subtly pathetic: on the one hand, the proverbial
absent-minded professor; on the other, the scholar who supposes that
publication ipso facto secures readership. The
disorder takes a more specific form in terms of the relationship between
historians and philosophers of history, or “metahistorians” in Hayden White’s
terms.
White uses the expression “cognitive
responsibility” to distinguish the two groups of inquirers. 37
Metahistorians display cognitive
responsibility for their narratives in ways that ordinary historians do not.
They introduce epistemological
complications that historians normally avoid because historians generally do
not refer to the contexts in which their own texts are written and read.
38 By this criterion, both
Conant and Koyré were metahistorians. Conant’s
reflexive engagement appeared in disparate presentations of the nature of
science to disparate audiences; Koyré’s in scholarly works clearly aimed for
highly specialized audiences mentally prepared to receive uncomfortable
truths. These acts of cognitive
responsibility incurred costs: Conant’s message became diffuse and widely
attacked, Koyré’s esoteric and nearly ignored.
Kuhn lacked this sense of responsibility because he took their two
visions as the background conditions for his own seamless narrative for an
audience largely unfamiliar with both the quotidian science policy struggles
that concerned Conant and the transhistorical worries about truth preservation
that concerned Koyré.
37. White 1973, 14 n. 7, 23 n. 12.
White’s source for “cognitive
responsibility” is Stephen Pepper, World Hypotheses (1948).
Pepper, who trained at Harvard under
the critical realist Ralph Barton Perry, was chair of the
38. Here I follow White’s discussion for purposes
of elucidating the history/metahistory distinction without necessarily
endorsing his blanket characterization of historians and philosophers.
Clearly, “historians” and
“metahistorians” in his sense can be found on both sides of the disciplinary
divide between history and philosophy.
398
Of course, Kuhn’s specific style of culturopathy
bore the traces of his habitus. He
disengaged aristocratically. Upon the
publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn did not
call for the immediate overthrow of the intellectual and political regime
associated with Big Science. Instead,
he withdrew his services from both the regime’s supporters its and
opponents. Only someone already in a
privileged position could have afforded the luxury of disengaging in this
fashion without being consigned to oblivion. For
despite having failed at Harvard, Kuhn managed to move to
If Kuhn was indeed a culturopath, then the
challenge for his admirers will be to disentangle whatever insight they have
derived from Structure from any attributions of intentionality to its
author. The difficulties that lie
ahead in neatly drawing such a distinction speak to the peculiar way in which
academic knowledge claims are legitimated in our times.
In what sense does a text remain a
useful legitimatory tool once it becomes generally known that its author meant
few, if any, of his readers’ interpretations and that the social contexts of
the text’s production and distribution are regarded as suspect by the text’s
most discerning readers? If readers
leave my book troubled by this question, then I shall have succeeded in
conveying my main critical point. You
will have begun to appreciate Structure as an ironically
self-exemplifying text: a work that grounded science’s success in paradigmatic
pursuits that was itself the creation of a mind-set that could not see beyond
the paradigms under which it labored.
3. Getting over Kuhn: The Secularization of Paradigms as Movements
Consider the first lesson in the average Western
epistemology course: knowledge consists of a truth that is believed for good,
if not the best possible, reasons; in philosophical shorthand, knowledge is
“justified true belief.” [39] This
definition, which is usually presented with a gesture to Plato or Descartes,
fossilizes the opposition that has characterized the “essential tension” of
Western culture since the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation,
specifically the process by which civil authority became autonomous from
religious control, or secularization. [40]
That knowledge claims command one’s
belief harks back to tests of religious commitment, whereas the demand that
such claims be justified recalls the legal procedures of trying cases in
secular courts. In this sense, the
philosophical definition of
39. See, e.g., Chisholm 1974.
40.Fuller 1997e.
399
knowledge is a negotiated settlement between
secular and sacred authorities. [41]
The two poles of the tension, which stress the “justified” and
“belief” side of the definition, respectively, are epitomized as follows:
(A) Because knowledge is ultimately a
justified truth claim, it does not require a personal commitment of belief,
simply conformity to the procedural rules of evidence and inference.
Example: legalism, or the public
acceptance of secular authority.
(B) Because knowledge is ultimately a matter
of belief it can never be fully justified, except by the strength of the
commitment and its consequences for action. Example:
voluntarism, or the private acceptance of sacred authority.
It may seem that (B) has virtually disappeared
from scientific discussions of knowledge. However,
as we saw in chapter 6, section 2, such a verdict would be too hasty.
In excavating Kuhn’s pragmatist roots,
I mentioned William James’s “will to believe” version of pragmatism as a
precursor, which is the exception that proves the rule.
Current debates between realists and
instrumentalists also turn on whether one truly needs to “believe” in the
entities referenced in one’s theories or simply act as if one believed in
them. One plausible way of
encapsulating recent philosophical debates over scientific rationality is in
terms of when one should make and forsake commitments to particular research
programs, especially in the face of less than adequately justified knowledge
claims.
Kuhn, following Polanyi, located the “genius” of
science in the personal commitment that each scientist presumes of her
colleagues. This mutual presumption
then creates a climate of tolerance for somewhat divergent paths of research
and even temporary disagreements over matters of fact and interpretation.
In that sense, (A) and (B) remain
bound together because (A) is taken to govern the microlevel of day-to-day
research and (B) the macrolevel of the paradigm’s overall direction.
Kuhn’s account of paradigmatic change
in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions manifests the latent
instability of the classical definition of knowledge.
As puzzle solving proceeds apace in a
paradigm, scientists who profess a commitment to a certain vision of the truth
and have played by a set of rules for justifying claims to the truth will
inevitably encounter anomalous phenomena that eventually cause them to diverge
on the appropriate direction for inquiry. This,
in turn, precipitates the “crisis” that eventuates in a “revolution” and a new
paradigmatic regime.
For Kuhn this tension - the source of collective
disenchantment associated with secularization - is potentially divisive; hence
its presence should
41. On the idea of belief as commitment or faith (from the Latin fides, as in “fidelity”), see Smith 1977. On the rise of secular law in the emerging nation-states of
400
be minimized at all costs, most notably in the
“progressive” histories of science that students are taught in their
introductory science textbooks. However,
an alternative social epistemology of science would forgo this Orwellian
solution and embrace the tension as productive, along the lines of Popper’s
model of “conjectures and refutations” as the model of rational inquiry,
whereby one would be both the best proposer of her own knowledge claims and
the best refuter of such claims made by someone else.
But here I must quickly add that the
desired metatheory would justify the participation of the entire
society in the process of mutual criticism rather than just a self-selected
community of experts.
Instead of first tampering with people’s biases as they are trained to be “objective” in their personal assessment of each other’s knowledge claims, I believe that “objectivity” should be a continuously emergent property of the interaction of proponents and opponents of knowledge claims. Biases, such as they are, would then be negotiated, canceled out, or otherwise overcome in open discourse, not prior restraint. The model social entity of this collective dialectical process is the movement, which gains strength not by resolving its internal differences but by involving ever larger segments of society in the articulation of those differences. A good image here is that of a whirlpool that draws more attention to itself as discussion acquires more intensity. [42] The closest that academia currently gets to this arrangement is the constitution of the social sciences, which (in sharp contrast with the natural sciences) do not launder out ideological disagreements in professional training, but rather enable those disagreements to align with, and often alter, conflicts in the society at large. [43
The American sociologist Robert Wuthnow has
shown that the three most socially significant intellectual movements in the
West’s modern era - the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and
nineteenth-century socialism - were
successful to the extent that a fairly esoteric group of inquirers extended
their arguments to the wider society, so that others found their categories
relevant to describing their own lives and situations. 44
These movements lost their creative
transformative energy once they became sectarian and paradigmlike.
The difference between a movement and
a paradigm may be seen as a shift in the relationship between
42. For an impressive synthetic treatment of
movements as the core social formation in terms that resonate with the key
role I assign them in knowledge production, see Melucci 1996.
My thanks to Gerard Delanty and
Sujatha Raman for alerting me to the significance of this work.
43. On the movementlike character of the social
sciences, see (in addition to chapter 5, section 1, above) Fuller 1997d,
20-23. The idea of movements as
the natural opposite of paradigms was first suggested to me by Sujatha Raman.
44. Wuthnow 1989.
401
presumption and burden of proof.
Whereas a movement shoulders the
burden of trying to persuade people who are not yet true believers, a
paradigm’s members presume the strength of their common commitments and then
wonder how a substantial change in direction would be possible.
The question, then, becomes how to get
those who do not spontaneously share the movement’s core beliefs and
experiences to act in ways that promote the movement.
In any case, I urge that we turn
Kuhn on his head and demonstrate that a paradigm is nothing more than an
arrested social movement.
This inversion entails that we regard inquiry as
an especially focused form of political action.
Whereas a paradigm-based approach to
knowledge would declare politics to be vulgar metaphysics, a movement-based
approach treats metaphysics as an inchoate politics.
Thus, a stable body of knowledge is
simply what political action becomes once the public space for contestation
has been restricted. (In a similar
vein, a functioning artifact - a technology - is simply what political action
becomes once patterns of access and usage have become regimented.)
Movements wither and die when “true
believers” of various persuasions break off the debate and form sects that
invite discourse only from the like-minded. In
that case, the knowledge becomes esoteric and the artifacts fetishes.
Sometimes sectarianism is a legitimate
response to a debate that has devolved into violence.
But with a little luck, by then the
movement will have left its long-term mark, as the major groupings in society
- most of whose members are casual observers to the movement’s activities -
reconfigure themselves in terms defined by the movement’s discourse.
Thus, it is crucial for understanding what
follows that readers forget any monolithic connotations that the Reformation,
the Enlightenment, and socialism have acquired since their heyday as
movements. Following Wuthnow, I am
exclusively concerned with the multifarious activities of those who identified
themselves in terms of these three movements, and not the activities of
those upon whom these terms have been foisted once the movements had been
reduced to “grand narratives” that capture little more than a rough
periodization of modern history.
Traditionally, social movements have been
conceptualized as purely reactive entities composed of disgruntled - if not
downright irrational - individuals who lack the sustained purposefulness
enforced by proper institutions, such as scientific paradigms.
Perhaps because professional
sociologists have often worked on behalf of public administration or
industrial management, even they have tended to treat movements as transient
or degenerate social formations. Wuthnow
reverses this negative image by charting the trajectory by which discourse
fields manage to acquire the political and economic resources that enable them
to become vehicles for
402
large-scale social change.
Accordingly, a movement gestates
during a period of economic expansion, which allows many people to enter
discourse-intensive occupations, such as the clergy, academia, and the state
bureaucracy. The proliferation of
these occupations implies, at the very least, that people feel they need to
know what others are doing before they themselves can act, but they cannot
fathom for themselves how those others think.
In the final sections of chapters 2 and 7, this feeling was captured
in terms of a sense of increased “social complexity” and the attendant need
for these salaried scribes to engage in social “intermediation,” but Alvin
Gouldner and other critical theorists have tried to give a more radical spin
to their labors. [45]
This emergent communicative complexity is
followed by a period of economic contraction that causes considerable status
dislocation as different sectors of society adapt differently to their new
situation. Professions that had been
prestigious or rich lose status, and vice versa, thereby providing the
condition of “relative deprivation” that is often seen as a precondition for
social revolution. People in the
discourse-intensive fields, who have themselves become dislocated, compete
with one another in offering new criteria of legitimation.
They convert their collectively
threatened position into an opportunity for expansion and very often risk
taking (hence the frequency with which political revolutions are associated
with alienated intellectuals). Whether
any major social change actually occurs depends on the ability of dislocated
groups to identify a common foe, such as a neighboring country or a vulnerable
minority, even if, upon reflection, this supposed foe is clearly little more
than a pretext for change: a scapegoat.
Wuthnow’s account represents a recent trend
toward treating movements as “flexibly organized cognitive praxes” that
produce knowledge for enabling and disabling certain transformations of social
life. [46] What
differentiates movements from paradigms is their sense of organization - not
necessarily their goals, their longevity, or even their commitment to inquiry.
Successful movements manage to retain
their dynamism, their distinctive form of consciousness, as they gain
credibility in the course of achieving concrete goals.
They do not simply “evolve” into
paradigms. However, because
credibility is popularly measured by the degree of stability that one
contributes to the social order, the dynamic credibility required of
successful movements would seem to strain the imagination.
Two styles of recent theorizing about
movements define the “essential tension”
45. For an early realization of this phenomenon,
see Gouldner 1979. See also
chapter 5, section 2, above.
46. For a theoretically sophisticated elaboration
of this point, see Eyerman and Jamison 1991.
403
needed for this dynamic credibility to be
maintained. Between them they display
the tension between (A) and (B) in the classical definition of knowledge,
corresponding, respectively, to what I call the North American and
European styles, so-called for where the relevant researchers tend to come
from, but undoubtedly also a willful exploitation of cultural stereotypes for
analytical purposes. [47]
The North American style stresses the
justification side of the classical definition of knowledge, while the
European style stresses the belief side.
The European style centers on the
consciousness-raising function of movements. It
is primarily studied by social-psychological methods.
The North American style focuses on
the goal achievement function of movements. Its
studies have been grounded most recently in rational choice economics.
Each style of movement thinking is
necessary, but not sufficient, for maintaining a movement’s dynamic
credibility, as can be seen in Table 15.
The European style emphasizes the role of
movements in forming a collective identity among people who may be disparately
located (in both space and status), but who nevertheless share experiences
that heretofore have been ignored or trivialized - even by the individuals
themselves. The original example that
Marx used to discuss this feature is particularly instructive.
Martin Luther campaigned to get the
German peasants to stop discounting the cognitive significance of their own
sensory and spiritual experience. This
campaign was at once directed against Catholic theology and heliocentric
astronomy, which, in their quite different ways, were bastions of cognitive
authoritarianism. However, as Marx
himself had already realized in The German Ideology, a movement that
thrives entirely on consciousness raising is likely to be confined, ever more
dogmatically, to just those people who have had the relevant sensitizing
experiences. In short, it becomes
cultish to the point of losing all hope of establishing society-wide
credibility.
In contrast, the North American style focuses on
the instrumental side of movements, their ability to achieve the goals on
their agendas. Here we find the
efforts to distill utopian aspirations to planks on a party platform, which
enable the movement to make a series of short-term alliances with more
mainstream interest groups. Not
surprisingly, the sheer increase in the movement’s dimensions is taken by its
members as a sign of progress, even if it involves diluting the movement’s
identity and exaggerating the significance of getting a compromise bill passed
as part of an omnibus legislative package. The
advantage of seeing movements as agenda-pushing
47. A good sourcebook for research into the two
styles of movement thinking is Morris and Mueller 1992.
The distinction between what I
have called “European” and “North American” styles of movement thinking is
normally credited to J. Cohen 1985.
404
TABLE 15.
The Essential Tension That Defines Social Movement
MOVEMENT STYLE
EUROPEAN
NORTH AMERICAN
epistemology
belief-oriented
justification-oriented
sociology
ideology
technology
practice
consciousness raising
agenda pushing
status
end in itself
means to an end
norm
intensity of commitment
breadth of support
economy
resource generating
resource mobilizing
rationality
communicative
instrumental
corrupt version
cultishness
co-optation
vehicles is that it provides concrete reference
points for the movement’s activities, continually reminding the movement’s
members - especially those who have not had the relevant sensitizing
experiences - that it is heading the entire society in the right direction.
However, a movement that is
exclusively focused in this way easily falls victim to its own success, as the
movement’s ability to adapt to the mainstream gets mistaken for its ability to
bend the mainstream to its will. In
short, the movement becomes captive to its immediate context.
Thus, the dynamic credibility of movements depends on creatively resolving the tension between cultishness and co-optation. Of course, this is easier said than done. Most contemporary movements display both tendencies at once. The sharp divide in the strategy and tactics of so-called “radical” and “liberal” feminism within the women’s movement may be the clearest contemporary exemplar of the difference between European and North American styles of movement thinking. Many radical feminists ground the distinctive consciousness of women in their biological differences from men, whereas liberal feminists regard gender as a one of several sociohistorical markers of inequities in a system that aims to eliminate all such inequities. The history of black activism in the
405
between the European and North American styles
of movement thinking in each case.
When it comes to sustaining a movement’s dynamic
credibility, the tension in need of resolution is rather different from Kuhn’s
“essential tension” of tradition and innovation, referred to in the title of
his collected essays, which defines a paradigm’s form of knowledge.
According to Kuhn, for the latest
generation of scientists to remain motivated, they must be led to believe that
even a revolutionary theory that came from “left field,” such as Darwin’s
theory of evolution by natural selection or Einstein’s theory of special
relativity, could have just as easily come from establishment science.
This leads to the double truth that
distinguishes the historical consciousness of historians and scientists.
In contrast, the essential tension
defining movement knowledge involves showing that the disparate historical
origins of various interest groups in fact converge in common cause.
On the one hand, the goal is to keep
an already existing community intact by homogenizing the more disparate
features of its history; on the other, it is also to enlarge the community’s
constituency by integrating its disparate strands into one trajectory.
The way to meet both goals at once is
to recruit the larger society, so that differences within the movement become
the terms in which those outside the movement define themselves.
This is the ultimate trick for the
public intellectual to turn.
Movements are especially effective in this
regard during periods of socio-economic dislocation, when the old social
categories fail to capture emerging political realignments.
Regardless of what people think of a
movement on its own terms, the movement’s discourse may nevertheless provide
the only publicly accessible framework for understanding the full range of
on-going changes. A good case in point
is the legacy of socialism, no small part of which was that factory owners
came to think of themselves as a “class” in systemic opposition to the class
represented by their employees.
Of course, the factory owners did not become
card-carrying socialists once they started to think in terms of class.
However, by accepting this
movement-inspired designation as their own, they unwittingly opened themselves
to certain ways of describing and explaining existing divisions in society
that eventually made it easier to justify the intervention of the state in
economic affairs. Wealth that would
have appeared, early in the nineteenth century, to be the result of the
factory owner’s individual initiative was more commonly seen, by the end of
the century, as the product of some sort of exploitation.
This transition enabled the taxation
of factory owners and the protection of workers to be regarded as reciprocal
policy measures in the emerging welfare state.
Thus, owners have increasingly had to shoulder the burden of showing
that they are entitled to keep all
406
the wealth produced under their name.
In short, the discourse community
created by a social movement can be politically effective simply by altering
the “spin” that different social groups give to one another’s activities,
which in turn opens new spaces for action, especially by third-party
regulatory agencies.
Considered in light of Kuhn’s overriding concern
for consensus formation in science, a striking feature of the trajectory
common to Wuthnow’s three movements is that the peak of their influence
corresponded to a high level of internal division.
In each case, opinion was divided over
an abstract philosophical question in ways that had clear implications for the
parameters of legitimate collective action. The
Protestant Reformers disputed interpretations of the Bible and the writings of
the Church Fathers. The Enlightenment
wits argued about humanity’s capacity for self-governance.
Socialists vied over whether
industrial capitalism and parliamentary democracy were preconditions or
impediments to the ideal society. Rather
unlike the professional posture of a Kuhnian paradigm, the parties to these
three movements did not presume that concerted practical action had to await
resolution of these fundamental questions.
On the contrary, the more the movements increased their transformative
capacity, the wider the circle of people who felt that their interests were
somehow implicated in the swirl of opposing discourses.
Here it is worth recalling Wuthnow’s own roots
in the sociology of religion, which, following Max Weber, has regarded
institutionalization - the formation of doctrinal consensus and its ritualized
reinforcement - as sapping the spirit that marked a religion’s charismatic
origins. [48] Under the
Weberian gaze, established churches appear as the domestication of more
ecstatic forms of religious experience. Similarly,
the kind of divisiveness that eventually diminished the impact of the
movements that Wuthnow studied was that of sectarian withdrawal, often under
the guise of “purity”: that is, either a refusal to argue with doctrinal
opponents or a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of any existing
authority. [49] Indeed, it would not be far-fetched to think of
consensus-based normal science as a strategic retreat from the spirit of
inquiry in just this sense, especially if “inquiry” is conceived in the
Popperian sense of a sustained willingness to challenge the status quo and to
entertain opposing arguments: “permanent revolution,” as he put it in a bit of
anti-Kuhnian pique. [50] In
that case, what Kuhn regarded as a mark of collective self-discipline on the
part of the founders
48. An excellent recent attempt to put Weber’s
perspective in the context of fin de siècle fears of degeneration is Herman
1997, esp. 128.
49. For contemporary corroboration of this point,
see Frey, Dietz, and Kalof
1992.
50.
See esp. Popper
1975.
of the Royal Society to exclude politics,
religion, and morals from their purview would come to be seen as an
institutionalized failure of nerve. And
this is precisely the image that I wish to promote.
The Reformation, the Enlightenment, and
socialism each left the state stronger, not because the intellectuals
supported the status quo (often they did not) but because their disputes
reinforced the idea that there was a single, albeit elusive, source of
authority, control over which could be determined by publicly contestable
means. [51] In theory the
ultimate source may have been Truth, but in practice the state turned out to
be the unintended beneficiary of each movement’s relentlessly critical
inquiry. Despite the ambiguous
lessons contained in this conclusion, the fact that the beneficiary was the
state - and not a private sector of society - offers a ray of hope of
movements contributing to the revival of the public sphere.
The unique sociological success of science in
the twentieth century has been its ability to dictate to the state the terms
of its preservation. In effect, the
scientific community has required that the state adopt its leading theories as
a civil religion in return for providing authoritative means for organizing
and mobilizing the populace. [52] An
unusual feature of this process is that whereas religion is typically
integrated into the daily lives of people who can provide religiously
sanctioned justifications for their practices (e.g., food intake in terms of
dietary laws), science maintains its hold on society largely through public
accounting procedures - such as examinations of mental and physical competence
- that still have relatively little connection to people’s lives, as reflected
in their persistent ignorance of what informs those procedures.
This helps explain the current crisis in the
“public understanding of science” in the English-speaking world, the analogue
of which would be difficult to imagine in the case of religion - not because
people are more secure in their religious beliefs but because those who reject
religion have a better grasp of what they are rejecting than those who reject
science. [53] Since science
was embraced by state agencies before it gained much grassroots support in the
general public, it has continued to appear an artificial feature of
contemporary societies, with the Enlightenment ideal of the “citizen
scientist” who can think for herself proving increasingly elusive.
51.
See Wuthnow 1989, 577.
The idea of the state as the
repository of Truth is, of course, a feature of Hegel’s philosophy of history.
52.
We discussed the origins of this process in
chapter 2, section 7, when examining the long-term implications of Planck’s
victory over Mach.
53. See Fuller 1997d, esp. chaps. 1and 4.
408
4. High and Low
Church Secularizations of Science
The process by which Christendom came to be secularized may prove a useful guide to what lies ahead for science. As the European states secularized, they refused to grant any religion a monopoly over political and economic resources, while protecting the rights of any religion to profess its creed within state borders. The immediate cause of secularization was the destabilizing effect of religious wars on the emerging nation-states of
If the secularization model is an apt one, we may speak of two “waves” in the critique of the social dimensions of science and technology, akin to the waves of secularization in the history of modern Christianity. I have called the two waves, Low Church, which resembles the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and
54. Among major mainstream economists, the idea
that, by the second half of the twentieth century, science had become “the
secular religion of materialistic society,” has been most clearly observed in
Johnson 1965, esp. 141.
55. I was inspired to draw the Low/High Church distinction in STS in response to Juan Ilerbaig, a Spaniard studying in the
In the
HHC: [bracketed]
displayed on page 410 of original.
409
In the first wave, just as Luther, Calvin, and
their associates called for the Church to recover its spiritual roots from
corrupt material involvements, the 1960s witnessed the rise of scientists who
“conscientiously objected” to their colleagues’ complicity with the state in
escalating the Cold War. A secularized
science would never have given us the nuclear arms race, just as a
Protestantized Christianity in the Middle Ages would not have been able to
mobilize the material and spiritual resources needed to field a series of
Crusades against Islam. Indeed, these
insider critics of science were more likely to speak in terms of programs in
“Science, Technology, and Society,” in which courses in the history,
philosophy, and sociology of science were part of the core of the science
curriculum, not merely enrichment courses taught outside science departments -
let alone in autonomous science and technology studies graduate programs that
award doctorates for research that shadow the activities of scientists without
ever coming to terms with their normative implications. [56]
In this context, the late
epistemological anarchist Paul Feyerabend appears as the purest of Protestants
in calling for the complete divestiture of state support for science as the
best way of retrieving the spirit of critical inquiry from Big Science’s
inhibiting financial and institutional arrangements.
Extending the Protestant analogy would involve including the recent
charges of scientific misconduct, which have precedent in the personal
corruption of Church officials that made the calls for reform most vivid for
the average devout Christian.
The second wave of secularization occurred once
the Enlightenment transformed the intellectual orientation of academic
theology from the professional training of clerics to a form of critical
inquiry conducted independently of religious authorities.
The last and most accomplished
generation
56. For this phase of STS history, see Cutcliffe 1989. Among the science critics were, in the
410
of these theologians constituted the Young
Hegelians under whose spell Karl Marx fell during his student years.
David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of
Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity were the
texts from this period (the 1830s) that have had the longest impact.
Much in the spirit of post-Strong
Programme sociologists of science who have subjected the laboratory to
ethnographic scrutiny, these theologians applied the latest techniques of
literary archaeology and naturalistic social theory to demystify the
Scriptures. Far from blaspheming God,
they believed their demystified readings of early Church history liberated
genuine spirituality from the superstition and idolatry that remained the
primary means by which the pastoral clergy kept believers in line.
However, the ironic style of these
authors put them seriously at odds with both political and religious
authorities, causing many of them to lose their professorships and preventing
others - such as Marx himself - from ever pursuing academic careers.
The young Karl Marx wrote The German Ideology
as a series of didactic reflections on how it was possible for the Young
Hegelians, despite the attention they paid to the material conditions of
Christianity, to be so oblivious to the material conditions of their own
times, and hence be caught off guard by those who accused them of sacrilege.
[57] Perhaps a similar book
is now in order, given the surprise that STS practitioners have expressed
about the reception that the scientific community has given their work, which
has culminated in the recent Science Wars, as recounted in chapter
7, section 5.
It would seem that today’s science
secularizers have underestimated the extent to which threatening the
transcendental rhetoric of science threatens science itself.
So far, in terms of political effectiveness, the
57. Marx
1970. On The German Ideology
as an attempt to propel the hermeneutical differences among the Young
Hegelians into a political context, see Meister
1991, esp. 86 ff.
58. This viewpoint is by no means limited to the Low Church. Consider the stand taken by the
411
the set of statements and equations most closely
associated with a science’s cognitive dimension, but whether these tokens in
the scientific language game are made of “glass beads” (as in the Hermann
Hesse novel by that name) or money and people.
In short, the High and Low Church may ultimately compensate for each
other’s deficiencies.
5. Reinventing the University by Rediscovering the Contexts of Discovery and
Justification
Apropos the Low Church tendency to conflate the
propositional content of scientific knowledge with the social conditions that
enable it to possess worldly power, a great advantage of characterizing the
history of science under the rubric of movement rather than paradigm is that
it draws attention to the alignment of words and deeds – “ideology” and
“technology,” as Alvin Gouldner would have put it - that determines the
precise social form that science takes: Is
it a Platonic academic cult insulated from the material world or the
technoscientific infrastructure through which the material world transpires?
The historic site for resolving that
tension has been the university.
Until quite recently, the folk ontology of the university has been that of a relatively staid and stable institution, reflecting its dual role in extending the frontiers of knowledge in research, while reproducing the existing social order in education. [59] In chapter 5, section 3, we saw that already by the mid-1960s, Structure bolstered this dual process in the face of student revolts by legitimating academic disciplines, as institutionalized in the department structure of universities. But as was equally shown in chapter 2, section 7, the duality of research and teaching, especially as pursued by paradigm-driven sciences, has been increasingly in tension over the course of the twentieth century. Indeed, truth be told, stability has rarely been the hallmark of university life. At various points in history, especially in late thirteenth-century
59.Fuller
1999b, pt. 2,
elaborates this thesis.
412
Alasdair Maclntyre has argued that academics were at the peak of their collective public influence in thirteenth-century
Maclntyre is clearly indulging in revisionist
history, especially when he claims that the Enlightenment destroyed, rather
than promoted, the public sphere by being a little too hostile to Christianity
and a little too friendly to autonomy. However,
his account serves to remind us of the historically important role that the
university has played as a vortex for general social change. [61]
The one Enlightenment philosopher who
remained an academician all his life, Immanuel Kant, recaptured Maclntyre’s
lost image in his last book, The Conflict of the Faculties (1798),
which helped cause the resurgence of academic inquiry as a political force
that characterized the German idealists and Hegel and his followers, most
notably Marx.
However, the history of the university over the
last 150 years has been, for
the most part, a transformation of “academic freedom” into a jealously guarded
guild right. Instead of providing the
models for public debate, academicians have made a point of discouraging
public-minded attitudes and actions among themselves.
The benefit has been to shield the
university from direct political interference; the cost has been to disable
the university from functioning in any political capacity,
especially one of its own initia-
60. Maclntyre
1990.
61. One aspect of this situation that we cannot
explore here is the role of the thirteenth-century
university in laying the groundwork for the seventeenth-century
Scientific Revolution, a favorite thesis of Pierre Duhem.
Even those who refuse to trace
Galileo’s discoveries back to Scholastic speculations in
413
tive. Consequently,
most of the drive to change the structure of the university today has come
from the outside, often from corporate sponsors who want to blur hallowed
distinctions between basic and applied research, not to mention between
academic and vocational training.
Rather than seizing these external socioeconomic changes as opportunities for the university to take control of the forces of social change, both liberal and conservative academics have too often recoiled from the challenge, treating it entirely as a threat to the university’s integrity - again, presupposing a stability to the institution that it has lacked when at its best in the past. A notable exception to this tendency is feminism, which arguably has done more to dynamize the structure of the Western university - to put administrators and faculty more in the mind-set of a social movement - than any school of thought since the original Humboldtian call to Enlightenment as the mission of the university in early nineteenth-century
In particular, feminism has drawn systematic
attention to the ways in which disciplinary divisions obscure both complex
problems and alternative forms of life. Over
the course of this century, Marxism has attempted a similar emancipatory
mission in the universities. However,
feminism is unique in that the movement’s theorists truly embody their own
theories. Instead of
upper-middle-class white males just talking about the revolution in their
classrooms, the female professoriat actually live it.
This has opened the door to more
diverse elements of society entering university life, a development that
generally falls under the rubric of multiculturalism, much of which
challenges residual elitist elements in even Marxist and even Western feminist
thinking. [62
The maxim that the Gospel should not be spread
before the ink on the last page is dried is a familiar trope from the history
of disciplinization, and indeed has been a useful way of demarcating the pure
academic fields from the liberal professions. [63]
Pure academics believe that
practical action - be it policy advice or political activism - is only as good
as the quality of
62. On the development of feminism and
multiculturalism in the contemporary academy, see Fuller 1999b, chap. 4.
Sandra Harding has been probably the
most prominent feminist to have developed this point.
See Harding
1991, 1993.
However, there are also signs
that even feminism is suffering from paradigmitis - admittedly of a most
peculiar kind. A good example is
Nicholson 1994.
This book is a collection of
exchanges among four of contemporary feminism’s leading theorists: Seyla
Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser. As Fraser herself
points out (158), they unwittingly reproduce the positions already staked out
by, respectively, Jurgen
Habermas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty.
63. A full-blown theory of disciplines based on
this perspective is Abbott 1988.
The perennially vexed status of “psychology” as both a therapeutic and a
research practice is perhaps the paradigm case of this kind of boundary work.
414
the knowledge on which it is based.
If there is room for doubt, then that
may be enough for the action to do more harm than good.
Yet these High Church tenets are
little more than superstitions that presuppose the very sort of
epistemological foundationalism that STS researchers have been keen to reject
on the basis of constructivist scruples. If
the practical lessons of STS research were reduced to two maxims, it would be
these: that you do not need to be an expert to understand expertise,
and, moreover, that the experts themselves may not live up to their own
standards. Thus, the possibility
that we may be wrong or change our minds is taken as not merely given but
unavoidable. What we need, then, is an
ethic of accountability for the knowledge claims we decide to make, in light
of such a fallibilist epistemology. This
may mean making it institutionally easier to admit error and change one’s mind
in public, as well as to compensate those who have been wronged by the actions
we have taken. [64] The
overall result would be to make a general reluctance to participate in
politics unjustifiable on a purely epistemological basis.
Taken together, the radical lessons contained in
High and Low Church STS provide the core ideas for reversing the embushelment
of Western intellectual life, which, as we saw in chapter 1, section 6,
reached the university’s doors in the 1830s with William Whewell’s coinage of
“scientist” as the name of a profession. 65
Closely associated with this
coinage is the distinction in the contexts of discovery and justification in
scientific research. In chapter 1,
section 7, we witnessed the initial deconstruction of that distinction
by Kuhn and other historicist philosophers of science.
Sociologists of science then dealt the
final blows in the 1980s. Common to
the
64. For a defense of the need to preserve what I have called “the right to be wrong,” see Fuller 1999b, esp. chaps. 1, 8. It was also instrumental in the original modern debates concerning the “public sphere” in
65. The rest of this section retraces ground
covered in Fuller 1999b, chap. 6, sec. 3. The
key difference between what is said there and here turns on the role assigned
to republicanism in that book versus that of social movements in
this one. (On the provenance of
republicanism, see chapter 1,
section 2,
above.) To be sure, they are not the
same but they share a concern for the material conditions under which
knowledge can have empowering consequences for those who would lay claim to
it. In republican societies, those who
engage in public debate need not worry about the consequences of their
knowledge claims on their own well-being: staking an idea is kept separate
from staking a life. In that sense,
one can err with impunity. For this
reason, property ownership was often made a requirement for political
participation.
Social movements adopt a rather opposed strategy
but to similar effect: instead of assigned well-defined “inalienable”
(property) rights to individuals, movements “deindividuate” their members,
such that each individual can count on the rest of the collective to
compensate for whatever problems she runs into as they all strive toward
realizing the movement’s ideals. Were
scientific inquiry conceptualized as a movement in this sense, then the fact
that a discovery originally emerged from a particular research program would
be taken not as an achievement warranting the reinforcement of that program,
but rather a problem that is redressed only by making that discovery available
to as many other research programs as possible.
415
historicists and sociologists has been the view
that a research tradition justifies its continuation by the number of robust
discoveries that are made under its auspices.
In effect, a research tradition enjoys intellectual property rights
over the knowledge claims it originates.
Thus, if a scientist working in, say, the Newtonian or Darwinian
research tradition happens to make an important finding, then the finding
counts as a reason for promoting the tradition, and soon the impression is
given - especially in textbooks - that the finding could have been be made
only by someone working in that tradition.
In other words, priority quickly becomes grounds for necessity.
This view presupposes a highly competitive model
of scientific inquiry that gravitates toward the dominance of a single
paradigm in any given field. It does
not entertain cases in which knowledge claims originating in one research
tradition have been adapted to the needs and aims of others.
One important reason is that
ultimately the historicists and sociologists believe that alternative research
traditions are little more than ways of dividing up the labor in pursuit of
some common goals of inquiry, such as explanatory truth or predictive
reliability. Thus, they presume that
there is some automatic sense in which a discovery made by one tradition is
“always already” the property of all - though access to this supposedly common
terrain requires that one exchange allegiances first.
Consider the treatment of Darwinian evolution and Creation science as mutually exclusive options in the
66. Carter
1993, 156-82.
67. For more on the broad church of maverick
biologists who advance this line of argument, see the interviews with Brian
Goodwin, Lynn Margulis, Stuart Kauffman, and Stephen Jay Gould in Horgan 1996,
114-42. These biologists are
attracted, to differing degrees, to holistic, preformationist, and even
quasi-teleological accounts of evolution.
Typically, they justify their revision of the Darwinian canon by
widening the scope of evidence and reasoning taken to be relevant to a
comprehensive explanation for the development of life on Earth.
Here it is worth observing that one of
the founders of the neo-Darwinian synthesis was himself a Russian Orthodox
Christian who made a valiant attempt to reconcile his own research in genetics
with contemporary existential theology: Dobzhansky 1967.
416
Here arises the social responsibility of the
science educator, either a professional scientist or a philosopher or
sociologist of science: Should students be forced to accept the current
scientific canon in the spirit of a Kuhnian paradigm - that is, as a total
ideology that would deny the legitimacy of whatever larger belief systems they
bring to the classroom? Or should
students learn how to integrate science into their belief systems, recognizing
points of compatibility, contradiction, and possible directions for personal
and collective intellectual growth? If
we favor the latter movement-based perspective over the former paradigm-based
one, then we need to reinvent to discovery/justification distinction.
According to the old distinction, an
ideally justified discovery would show how anyone with the same background
knowledge and evidence would have made the same discovery.
The role of justification was thus to
focus and even homogenize the scientific enterprise through a common “logic of
scientific inference.” In practice,
however, “the same background knowledge and evidence” was an understatement of
what was actually needed for people to draw the same conclusions, namely,
involvement in a particular research tradition.
In contrast, the new distinction I propose
conceptualizes scientific justification as removing the idiosyncratic
character of scientific discovery in a deeper sense than the old distinction
pursued - not simply the fact that a discovery was first reached by a given
individual in a given lab, but the fact that it was reached by a particular
research tradition in a given culture. In
other words, the goal of scientific justification would be to eliminate
whatever advantage a particular research tradition or culture has gained by
having made the discovery first. Its
overall import would be to remove the objectionable, exclusionary features
associated with “scientific progress” without erasing the undeniable insights
that have been achieved under that rubric.
This project would safeguard scientific inquiry
from devolving into a form of expertise whereby, say, one would have to be a
card-carrying Darwinian before having anything credible to say about biology.
It would also have the opposite effect
of the old distinction, in that it would aim to render a discovery compatible
with as many different background assumptions as possible, so as to empower as
many different sorts of people. Models
for this activity can be found in both the natural and the social sciences.
In the natural sciences, there are
“closed theories” (e.g., Newtonian mechanics) and “dead sciences” (e.g.,
chemistry), which can be learned as self-contained technologies without the
learner first having to commit to a particular metaphysical, axiological, or
perhaps even disciplinary orientation. Perhaps
the historically most interesting models of this renovated sense of
discovery/justification at work are the hybrid forms of inquiry
417
that emerged originally as a defensive response
to Western colonial expansion in the nineteenth century, which have reappeared
in late twentieth-century non-Western resistance to “postmodern” approaches of
science studies. [68]
In the social sciences, conceptual and technical
innovations originating in one tradition are typically picked up and
refashioned by other traditions, so as to convey an overall sense of history
as multiple partially intersecting trajectories.
Indeed, just this cross-fertilization
has historically given the social sciences the appearance of a field fraught
with unresolvable ideological differences. However,
from the social movement approach to knowledge production I advocate, this is
a good thing. 69 It
means that the universal value represented by “science” starts to resemble
that of “democracy,” in that both may flourish in a variety of social settings
but, at the same time, must be actively maintained and renewed because of the
ease with which the ideal can turn corrupt, especially as particular sciences
or particular democracies become victims of their own success: e.g.,
governments whose mass popularity renders them authoritarian, sciences whose
consensuality renders them dogmatic.
In Table 16, I contrast my vision of
movement-driven “citizen science” with that of a paradigm-driven “professional
science” in terms of alternative ways of articulating the
discovery/justification distinction. The
relationship of discoveries to their scientific justification has been
traditionally compared with tributaries leading to a major river.
Sticking with the fluvial metaphor, I
counter with the image of a major river opening up into a delta in which
multiple traditions can make use of a body of knowledge that
68. In Fuller 1997d, chap. 6, I considered the cases of modern Islam and
69. In this respect, I do not share the
misgivings occasionally expressed in Deutsch, Markovits, and Platt 1986, which
documents the tradition-jumping tendency of innovation in the social sciences.
418
TABLE 16.
Redrawing the Contexts of Discovery/Justification Distinction|
KNOWLEDGE-PRODUCING UNIT |
PARADIGM (CLOSED SOCIETY) |
MOVEMENT (OPEN SOCIETY) |
|
metaphor guiding the distinction |
convergence: tributaries flow-ing into a major river |
divergence: a major river flowing into a delta |
|
prima facie status of discovery |
disadvantage (because of un-expected origins) |
advantage (because of expected origins) |
|
ultimate role of justification |
concentrate knowledge through logical assimilation |
distribute knowledge through local accommodation |
|
background assumption |
discoveries challenge the dominant paradigm unless they are assimilated to it |
discoveries reinforce the dominant paradigm unless they are accommodated to local contexts |
|
point of the distinction |
turn knowledge into power (magnify cumulative advantage) |
divest knowledge of power (diminish cumulative advantage) |
|
definition of “contemporary science” |
present is continuous with the future — the past is dead and best left to historians |
present is continuous with the past — the future is open to the retrieval of lost options |
|
scientist exemplar |
Max Planck |
Ernst Mach |
originated in only one of them.
At stake in both cases is the ease
with which knowledge can be used as an instrument of power. 70
In chapter 7, section 4, I briefly
discussed the “Epistemological Chicken” debate on the future of STS.
There I observed that the two sides
extrapolated from a common past to alternative futures, both of which
inhibited the field’s political and intellectual dynamism.
In light of the movement model of
inquiry developed in section 4 of this chapter, some significant nuances can
be added to this critique. On the one
hand, Harry Collins’s appeal for STS to plow ahead in a business-as-usual
fashion, extending the breadth of its empirical work without plumbing its
theoretical depth, is the sort of parochialism one would expect from the
corrupt version of the European style of movement thought.
On the other hand, Bruno Latour’s
appeal for the field to incorporate the scientist’s folk ontology into its own
70.
The table
refers to “assimilation” and
“accommodation.” The terms,
also found in Kuhn, are due to Jean Piaget and are used here to distinguish
the relative openness (low and
high, respectively) of a knowledge-producing community to fundamental
change.
419
narrative framework smacks of co-optation, an
instance of the corrupt version of the North American style of movement
thought.
The impasse between Collins and Latour is
symbolized by the Janus-faced character of STS’s much-vaunted case study
methodology. On the one hand, case
studies create intellectual entitlements for the STS practitioner that
effectively restrict the “community of inquirers” simply to those with similar
training and experience; on the other, because case studies are typically
evaluated merely in terms of their descriptive adequacy (“Does it tell a good
story?”), and not some larger normative context, they can be of potential use
to a wide range of users, most notably those who do not share the
STSer’s personal or professional commitments. Either way the dynamic spirit of
inquiry loses. [71]
Nevertheless, beyond my gloomy diagnosis of the
Epistemological Chicken debate lies a rosier prognosis for how a debate of
this sort may be turned into a movement catalyst.
On the surface, Collins and Latour
appear to be arguing about the future of a specialized field of inquiry called
“science and technology studies,” but in fact their attitudes reflect a
fundamental disagreement about the prospects of their own knowledge production
site, the university. Collins
has steered clear of collaborating with the state and industry, whereas Latour
has been housed in an institution that has had to develop such networks in
order to sustain its research programs. There
is nothing especially mysterious about this difference.
Their respective national academic
contexts largely explain it. But the
difference also reflects an emerging schism within academia more generally,
which STS is in an especially good position to explore, given its professional
interest in the social conditions of knowledge.
The schism is between what fashionable science
policy theorists call “mode 1”
and “mode 2” conceptions of knowledge production. [72]
Collins represents the mode 1
conception of university-protected, paradigm-driven research, whereas
Latour represents the mode 2 conception, which welcomes the university’s
permeability to extramural concerns. There
is much at stake, once the dispute is amplified in these terms.
What does it mean to be “political”
or, for that matter “public,” in this volatile context of inquiry?
71.
The
success of case studies in driving out “grand narratives” from science
studies - namely, the
philosophical histories mourned in the introduction to this book - is much
like the success enjoyed by
a country that remains
neutral during a time of war. While
historians, philosophers, and sociologists of
science can nowadays congratulate
themselves for not reifying Capitalism, Progress, and even Science, the
forces behind these hypostases continue their work in the world uninterrupted.
All that has changed is that a group
of academics have voluntarily removed
themselves from the fray.
72.
This jargon comes from Gibbons etal
1994.
For a critique of the historical sensibility that
informs this work, see chapter 2, note 20.
420
How are the universal aspirations of inquiry to
be reconciled with the pressure to be both professional and client-driven?
What fate awaits the flickering spirit
of criticism in an intellectual world increasingly beholden to the idea that
there is safety in numbers? The
influences that have flowed through and from The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions provide one set of answers to these questions, which I have
presented and opposed in these pages. [73]
Perhaps the most disturbing feature of the
debate surrounding mode 1 vs.
mode 2 knowledge production is the negative stereotyping of the university
that it suggests, especially the association of academic inquiry with
disciplinary specialization (mode 1)
and of nonacademic inquiry with interdisciplinary exploration (mode
2). As we saw in chapter 5, section 3,
this stereotype has been one of the Kuhnian legacies to higher education -
that the natural development of science consists of a potentially endless
division of disciplines into mutually exclusive domains of inquiry.
Any diversion from that plan must come
from the larger society, which is the ultimate source of the excitement and
relevance that characterizes interdisciplinary research.
Yet the “problem-centered” nature of
such research means that once the work of an interdisciplinary team is
completed, its members return to pursue normal science in their home
disciplines. There is little
expectation, and virtually no institutional incentive, to convert that
research into a form of knowledge that challenges existing specialties.
Indeed, like the biological hybrids to
which it is often compared, interdisciplinary research is not supposed to
spawn offspring. I have spent much of
my career contesting this view of interdisciplinarity. [74]
Notwithstanding the proven persuasiveness of
this Kuhnian mythology, disciplinary specialization was not endemic to either
scientific inquiry or academic life before the onset of the Cold War.
Indeed, with the end of the Cold War, and a general contraction of
funds for higher education, this point is being learned the hard way.
But it is just as much a lesson in
history as economics. The task before
us as academics is to reverse the image of the university that the mode
theorists project, so that instead of being an institution that must be forced
from the outside to change, the university becomes the site where major social
change is initiated. [75
73. Another recent attempt to address these
questions is Brown 1998.
74. See Fuller 1993b, esp. chap. 2.
75. Although the argument cannot be pursued here, I would go so far as to claim that, given the current surplus of academically overqualified people (i.e., people with Ph.D.s working outside of universities), the potential exists for reversing the effects of mode 2 knowledge production, as academic norms are injected into state and business cultures that have become too adaptive through an uncritical pursuit of short-term goals. An instance of this injection is the emergence of the “chief knowledge officer” (CKO) in corporations, often sporting the [credential “executive Ph.D.,” who treats the scientific literature as part of the economy’s extractive sector, i.e., a natural resource that can be cultivated and prospected in ways that the scientific community itself has failed to do because of its habitualized normal scientific patterns of behavior. (In this context, the scientific community functions much as indigenous peoples sitting on a rich mineral deposit.) The interesting feature of this development is the extent to which businesses will allow their training, practices, and expenditures to be structured by academic considerations, which are seen as helping to stabilize their dynamic environments. Of special note is the “Fenix” initiative between the
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421
Of course, this is a very tall order, but the
history of STS provides one clear way of seeing it through.
It requires that our field overcome
its amnesiac sense of novelty and inertial sense of autonomy (see chapter
7, section 3) by rekindling its institutional roots in service teaching
for scientists and engineers. A
perhaps more attractive way of putting the point is that STS is better
positioned than any other field to reinvent liberal arts education, which
originally aimed to equip the elite with the ability to think independently
about a broad range of topics where their opinions would matter. [76]
Today the charge has been
democratized and the students are not so much ignorant as encumbered with
technical knowledge whose strengths are much better known than its weaknesses.
In our mode 2 world, it is
increasingly obvious that private firms can provide specialized training much
more effectively than a university bureaucracy that would have students take
courses that have little bearing on their anticipated future careers.
Yet the precarious employment market
of high capitalism and democracy’s need of a fully functioning citizenry
points to the unique value of a specifically university-based education.
Ironically, STS talks a lot about the importance
of “science in the making” but says little about “scientists in the
making.” Consequently, STSers
typically confront scientists - be it as subjects in the laboratory or
adversaries in the Science Wars - as fully finished and all-too-resilient
products. In contrast, the insertion
of STS into science education at a mass level would erase the field’s alien
character. Indeed, eventually STS
thinking would reappear in the self-understandings of the scientific
traditions, as respected past scientists are assigned credit for anticipating
important STS findings. [77]
76. I must thank Bill Keith for this insight into
the implications of my interest in distinguishing paradigm-based from more
broadly university-based knowledge production.
77. This strategy was first made vivid to me by Graeme Gooday, who spoke at a conference I organized on “Science’s Social Standing” at
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422
Earlier in this book, I have had occasion to
remark that the Orwellian sense of history that Kuhn ascribed to scientists
was partly inspired by Alfred North Whitehead’s famous quote, “A science that
hesitates to forget its founders is lost.” [78]
In closing, let me suggest a
relevant counter-quote from another Harvard sage of the early twentieth
century, George Santayana (1863-1952), who declared, “Those who cannot
remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” [79]
After Kuhn, it has become common
to think that history needs to be left behind if science is to make progress.
But it maybe that what Kuhn and
especially his followers have taken to be the mark of intellectual resolve on
the part of the scientific community is really, as Santayana thought,
indicative of either infancy or, more likely, senility.
In either case, Santayana’s saying
points to a conception of the past as the living repository from which today’s
heresies and tomorrow’s orthodoxies may be forged. [80]
Raymond Aron made the point with
characteristic elegance: “The past is never definitively fixed except when it
has no future.” [81] This
book may be seen as having pursued the complementary thesis: The future is
never definitively fixed except when it has no past.
Ironic though it be, a forthright
attempt to make the past contemporaneous with the present may be the best
strategy for progressive thinkers in any field of inquiry to keep the future
forever open. If there is a subversive
message hidden in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, this is it.
78. See chapter 6, note 89.
79. Santayana 1905, 284. I first came across this quote in my earliest exploration into the nature of historical consciousness, a meditation on the relationship between Gibbon’s ambivalent account of the burning of the Library at
80. Compare Santayana 1936, 94.
This point marks somewhat of a shift
from an earlier statement in which I claimed that history (and the humanistic
disciplines more generally) could play only a critical role in reconstituting
the conditions of knowledge production. See
Fuller 1993a, xii-xiv.
81. Aron
1957, 150.
423